A New Zealander In Sydney Town

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 628, 3 April 1929, Page 9

A New Zealander In Sydney Town

(From Til E SUN’S Correspondent) SYDNEY, March 28. As Is always the case, Sydney is crowded for Easter. What with the Show and the Racing Carnival there is every justification for the general inrush from the country. New Zealand has sent her contingent. The Dominion is mostly represented by I racing men. There has been the usual protest against holding the Royal Sydney Show on Bood Friday. In the absence of Archbishop Wright in New Zealand, Archdeacon Boyce made it. But Miss Sydney, pagan that she is, did not even trouble her pretty head to reply. She ignored it. N.Z. Tourist Services It is rather refreshing to find an Australian finding something praiseworthy in the New Zealand tourist service. Mr. P. J. Marks, a well-known Sydney business man, who returned from the Dominion last week, said he was particularly impressed by the excellent arrangements made for tourists in the various centres of New Zealand, and by the splendid service of motorcars by which it was possible to visit all points of interest with the minimum of trouble. He even Went as far as to say that the N.S.W. Tourist Bureau could learn much by studying New Zealand methods. Mr. Marks pointed out that it was almost impossible to obtain in New Zealand literature relating to New South Wales, or even Australia, wheras at every hotel there was a mass of information available about the Dominion’s attractions. There is no doubt that those responsible for New Zealand’s publicity have accomplished excellent work in Australia within recent years. In every hotel of importance in Sydney there is an abundance of New Zealand literature. Visitors have commented to me upon its tasteful and generally artistic preparation. Undoubtedly it has played its part, and will continue to do so, in enticing travellers across the Tasman. Tourist propaganda of the right type is an excellent advertisement—as well as a sound investment—for the finest little tourist country in the world. Australian Literature

With a small group of New Zealanders I was present at the Lyceum Club the other night to hear Nettie Palmer speak on Australian literature. Mrs. Palmer, and Vance Palmer, her husband, reside in Queensland. Mrs. Palmer is one of the outstanding literary critics of Australia, as well as being an accomplished short-story writer, and a poet of considerable merit. A short, matter-of-fact little woman, with little or no pretension as a speaker, she nevertheless gripped her large audience by her obvious sincerity and quiet depth of feeling. Though Mrs. Palmer admitted that the Australian epic has yet to be written, she strongly advised the reading and studying of the writers who had endeavoured to present an Australia in the throes of transition, for the benefit of future generations. Commenting upon the recent success abroad of Henry Handel Richardson, the Queensland writer upbraided her fellow-Australians for a somewhat slavish following of what constituted success abroad. It would almost seem, she said, that an Australian writer had to win recognition overseas before he was entitled to that same recognition in his own country. Henry Handel Richardson, as Mrs. Palmer said, was writing in Australia and of Australia for 20 years before ihe was acclaimed as having written something that was considered a landmark in the history of the novel. New Zealand’s Appreciation?

If Australians can be criticised on this score, I think New Zealanders are equally to blame. Few New Zealand writers have any real success in their own country. Hector Bolitho, the Auckland writer, who had no fewer than three publishing houses after his last novel, “Judith Silver,” is an example of the proverbial prophet in his own land. Elsie K. Morton, on the other hand, has won a decided success with a most entertaining little volume on the country she knows so well, and which, I note, is now on the Sydney bookstalls.

. . . But to return to the Lyceum Club for one moment. Dora Wilcox, our own New Zealand poet, welcomed the Queensland writers, and Mary Gilmore made an amusing little speech. Nettie Palmer, by the way, in her review of contemporary poetry in this part of the world, extolled the work of Eileen Duggan, the New Zealander, and a frequent contributor to The Sun. Dora Payter, a former Aucklander, received congratulations on the first issue of her magazine, the “B.P. Magazine,” one of the finest trade journals—it is financed by the Burns, Philp Company—in Sydney. Dulcie Deamer, William Moore, Mrs. Brigham, of Auckland, and Mrs. Maxwell, a writer from Invercargill, were among the others present. Off to Europe E. J. Roberts, one of the best-known J. C. Williamson conductors, is off to Europe with his wife, formerly Miss Olive Goodwin, well remembered as a talented principal in many J.C.W. productions in the field of light opera and musical comedy. —ERIC RAMSDEN.