AUSTRALIAN NEWS

Hokitika Guardian, 11 April 1932, Page 2

AUSTRALIAN NEWS

NEWS AND JOTTINGS. RESIGNATION OF MR BAVIN. SYDNEY, April 2. Australians aio apt to be very parochial. This week they get another demonstration when Mr Bavin, exPremier and leader of the Sate Opposition, was forced by ill-health to retire. The papers paid tribute to his honesty and integrity as a good Australian, no one remembering that aggressive little gentleman is a New Zealander. lie was born in 1874 at Kaiapoi where his father, Rev Rainsford Bavin, was Methodist Minister, and educated at Auckland Grammar School. Mr Bavin is a K.C and will seek the com para tively calmer waters of the Law Courts. He will still retain his State seat.

N.Z. Visitors., "Visiters from N.Z.—about 2000 of them, here for the opening of the great Harbour Bridge, were incredulous that tilings could look so bright in a State already on the verge of a Trades Hall managed Socialistic era. But the truth is that now that the festival exodus has set in, New South AVales is into her old political ridden gloom. Last year 12,000 people -le:t Australia never to return, and of these 10,000 were from N.S.W. New Zealand’s economy measures may hot be happy to contemplate, but at least she will turn the corner when she reaches it, hut the future of N.S.W. is a problem that is exercising the whole of Australia,

Musical.

Pleasant reference to the work being done in New Zealand to foster musical consciousness was made at the annual meeting of the Musical Association by an artist well known in the Dominion. Mr Cyril -Monk. Music, he said, was the safety-valve of self-expression, and New Zealand was wisely using its schools to implant this basis of national character building.

Sydney Fashions. Sydney women, says Miss Gunther, an American visitor, who spent some time in New Zealand, have the best idea of fashion in Australasia. “But”, ‘she says, “they are. too clothes-conscious. Beautiful clothes do not seem to be natural to them, whereas New r Zealand women, with the preference for quieter dressing, wear their clothes superbly' and confidently. Australian men, with their magnificent bronzed bodies, broad shoulders and narrow hips, are the answer to a lonely American woman’s prayer.”

Liming Land., Sir Samuel Hordern, famed for his model farm at Hot-ford Hall, near Sydney, confessed at the Royal Show that he has to thank New Zealand for the best method of manuring grass land. He took the poorest paddock on, his farm, so hard that it had to he broken up with a rotary hoe, and to each acre applied five cwt of shell lime.