Visit Wellington For The Centennial Exhibition

Dominion, Volume 32, Issue 153, 24 March 1939, Page 12 (Supplement)

Visit Wellington For The Centennial Exhibition

W ELLINGTON, and the whole Dominion, will celebrate the close of a hundred years of history. The main feature of the Centennial festivities will be the great Exhibition to be held at Wellington, opening in early November this year and running for six months. It will be the finest and most spectacular event of the sort ever to have been staged south of the Equator.

ALREADY the construction of the huge buildings—the single structure of the main courts covers 15 acres—is far advanced on the level land adjoining the city, in the pleasant suburb of Rongotai. Centennial Avenue, flanked with pylons and flags, is approaching completion; Centennial Tower already stands nobly dominating the eastern suburbs of Wellington. The great New Zealand Government Court at the exhibition will show every phase of the national culture and life, administration and development. The commercial activities of the Dominion will be reflected in the motor-engineering and general exhibits sections. The British and Australian Governments will have separate and impressive pavilions. The Dominion Court, subscribed and planned by the various provinces, will comprise a gigantic model, 300 feet long, of the whole' Dominion, with actual mountains and hills, rivers and lakes, on a scale and of a realism unimagined on any previous occasion. Actual scale models of famous cataracts, 30 feet high, will glitter with rushing water, cleverly illuminated. Whole cities will be reconstructed in miniature, every building accur-

ately modelled on a small scale. Beneath this wonderful court will be reproduced the caverns of Waitomo, where tourists travel in rowboats between limestone stalactites, by the wan light of millions of tiny glowworms.

To provide music in keeping with the high standard of the Exhibition, the directors have engaged the band of His Majesty’s Welsh Guards, at a total cost of more than £30,000.

The amusement park, Playland, will be an outstanding feature of the Exhibition. It will be the finest of its kind ever seen in Australia or New Zealand. An English company has obtained the concession to administer this section.

In addition to the Exhibition, and in conjunction with it, tremendous programmes of festivities are planned to mark the Centennial. A boy scout jamboree at Heretaunga, Hutt Valley, will be attended by 6000 boys from all parts of the world —biggest youth gathering to have taken place in the Dominion. Cabarets and other such entertainments, historical, pageantry, sports meetings and championships of every description, scientific and industrial and commercial congresses, will take place.