Canadian’s Survey Of Life In New Zealand

Press, Volume XCIII, Issue 27859, 6 January 1956, Page 3

Canadian’s Survey Of Life In New Zealand

"The Press" Special Service

AUCKLAND, January 5. New Zealand—a land where “life is leisurely and folk are friendly”—has captured the affection of Mr I. Norman Smith, associate-editor of the “Ottawa Journal,” Canada. He believes New Zealanders have a wonderful place in which to live, and they refuse to mar it with too much thought and struggle. Mr Smith, who travelled through New Zealand as a Canadian delegate on the recent Commonwealth Press Union tour of the country, has added “a good two or three country spots in New Zealand” to the list of places where he would like to retire. Others are in Devon, the inland French Riviera, several sports on the St. Lawrence in Canada, and the lap of the Jara Mountains, near Geneva. Writing in the "Ottawa Journal,” Mr Smith says he found New Zealand a "much confounding country whose people welcome Jhe stranger with a gentle as well as generous hospitality and yet whose hotel and transport and tourist regulations are incredibly restrictive and Irritating.

“Its highways are perhaps the best in the world (if secondary roads are included), and its railways might be the worst,” he says. "Its country towns like Timaru and New Plymouth, are at peace in their happiness, and the cities display the tawdriest and most unimaginative of principal thoroughfares and business and Government buildings.” The article continues: “This New Zealand, this strange embracer of extremes: the worst possible drinking laws and the most demurely mannered people of all the white Commonwealth; the heaviest betting community on earth, and the possessor of perhaps the most responsible average of newspapers in the world. “This 2.000.000 population that boasts proudly that it has revived the native Maori race from a small and beaten 40.000 60 years ago to 130.000 today, and which has given its coloured Maoris full franchise and full privileges; this so-British breed of Englishmen once-removed that even people whose parents were born here speak of going ‘home’ to England. “This puzzling economic unit where not only man’s hours but man’s ambitions seem hurtfully stunted, of which some learned observers forecast grave economic crisis should wool and meat prices dwindle a halfpenny; whose farmers and cattle raisers live lone and labouring lives, but whose shops and factories and large capital projects seem to be choked by people idling about like so many boondogglers.

“This New Zealand, a country and a people easy to like, easy to meet, easy to settle down in; perhaps a little self-satisfied and therefore not striving very hard to improve either themselves or their land. But .even their fault of smugness is a gentle one, not boastful, or arrogant or proud. “They just like their little homes . . . and their hedges and shrubs and formal gardens. They don’t want larger cars or nicer clothes or posher movie theatres, and so they don’t see why they should work harder to earn money they don’t need to spend.” Other points from Mr Smith’s analysis:—

Luxury: ‘ You see even in the seaside viliaaes a cove full of dinghies and larger sailing craft, showing that sport comes before indoor plumbing in their scale of luxuries.”

Housewives: “There the housewife trots the sidewalk with her shopping

basket, a summer straw perched on the back of her untidy head (for you don't make a fortune running a beauty parlour or hairdressing salon in Mrs Bimblebees home town)." Six o’clock: “Drinking is done in the last 45 minutes <of hotel opening hours: and it is bedlam and savage and they stand 10 deep and pass the sloshing beer glasses over their heads to the men in the back row.” The Maoris: ”... A good lot. cheerful and unsullen. There is a tendency to trot them out as tourist attractions and their leaders, if not themselves, sometimes act as though they were natives of Coney Island or any other honkytonk. But visit them in their backwoods places or talk to them as you find them driving tractors or working on the roads and they are a sound and dignified lot, not ungifted in skill and intelligence, though apparently not too much hounded by ambition."

Auckland: “New Zealand hospitality here will certainly send us back across the Pacific with a song in our hearts.” In Summary: “New Zealand has been for the heart and eye and senses rather than the mind. Come to think of it, I've heard this may be a kind of national characteristic anyway. Thev have a wonderful place‘to live and refuse to mar it with too much thought and struggle.”