Random Notes

Grey River Argus, 14 January 1928, Page 3 (Supplement)

Random Notes

By °A Roffiag Sf ■«*

Lovely indeed is our country nt this time of the year for the traveller, whether by land or sea or river, and especially if he has the money to tour in his own, motor-car, camping wherever the country takes his fancy. Many rich visitors are up catching useless big fish off the Auckland coast at present. Others, some of them perhaps less wealthy, are climbing up Mt Cook or some of the glaciers. The wage-earners of the horny-handed sort, however, are ail back on the job, or hunting round .in search of a job. When they sample the scenery, it is mostly through a rail K way carriage window. It’s ■ no wonder that they are scarcely : •<> 9 enthusiastic as the tourist of greater leisure and opulence, over the beauty of inanimate nature. The bush looks all alike to the man whose gaze is focussed on a scarf in tin* bole of a forest monarch, or the cut of a cross-cut saw. It all looks like work. The banjo manipulated in th? bowels of the earth, with the swing of a pick, for the acconipanient, is not nt all musical in the ear of a miner. But there is one thing which nil and sundry can see with the same eye. It is a picture in the mind’s eye. It is that of a lonely aeroplane, cither sinking on a turbulent sea, or vainly flittering in darkness over jagged I ranges in quest of a place where it ran come to rest. There is the grave atmosphere of mystery around the Tasman flight which may render Tuesday last a day ever memorable in New Zealand history, because —at the moment of writing, as at any since the Ao-Te-Aroa failed to appear at the appointed hour —the mystery has a background of tragedy, no less than of romance. Some day, any day, all there yet can be learned of the flight’s termination may be revealed, but its first impression can never quite be oliberated. A second ary impresion will in any event supervene. Beautiful and bountiful as Maoriland may be, it is no aviator’s paradise. If it demonstrates nothing else, the Tasman flight will serve to illustrate that fact. A night landing is a matter of extreme difficulty on nearly all the western littoral of the Dominion owing to the close proximity of high and lonely country, and there is only a minor proportion of the Dominion’s whole surface, over which an aviator would not be obliged to dodge ranges in quest of safety. It is doubtful if the fate of any two individuals ever before has so universally intrigued th? imagination of New Z alanders as that of Moncrieff and Hood. V, hatever else may be said in their praise, the thing that will never be forgotten is that they were the first to brave the dangers of the Tasman Sea in the air. and if the result should seem to lure a failure, that idqa will have no more effect in effacing their memory than their deaths in dimming the exploit of Captain Scott and those whose bones lie with his amid the ice of the

Antarctic. Some deeds are never measured by such a puny yardstick as that which subordinates the end of the ob ject. There is such a thing as a martvr in the cause of human association which is the object of aviation, just as there is in the cause of medicine, nationalism or religion. They are the ones who lead. The rest of us only follow, and most of us a long way back. This is the time of the year to onserve the most modern of the superficial sex distinctions. I mean in the way of clothing. Except for a few youths who affect slack pants ami lurid sox, and occasionally a vagary in the colour of other garments, the mere male maintains a drab monotony in dress and probably too much of th.it in most individual instances. But the fair sex, while they continue to re* duce the quantity nearer to a minimum at the same time achieve colour varieties almost to the extent of the prismatic maximum. They are, of course, the decorative sex, but I <la resay it was a scoffer whtrsaid that while men pretend to influence through mental means, women are able to dispense therewith and to dominate through the sole agencies of material ones. At anyrate, they fill the social landscape with contrasts, having no limits for their hues and stripes, but rigid limits for their raiment.

It will be like a second Christmas next month when the jubilee begins with a couple of race meetings, and there are jollifications for a whole week, with many old timers back, and plenty good cheer of the liquid and solid order. At the same time., there is going to be a lot of hard toil in the celebration, and it is about time that the citizens generally began te realise that what is everybody’s business is certainly not the business of nobody. There is a certain amount *f organisation necessary, and a certain amount of filthy lucre, given which the public can be relied on to extract plenty of fun from the functions arranged for them. It is always desirable to leave scope for Jubilarians to amuse themselves, without cutting and drying everything in advance. The executive people may be calculating upon this and that giving a certain return, and may even cudgel their ' brains as to the disposal of a possible Jk surplus, but so long as they see their ' way to avoid any deficit, the best thing 9 to do is to recollect that it is a good time everyone is looking for, and no more. I am glad to know there is to be an Old Timers’ Band, and that «t is getting up a fine series of early day melodies for the occasion. I think the Committee would do well if they introduced into the pageantry as many tab leaux and representations recalling the early days here as they are able to do. It is very nice to depict other countries or localities, but after all the Jubilee is purely a Grey district affair, and if the history of the pla?e can be illustrated by vivid representations of the palmy days, the effect will be far better than would that of any number of costumes and types redolent of the Old Country, Canada, Peru, Lapland, Tierra del Fuego, or any other land one could name. Let us sec in,

all their glory the wide-awake hats, moleskins, puggarees, moleskin shirts, red handkerchiefs and bowyangs, of 5(1 ami 60 years’ ago. A miner’s cradle or two, the Californian pump, the old trams, and such devices would figue admirably in a pageant in celebration of pioneer period. The promoters might be able to induce different individuals to take up such representations, and they would be no less interesting to the younger folk, and more so to the older, than the stereotyped tableaux seen in national representations.