IGNOBLE OBSEQUIES

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23044, 21 November 1936, Page 12

IGNOBLE OBSEQUIES

It would not be seemly that no word of farewell should accompany the disappearance, of the iron-throated friends that have for so long presided over certain of our city parks. The reference is not to the soap-box orators, who appear, doubtless in preparation for leisure, to have lost a good deal of their zest for out-of-door gesticulation. November 19 shouid be remembered henceforth as a day of peculiar significance in the annals of the City Corporation of Dunedin. It marked the beginning of the removal and committal to the grave of the brave old guns which for so many years have reposed peacefully upon the green sward of the Queen’s Gardens. Like sentinels they crouched, not inappropriate emblems of guardianship, even as the sculptured lions, near the base of the Soldiers’ Memorial. But nearly a year ago the City Council, with all that wisdom and fine feeling which finds happy manifestation in a politicalminded majority wedded to the interests of humanity, decided that the guns must go. Children climbed over them and were infected with warlike impulses. The chairman of the Reserves Committee could not

behold these relics of a barbarous age, as he confessed, with an unmoved stomach. So there the guns lay for the taking, without money and without price. And there they seemed likely to remain, ponderable and slumbrous, in the lack of any bids for the office of executioner, sexton, or scavenger. But private enterprise, under the benison of the City Fathers, has at length intervened. The idea of burying where they fell the offending portions of these dark insignia of passion was surely an inspiration. The guns have won their victory after all. They remain in the Queen’s Gardens, incorporated in the soil, and such is the resolution of their composition that to the worm and corruption they will bid defiance. Out of the earth that covers them may spring the rue that stands for remembrance. But why are our councillors of so incorrigible a modesty? Here was opportunity for a little suitable pageantry. But nobody has come forward to lead or participate officially in this striking denouement to an old controversy, this glorious illustration of practical disarmament. No thought has been given the conduct of these moving obsequies with appropriate and improving ceremonial. ' An announcement of the day and hour of the burial, a funeral oration from his Worship the Mayor, and a modest public recapitulation by Councillor Batchelor of his own part in bringing these things to pass might at least have been expected. In a “Nunc Dimittis” the Council as a whole should have led the concourse of its pleased and grateful admirers. But not a drum was heard; not a funeral note, not even a cheer from the pacifist at any price. It was worse than the gravedigger scene in “Hamlet.” If in the furtiveness of the business the City Fathers make no confession of being a little shamefaced that feeling may not be unbecoming in the citizens./ To the old guns they bid their “Ave atque Vale.” Concerning municipal administrators they will have their own reflections. In the Queen’s Gardens the tortured earth will become smooth and green again. But this small and precious reserve is to have an adjacent embellishment —far better than guns. On his recent visit to Dunedin the Minister of Railways baldly announced the intention of his department to erect a great structure as a bus terminal on the garden plot across the way. By its silence the City Council, mirror of the sentiment of the community it serves, gives consent to this gratifying design of the Government to adorn the civic environment by reduction of its open spaces. Why consider a few whispering cabbagetree^?