Reporter's Diary

Press, 7 March 1978, Page 2

Reporter 's Diary

His own reasons

WHY IS the Queensland Premier, Mr Joh BjelkePetersen , so keen to get the discredited cancer specialist Milan Brych over to Queensland from the Cook Islands? The New Zealand-born premier has told the “Australian” newspaper that he has a very personal interest in the matter. He had polio (then called infantile paralysis) as a small boy in 1920, and doctors told his parents that nothing could be done for him. But his parents heard of the theories of an unqualified Queensland woman, Sister Elizabeth Kenny, and treated him at home with her massage methods. His leg was better in about a year. Sister Kenny’s methods were condemned by an all-doctor Royal Commission in Australia in 1937, but she rose above it to become one of the most famous therapists in United States medicine. Mr Bjelke-Peter-sen, says he wants to make sure that the medical profession is not making a similar mistake about Milan Brych. He says Mr Brych will visit Queensland after the premier returns from a visit to Japan in about three weeks. Home or office? BUSINESS should < .me before family — that is the essence of the proposition which students of management will debate at

the annual general meets ing of the Canterbury division of the Institute of Management on March 14. “Should an executive endeavour to keep a balance between his duty to his employer and his family commitments? Or should one take precedence over the other?” says the division’s newsletter.

announcing the debate. It says the topic is a very vexatious one in manage'ment circles.

Premature

LAGER had become very popular in Britain in recent years, said Mr C. H. Tidbury, president of the international Institute of Brewers, in Christchurch yesterday. Twenty years ago Britons drank- 100,000 barrels of lager a year; 10 years ago they had boosted this to a million barrels, and last year the total reached IOM barrels — an increase from 1 per cent to 25 per cent of the total market in 20 years. “There’s a strong possibility,” Mr Tidbury quoted from the “Brewers’ Guardian,” “that German lager will replace traditional ale in the next 20 years.” That edition was published in 1881, so although the timing was well astray, the prediction was not very far off.

Discovery and us SCOTT’S Antarctic expedition ship the Discovery, which the British Government is now prepared to give away be> cause of rising damp in her timbers, has more than one link with New Zealand. Thousands of New Zealanders have visited the old ship at her berth in the Thames, and many will have noticed the colour picture on board of the Scott statue in Christchurch. Two New

Zealanders have sailed in the Discovery too. Sir Robert Falla, former director of the Dominion Museum, and Dr Ritchie Simmers, former director of the Meteorological Service, sailed on Mawson’s expeditions from 1929-31 when Falla was a young ornithologist and Simmers a young meteorologist.

Off the list AN OLDTIMER who remembered the Union Steam Ship Company’s vessel Manuka rang John Leslie to say that he might well have had the wrong figure in his article on Saturday for the number aboard when the ship was wrecked off Long Point, South Otago, in 1929. Now in his seventies, he clearly recalls sailing to and fro across the Tasman in her in the 19205. But he did not pay his passage — he was a stowaway. The Manuka was a very popular ship for free passages, he said, and he stowed away more than once to get to Australia for the shearing season. Many others did the same, with the connivance of members of the crew, and he feels sure that some stowaways would have been aboard for the Manuka’s fateful voyage.

Drawing conclusions WHAT are the chances of the Christchurch Arts Festival’s International Of Drawing being accepted as part of the regular interaiational art competition circuit now that a New Zealand judge has awarded top prize to a New Zealand artist for a work which appears not to be a drawing at all? Barry Cleavin, director of the contest, says the boundaries between. artistic methods — drawing, painting, printing, sculpture — are very blurred these days. Although Ralph Hotere’s winning work appears to be a large rectangular area of ink or stain, in fact he has worked over it with a piece of graphite, bringing it within the scope of graphic art. Other works sent to the contest by invited artists from all over the world demonstrate a very free interpretation of the word “drawing,” and indeed, says Mr Cleavin, the main criterion laid down was artistic excellence, not method. He says the choice of a New Zealand winner (Ralph Hotere lives in Dunedin) might bring the international standing of the contest into question, but he is convinced that Hamish Keith used a scrupulously fair basis of judgment. One of the most notable entries he adds, is from a Yugoslav artist who won an international drawing exhibition in his

own country with work which would more accurately be described as paper sculpture.

Inevitable

ALSO seen at the International of Drawing was a selection of envelopes and containers that came with the drawings, including one giving the particulars of an Oriental contestant called Mr Kwak — first name, Duck. Do-it-yourself

EVERYBODY wants to be a property developer, judging by sales of “Jones on Property,” by the Wellington millionaire property developer Bob Jones. Fourth Estate Books produced a modest 5750 copies in October, and they sold out in two weeks. Another editioh of 3500 was put in train, and although it was not ready for the Christmas trade, it has now led to a third edition which the publishers say is two-thirds sold in advance. That brings the total to 12,250. A revised edition is also being prepared for sale in Australia later in the year. Don’t dig him

A BRITISH visitor reports that Mr Justice MacKinnon, the Australian-born judge who gained considerable notoriety recently for a judgment approving a man’s use of derogatory racial terms, is now known in his profession as “the digger in the woodpile.”

— Garry Arthur