FINDING NEW ZEALAND.
AN AUSTRALIAN'S VISIT-
IMPROVING THE CROSSING. ENGLAND'S MARRIED DAUCJHTiIRS. No. I. BT ETHSL TCENER. The entente cordial® bstween Australia and New Zealand is not, to use the succinct term of the moment, "Quito !" The entente corc'iiale between Australia and New Zealand can never be "Quite!" until— As a very recent traveller, running over, as is the very recent traveller, •with suggestions and sapience, I £ refer my ideas of remedy: two things ilone are needful, the second of which is a plane. Net entirely a seaplane ancli yet that way inclined; I would rather desscribe it as a sort of snper-carpoiiter's plane, for slicing off the peaks of the waves of the intervening Tasraan Ses. The handle would be carefully adjusted to the palms of both of the archangels so that while Michael slept o" nights, Gabriel would begin his shift without as much as the susurration of a 'pause* between waves. The alternative remedial notion I off«r is the employment of vast hordes of the Anthozoan polyps, those cunning beiisties of the deep that secrete carbonate of lima from the sea in their infinitesimal tissues until we call them coral reefs. Two latitudinal coral reefs, built by these Anthozoans somewhat after the plant; and specifications used by them in erecting the great Queensland barrier reef; two latitudinal coral reefs, stretchy! out, one between Sydney and Auckland, ono between Molbourne and Wellington;—(or better still, between Hobart and a point west of Dunedin) and the entente ccdialo between Australia and New Zealand would be well, like Mrs. Vincent Crummies, "tumultuous, fairylike,, absorbing." An Unattainable Vision. Then would go sliding over the calm waterway imprisoned between, Aorangi, proud spurner of coal, and light-booted Niagara, dancing Marama, Maunganui of the mist and all tho rest of them, for ever weighed down to plimsoll marl* with heavy passenger lists. Then would sum-mov-sated Sydney and Molbourne and Brisbane with one accord pack its suitcases, laze deliriously on decks and in berth for the four-days crossing, and magnificently restoro themselves to energy with Egmont's icy' mountain anil Ngauruhoo's pines, with Rotorua's fountains and Zane Grey's lines. There would the windweary Wcllingtonian and tho frost-galled Dunedinito bo for ever leaping lightly along gangways, straining toward a; fortnight of creaming sun-sweet surf on beaches gold instead of grey. But no. These things are otherwise, as, in sad truth, things in this vale of tears mainly are.
Expressing the Continents. Vision the two countries a morpmnt as wompn, since such visibning is the polite habit of the world.
Vision them the married daughters of grey-haired England that stares acre ss the oceans now to one, now to the ofher of them" in their isolation a little wistfully, a little puzzled. Can sho-learn anything from them herself, whose heavy blunders and shortcomings .strew her path with tha thorns over which to-day her fest ar* pressing? Can they learn something from lier of, nobility, of selflessness, of a "starry aim ! ' Inscrutable the married daughters go. their ways, building up their houses, lay* ing out their grounds, this sHo the "creek'' ihe daughter opulent, laughing, silk-frocked, careless of the morrowthat, side, not so rich but nev|jr withont a bank, balance, not so lau^hin|{— -a fine old Oalvjnistic strain 'of dwty still runs in the blood, .hearth-lovers, thrifty, happiest in tweed coat and skirt. Not yet iias thfc sculptor hewn either daughter fori us in marble; he awaits,the farther crystalisa. tion of each.
Am Artist With a Cinema. Not 'yet has any writer or poet ap. proached them adequately. I met, a m&iv with a camera on my first crossing who was making a valorous attempt a); it. A Scandinavian he vm taking his pleasure., sadly in u travel trip about the world, his sole companion a 'cinema camera. To while awav an evening when neither Michael nor Gabriel had planed; away the wave tops sufficiently for rigged up a sheet on deck and flashed before us as we sat in deck chairs in the dark, glimpses heiii and ihewi,.about the rolling—the very much rolling--world; Venice with the pigeoijs and the beggars moving about the doors of St. Mark's. A Swedish fiord and a sail gliding along a patch of white on it~that meant the reflection of the midnight sun. St. Paul's appearing and reappearing among motor omnibuses and advertisements. A stone cross on a plateau in Tibet and some priests going by with a flutter of robes. A road winding through tea planters' country in Ceylon, with here a group of elephants by the wayside and there a car of the very minute's model. A flash that caught queerly at the fancy along this same road was an English bungalow a little back] from the wayside,-with palms and a still> native ficure or two in the compound and an English woman's figure in white rising from a seat on the verandah, coming slowly down to the gate, and shading her eyes'with a hand. The sense of. waiting, of exile, were oddly, even poignantly vivid. Odd, too, it was to realise liow little that woman had dreamed as she walked to the gate of flint, lonelyeyed Scandinavian passing and fpcuesmg her and then flashing her to us hero as W6 sat rug-wrapped, huddled in deckchairs, on a tossing ship in the midst of an ink-black ocean. A Tantalising Subject. The same man from the land of the midnight sun was so deprecating about his good little pictures afterwards thjfe I tried to express the fact thaV I had noted a certain dramatic appeal in several. "No," he said discontentedly, "I faiL I try but always toniething is not right, the light, the camara, the. judgment. But Igo on trying- I have been taking Australia—l nave been taking Tasmania, now Igoon to take New Zealand. I ■want, you may call it, to express them as I see them but T shall fail, I have no doubt—the light, the camera, my powers of observation; —" His words trailed sadly away into the salty darkness. I stumbled'against him from time to time in the next few weeks, always alone, always personally carrying the costly camera and the attachments and bv its chin straps a helmet he had acquired in India and had been told was a necessity of life ii. our sun-smitten countries also I saw him last at Botorua, restless y wandering among the Maoris, patiently waiting for Pohutn to perform, out he ctill worn his look of profound discontent. TTio light, the weather, the camera the judgment, something was not satisfying h, Bui not yet Hie days of their true expression in" marble, - paint, ink or film, these two women with their Mona Lisa smiles, these two married Australia and New Zealand, that knglanrt • , psrpctually follows with that gaze of hers, half wistful that she has not their , opportunities, half pnzzled that they not roakfi more use, of them. . ffl|
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New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 19413, 23 August 1926, Page 11
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1,147FINDING NEW ZEALAND. New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 19413, 23 August 1926, Page 11
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