Waitangi On The Air

New Zealand Listener, Volume 2, Issue 33, 9 February 1940, Page 12

Waitangi On The Air

HE meaning of the Treaty of Waitangi most people now understand. They understand the meaning and the purpose of the celebration of the Treaty this week. They even understand dimly why the most enthusiastic celebrant, if he occupies a public position, will temper his enthusiasm with discretion. But those things concern others more than they concern us. We are not historians, or politicians, or land-jobbers. We are dealers in magic, and the magic of Waitangi is the fact that nearly everyone in the Dominion can be at the Bay of Islands this week without leaving home. It is, in fact, far harder to understand what we are doing in 1940 than it was for the Maoris to understand what they did in 1840. They may or may not have realised fully what they gave and what they got. They certainly understood what they hoped to get. But we have no more than a glimmering view yet of the consequences to New Zealand of radio broadcasting. It is plain enough to the dullest of us that the consequences are wide and deep. If the lighthouse-keeper at Puysegur Point hears, not merely what Maori and Pakeha are saying at Waimate North, but what Berlin and Moscow are trying to tell him about London, he is no longer a lighthouse-keeper. He is a citizen of the world, no wiser perhaps than he was before, and perhaps no happier, but he can no more become the man he was than a frog can again become a tadpole. Frogs or tadpoles, or just poor fish, we are on the move and can’t stop. The meaning of Waitangi is no doubt what we think it is. The sensation of its celebration this year is the fact that we have said good-bye for ever, Maori as well as Pakeha, to life in an isolated pool,