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Press, Volume LXXV, Issue 22822, 22 September 1939, Page 8

The hundredth anniversary of the arrival at Port Nicholson of the sailing ship Tory fell the dav before yesterday, and that of the landing on Petone beach of the New Zealand Company’s officers to negotiate the purchase of the site of Wellington was yesterday. The Tory, an eight-gun, 400-ton wooden sailing vessel, had left England a few months^ ahead of the first emigrant ships. She arrived off the New Zealand coast in August, 1839, and called at the Whaling station at Te Awaiti, tjien the most important European settlement in that part or New Zealand. Tory Channel was so named to commemorate her visit there. In giving reasons to the N*ationaX Centennial Cnuftcil why the centennial projects should, be ?arried out, the Hon. W. E. Parry, Minister for Internal Affairs, referred to the Olympic Games "of ancient Greece. “Undoubtedly these events, he said, “will provide a form of expression of human effort and aspiration that has age-long endorsement, secular and spiritual in time of war as in.time of peace, No grater has ever blossomed on earth than that of the ancient Greeks, who maintained them Olympic festival unbroken for more than 700 y e “ s * How great in significance and importance was the month in which the games were , held—a signification of a period of sacred truce between the continually warring states. We have there an example which should make us refrain from lightly abandoning our celebrations. “Since our last meeting’there have been 'momentous changes in the world, said the president of the Otago Centjre of th e New Zealand Amateur Athletic Association (Mr C. W. Clark) at the monthly meeting of the centre. “Our nation is now at war, and I think it is only right that we should, through our council, express the loyalty of 'Otago and Southland athletes to the British Throne.’ A motion on these lines was carried, Mr B. R. McKernan stating that athletes had done their part in the Great War, and he had no doubt they would be in-the forefront again.