OUR UGLINESS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 1, 2 January 1937, Page 1 (Supplement)

OUR UGLINESS.

DON'T WE NOTICE? OR—DON'T WE CARE ? (By K. M. KNIGHT.) Returning to New Zealand one is struck violently by certain aspects of the country. Away, one dreams all the while of the heat of the sunshine; coming back, one is hit not by the sun's rays—or this summer, by the absence of them —but by the terrible untidiness that is everywhere manifest. Realising for the first time just how many square feet of corrugated iron rot under the New Zealand weather; just, how many old sacks lie about; how much wood is left for bugs to shelter under, one is forced to ask for a reason. Is it that New Zealanders, although they have a sense of the beautiful, have no sense of ugliness ? Auckland is perhaps the worst offender in this respect. The city itself has no architectural uniformity. Every man who build?, a house or a block of offices, does so as an individualist. He pays no attention to the style his neighbour may have built in. The consequence is that anyone arriving in the city is struck by the absolute lack of design in the city itself. Look up the main street. It might have been built of bits and pieces left over from a dozen small towns, and a few large cities. The buildings are all shapes, all colours, and present to the street faces as diverse as those at an international peace conference. Stand back a bit and see the city spread a little wider, and rusting iron sheds, roofs, old tumbledown shacks disfigure the landscape. _ #

* A Bad Advertisement. Go for a ride in a bus. Go north or south, east or west —the result is the same. You will see nothing but telegraph poles, post and wire fences in various stages of repair, heaps of old drain pipes, more rusting iron, road metal, logs of wood, piles of sacks, tins, and rubbish of all shapes and sizes disfiguring the roads. Just over it there may be the glory of a sunset on the Waitakere Ranges; red and gold lights reflected in the water at Point Chevalier; the green of trees and a mist of shadows. Bat you will be a poet indeed if you can raise your eyes far enough to look past the unpainted wooden houses, the fences that support posts out of sheer good nature, and the wires that convention has fixed to rotting posts. » People who come to New Zealand and never go further inland than the ports— the boats that touch these shores are full of well-meaning but superlatively disdainful y<»ung officers, who think this country is the ugliest in the world— get the idea that there is nothing in New Zealand but badly-built houses and offices, and streets that wind as aimlessly as cattle tracks. They think that the appalling ugliness of the cities is the answer to everything, and nothing will induce them to travel a little further and see New Zealand as rhe is to those who love her. There must be a reason for this lack of a sense of ugliness in the people who day by day walk past their gateway, and never see the old sack rotting on the fence, who never think to bury tins and hide old iron sheds with creeperc if they are too .-useful to pull down.

It must be that years ago men's minds were too occupied with the utilitarian viewpoint to think of the artistic one. The pioneer had no money to build a farmhouse like the one he had left in the Old ' Country, surrounded by its lovely old farm buildings. He had to cut down a tree, hack it up as best he could and be thankful when the rain did not come through .the cracks. Later, when he might have been able to build artistically, his eye had got used to the hideousness of his surroundings. His children had never seen anything else and they looked for nothing better. They grew uji individualists, as all colonials are, and built homes of their own not a great distance away. The financial position, and not the style of architecture prevalent in the district, decided the design of the new home. Unwilling to Wait. This, perhaps, is the crux of the whole matter. The New Zealander did not, and. does not, wait until he can afford to build, as perhaps he would like to. He needs a shop or a home. He has so much money. He goes ahead and builds a structure. Chance may put it next to a very pleasing home or block of offices, or the boot may be on the other leg. He may build something that would not be out of place in Repent Street, and in its shadow is a building that would be so grotesquely out of place anywhere but in New Zealand that people would laugh as they passed it. Probably this lack of uniformity is bcund to" follow, in a country where every man owns his own little block of land. The countryside of England is, or was until recent years, owned by the exclusive few. Farm houses were built, surrounded by cottages that were as like their mothers, the manorial homestead, as chickens resemble the old hen who scratches for them. Manor, farmhouse and cottage all melt into the landscape as thoujrh they had grown out of the soil. There never was any question of "making do" with a shack. The farmers who were responsible for the soil had their homes; their workmen had theirs. The lord of the manor had his. They were all of a family.

"Getting Things Done." The same story could be told of the English cities. They were not built overnight by people with a genius for "making do*." They were built by people, and for people, who could no more have gone to work in a makeshift office than they could have stayed away from church on Sundays. There is a good story of a group of Englishmen who can.e to this country to start a factory in a fruitgrowing district. The fruit was ready for canning, the factory we? ap,-ar-'ntly finished. But still the wheels were not turning. Then the man who was to manage the concern was asked why things had not got moving. "Well, jou see," he explained, "the whistle is not working yet. Without it we would not know when to start and when U. stop." Here, perhaps, are some of the reasons for the untidiness of this country, where man has laid his axe and his hammer upon virgin beauty. The independence, the individuality, the capacity to "get things done" that mark the colonial have marked his landscape also. He certainly can get things done. He could bottle fruit without a whistle to call him, to work. He has a great urge to» gta on with the job, suffer what may. Whether it is worth it or not is another matter. To the overseas observer, steeped in a beauty that is centuries old and was not built in a day, it definitely ib tot.