A MATTER OF SIZE.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 184, 7 August 1933, Page 6

A MATTER OF SIZE.

A young woman from Chicago University who is touring New Zealand complains that this country is larger than she bad been led to imagine. She says too much stress is placed, in Dominion publicity, 011 tho smallness of Now Zealand. It is difficult to please all our visitors. Hero is a lady who bewails the fact that after she had seen tho South Westland glaciers she found to her disappointment that she had not time to movo 011 and round to Milford Sound. It was too far away. There have been other Americans (and not only Americans) who were never done telling us how very little wo were by comparison with a real man-sized country. This kind of thing, reiterated, has tended perhaps to produce ill us what calls an inferiority complex. New Zealanders admit with downcast eyes that their land is not neaily so bio- as it ought to be, and confess that it is merely a kind of pocket edition of varieties of scenorv, until the great world outside- is led to believe that we arc about the sizo of Pitcairn Island. . >• i Clearly a semi-apologetic attitude is a tactical error in business, especially the tourist business. We have been over-scrupulous in our adherence to facts. This excessive modesty must be reversed if we are to win the respect of Chicago and indeed of the great world in general. Let us rally round and all that and speak up for ourselves. We must tell tho world about our vast prairie-like plains smiling with all tho wealth of the globe's richest harvests, about our illimitable forests containing the greatest trees in the known universe, about our alps and glaciers that outdo any other iceworks in human ken, our n-evsers that hurl their glittering diamonds hundreds of feet into the bluest sky on God's green earth, our great rivers rolling, as Mr, Noyes wrote, through the ferns of Paradise. Distance and magnitude call for superlatives. It is no use at all saying that Mount Cook is reached in a few hours from jßotortia. The American, one i* led to conclude, is fond of keeping 011 travelling, for all his air of intensive economy of time. So let us emphasise that aspect of the New Zealand tour. Why insist on telling the world that we are only a trifle larger than Great Britain? Indeed, tho. time has arrived for a revision of tho world map so far as New Zealand is concerned. Really, when one comes to think it over, it seems absurd that a country of our importance, with a national debt of hundreds of millions, should be shown as only a thousand miles or so in length. How humiliating it is to look at the map and observe how small we are by comparison with our big- and bloated neighbour Australia. One gets all hot up over it. I am most strongly of opinion that the Government should take immediate steps to double, or treble, the area occupicd by this Dominion on tho maps and charts of the world. An insurance company once issued an admirable advertising map showing New Zealand as the all-commanding heroic-sizo centre of the Pacific scene, with steamship lines radiating from it to all parts of tho world,, including an Australia of modest dimensions. That's the spirit! —TANGIWAI.