Katherine Dolan's blistering attack on New Zealand attracted a huge response from Stuff readers. Within eight hours of the article being published there were 850 comments.

In the first of five instalments, Dolan wrote about growing up in rural New Zealand hating the country. She's been travelling the world for the past decade and still considers the New Zealand she knew as a child to be a "uniquely lonely and uncomfortable place".

Some agreed with her, others are glad she's overseas, some gave up part-way through the article, and others congratulated Dolan for being prepared to speak out.

Supplied New Zealanders were "bred for the trenches", Dolan wrote.

Rural New Zealand in the 1980s and 1990s was: "a puritanical, misogynistic, authoritarian, anti-intellectual, alcohol-dependent society that specialised in casual brutality," Dolan said. Sheaccepted things may have changed since then.

When she was growing up, the country "worshipped the Spartan virtues: stoicism, masculinity, physical strength, group cohesion, terseness".

Dolan felt New Zealand troops "eagerly died by the thousands in Gallipoli" and said Kiwis were bred for the trenches. In peacetime, the closest thing to war was rugby, which she considered to have been a "national religion".

Derek Flynn/Fairfax NZ "... in peacetime, the closest thing to war was rugby."

Cold homes were also on the list of unfortunate aspects of her life in this country. She had to "wear thermal underwear, a woollen hat and woollen socks for most of the year."

She linked rugby to bullying and described an incident where a small boy at her school was being kicked by older boys. The vice-principal