HATS OUT OF RABBITS

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 5, Issue 1, 9 January 1942, Page 3

HATS OUT OF RABBITS

FATE OF N.Z's PESTS

BRITISH PUBLICITY SYSTEM

"Conjurors can produce rabbits out of hats. It is more difficult to produce a hat out of a rabbit; yet this is done cverj r day by hat manufacturers." So London's Imperial Institute wittily announces a display showing how New Zealand turns its rabbit pest into a national asset —one of many vivid exhibits by which the Institute each day pictures the Empire's vast resources to parties, ineluding Poles, Czechs, Belgians, Free French, Dutch and Norwegians now fighting alongside Britain. lii the galleries, where diagrams I And story exhibits bring together under a single roof the remotest corners of ' the Empire, director Sir Harry Lindsay and his staff have evolved a technique of their own for displaying the Empire's resources. In normal times their visitors arc mainly school children, parties' of whom come to the Institute, even in wartime, to wander among the goldfields of the Rand, the frozen uplands of#the Falkland Islands and the sugar plantations of Jamaica.

In the cinema they may see films of salmon-catching and canning in British Columbia or the life and scenery of India. Now that thous-< ands of them arc evacuated to the countr.v, Institute lecturers, each with a district of his own, are taking the talc of Empire to the schools. Since the war, 4500 films have been loaned out to the countryside - free of charge. The Institute's latest venture is to show by poster the processing of such products as Ceylon coconuts, Uganda cotton seed, Trinidad lake asphalt, West Indian cane sugar ("from .G*inc lo Candy"), and Sea Island cotton ("The Story of a Shirt").