INDUSTRY AND ART

Press, Volume LXXVI, Issue 23204, 16 December 1940, Page 6

INDUSTRY AND ART

Technical College Influence

MRS L. €. WEBB’S ADDRESS The part that the technical colleges could play in training young New Zealanders to be versatile and resourceful to meet the demands that will be put upon them to build up new industries to replace with New Zealand-made goods those that are no longer available from overseas was mentioned by Mrs L. C. Webb in her address to pupils of the Christchurch Technical College at the annual prize-giving ceremony. “It is to the technical colleges,” Mrs Webb said, “that the country will look to supply the resourceful, handy people with a good general education who are so much needed in the reorganisation of the’New Zealand economy that is taking place to-day. And by meeting this need the technical colleges will assume a new importance in our national life.” Commenting on the general high leyel of prosperity based on the steady production of standardised goods—mostly primary produce—ir New Zealand, Mrs Webb said, “we have more motor-cars, telephones, and electrical appliances per head of population than most other countries. But our life has little or no flavour of its own, especially in the towns. There is almost nothing that could be called New Zealand culture. Just think for a minute of the New Zealand drawing room. It is furnished with a patterned carpet made in England specially for export and sent to many countries in large quantities. The chairs and tables are probably imitations of antique English furniture. Other furnishings come from the factories of America, Japan, or what was Czechoslovakia. And the pictures may be of the Venetian canals, the Egyptian desert or the English countryside. It is a pleasant enough room in its way, but it is not a harmony; it is a hotchpotch. Now, at last, we have a chance to develop the synthesis that comes from a close association of a people with the country they live in.” There would be work for the technical colleges also, Mrs Webb continued, in bridging the gap that had so disastrously developed in modern times, between art and industry. “There is every reason,” she said, “why we should do everything possible to §nsure that the young industries, still in their formative stage, produce articles, materials and clothing tnat are beautiful as well as serviceable. This is our chance to use the artistic skill of which there is no lack in New Zealand to make everyday life here as pleasant and beautiful as possible.” In New Zealand’s new economy, embarked on as a result of the war and the forces that led to the war, the technical colleges could play a very important part, Mrs Webb concluded. “They arc,” she said, “institutions best able to train boys and girls to meet the new conditions, and they, in co-operation with other agencies, have it in their power to ensure that these changes shall enrich rather than impoverish our national life,”