A NEW LAND

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 39, 15 February 1930, Page 11

A NEW LAND

AND NEW ATMOSPHERE

NEW ZEALAND TO-DAY

(From "The Post's" Representative.) LONDON, 7th January.

A correspondent of tho "Sunday Times," writing of New Zealnad today, strikes a new note in his appraisement of the Dominion. He sees in the people and the customs a hybrid element—part English, part American.

"Prom a<country originally pioneered and settled by the best of English stock," says the correspondent, "we may expect to find a resemblance- in many of its customs and institutions; but a laud with railways modelled on American lines, its motor-cars almost entirely of Yankee manufacture, legislative bodies styled the House of Representatives and the Legislative Assembly, and with a people possessed of democratic instincts as interpreted by the U.S.A., must surely partake in some degree of the peculiar character of that country. As the newcomer steps ashore he finds himself in surroundings neither typically English nor American, but which have tho air of both, and he is not long discovering that this hybrid atniospiiere has developed a people almost as much the children of Uncle Sam as of John Bull."

Comparing thevEnglish countryside ■vvith that of New Zealand, the writer says: "The old-world village, the wayside iun, the thatched cottage, my lord's country seat, the road winding between neat hedges, the long twilight summer evenings, the notes of tho/last thrush uttering his vesper, tho sweet chimes of Bells over a Sunday countryside —-where are they? To English soil wo attach a kind of sentiment. Wo know that its toilers drive a trade, yet they are figures in a natural pageant, part and parcel of the land they till. We have traditional bucolic types, John.Hodges and Tony Lumpkins; whilst here a man milks his cows in the • same spirit of accountancy as prompts the ironmonger to sell his hardware, the chemist to retail his pills and powders. In such an atmosphere, under such a sky.as this, 'The "Vicar of Wakefield' or Gray's 'Elegy' could never have been written.'' ADAPTATION TO CIRCUMSTANCES. Mr. H. T. B. Drew, Government Publicity Officer, ever watchful for such loose generalisations, replies to tho article. "Are the differences not purely the result of necessary adaptation to circumstances?" ho asks. "There are, for instance, no lords in New Zealand, therefore there- cannot bo a House of Lords, and if no lords, how could the Lower Chamber be- termed House of Commons'? The railways, though differing from those in Britain in many respects (England has not had tho per-manent-way construction problems to face that New Zealand has), are by no means American, though some things learned in America may have been applied. The thatched low-roomed, illventilated, ill-lighted farmer's cottage of a century ago is not there because it is not hygienic—though picturesque; tho country inn is not to be found everywhere, because New Zealand has a sentiment against providing drinking establishments everywhere; the cow is milked for the profit it returns and under methods reducing labour costs to a minimum,- rather than because certain traditional customs must •accompany the process.

"If your correspondent had proceeded to speak of tho people, ho would have found them very true to typc-thcir language pure English, their money British money, their educational system the same as here, their Law Courts purely British, their parliamentary procedure also so. In their preservation of British traditions there is not a tittle of 'hybrid' evidence; and if there happens to be more'Ameriean than English cars in. New Zealand, might not this be rather an evidence of something else, some fault lying, nearer to your correspondent's own home-door, than of any hybrid tendency in the New Zealand nation?"