RACY COMMENT

Southland Times, Issue 25302, 4 June 1935, Page 5

RACY COMMENT

AMERICAN TOURIST NEW ZEALAND’S CHARMS Interesting references to an American tourist’s visit to New Zealand, with special mention of Southland and an hotel at Lumsden, are contained in the May number of the “Atlantic Monthly,” a well-known American review. The writer was Mr Glanville Smith. “Obviously, the place is Great Britain,” Mr Smith wrote. “The beefsteak-and-kidney pies,. the skylarks, the policemen’s helmets, are unmistakable. The rivers, it is true, are rather unruly, the mountains are very peremptory, but it is Britain all the same. The date, however, is a study. “In some ways it appears to be the Britain of the future, where inequali-. ties have been ironed out by long adjustment and sacrifice. The only department of life in which excitement is permitted is sport. There are no ultrarich, offensively living in palaces; there is no .one too poor to risk something on the horses. Nobody ever is killed in a railway accident. Praise For Newspapers. “The newspapers are handsome in looks, gentlemanly in policy, most perfect in morality; oh, happy land, nourished on such blameless journalism! The school children are in uniform, strictly; no thought need be squandered on little Marjory’s wardrobe —it has long been established, as has also the menu for each of the days six»meals. “There is no agony of creative endeavour; nature and the botanical gardens are full of wonder, and the past has heaped up already more masterpieces than the longest life can enjoy. Among the violent ups and downs of their terrain, and tortuous ins and outs of their coastline, the New Zealanders have achieved a society as level and as safely circular as a pancake. “But wait. There is unemployment in this Utopia. Wool-growers, disgusted at what the buyers of Germany, France, Bradford and Japan will give them for their wool, withdraw it from the sluggish market. At the same time a Britain without manufactures, a land of wool growers, cheese-makers and sailors, suggests an age prior to the Industrial Revolution.” Mr Smith escapes from a picture theatre in Auckland, where “some Hollywood star, vastly enlarged on the screen, sings a song which is undoubtedly of this year of grace. It is at such times that the visiting American’s patriotism grows most intense; how ardently—for the honour of the Stars and Stripes—he wishes that she would stop singing.” His escape is into the gardens of Albert Park, where “Albert’s queen, plump and regal in bronze, watches quietly over the city.” Concerning Hotels. “There is abundance of evidence about that Victoria still reigns,” he continues. “There is a Dickensian quality in the hotels that is delightful; the ‘hot joints,’ the ‘cold viands,’ the waitresses’ rattling aprons, and the big oil paintings that lean from the walls all are part of the spell. Certainly it is a day prior to the invention of clothes closets or coat-hangers; one hook, for the visitor’s periwig presumably, is found on the back of his bedroom door.” The country hotels of the South Island gave Mr Smith a taste of a new and pleasant life, and in particular one at Lumsden. “I kept looking up and about at the old brown room, with its flowers and fire and friendly people,” he says. “The world about Lumsden is very large and lonely, yet here in the middle of it was a core of warmth and comfort that I stranger, was free to share. Thoreau once said that a man’s pants don’t fit him until he has worn them three or four years. Chairs take longer;' how humane the acquired curvature of these commer-cial-room chairs.

“The pictures on the wall were equally pleasing: “Lovers’ Lane’ in rich colour; the big dog and the little dog. ‘Dignity and Impudence’ respectively, and a framed Masonic document with its columns, seal and staring eye. ‘Why,’ the eye seemed to ask, ‘do your American hotels fail to grow old gracefully, like this one?” “It is all very perplexing. When you would call for a sedan chair, up drives a motor-bus. And in the bus, as you ride briskly along. . . . voices come in by radio, reminding So-and-So, who has been balky about his porridge, that he will never grow into a big strong man if he acts like that. What can be made of such chronological puzzle? I think the fates have put a snarl in the thread to tease me. But the-thing for a traveller to do anywhere is to enjoy things as he finds them. In New Zealand this is easy.” Picton and the Lakes. Mr Smith is full of praise for Picton, and the quiet beauty of Queen Charlotte Sound. Later he speaks of the southern lakes. “As for Manapouri, the southermost and most beautiful of New Zealand’s great mountain lakes, here I am, by it,” he writes. “There was brown trout for luncheon, venison for dinner; what will breakfast be? • • • ■ Beyond are the mountains, topped with snow. New Zealand’s secret may lie locked up in the deeps of all this grandly heaped up masonry, but how shall I fetch it out? The secret hid in the mountains is perhaps too strong after all. And suddenly the gorse of Picton, the roses of Elbow’s wallpaper, bloom fresh and significant in my brain. This is a good place.”