EARLY JEALOUSIES.

Press, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20587, 1 July 1932, Page 10

EARLY JEALOUSIES.

1 PAROCHIALISM OF LAST CENTURY. The jealousy and parochialism of New Zealand settlers in the '4o's was the subject of amusing comment by the Rev. W. Bramwell Scott in his address to the Rotary Club in Wellington on Tuesday. His subject was a review of the early history of the Dominion. "The various communities knew little of each other save Wellington and Nelson," said Mr Scott. "Auckland pitied the poor wretches who had doomed themselves to the frost, mist, rain, and snow of Otago. Otago pitied the Aucklanders, broiling in tropic heat and exposed to the onslaughts of naked eannibals. Canterbury looked on Otago as a set of bigoted Scotch Presbyterians in a country of hills, where only oatmealeating Scotsmen could exist. Otago returned this scorn. It regarded the settlers of Canterbury as a set of aristocratic swanks and snobs dependent for their existenco on the contributions of wealthy friends in England rather than on the results of their own energy. "Wellington hated Auckland with a perfect hatred, as having deprived it of the right of being the capital of New Zealand, as intended by the N,ew Zealand Company. Auckland despised Wellingtonians" as a turbulent set of fellows existing somewhere in the region of Cook Strait, which seemed to jangle their nerves. "Nelson and Taranaki alone," the speaker concluded, "were content to paddle their own canoes."