A WOMAN OF ACTION

New Zealand Listener, Volume 9, Issue 216, 13 August 1943, Page 9

A WOMAN OF ACTION

"Don't Send Listeners To Sleep," Says Judith Terry

200-mile journey on_ horseA back through North Auckland at the age of 10 years began a life of adventure 40 years ago for Judith Terry, broadcaster, journalist, dancer, dramatic producer, banana-planter, gardener, and mother of a family. She is telling some of the stories of that journey on horseback in a fortnightly series of talks

from 1YA: "Horseback Holiday"-on alternate Wednesday evenings. I asked her if she had _ ridden even before she could walk, to practise for that 200-mile journey. "Oh, no," she said, "the man in charge of the party taught me to ride the day before we set out. After that I learnt as we went along. My steed was old Moses, about three times my age, and I had a sheepskin, woolly side out, for a saddle. It was beautifully comfortable. It’s

awfully cheeky of me, but I’ve ridden in shows since then." Mrs. Terry was born in Australia, but has spent most of her life in New Zealand. When she was 18, she was dancing in Sydney, and was chosen to tour for 18 months with the J. C. Williamson Company. "Of course," she said, "You'd hardly. call it dancing — posturing and wearing pretty clothes, rather." But she enjoyed it, and still hasn’t lost her love of the stage; she produces plays in and around Auckland, lectures and reads and gives advice wherever people are listening for cues. On Norfolk Island Then she got married and went to Norfolk Island. "When we got there I wanted to plant a garden at once. ‘Oh, you can’t grow anything yet,’ everyone told me; ‘this is the wire-worm season.’ Puf! to wire-worms, I thought, and soon I had cauliflowers and cabbages and lettuce and rhubarb and potatoes and a thousand things. I’d send a message by . bush telegraph: ‘We’ve got cauliflowers’ and everyone would come at the run. Then we'd find a package of oranges in exchange on the veranda. It was a good barter system as far as vegetables and bananas went-but you can’t dress in banana skins. So I came home to do some broadcasting to buy some clothes and a few other things." Scooping the BBC Mrs. Terry broadcast in Australia as well as in New Zealand. For a time in 1923, before the private stations came under Government control, she was what she described as "pretty well the whole works" at Ivan O’Meara’s station, 2YM.

at Gisborne. "The Works" at that time were largely advertising; but.in May she read in an English journal a item about an experiment that was to be made in August of that year — the reading of Shakespeare over the air. "So I said, ‘if they can read Shakespeare over the air in England why can’t we do it in New Zealand?’ So I read Shakespeare, and I think it possible that we got in before the BBC." .

Working on and off newspapers and in and out of broadcasting stations for 20 years, Mrs, Terry’ has done all sorts of jobs from crime reporting to reading market reports in the seven o’clock session. Her one complaint is that sub-editors won't let her develop a style of her own. She says she never lets her friends read her broadcast scripts because they always find that she’s left out a semi-colon. "That doesn’t matter as long as it’s alive," she said. |

A New Noel Coward Story When Noel Coward was in New Zealand, Mrs. Terry met him as an old friend: when she was in Norfolk Island she raised money for an X-ray plant for the hospital by putting on his plays. with his permission, without production fee. So in Auckland he told her a story. When he was in New York preparing for The Scoundrel to appear he was rehearsing the scene in which the voice of God is heard addressing the victim: "You will not rest until a woman weeps for you." This came out of the heavens in the most nasal of nasal Yankee. "Good God," cried Coward. "we can’t have that." "What makes you so sure." the Yankee voice demanded, "that God’s an Englishman?" Noel Coward told Mrs, Terry he was going to’ tell this story in his next book. "Ha," she said. "I’ll beat you to it." "Yes, I suppose you will, you old rascal," he said. To talk to Judith Terry is to feel that man’s deadliest sin is slothfulness-she’s full of action and likes active stories and dramatic broadcasts; her terms of abuse are "flat" and "dull," and her terms of praise are "alive" and "dynamic’-terms which she uses with a thump of a fist that is certainly not faint-hearted, If she had her way, she’d "singer-up" . the radio programmes: "Excitement! That’s what radio listeners want," she thumped. "Make ’em sit up! Let them object, let them argue, but for goddness sake don’t send them to sleep."