NEW ZEALAND AT WEMBLEY.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXII, Issue 19027, 26 May 1925, Page 8

NEW ZEALAND AT WEMBLEY.

Those who were disappointed with the New Zealand Pavilion at Wembley last year will be the first to applaud the improvements that have been briefly praised in recent cable messages and are more fully described in an article published to-day. There is no doubt that last year the representation of New Zealand in the exhibition that was designed as a miniature of the British Empire was inadequate and ineffective, and its deficiencies were emphasised by their unfavourable contrast with the displays made bv other Dominions. There was a charitable zeal to explain this relative failure by the haste, with which the display was organised, but the real weakness was the lack of imagination and consequently of harmony in the selection and the arrangement of the exhibits. Instead of having the direction of the whole effort from its inception, the commissioner and his staff were given a heterogeneous collection of goods from the Dominion, and in the limited time were able to achieve little more than order in their disposition. The result was that the pavilion was a mass of facts but not a picture. It made no direct appeal, and wot only disappointed those who know the country but also failed to impress those whom it was designed to attract to New Zealand. It is apparent that an entirely different conception has influenced the character of this year's display. Visitors who saw it in its incomplete stage have not been impelled to discover excuses; they have had reason for enthusiasm over what they saw in the finished state and confidence that the execution of similar ideas in other directions will be equally satisfactory. * After all, the visitor to Wembley cannot be expected to surrender his interest to a Dominion that offers no more than a comprehensive selection of its productions. There must be a distinctive appeal—a distinguished foreign author left Wembley last year with the impression that the •principal product of Britain's tropical dependencies was upholstered furniture —and that appeal can best be made by New Zealand with the beauty and the mystery of its natural wonders. Apparently, Mr. Roberts, the commissioner, and those associated with him have, by developing this principle, presented a display that is eloquent of the Dominion's attractions and fully deserving of its place in the exhibition.