AMUSING COMMENTS.

Waikato Times, Volume 110, Issue 18392, 28 July 1931, Page 8

AMUSING COMMENTS.

TOUR OF DOMINION. JOURNALIST CRITICISES N.Z. Most unusual impressions, many of them not at all flattering to New Zealanders, have been taken back to England by Mr G. J. Aubertin, who is more widely known as “C.J.A." of the London Daily News. Mr Aubertin spent three months touring the North Island by car and, in an article in the News Chronicle, he says: “Grieve with me, as I with you, for I have become an authority on New Zealand. "The chief incubus of New Zealand is mutton,” says Mr Aubertin, who complains that he had too much mutton to eat. In support of this complaint, he gives the following illustration:— “I will ’tell you about It. I was staying with a cousin, whom we will call Will. His wife we will call Evelyn. They are the chief characters in the play. “Evelyn: My dear, I’m /getting 'a bit short of meat.

“Will: All right, my dear, I’ll kill a sheep.

“In a day or two we had a leg of mutton, then -a shoulder, ’then another leg, all beautifully cooked and with prolific and varied vegetables. And so on, varied by chops -for breakfast, down to -impossible gizzards and improbable haggises."

Mr Aubertin adds that his host and hostess, and unfortunately, himself then lived on fowls which ha’d been killed because ffiey had ceased to lay. They were boiled fowls.

Next came scene 2 of Mr Aubertin’s' little play:— “Evelyn: My dear, I’m getting a little short of meat.

“Will: All right, my dear, I'll kill a sheep. "And so we began again.”

The Decoy

The unhappy visitor says they were just getting to the gizzard stage when he made the error of going to see over a* freezing works. "Th.\v kill them there by hundreds,” be writes. “They get 30s for every hundred they kill. The sheep enter, daintily led by a swagger old thing with a blue ribbon round her neck. I thought: ‘Good Lord!’ (or words io that effect). ‘Are they going to klil her?' But not so. She was a decoy. She passed daintily through the works, and when the next lot of sheep came in there she was the head of them again. Her followers they push by sixes into pens to be killed. Nothing is wasted.”

"The people of New Zealand are very patriotic. They put the Britisher to shame. After a theatre performance, for instance, they are not caught searching under fheir seats for hats. No, they stand at attention and wait until the orchestra has played an interminable number of verses of ‘God Save the ‘King,’ and they seem to enjoy it!” he declares.

Whiz Round

Mr Aubertin’s comments on motoring in New Zealand arc given in a heart-felt manner. "The roads whiz round mountain sides and valleys in

extraordinary curves and you have to keep your eyes on them io the detriment of Hie scenery. Occasionally, when you least expect it, there is a hole big enough to bury a cow. Nobody seems to mind them. I saw only two road menders at. work during tne whole of my tour,” he says. A few additional complaints arc that the only cars to sound horns are those whose drivers wish to pass. Cars in (lie opposite direction dash past without a sound. Dangerous one-car bridges abound and the. villages are so small, Mr Aubertin continues, that he was through them before lie knew lie had reached' them.

He also says that petrol is called "benzine" in New Zealand. (if the Maoris, Mr Aubertin writes: "1 met many Maoris. They are treaied on terms of absolute equality. There is no .so-called Yolour'-bar. I asked a journalist who was llie. cleverest man in llie New Zealand Ministry. ‘Oh, Sir Ap-“somebody” Ngata. 1 should say,' he replied. Sorry [ have forgotten his name, and I do not. know what post, lie holds, hut it is nothing to do with Maoris." Mr Aubertin, who says quite cheerfully that tie is an authority on New Zealand, confined his tour to the North