"LAND OF EARTHQUAKES."

Manawatu Times, Volume LXV, Issue 1867, 11 March 1913, Page 2

"LAND OF EARTHQUAKES."

AS OTHERS SEE US. The cabled information about the earthquakes in New Zealand, writes the Auckland Herald's Sydney correspondent, has confirmed some people over here in their belief of New - Zealand as being closely associated with Dante's Inferno. It is bad enough to have Rotorua described in that way, but when the whole of the Dominion is regarded as "dangerous' ' it is apt to lead to a falling off in the tourist traffi*. Probably if the officers in charge of the New Zealand Tourist and Immigration offices in Sidney and Melbourne had ! their way they prohibit the cabling of information about the Dominion's earthquakes. One of the newspapers here put up the heading "Tne Land of Earthquakes" —as if earthquakes were of everyday occurrence across the Tasman Sea. There are a few people of course, who are attracted by such thingspeople who have never felt what an earthquake is like, and want to go through tne experience, and who would "just love to see all those geysers and boiling mud arrangements at Rotorua"—but the majority of men and women are scared bv the thought of such things. "If there's one thing I like to be sure of," said a lady in her snug drawingroom at Potts Point the other night, "it is that I'll wake and get up in the morning, and not find the earth has fallen in. My daughters are always wanting me to take them over to New Zealand for a holiday but I daren't. Something dreadful is going to happen tnere one of these days, you mark my words. I've just been reading about these earthquakes they've had three. The poor miners say It was like pandemonium. I fully believe that the whole of New Zealand will just drop down into the sea before long."