New Zealand Prepares For Her 100th Birthday

Dominion, Volume 32, Issue 65, 9 December 1938, Page 10 (Supplement)

New Zealand Prepares For Her 100th Birthday

Centennial Exhibition Will Symbolise Her Century ? s Progress

LITTLE more than a year hence New Zealand will celebrate her hundredth birthday with public festivity, historical pageantry, and a great exhibition at Wellington, symbolic of a century of pioneering, progress, development, achievement. From all the world over visitors will be bidden to the birthday party of the youngest daughter of the British Empire. She will offer her guests something more than entertainment. They will be told the whole romantic, colourful, true story oi her adventurous childhood and her splendid youth. Already at Rongotai. seaward suburb of the capital city of New Zealand, is rising the gaunt framework of the huge building that will contain the main sections of the New Zealand Centennial. Exhibition. A single building. 15 acres in extent, it will be the biggest wooden structure in the Southern Hemisphere, perhaps in the world. From the gateway the visitor will gaze up Centennial Avenue, past the English and Australian pavilions, past gardens, fountains and pools, to the tall and graceful tower that will be the culminating architectural feature of the Exhibition. By day in the blaze of southern sunshine, by night floodlit against a background of radiating light, it will dominate the Exhibition, and the surrounding suburbs and hills.

Within the buildings, in the Government court, will be represented every aspect of Dominion life and administration. Every single Government department will participate with a carefully-planned section setting out its own activities and achievements. Even the little outer empire of mandated colonies and island dependencies administered by the Dominion will be fully represented. A walk through this court will convey an accurate and complete impression of New Zealand’s material progress. Scenery, products, cities and notable features of the New Zealand countryside will be incorporated in a wonderful model representing the entire country in sectional model, in the combined provincial court. Waterfalls will thunder down mountains modelled on a 25-foot scale. Trams and motor-cars will run in the streets of the principal cities, ferry steamers will ply across a miniature Cook Strait, and farms and factories, Maori villages and pakcha ports, will. all be reproduced in lifelike replica. 'J he model will cost some £40,000. Welsh Guards’ Band

To satisfy the cultural requirements of such an Exhibition, and cater for the tastes of a music-loving nation, a first-class military band is being brought from England, at a total cost of a further £30,000 or soothe band of His Majesty’s Welsh Guards. Special soundshells will be provided, so that the band can play in shelter whatever the weather, and whatever way the wind.

As for the amusements park, called "Playland,” it will cost £lOO,OOO to £1'50,000, and will be the finest of the kind ever seen this side of the Equator. It will contain every latest and most ingenious, thrilling, surprising, or fascinating device calculated to minister to the pleasure of a people accustomed to sport and play, and used to living in the finest natural playground given to the sons of men. This exhibition is not being run to make money. It is not a commercial venture. Any profits will be handed over to charity. It is an attempt to commemorate in a fit and proper manner our country’s brief but glorious past.

It is only the last hundred years that are recalled by the coming centennial. It was on December 13, 1642, that Abel Janszoon Tasman, famous Dutch navigator, steering eastward from Tasmania, encountered a “large high land” barring the progress of his ships-— it was the legendary “Great South Land.” His sole encounter with the brown inhabitants proved disastrous, and Tasman departed, shocked and discouraged, without even setting foot in the land of his discovery. So Tasman has no part in this commemoration. It was in 1769 that Captain James Cook sighted Young Nick’s Head, off Poverty Bay, where he anchored two days later. His first contact with the Natives, too, was marked by bloodshed, but this time it was Maori blood that was spilt, and for the second time

in history musket-shots echoed off the coasts of Maoriland. It was a commonplace sound thereafter. Cook rediscovered New Zealand, and claimed the land for King George; but the land remained savage, unknown, unwanted, for many years. The wild whalers, the bold missionaries, settled there; the adventurous traders bartered muskets and powder and shot for flax and spars; and in Maoriland took place the bloodiest tribal wars the land had known, when le Where Where, and Hongi Kai Tangata, and the great Te Rauparaha, Jords of the musket, laid waste the lands of lesser chiefs still armed with the weapons of the Stone Age. It was a dark, tragic period in history. It, too. has no part in this Centennial celebration.

But in 1840 took place two events which mark the beginnings of New Zealand s story as a nation. 1. he first was the arrival at the Bay of Islands of the first Lieutenant-Governor, Captain William Hobson, empowered with the consent of the Natives to proclaim British sovereignty. On February 6, at Waitangi, was signed the treaty by which the Maori chiefs ceded their sovereignty to Queen Victoria for her protection. It was afterwards signed by other chiefs throughout the country, and British rule was acclaimed at Kororareka and in the South Island at Cloudy Bay. On November 16 the islands were created a separate colony.

The same year of 1840 there took place another train of events of equal importance. After long neglect by the Imperial Government, the country began to lie systematically settled. At the instigation of

Edward Gibbon Wakefield, and under the leadership of Colonel William Wakefield, the first body of organised settlers of the New Zealand Company landed at Port Nicholson, on January 22, and founded the city of Wellington. Colonization thereafter proceeded apace, and from these events the development of New Zealand dates. They will therefore be the main historical events recalled at the Centennial, and commemorated by the celebrations of which the Exhibition will be the chief.

