Reporter’s Diary

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33966, 6 October 1975, Page 3

Reporter’s Diary

Top price THE MOST expensive contemporary New Zealand painting ever offered for sale in Christchurch is on display this week at the Brooke/Gifford Gallery, in Manchester Street. It is a large oil painting called “Frigate Birds,” done by the Auckland artist, Don Binney. in 1968. The painting is 6ft by sft, and costs $2500. It is one of three Binney paintings which have been toured around the United States under the sponsorship of the Smithsonian Institution. One has been bought by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the other by Fletcher Holdings, which has an important collection of

New Zealand paintings. Don Binney is one of the highest priced painters working in New Zealand today. Look and learn THE BRITISH Broadcasting Corporation has launched a three-year programme to help the estimated 2m illiterate adults in Britain to read and write. It said it was swamped by the response. The adult literacy telephone referral service is linked with a series of 50 10-minute radio and TV programmes, each of which will be broadcast three times a week. The 8.8. C. said the total cost of the broadcasts was more than

SNZI.22m, plus’sB2,ooo a year for the referral service. Sky lab poster HOW DOES an advertiser in Dunedin come to be offering for sale colour blow-ups of United States Information Service pictures of New Zealand taken from 200 miles out in space by the Skylab 111 satellite? Mr W. Patterson, of the U.S.I.S. in Wellington, explained that a Dunedin newspaper was selling the pictures as a service to the many people who had inquired about them after seeing a news photograph. It had turned the Skylab picture into a poster, but was making no profit out of the sales, said Mr Patterson. It was being done this way because the U.S.I.S. had only one negative of the Skylab picture and could not satisfy all requests with it. The Dunedin poster had to be sold at cost. Old London THANKS to a building recession in London, archaeologists are hoping to establish soon that the city has been continuously inhabited for 10,000 years. The first evidence of a permanent settlement before the Romans has recently been found on building sites around St Paul’s Cathedral in the heart of the City of London. It includes fragments of flint tools now established to be from the Mesolithic Age, which stretched from 10,000 B.C. to 3500 B.C. Nostalgia ALL THOSE sensuous Eastern lovelies flitting across the screen in the film version of the “Arabian Nights” may have thrown the projectionist off balance on Thursday evening. A

movie-goer who enjoyed ihe show says it was just like the old days when the single projector had to be rethreaded between reels. Three times in the course of the programme the film stopped, apparently at the end of a reel, and patrons had to fill in two or three minutes in the traditional manner—stamping, whistling, and dropping their Jaffas. Pop auction A CHELSEA gallery this month launches an experimental auction sale of items which its directors regard as the antiques of the next century. Called “The New English Collection,” the auction will feature electric and acoustic musical equipment from the 1950 s to today. Listed for sale are famous guitars of the fifties and sixties— Fenders, Les Pauls and Gibsons. The saleroom has been in contact with past and present pop groups and will include musical equipment from Yes, the group at present one of the most popular in the world. Also on sale will be rare records, old gramophones, juke boxes, and amplification equipment. Spellathon SPONSORING young people for fund-raising has reached new heights with a scheme being run at Christchurch Boys’ High School. Students have been set the task of learning to spell 500 difficult words, and are canvassing the local streets for supporters willing to back them for a few cents a word when testing time comes around. Each boy will be tested on 50 of the 500 words, and if their spelling has improved they will raise quite a lot of money for new school equipment.