“New Zealand Should Wake Up”

Manawatu Times, Volume 64, Issue 96, 26 April 1939, Page 12

“New Zealand Should Wake Up”

OUR BLIND AS WELL AS OUR BEAUTY SPOTS

“I feel that I am a New Zealander now,” Mrs F. Bauer told the Auckland overseas League, in describing a recent trip to the East. “I have been here so long. I know all our faults, and when I go away I realise how lax we arc; how a pathetic; how insular and behind the times. The rest of the world is achieving, advancing, and we are Jiving in a little world of our own, not known by other people and not knowing what other people are doing. In Java I found we were not ou the map at all. I saw a wonderful display of Australian produce, and there was not a thing there that New Zealand could not have produced—better than Australia. But no mention was made of us. We are thought to be a part of .Australia. ” New Zealand should wake up, Mrs Bauer said. In all her travels she saw no more beautiful place than Auckland, graced as it is with untold natural possibilities. When in Singapore she was particularly taken with the swimming pool—a great salt water bath a little way from the sea. Auckland could well learn from the hygienic conditions employed there. No person was permitted to enter the bath before he hud (a shower at one of the many showers placed round the bath. If one walked along the edge of the bath one’s feet had to be bathed again before re-enter-ing. “But life in Singapore is too gay,” Mrs Bauer said. “There are too many cocktail parties and too much nightlife. I was greatly impressed with a Chinese speaker I heard there. He spoke to a gathering of young Chinese women students on the ‘Joy of Living,’ and he didn’t talk about artificial amusements, lie spoke about beauty—the beauty of sea and sky, of nature as she is to be seen by anyone with eyes to see. It was a lovely talk. It made me think that there should be more ‘live and lot live’ in tho world, and with this spirit there w6uld be no need for the mad

armaments race and the ghastly fear of war hanging over our heads all the while. ’ ’ Time Payments “The Papuans have a great system of getting wives,” Mrs Bauer said. ‘ ‘ The bride is bought on the time payment plan. Sometimes tho payments fall off and the bride is returned to her people. She is handed back in default of payments.” Java, where Mrs Bauer lived a few years ago, claimed a lot of her time while she was away. They can boast of hotels there, she said, that put ours to shame. If you go wandering round looking at the town till after ten at night you can still get your dinner. “It is quite refreshing to find,” she said, “that there are some people left in the world who don’t mind work.” Mrs Bauer saw a lot of the countryside from a ’plane. “The rice fields—green, grey and brown—looked like big maps as we flew over,” she said. “We saw the jungle and a volcano, but I was not as impressed as some people who had not seen Rotorua and the lovely New' Zealand bush.”