’A Country Of Secret Drunks’

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31197, 22 October 1966, Page 1

’A Country Of Secret Drunks’

f.V.Z.P A.-Reuler—Cops/npht • NEW YORK, October 21. Pete Hamill, a “New York Post” columnist, says New Zealand “looks like a country of secret drunks, filled with men with rheumy eyes tip-toeing past tea-rooms, free of sex, public emotion and disorder.”

Writing from Wellington, where he travelled with the other correspondents accompanying President Johnson. Hamill told in his Thursday column of arriving in the New Zealand capital.

“The country that Lyndon Johnson swept through appeared to be the creation of an act of will,” the columnist said.

“From the Cl3O coming into the capital, you saw long, rolling, hand-made slopes, a soft controlled landscape like that of the Irish or English countryside, with the same persistent rain falling, the same wet greyness washing the houses, and boys playing soccer on open grass. “It was as if all those people from the British Isles who had come here in exile had decided that no matter what else happened they would utterly change the wild country’s face.

“So we discovered ourselves in a place where fish ‘n’ chips stores dot the main streets, and they put butter on the ham sandwiches, and the saloons close at 6 p.m. and grown men tell smutty jokes and giggle at themselves. “The houses seem always deserted, as if everyone were secreted in some dark back room, and only occasionally can you see a dusty white face peering from behind a very British lace curtain. It looks like a country of secret

drunks, filled with men with rheumy eyes tip-toeing past tea-rooms, free of sex, that Johnson came to proclaim New Zealand as part of an emerging Asia. It was a proposition that contained as much logic as saying that. Wales was part of Southern California. “Yet there he was: standing in a needly rain at Ohakea R.N.Z.A.F. air base, flanked by the Prime Minister, Mr Holyoake, and their wives, facing an audience of schoolboys in short pants, dumpy women and little girls in wet wool skirts.

"On the side, a group of Maori dancers shivered in bare feet and beaded skirts, listening to Lyndon talk about, his great affection for New Zealand and how threatened it was when he was here in 1942 and how much better it was now,” Hamill said.