NEW ZEALAND HOUSE

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22308, 24 January 1938, Page 18

NEW ZEALAND HOUSE

ATTRACTIVE DISPLAYS IN LONDON CURIOSITIES OK EMPIRE REPRESENTATION fsrECIALI-T •TC-BITTE.S- TOB THE FRE3S.) [By J. H. HALL.] LONDON, December 25. The display windows of New Zealand House are frequently among the most attractive of their kind in London. This week the smaller one is devoted to trout fishing and to an exhibition of the New Zealand illustrated "annuals," a type of journal without its equal anywhere else in the Empire, and one which every Christmas carries the greetings of hundreds upon hundreds of New Zealanders to kinsfolk and friends in the Homelands. The larger window portrays the New Zealand holiday Christmas —a family camp on a well-placed slope near running water, with pohutukavva in blossom and sheep grazing the rising hills beyond. Next to the human likenesses between New Zealand and the United Kingdom, her natural beauty and sunshine are what attract Home people toward the Dominion; but whereas the one has to be experienced to be understood, scenery can be communicated in part by modern pictorial devices, and a good poster artist can catch the charm of sunshine and with it arrest the eye of the passer-by. "Window exhibitions have their limitations, but within those, and in the space available, New Zealand House always makes a highly creditable showing. Its windows in the Strand are passed every day by probably more people than those of any other Dominion except Southern Rhodesia, which also has offices in the Strand. New Zealand at one time owned the present Rhodesia House, and it was proposed to transfer New Zealand House there. For various reasons the intention was reversed. It is not for a layman to criticise, but in the matter of window displays, at any rate, Rhodesia House offers greater scope than does New Zealand House. Rhodesian displays are not better than New Zealand displays, and no Rhodesian window offers a better opportunity of • display than does the larger of the two New Zealand windows (although that is needlessly high); but Rhodesia House has more windows, and is on a corner, which gives it great potential advantages. Australian Disunity One of the curiosities of Empire representation in London is furnished by Australia. One hears of Australia House, which occupies a magnificent island position on the corner of Aldwych and the Strand, and visualises there a concentration of the activities of the Commonwealth. Actually, Australia House is the headquarters of the Commonwealth, of Victoria, and of Tasmania. Queensland has its offices and windows in the Strand near New Zealand House; New South Wales asd Western Australia have small corner positions on the opposite side of the Strand, and South Australia is away at the far end of Oxford street, by the Marble Arch. It seems to be another of the defects of the federal form of government' that State representatives get along better when separated than when gathered together: each Australian State maintains its agent-general in London, and then the Commonwealth has the High Commissioner for Australia, to which post Mr Stanley Bruce has just been reappointed for a further term of five years. If the staffs of all of these were grouped in Australia House, and if each State had its display windows there, the massed effect wonld be striking. As it is, shipping companies and the Crown Colony ot Ceylon, as tenants, have the benefit of the exhibition space which one would normally expect to be used by the Australian States. It may be, of course, that the absentee States prefer their present "stands" for business reasons. Australia House, although much more impressively situated than New Zealand House, for instance, is less on the route of pedestrian traffic, and it is mostly for pedestrians that the Dominions dress their windows. Canada, whose headquarters, like those of South Africa, face Trafalgar square, has no display windows, and the lack is undoubtedly a handicap, although perhaps not a very serious one, to the senior Dominion's marketing appeals. As Mr Vincent Massey, High Commissioner for Canada, looks across toward his colleague from South Africa Mr Te Water, he must be reminded also that Canada has no nag of her own; at any rate not one that is officially recognised. The Union Jack and the South African flag Ay a ll da y long from twin poles on South Africa House, and the building is entitled in Afrikaans as well as in English. Resumption of Immigration

Closely allied to Dominion representation in London, and to the methods employed there and throughout the United Kingdom to portray overseas life and conditions to the generality of the British people, is the question of immigration. Next year, in Glasgow, is to be held a great Empire Exhibition, the first of its kind since Wembley in 1924 and 1925. Out of Wembley grew the Empire Marketing Board, now no more. Some of the leading sponsors of the Scottish Empire Exhibition are hoping that from it may spring an active Empire Migration Board. Having in mind the splendid work of the sons and daughters of Scotland in the earlier colonisation of the Dominions, the hope is not inappropriate, although the fact has to be faced that a revival of migration on the old lines is unlikely. Although there are still many people without work in England, Scotland, and Wales, the population of the Kingdom like our own, is slowing in its rate of growth; and the lot in the present generation of the working man, whose prototype in years gone.by was the mainstay of emigration, is so much happier that there is not the same urge to leave. Economic necessity and the hope of better conditions in a new country were stronger factors than Imperial zeal in stimulating the outward flows which laid the foundations of organised settlement in New Zealand.

It is being said to-day in some quarters that the British working man will not emigrate, and said in a tone of voice which implies some degeneration in his stock. The statement itself, if meant absolutely, is incorrect. One has not to travel far to find workmen who are fully prepared to emigrate if convinced that the opportunity for success can be theirs. They will not go blindly, but neither will they expect Dominions governments to do for them that which their British pride would much rather do itself. They ask opportunity, not assurance; but opportunity in such circumstances as will bring success if they do thenpart. To this end there will need to

be in the new migration a closer association of man power, money P OW JL' and direction power than was the ca. formerly. Capital as well as unrai grants will have to be provided: angovernments of emigrant and '"™ L. grant countries will be required, n - to spoon feed, but to oversea a"* regulate the transfers. The dav "•*. gone when a handful of men couia " dropped in an out-of-the-way pa« of the world with spades and P ic k?*r and left to found an outpost of *&> pire. But the sort of men—ana «• sort of women—who did that splendidly last century is not e* hausted; "and the tide is already turw ing for a new flood. Whatever rw. be the outcome of the 1933 Exhibition, some of the families »» have eaten their Christmas dinners ". Homeland firesides to-day will W "J: time next vear have exchanged w» sulphurous fogs of British Wl " ter w i w the sunburn and sandflies of j" c Zealand summer. After 10 vea "L:7 suspense, migration is starting as