Colonization was not without incident. The Maoris resented the loss of their land; spendthrift, they dissipated the price given them by the newcomers, and regretted the bargains they had made. 'I he white men dealt foolishly with them. Throughout the country, at the Wairau, at the Hutt, at Kororareka, smouldered fires of inter-racial strife. The appointment of Governor Grey was a great influence for peace; but through years of neglect and indifference Maori resentment, temporarily allayed, broke into flame again, in 1865. throughout the country. It was accompanied by several strange and interesting phenomena, in which the restlessness and dissatisfaction of the Natives found forcible outlet. The King movement, the Hauhati religion, the Te Kooti manhunt, were episodes based on the same underlying causes. After eight years’ warfare, sometimes savage and barbarous, often heroic and chivalrous beyond precedent m Native rebellions, the Maori gave the unequal struggle best, and sank into sullen and sulky acquiescence to.a regime he was powerless to avert. Only in recent years has he been reinspired with some vestige of the high racial pride, the noble intellectual and physical attainments that were typical of his race ol old.

Meanwhile, in 1854, New Zealand began to govern ‘ herself, on the democratic and representative lines that : she has followed since. In 1907 she was proclaimed ■ a Dominion instead of a Crown Colony, and was given ; the full rights of a separate nation, and an equal part- • tier in the British Commonwealth, by the Statute of , Westminster in 1931. ■

Throughout the nineteenth century organised colonisation continued, and was, of course, accompanied by the exploitation of the natural resources of the land, the growth of cities, and the birth of secondary industries. The most striking feature of New Zealand’s infancy was her strong allegiance to English tradition, her unswerving loyalty to the King anil the Empire.

At the outbreak of the South African War New Zealand, then as now, wholly unable to defend her own country, sent troops to fight for the British cause. At the Great War the New Zealanders won a high reputation for courage, endurance and discipline, while at Gallipoli the Anzacs made a name for themselves that will endure as long as the annals of the Empire. Maori; and white man, who, half a century before were shoot- i ing one another, now fought side by side, New Zea- : landers both. And yet there were men still living who' had fought in the Maori Wars. \ For in a century the Maori has stepped from the i Stone Age into the Machine Age, ten thousand years J of evolution compressed into a few decades. The white i man, no longer snatching the Maori land, is teaching; him his duties and. responsibilities, his prospects as a i citizen of a British Dominion. Cultured children oft cannibal chiefs debate in Parliament the economic adap-I tation and social advancement of their race. Warriorsj of yesterday till the fields and herd the flocks. I he; barbarities and pantheism of the past are banished. I New Zealanders, white and brown, have grown up: a race of sportsmen. Their puny population has sent j forth world champions of track and field, athletes, ', swimmers, boxers, riders, pilots. Her Rugby foot-;! bailers were, and will be again, the greatest in the | world. Here every citizen can partake in any sport,, however expensive or exclusive it may be elsewhere., I And citizens of other countries are learning to holiday I in New Zealand, the playground of the South Seas. Prominent In Trade

In commerce and in trade, New Zealand now takes, a place in the world out of all proportion to her poptilation and her acreage. Her produce is prominent on' the markets of the world. Her vast export trade, built; up in so few years, has brought her riches that have . enabled her to outstrip many older lands in her internal development. In governance, too, she has taken her place as an equal among the nations. She has her seat, ana the voices of her representatives are heard, not only at Imperial conventions, but when the nations sit in conclave at Geneva. She rules a little Empire of her own, far-flung island dependencies in Antarctic seas and under tropical skies. AH this in a hundred years. ... So much for the bare facts oi. history. No writer can trace the imperceptible but definite steps by which the two races, the mixed pioneers, became welded into a single nation of high and proud ideals, constant aims, and single purpose. No volume could contain the countless romances of'industrial development and commercial expansion. But at the Exhibition visitors will see set out for the first time the full material proof of New Zealand's progress. And that will be the real significance of the Centennial and of the Exhibition. For it will truly epitomize the New Zealand ot the present day. Its architecture will be modern, cleancut, simple, the vision of New Zealanders carried out by workers of this Dominion, fl he great Government court will symbolize the social and cultural and material attainments of the Dominion —health, education, justice, defence, trade and merchandise, transport and communications, land development, forestry, mining, fisheries, primary and secondary industries, tourism, administration, child welfare, all and every aspect of our national life. In the provincial court will be obtained some glimpse ol the beauty ot our countryside, the pride of our cities, the charm of a young Dominion floating on a summer sea. Tn the general courts will be seen plain proof of our industrial and commercial advancement. Thronging the fine buildings, the gardens of coloured lights, listening to the military band, taking their pleasure in the park called Playland, looking onward and upward to the high, floodlit pinnacle' of Centennial Tower, will be the people of New Zealand themselves—grave, gay. careless, adventurous, ambitious, the virile nation-builders of the Great Snith Land.