AS OTHERS SEE US.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXV, Issue 4739, 18 August 1924, Page 1

AS OTHERS SEE US.

! NEW ZEALAND AND PUBLICITY. A correspondent, wilting in tile “Spectator” from San Francisco, thus refers to New Zealand and New Zealanders: It takes a long time for my Spectator to reach me here, so that I have only ,i ust seen the issue of April 12 and the paragraphs in "The EnglishSpeaking Column” on the above subject. To anyone who has visited New Zealard or known much of its people the suggestion of a publicity campaign in that country is amusing from its incogruity. If Britain finds it temperamentally difficult to advertise, as she does, the difficulty-becomes almost an impossibility in the case of New Zealand, for, though perhaps nhe would not admit it, the latter is more British than Britain in some respects. Far fiom welcoming visitors the New Zealander, as many a traveller there will agree, appears to regard them with extreme reserve, mingled often with suspicion. He is intensely proud of his country and his climate, whether he basks 'in the sub-tropical heats of the North Island or is braced by the Scottish rigo&rs of Dunedin in the South. His own newspapers are perpetually full of excellent photographs of its varied beauties. But his pride is a close, jealous pride. He hugs the beautiee to himself and has no. wii-h, as far as,one can gather, for anybody else to see them. It would be useless for the New Zealand Government to issue posters to the world "Come and See Us,” if, when it came, it was met by the first resident with an annoyed "What on earth have you come for ?” British myself, I am no lover of publicity “stums,” and a residence of some months in America has greatly strengthened rather <than weakened this feeling. But nothing so rigorous or alien need be necessary for New Zealand if only she could be induced to develop a rather wider outlook <lll places and peoples beyond her own pleasant shores. A little more friencliness to the outer world and she would soon be better known and her attractions appreciated. But not only is New Zealand itself little known, but no one, not even New Zealanders themselves, appear to know that the Dominion has possessions in the South Seas which, if made, the subject, of a publicity campaign, could no doubt soon rival other resorts of that picturesque region. The Cook Islands, a group of five islands twenty degrees south of the equator and within some eight hundred miles or so of the famous Tahiti, are in the administration of the Dominion. Raratonga, the chief of the group,, fe regarded by setae South Sea writers as one of the loveliest islands in ths Pacific. It is twenty miles round and five miles broad. Down its centre runs a chain of peaked hills clothed to the top in bush. It has all the luxuriance of vegetation, riot of hibiscus and flamboyant frangipanni, which has made the islands of the South Seas so romantically attractive; its lagoon is opalescent; its bronzehued maidens and youths go flowerwreathed and„barefoot. It plays the tom-tom beneath the coco-palms and still dances the hula-hula not for pay at tawdry music halls, but because it likes to do so. Schooners occasionally make trips to the other islands of the group—Aitu, Aitutaki, Mangia, and Maiike. There is a monthly serivce of steamers which call at Raratonga on the route from Sydney and Wellington to San Francisco. Raratonga, is no more distant from Wellington, than Honolulu from San Francisco. Yet while all the world has heard of the latter (or if they haven’t it’s through no fault of America, which owns it) and one gets an impression that it is a day’s run from San Francisco, hardly anybody but a few South Sea travellers have heard of the Cook Islands or know that they belong to New Zealand. I have read numbers of articles and books about the South Seas which have dealt with Tahiti and Hawaii, Samoa and Fiji, the Marquesas and the Paumotus, the Solomons and, in fact, every group save the Cook group. It seemed sometimes as if there was a conspiracy of silence about these islands. Not even,, as I have said, do the people of New Zealand, who own them, know them, beyond a few officials. It is the most ; difficult thing when in that Dominion to get any information about them — and when you do get it, it is only that any passenger for that port must buy a return ‘ ticket in case the island authorities refuse to receive you! I do not in the least want to see Raratonga made into a second Honolulu, and it is a good side to New ' Zealand’s reserve that this is not at all likely to be its fate. Your writer’s reference, however, to New Zealand and to Hawaii made me feel it might- be of interest to note this remarkable instance of national exclusiveness.