Reporter’s Diary

Press, 24 August 1976, Page 2

Reporter’s Diary

Speechless THEY tend to be people of action on the West Coast. At a “Festival of the Spoken Word” for secondary school students last week, pupils travelled all over the Coast to various venues. “Individual Items” was the subject at Greymouth High School, and after the usual run-of-the-mill speeches, poems, and short stories, three girls from Reefton stole the show with a demonstration of opossum skinning. Regrettably, the knife slipped on one corpse, and the resultant spillage of intestines sent three members of the audience stumbling for the exits. Inside story PRISONERS being delivered to the Magistrate’s Court these days get a close look at the construction of the extensions to their quarters. They enter the old cells through the new carpentry-, and no doubt notice that the wails are lined both outside and inside with thick particle board of maximum density. “You’ll never put a boot through that,” said a man working there yesterday. When they are finished, the extensions will have doubled the size of the cells, and added a separate cell for female prisoners. The old cells had deteriorated to a state which Cr Nancy Sutherland described as appalling, degrading, and humiliating for prisoners. Route maps STREAMLINED time-tables will soon be distributed free to householders in the Christchurch Transport Board’s area. Instead of the previous 30 route timetables, the board has reduced the number to 17 by combining on one sheet both legs of routes such as Papanui-Cashmere which go through Cathedral Square. Another innovation is an elapsed time scale printed against the route map, restoring in graphic

form the information which used to be given in the old time-table books. Them, too MOTORISTS who have felt their necks starting to glow when detected doing the wrong thing will be comforted to learn that professional drivers sometimes do the same. A taxi-driver was seen the other day trying to go the wrong way in Madras Street’s one-way system. Prison poems TWO CONVICTS have been named runners-up to the New Zealand poet, Michael Jackson, for the 1976 Commonwealth Poetry Prize. The award for a first published book of poetry by a Commonwealth author went to Jackson’s book, "Latitudes of Exile,” published in March this year. He is a graduate of Cambridge and the University

of Auckland, and has done welfare work among Australian Aboriginals, the destitute of London, and the people of Zaire. He lectures in social anthropology at Massey University and is writing up research on the Kuranko. of north-east Sierra Leone. Robin Thurston, one of the runners-up, is also a New Zealander. He was born in Feilding, but has been a prisoner in Australian gaols since 1969. serving cumulative sentences for bank robbery. The other is Peter Kocan, an Australian who was arrested at the age of 19 for attempted murder. He is serving a life sentence, but for some time has been a patient in a psychiatric hospital. Guaranteed

“FIRST available flight” was the most National Airways used to be able to promise with its parcel service. Now the airline has gone one better and introduced a “courier pak” service for top-priority items such as parcels of computer print-out, blue-prints, payroll cheques, sales sam-

ples, and data-processing material. N.A.C. guarantees that parcels consigned by the new service will go on the flight designated by the consignor, Worrying IS THE MEDICAL profession hiding something from us about the rate at which children mature? The label on a bottle of cough mixture bought at the weekend said it was for children aged two to 12 years, and carried a stem warning against using it during pregnancy or driving a motor-vehicle within six to eight hours of taking it. Gummed up THERE was no “Fred Dagg” sign on the wall, but there was unmistakable evidence of his recent presence in a motel at Mount Somers. After the guest had departed, the motelier spent hours removing melted rubber from the inside of the tumbler clothesdrier. The traveller used it to dry out his gumboots.

—Garry Arthur