WALKING A LOST ART

Evening Post, Volume XCIV, Issue 40, 16 August 1917, Page 6

WALKING A LOST ART

Every passenger transport strike serves to show up in a lurid light the lost art of walking. Time was when a walk from city to,,suburb was regarded as a pleasurable and healthful. exercise; to-day it is considered a pilgrimage exceeding, in everything but holiness, the progress to Mecca. "On each footpath," •writes our correspondent's story of the Sydney strike, "was a dense black mass of people, plodding steadily homewards, and many stoically facing a walk of four to six miles." When stoicism is required by healthy men to enable them to face a walk of one hour and a-half, along easy city pathways, one wonders what stuff our fathers w«re made of, and whether the wonderful promotion of modern wheeled traction has really made for progress. Worse still, these slaves of the railed vehicle were in. some cases not only stiff in the leg but destitute of the sense of locality, for they actually got lost. It is quite understandable that where the tramcars run on their o-wn tracks through places like Moore Park, the home-going pedestrian might prefer to travel a more or less parallel course on regular streets, but how the explorers of the out-back would smile to see a sober suburbanite "bushed" in the simple progress from city to home by an alternative route! Urban concentration, and the habit of having everything done automatically, may in a few generations work a revolution in the physical and mental structure of the human animal. But will-the change be ■for the better?