TWO EXHIBITIONS.

Auckland Star, Volume 55, Issue 94, 21 April 1924, Page 3

TWO EXHIBITIONS.

CRYSTAL PALACE TO t WEMBLEY. - NEW ZEALAND'S FIRST EFFORT > ODD EXHIBITS OF 1851. Most of us have hard fathers and ; mothers or grandparents tell of the ■ splendours of the Great Exhibition of 1851, and many colonial children must .' J ' ave . g sadly mixed between the Crystal Palace and the glittering . palace of glass which was such a favourite place of abode for the queen in ; the fairy story. That popular engravi wg of the lofty transparent dome! en- . closing whole elm trees, with the young .Queen Victoria, surrounded by her i family, performing the opening cerei mony, has rendered the scene familiar to : | many of us. It was a most splendid i j spectacle, and the original feelings of : | mipressiveness could not be effaced by , even the knowledge (gained in later life) . that the splendiferous Chinese gentle- . man of the very highest button obtaini able was not an ambassador from far , Cathay, but was merely an adventiI tious celestial haled in from the street, . | where his gorgeous get-up had hit the ', | eye of some of the Exhibition heads, j and suggested an effective bit of colour ' j for the opening ceremony. i In 1851 the British made things to • j last, and the famous palace of glass, , I carefully taken down from is site in I Hyde Park, was removed, and to-day i , stands as transparent as ever at Syden- , ham, in South London. Will there be anything left of the Wembley buildings I in 1997 ? A particularly fine "official description and illustrated catalogue of the Great Exhibition, 1851," in three volumes, makes highly interesting reading on the eve of the "Great Empire Exhibition of 1924," and one naturally turned to find what little New Zealand did when she was eleven years old. More Brown than White. In 1851 there were only 100,000 people in the whole of the colony, or considerI ably less than the present population of i Auckland alone. Auckland and Wel- | lington each had a population of 4000, ! Nelson had 2000, and New Plymouth and Otago had 1000 each, and in the whole of the rest of the colony there were only 8000 souls, making a total of 20,000 British, as against 80,000. Maoris. I In those days there were only nine shipß I a year from Great Britain. The revenue I of New Zealand in 1848 is given as j from the colony £47,000, aid from British I Parliament £51,000. The only two items i of expenditure shown are: Officers of Government, etc., £62,000; public works, f.cc, £34,000. "A valuable and tolerably extensive collection of native and other products has been forwarded from this distant dependency of Great Britain," says, under the heading "New Zealand," the official catalogue, profusely illustrated with excellent cuts and engravings. Ore , paragraph reads, "The abundant store of iron contained in the iron-sand of Cooper's Bay, Auckland, has at length been made available ior the manufacturer; and the first casting at Auckland foundry in December, 1850, has been sent for exhibition." Seventy-three years later the scientific men are still struggling with the problem of ironsand. And, by the way, does anyone know where Cooper's Bay is, or rather, was? A good deal of prominence seems to have been given to exhibits of copper ore from an island that is printed as Kawan in one place, but later on is given its rightful final "v." Oddly enough, all the native names of the timber sent for exhibition are spelled correctly. They stumble over "harbuka," and make a rather wild guess at Maori in "owee" when speaking about fiax—Oue, the name of the copper-coloured variety is probably what was meant—but we must remember that Maori must have been a very strange language to European cars in those days. There was a very good display of dressed flax, and various kinds of rope, down to one thin enough for catching the before-mentioned "liaVbuka." Hopes of Copper. The geology of the young colony was pretty "well represented in a popular way. There were on view specimens of coal from the Waikato, a "specimen of lignite obtained from the banks of the Tamaki, near Auckland," and spacimens of stone of various kinds, iron ore, manganese, and kulphur from White Island. In connection with the last-mentioned, there was another exhibit that must have brought it home to the English people that little New Zealand was rather out of the ordinary, and that was a "model of White Island in native sulphur, scale 10 inches to a mile." This was shown by C. Ligar, who was no doubt the wellknown surveyor .of those days. There was also a drawing of the same island by C. Heaphy who would probably be another well-known member of the su:» vey office staff, Major Heaphy, V.C. Evidently the Kawau copper mines were expected to turn up trumps if one can judge from the prominence it occupies. Could they have been flying kites with a view to floating a company? Copper also came from the "Great Barrier Island mine." New Zealand's beautiful timbers were represented by a number of examples cf kauri, rimu, ,fcotara, etc., and even at that early day there were several specimens of furniture inlaid with New Zealand woods—including several "what-nots." Both what-nots and inlaying seem to have gone completely out of fashion, but probably after another seventy years they will be back again. Out of the Common. In the list of forty collections of exhibits that made up New Zealand's quota to the Great Exhibition there are some rather quaint articles. "Hat manufactured by Nicholas Cod, pensioner, Howick.? "Baskets made of supplejack obtainable in the New Zealand forests from the eighth of an inch to a foot in diameter, by J. Meagher, pensioner, Howick." Howick had only been founded four years when the Great Exhibition was held, and one can quite understand the pleasure these two timeexpired soldiers in this lonely spot would get from making something that would give them a link with the land for which they must have often been homesick. "Specimen of orchilla weed collected in the vicinity of Auckland," would puzzle most of us, not excluding those young people that are supposed to be steeped in "nature study" at some jof our schools. This exhibit reminds i us of the wide gap that separates Wembley from Crystal Palace. Orchil, or archil, was a violet dye obtained from several species of lichen that grow on maritime rocks. Nowa-

