AS OTHERS SEE US.

Shannon News, 10 March 1922, Page 3

AS OTHERS SEE US.

A Canadian, who lately returned to Sydney after visiting New Zealand, was asked by a Sydney Sun representative for his impiesifions of the Dominion. “What the Sam Hill did i think of Noo Zealand?” he asked meditatively. ‘‘Say, of ail the melancholy, moss-grown, fungus-smitten, custom-ridden, aftemoon-tea-drinking, elegy-in-country-churchyard sort of places, give me little old Noo Zealand. It’s 'the limit, the pepless limit. They don’t know they’re alive in that country,” he.went on, “If they ever did, the Lord'and themselves alone knew it; now they have forgotten, and the Lord only knows. Say, but I dove back 60 years in about twelve months —right back to early • Victorian England.”

“Passing Show,” a London weekly paper, publishes the following: “Siegfried Sassoon is grimly amused to learn that a New Zealand newspaper proprietor who republished one of his war poems has been prosecuted for “blasphemous libel.” New Zealand has long done its best to uphold early Victorian literature and artistic standards. Not so very long ago a bookseller was prosecuted for offering Boccaccio’s ‘Decameron’ to the unsophisticated Maorilanders. An even more amazing prosecution was that of a print-seller who exposed for sale reproductions of a chaste nude (painted by Mr Bernard Hall, an English artist now in Australia, where he holds the position of Director of the Melbourne National Gallery), in which a New Zealand policeman detected signs of incipient indecency. Culture has rather a hard row to hoe in the land of frozen mutton!”