GOVERNMENT HOUSE

Evening Post, Volume CXV, Issue 120, 24 May 1933, Page 3

GOVERNMENT HOUSE

AN AUCKLAND PROBLEM

UNIVERSITY AND SITE

An old and vexed question, that of university expansion and the Government House site, was humorously revived by tho Governor-General Lord Bledisloe, at the jubilee reception at tho Auckland University College ; on Monday evening (states tho '' New Zealand Herald")After mentioning that he was prer sent in ' several capacities, including that of "your- nearest neighbour," Lord Bledisloe continued: —"There is another capacity—that of CfovernorGeneral —which I do not' propose to emphasise on this occasion, because that functionary resides, virtu to officii, at Government House, in relation to the premises of which the predatory instincts of your president, Sir George Fowlds, which have characterised his ardent championship of the claims of the: college for "at least a generation, might be at once aroused and a furthor encroachment bo forthwith contemplated as a fitting mode of inaugurating a fresh half-century of progress, geographical as well as academic. '' Suffice it to state on this delicate subject my earnest hope'that, if, with the gradual triumph of mind over matter and of academic expansiveness over Viceregal attenuation, a further sue-! cessful invasion of gubernatorial territory ever takes place, the plan of campaign will take the form of reverential occupation rather than of ruthless demolition. Government House, Auckland, is a charming reproduction in wood of a typical English mansionhouse of eighteenth century architecture, and as such has proved to-me, and possibly to some at least of my predecessors,' the strongest of all antidotes in this Dominica to tho stubtlo poison of homesickness, or what the Roman Jurists used to call the ' animus revertendi,' or the yearning for Home." ••■•.- ■