days the chemists manage that sort of thmg for us. ' There were also on exhibition specimens of hinau "dyeing bark" and towai and tanekalia "tanning bark" but it is to be feared we have not made as much of these as the people of 1851 thought their descendants would. The controversy about the kind of stone that is to be used for the Auckland War Memorial 'Museum occurs to one when one reads in this 1851 catalogue under the heading "building stone," that someone went to the trouble of sending to London "scoria from the vicinity of Auckland, obtainable in any quantity," and that on the same stand was "stone from Matakana, 15 miles from Auckland brought to Auckland in blocks of large size and used in the Ordnance buildings." The first mentioned would be our old friend from Mount Eden, and the Matakana exhibit would be limestone. When we asked an old Aucklander where the Ordnance building was lie said he could not tell unless it was the one in O'Rorke Street, next the Police Barracks. "Specimen of limestone from Wangarei" is understandable, but does "specimens of Roman cement stone found in large quantities on the banks of the Tamaki, near Auckland" convey any definite idea to you? "Specimen of sharks' fins, which can be obtained in large quantities and are suited for the China market ,, refers to an article of diet that is still unexploited, and in the same category can be placed "specimen of salted mullet, that can be obtained in great quantities, and well suited for the India and China markets." True in the case of the mullet we have done something, but canning as we know it was undreamed of by the people that nocked to the Crystal Palace. Maori Flour. Looking through the list of New Zealand's court, which occupies only three and three-quarter pages of something like 1500 pages, closely printed, the oddest exhibit to anyone reading the list in 1924 is probably, "specimen oi flour presented by natives of Rangiaowahia from wheat grown by Maoris and : ground by their own mills (turned by water)." There were in those days only 20,00 C British in the colony and there were 80,000 natives. In 1924 there are over 1,218,000 Europeans and only 52,751 Maoris, and the rarest tiling we could send home to adorn our pavilion at Wembley in 1924 would be a handful oi native-grown-and-manufactured flour. o We never know what the future has in store for us, and had anyone told the gentlemen in voluminous coats and tight trousers (and whiskers) and the ladies that wore crinolines and their hair in a net (and still looked undeniably sweet if the pictures of the era don't lie) thai the next time the Empire held a Great Exhibition little New Zealand, 6000 milea away, would be exhibiting fresh meat, butter and cheese, what would have been their answer?