Country Women’s Vice-President On Visit

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30066, 26 February 1963, Page 2

Country Women’s VicePresident On Visit

Country women throughout the world have an enormous amount of natural good will which can be used to tremendous advantage in the international sphere, according to the visiting vice-president of the Associated Country Women of the World, Miss Beryl Hearnden, of London.

At the start of a four-weeks’ Dominion tour, “mainly for pleasure,” after an extensive visit to Australia and neighbouring countries, Miss Hearnden is spending a short time in Christchurch.

Writer and jouraritet, Mias Hearnden has used her skills to the benefit of country women as a former editor of the organisation's bulletin. “The Country Woman’ and as a radio journalist for branches throughout the ■world.

On thia visit, her third to Australia and Mew Zealand since the war, she is meeting members of country women’s groups in all parts of these countries.- She attended the A.C.W.W.’s world conference in Melbourne last October.

Miss Hearnden is not the first high executive of the movement to visit New Zealand since thia meeting. The world president, Mrs Geerda van Beekhoff, of the Netherlands. made a short tour of the Dominion soon after leaving Australia last spring. Yesterday, Mias Hearnden praised the meeting, which had resulted in a definite deepening of interest amongst Australian country women. ‘Everywhere I went in all the States they were still talking about it." she said.

Formerly, many of those who attended had never met women from other parte of the world. But at the conference they had come to realise that country women everywhere were just the same and not “foreigners.’’ Particularly in Australia, with the vast distances hampering contacts between women, was this of infinite value in developing international relations, she said

Since then, women's institutes seemed to be extending their spheres of interest.

devoting more time to the arts and to addressee on subjects outside the normal basic work.

From her recent visits to other countries including the Lebanon, Fiji and Malay*, Miss Hearnden said the spirit and cohesion of the movement wee moat heartening, ftactieal people at heart, country women contained a great potential for good, if only this could be tapped within the wider sphere of the outside world.

An example of this could be seen from a recent response to an . Australian radio programme prepared by Mias Hearnden on the life of the Eskimo women of Greenland.

New South Wales institute members, hearing of the

treat need for wooOeaclotbing and the difficulties met in producing wod, sent a huge consignment of coloured wool. to those northern members of the AjC.W.W. This had now been knitted into thick sweater* for their famines’ use during the long Arctic winter, reported Miss Hearnden. From being storybook characters, Eskimo women had materialised into ordinary human people, simply through the power of radio. But Mias Hearnden’s writing has not been confined to fact, for she was formerly a professional writer of crime novels. Full of admiration for the books by Ngaio Marsh, she. admitted that not all murder mystery writers were in that class. “The whole business is rather like making a meccano set You’ve got to get all the bits put together exactly right It’s much easier to report a dog fight," she said.