A STRANGE IDEA

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLV, Issue 193, 20 July 1925, Page 8

A STRANGE IDEA

¥>:POOR NEW ZEALANDERS! “IGNORANCE OF AUSTRALIA.” . SYDNEY, July 9. The leader of the Oxford University Debating team, Mr J. D. Woodruff, has a queer idea of the knowledge, of New Zealanders regarding Australia. This is what he says in an article in the Sydney Morning Herald when describing his impressions- of his- four through the Dominions :

“If you visit Australia, come straight .out from England, and do not go travelling through America and New Zealand first. So will you have nothing to get rid of beyond your native English precept ions. These I know to be amiable ’ but vague, and to need correction and amplification rather than complete abandonment. You will not .be loaded up, as were we, with a great deal of wholly false information, such as came our way in New Zealand and the United States.

“But one English preconception you will have to abandon —the notion, fostered by cheap globes from Japan and cheap maps from Germany, that Australia and New Zealand live side by side, only separated by a narrow sea, knowing all about; each other, and sharing a common life. New Zealand is not outside the Commonwealth from a whim, however sensible, like Newfoundland. The countries are as ' many days’ journeying apart, incredible as it sounds, as England and New York, and they take very little interest in each other. Tasmania is, in actual fact, less closely bound up with the main continent than New Zealand is freely imagined to be. “So in general New Zealanders speak without any real knowledge of Australia, which few of them have visited. They are rightly proud of . the orderly, civilised, quiet prosperity that, is their achievement, and they give the traveller the impression that, their large neighbour is a mixture of Rhodesia and Chicago. Things quite trivial in themselves reinforce these ideas. It is not wholly fanciful to attribute the way Australia and New Zealand are lumped'together in England to the military grouping that gave us the word Anzae. And the fact is that New Zealanders are brought most in contact with the shipping industry, the least urbane side of Australian life. Anyway, no more is known about Australia in New Zealand than in England.”