NEW ZEALAND LIFE

Northern Advocate, 28 December 1934, Page 8

NEW ZEALAND LIFE

PRAISE AND CRITICISM. £ ARTICLE BY HECTOR BOLITHO. ;; DRINKING AFTER SIX O’CLOCK. ■■ While gently critical of some aspects of New Zealand life, Mr Hector ;; Bolitho,-in an article in the November number of “The Fortnightly,” gives the impression that his recent visit to the Dominion, after an absence of 12 - years, was an agreeable tour of re-discovery, which revealed ;; that the essential charms of the countryside had: not greatly changed, and i that New Zealanders still clung sentimentally to the English tradition. But he did find some changes, as - ■ he illustrates by an account of his ; revisit to the farm of relatives with ,r Z whom he had spent many happy boyhood holidays. The farm, the text would imply, was in the Waikato district. “Almost every happy memory of my childhood was wrapped up in • the little farm,” says Mr Bolitho. “When I was still young enough to believe in ogres and the little people, I had hunted among the pear trees and down by the river bank for magic. When magic no longer deceived ri)e I still went there, drawn by the peace and the gentle resignation of two old people. “Twelve years had worked stronge changes upon my farm when I went back there. One Sunday I set out . . no longer in the shallow river steamer upon which I travelled as a child, I almost flew along the new motor roads, with their garages, and their cinema theatres, nearer and nearer to the water’s edge. A Beautiful Countryside. “Once or twice I felt that I should turn back. The warning had come to me when I spoke to my aunt on the telephone. There had been no telephone in the sitting room 12 years before. ... It seemed to me an ill-omen when I heard the beloved voice say, ‘Are you there?’ ” Other changes Mr Bolitho noticed on his arrival. An electric stove had replaced the big range, fed by coal and fir cones; the radio had been installed; the shabby Turkey carpet in the. sitting room had gone. But the trees and shrubs in the garden had not changed. “Even with machines and telephones and electric light the countryside was beautiful; more beauti- . ful, I think, than any other land in the world,” continues Mr Bolitho. “And in ’ every social enterprise, every little clique and every solid ■business house, the worship of England . was .still lively. A singleminded, unquestioning loyalty em- ' ‘bellished every occasion. The busy Rotarians ended their luncheon with the anthem sung, while the Union Jack fluttered at the end of the hall, with the aid of a hidden electric fan.

Views On Alcohol

“The town was full of people one evening to,, sing old English songs for two hours. The Governor-General and the Mayor were there, and their speeches were of the ‘Old Country.’ Why this spirit survives is slightly mysterious to me. It is not enough to say that the ties of blood survive distance and isolation, for the Australians have already deserted the shrines to which the New Zealander clings so devotedly. The Australian is arrogant, with a certain brave pride to excuse his arrogance. While the New Zealander still takes his weekly joke from “Punch,” the Australian has created his own comic paper and his own channels of humour, as different from the English tradition as the American wisecrack or the German ‘joke with a blush.’ ” On the question of closing hotels at six o’clock Mr Bolitho is caustic. “The New Zealander,, has retained his English subleties and the gracious hypocrisies which we call good manners,” he says, “But there is one disastrous hypocrisy which is bringing harm in both countries (New Zealand and Australia). The law demands that all public houses close their doors at six o’clock. “I, who have always drawn my views upon alcohol from Omar rather than Lady Astor, was profoundly shocked by the amount of drinking I saw in both Australia and New Zealand. The front doors of the public houses close at six, but there is always a back door by which one descends to a murky cellar. There the younger people learn to drink, and what should be a controlled, pleasant habit, becomes a secret vice Progress in the Arts, “It is almost impossible to write or speak seriously upon the subject without sounding like an interfering and sententious bore. But I could not heir being depressed when I returned to my country to find that the authorities and the religious advocates shunned the the only honest approach to an old and vexed trouble It is through freedom that people learn to govern their daily life with temperance and restraint. A land in which the people live near to the earth itself, people who are diligent, self-respecting and moderate in most things, does not need the restrictions of a prison.” Passing to another theme, Mr Bolitho shows that New Zealand, particularly in her early literary associations, has a fair tradition to inspire writers and painters. He refers, inter alia, to Samuel Butler’s Erewhon; to Mary Taylor’s letters to Charlotte Bronte, written from Wellington in 1845; and to Alfred Domett.

Incidentally, Mr Bolitho betrays again his weakness in citing dates. In a recent article he affirmed that King George had twice visited New Zealand, once when serving on the Bacchante, and later in 1901, when as a fact the Bacchante, although calling at Australian ports in the early ’eighties, did not come to New Zealand. In the

article in The Fortnightly Mr Bolitho refers to Charles Armitage Brown, the friend of Keats, “who went to New Plymouth in 1814.” In point of fact Brown did not leave Europe until 1840, and he died in New Plymouth in 1842, being buried on the slopes of Marsland Hill, an eminance at the back of the town. Mr Bolitho thinks that painting has made “happy strides” in New Zealand in recent years. “In landscape especially the New Zealand painters arc breaking awa}' from the Italian tradi lion which haunted them for so long.” he says. “They have realised that New Zealand light and colour are not the same as the light and colour of Florence, and that they must find their own way of painting their country, as the Canadians and the Australians have done. . . . The exhibition of paintings I saw in Auckland last May encourages me to feel that New Zealand artists are upon the same health}' road.” Conception of Citizenship. Concluding, Mr Bolitho says: “The sanity of day to day life in New Zealand is its chief attraction, apart from the little narrowness of legislation which is irksome when one goes back, accustomed to the freedom of England. , . . I was proud, when I went back, to find that there was nobility in the New Zealander’s conception of citizenship. “The political plums seemed to have fallen into the hands of second-rate men, but this disaster is not peculiar to New Zealand, and in the universities I found young men who are as serious as the undergraduates of Cambridge and Oxford in thinking of the future, not from an egocentric point of view, but with some broad vision of the needs of all mankind.”