U.N. Area Director Explains Work

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30512, 6 August 1964, Page 18

U.N. Area Director Explains Work

The new director of United Nations Information Services in New Zealand and Australia (Mr A. Tyrrell) said in Christchurch yesterday that he was a South African who had been “considerably detribalised.”

“My job is really basically to inform the world of United Nations activities and bring better understanding of the work of United Nations to the people in the area,” he said.

His new post, he said, was his first semi-permanent post abroad in his 16 years with United Nations. Previously he had been an editor-writer in the press and publications division of United Nations and for the last seven years had been chief of the photographs and exhibits services of the United Nations.

The services, he said, distributed about 240,000 enlarged photographs world-wide each year.

Mr Tyrrell said he was at present on a familiarisation tour of New Zealand, but hoped to make a more extensive visit in three to four months. He was meeting editors and public leaders. “I hope we don’t increase the volume of words we send

out from United Nations,” he said. “Words is the United Nations industry. My job is to give it application where I work—and interpretation.” Asked if the ultimate aim of the United Nations was political, Mr Tyrrell said that, In a sense, even the giving of a cup of milk to a child was a political act. What he wished to accomplish in the time he was in New Zealand and Australia was to give a greater understanding of United Nations work.

“Quite often when you have a political mission you have no war, and peace is not news,” he said. “If I can get in touch with political writers, people can get hold of the fact that peace is news as well as war—in fact, more progressively so.” Mr Tyrrell said that eventually he hoped to get in touch with smaller type provincial newspapers in New Zealand

and supply them with free United Nations material.

“The value of the smaller paper is far out of proportion to the comparative circulation,” he said. “It is our smaller country newspapers that are read, whereas, with the “New York Times” for Instance, with a Sunday edition weighing about 101 b, one wades through it.” Mr Tyrrell said he was a journalist by profession. “I was apprenticed on an English paper and I also worked on two South African papers and magazines,” he said.

Mr Tyrrell said he had several “information missions” for the United Nations in South Africa and his last mission had been in West New Guinea. He was in charge of a team including a director, a movie-cameraman, a stillphotographer and a radio officer. He looked the situation over, as head of the team and wrote the outlines for the free media to follow up. Miles and miles of photographs were taken and hundreds and hundreds of tapes. Today Mr Tyrrell will leave Christchurch for Dunedin. On Saturday he will attend the Dominion council meeting of the United Nations Association in Wellington. He will return to his New Zealand and Australia base office in Sydney on Sunday.