European Interest In Attractions Of New Zealand

Bay of Plenty Times, Volume LXXVII, Issue 14916, 2 March 1949, Page 5

European Interest In Attractions Of New Zealand

Requests To Tourist Department

Publicity Through Study Of Esperanto

A Parisian lawyer, M. G. Dronchat, has been responsible for bringing New Zealand’s attractions to the notice of thousands of people throughout the Continent and in many other parts of the world.

A keen Esperantist, M. Dronchat asked the Tourist Department if it could supply him with films of New Zealand with a commentary in Esperanto. The Department replied by sending him a film strip—the successor of the old magic lantern—with a wrftten commentary compiled with the aid of Mr Nelson Hill and other members of the Wellington Esperanto Club. Since then the Department has received more than 300 reguests for additional literature, photographs, and film strips from more than 20 different countries. Most of the requests come from professional people, including many journalists, and from secretaries of Esperanto clubs.

So great has been the demand that arrangements have had to be made through the Department’s London office to lend the film ■ strips and commentaries to national Esperanto groups for subsequent distribution to individual clubs.

Typical of the many requests received was one from a writer in Slovakia saying he had translated an article on New Zealand’s living fossils from an international Esperanto publication for reproduction in a local paper and asking for photographs of moas, kiwis and tuataras with which to illustrate it.

The editor of an encyclopaedia in Denmark wrote for modern photographs of New Zealand for his home, while an author from Czechoslovakia said he was writing a book on spas and asked for information and photographs of New Zealand thermal resorts. Other letters have come from the honorary president of the Frankfurt am Main Esperanto Society, Germany, Herr C. Barthel, who was intimately connected with the founder of the system, and from Sweden, Norway, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Egypt, Morocco, Brazil Argentina, Finland and the Canary Islands. Correspondence has even come from behind the Iron Curtain from Esperantists in the Russian sector of Germany, Poland/ Hungary and Bulgaria. The help of the Wellington Esperanto Club has been constantly enlisted in translating these letters and in retranslating the Department’s replies. This publicity—believed to be the first of its tyne presented by any Government department anywhere—goes far beyond Esoerantists, however, for manv of them translate it into them own languages for presentation to their people as a whole.