TO THE EDITOR

Taupo Times, Volume XIV, Issue 65, 19 August 1965, Page 6

TO THE EDITOR

COUNTY ENGINEER Sir, — As a county ratepayer, I view with concern the Taupo County Council's attitude on allowing one of its assistant engineers to do work for a consulting engineer. The fact that the notice-of-motion by Cr R. B. Dick to ptop this was given little attcntion by the council concorns me too. The senior engineer, Mr G. B. Burton, remarked that he had hoped the matter would have been discussed i i committee. Is he telling the council its business? Mr Burton also said he felt the council should stick to the decision it had made, but if you refuse to give a young boy a promised treat when you discover he is not really entitled to it, are you not doing him a service? Back in the days when Mr A. H. O'Keefe was county commissioner, we were

given very full reports of council business. Nowadays, we hear very little of what goes on. It seems to me there is too much behind-the-scenes work done by the council. — Yours, etc., R. O. EVANS, Palmer Mill Road. CONGRATULATION S Sir, I congratulate the Taupo Times on the good billing it has just received in tonight's (Wednesday, August 11) Postcript on Tv. Three mentions and two pictures gave Taupo quite a reasonable representation. However, one remark of the commentator may have been missed by many of your readers. It was on the subject of the treatment of news in a community, and specifically dealt with the effect it could have 011 tourism. How right that is. Most of us will remember the treatment our small tremors just prior to Christmas last year received at the hands of one national daily and the effect this had on some of our pre-Christmas tourist trade. It may not have been a Uad thing 'for Taupo if the effect had been worse. A drastic reduction in tourist turnover would bring Ivome to our re(sidents the extent to which Taupo's economy depends on tourism. However, my reasons for writing to you so frequently are to encourage tourist thinking in Taupo and not to discourage it. We should have, in a community such as Taupo, a full realisation of what the tourist really means to us. Further we should be striving at all times to attract more and more tourists to us. But do we? W. G. FOSTER.

HUNTER FOR HIRE Sir, — Firstly I want to thank you for at least reviewing my hook "Hunter For Hire." I am thankful that your reviewer liked the beginning and the end. How come he couldn't pick the middle? He states the writing changed in the middle . . . too plurry right it changed. From the happy-go-lueky kid with no worries to a dead serious existence as a safari guide with no business experienee. There was as much left out as was put in, and when these tough business tycoons "playing" hunters got at yours truly . . . no wonder the writing changed. I make no exeuse for the type of people I guided, a guide cannot pick his clients. Nor do I gloss over the truth of what clients were like. At least I had the guts to get out of the business, when I found the life of a guide was not all milk and honey as fiction would have one believe, and more so after experience taught me that I had no liking for the life of a guide. I have no doubt that I was of the wrong temperament, and too independent a Kiwi to carry on this means of livelihood — at least I admitted that. However, one thing stands out and a very important one that your reviewer missed, and one that I did not know myself till the book was written. Americans have, from my earliest recollections, always made fun of the big game hunter, in Tv., movies, and story. This big game hunter has always been an English pukka sahib, invariably with a walrus moustache, a pith helmet . . . and no brains whatsoever. In my years as a guide and from the hundreds of clients I have guided, I never met that type of Englishman, who appears to have dis-

appeared from the safari scene. However his place seems to have been more than ably taken by the pot bellied American with multiple cameras and dark glasses, complete with cigar . . . this is fact, at least it beats fiction. I in all honesty wrote an accurate account of tourists as I found them, and because I did not like what I found, I gave up the business. Should I have glossed over the truth? — Yours, etc., REX FORRESTER.