Is Your Home Here?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 1, Issue 4, 21 July 1939, Page 10

Is Your Home Here?

A unique experience and a most absorbing temporary career is being enjoyed by some twenty girls in Wellington at present. They form part of the large staff which is modelling a mosaic of typical New Zealand features for the Dominion Court at the Centennial Exhibition. The girls come from various parts of the country, and even more varied are the professions which they have temporarily relinquished. From the clever hands of the girls in the Tree Department come (all preserved and fireproofed) plantations of pines, rows of poplars, orchards of fruit trees, stately tree ferns, native bush, and even our rambling gorse hedges. Days of searching for suitable lichens, mosses and twigs have been necessary, and occasionally " trousered-and-smocked" figures have been observed leaving on an all-day expedition, armed with sacks and secateurs. Farms of every type rest on shelves in the Art Room, ready for placing on the landscape out in the Court. Sheep stations, dairy farms, small settlements, timber milling areas, fruit orchards, tobacco and hop gardens, are all there. At one table perhaps a field of wheat takes shape, while at another an intent girl paints a garage roof or wires up a clothes line in the backyard of a farm house. Haystacks, pigstyes, cow byres, and woolsheds are all assembled while you watch, The Art Staff has also had the detailed work of depicting public parks, avenues, and residential areas

in the elaborate models of New Zealand’s main cities and towns, It is a pity that the general public cannot be permitted to see these girls at work in order to appreciate the care and patience necessary to present a finished whole.