AUSTRALIAN NEWS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23109, 8 February 1937, Page 9

AUSTRALIAN NEWS

TRADE WITH NEW ZEALAND PROPOSALS FOR CABINET SYDNEY. Feb. 6. Senator M'LaChlan (PostmasterGeneral), who has returned from New Zealand, intends, after consultation with Mr Lyons, to place before the Federal Cabinet proposals aiming at the establishment of closer trade and general relations between Australia and New Zealand. Senator M'Lachlan isaid the sentiment of the people in New Zealand generally undoubtedly favoured closer cooperation between their country and Australia. He said he had also been impressed with the necessity for a better news service between the two countries.

SLUMS IN SYDNEY SYDNEY, Feb. 7. (Received Feb. 7, at 8 p.m.) Betty Riddell, in the Sunday Sun, after mentioning the commencement of the Housing Improvement Board’s efforts to replan slum areas in Sydney, says: “ Everybody seems to know about the slums of Sydney except the people of Sydney. Visitors from overseas, taken by unnamed guides through the industrial suburbs, return to tell the world, or their corner of it, that we have here slums as bad as or worse than the slums of London, Glasgow or Belfast. If a slum is a dirty house in a dirty street, where men play cards sitting in the gutter with their boots off, and babies cry and lie down with starved dogs, then we do have slums and I saw them last week. And if a slum is a house with the iron gone from the roof, holes in the floor, dirty paper shredded from the walls, the guttering taken from roofs by thieves, and dirt and lice and cockroaches on floors whose boards are so black and grimed that no scrubbing could get them clean, then we have slums.”

The Housing Improvement Board’s rebuilding schemes, when formulated. are to be submitted to the Government.

BOMB-PROOF SHELTER IN HOME

MELBOURNE, Feb. 7

(Received Feb. 7. at 10.30 p.m.)

For the first time in the history of Australian architecture a bombproof shelter has been incorporated in the design of a Melbourne home. The house has a high concrete tower sunk about seven feet underground with concrete •lairs leading down from a large central entrance hall through steel-lined doors to a shelter which will be used for storage.