No Fight, No Fun

New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 177, 13 November 1942, Page 3

No Fight, No Fun

HEN an Irishman trails his coat he expects someone to tread on it. If there is no fight there is no fun. An Australian will cast reflections on your ancestry and wonder why you don’t shout him a drink. What is an insult, he asks, among friends? So when Mr. Winston, Rhodes, an Australian lecturer in English at Canterbury College, told us. the other day that we have no culture -no literature, no music, no philosophy, no thoughts of our own in New Zealand-it is not at all likely that he was trying to be offensive. He was merely repeating what New Zealanders themselves have told him, and forgetting that what sounds rather interesting when we say it ourselves, rather generous and brave and big, may have a different sound altogether when some one else says it at us. We must not take ‘offence where none was meant, and we

must not deny what is so plainly true. But when Mr. Rhodes tells us to give: up imitating Britain and start playing the sedulous ape to America it is like advising a drunkard to give up whisky and take a course of methylated spirits. America is a great country, a very great country; if there could be such a place it would be the greatest country in the world. But if our trouble is that we have not yet learnt to write poetry or paint pictures or compose music or think, it is not to America that any wise teacher would direct us. America in three hundred years has produced one great poet. It has pro-duced-but not trained, developed, or kept-one great painter and one supremely great sculptor. It has given the world no great composer. It has produced two philosophers, both of the same period, whose minds have left a permanent mark on world thought. America is what New Zealand itself is, only in a vaster way; too young, too imitative, too comfortable, too rich, and too raw to produce the flowers that blossom in human dust.