MONARCH”

Dominion, Volume 32, Issue 153, 24 March 1939, Page 1 (Supplement)

MONARCH”

A NEW LINK OF EMPIRE

ITIHE maiden voyage of the Shaw Savill and Albion Company’s magnificent new motor-liner, Dominion’ Monarch, marks a new epoch in the history of Empire shipping. Built at a time when the British Merchant Marine is fighting a grim battle with heavily-subsidised foreign competitors on many world trade routes, the Dominion Monarch embodies a mighty effort on the part of her owners to maintain their 80-year-old traditions of service and progress and to uphold the prestige of British merchant shipping. There is much significance in the proud name of this splendidly-appointed ship. She is the pioneer vessel on a route which links Great Britain with three overseas Dominions—South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. New Zealand assuredly will extend a hearty welcome to the Dominion Monarch, and to her travellers.

m HE great and far-reaching significance of this new X J’d'Ut'a will be readily apparent to New Zealanders. It opens an assured and safe all-British ocean highway, secure as long as Britain remains mistress of the seas. It avoids the crossing of the landlocked Mediterranean, which is today, in times of international crises, liable to the menace of hostile warships and commerce raiders. It draws closer together than ever before the Mother Country and the three sister Dominions, whose interests are so closely interlinked, whose futures so wholly interdependent. Long ago, the stately sailing ships that brought to Australia and New Zealand their first pioneer settlers, came by way of the Cape. For many years the great Westerly winds of the Roaring ’Forties brought to New Zealand her commerce and her people. Later, the greater speed and directness of the Pacific“route, after the opening of the Panama Canal, occasioned the abandonment of the oldtime seaway.

Today, it has been reopened in splendid and dramatic fashion by a ship memorable in the annals of the sea. But, with the greater development of the young countries and the expansion of their interests, the service now opens up entirely new prospects of Dominion trade. It opens, without expense or trouble of transhipment, new markets beyond the seas, new scope for commercial exploitation. It opens, too, new tourist prospects. England, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand present a whole world of contrast and variety and differing charm. The sedate and verierable cities and county towns of the Homeland, and its parklike countryside, the high veldt and the bush veldt, the eucalyptus forests and coral islets and saltbush plains, the thermal regions, and alps and fiords combine to form a vastly varied and entertaining travelogue. Finally, it has now become possible, for the first time, to travel round the world—out by Panama, home by Australia and the Cape, or vice versa—all in the same company’s vessels, by a service girdling the globe.