Rich in Talks

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 382, 18 October 1946, Page 11

Rich in Talks

UNDAY evening, October 6, was more rich in radio talks than usual. At 8.45 we had the regular Sunday night talk from the National stations given by J. D. F. Green of the BBC and at 9.30, from main National and Commercial stations, we were flattered with a thoroughly adult and thought-provoking address by the American radio dramatist Norman Corwin, who was in the country five days on the last lap of his flight round the world on the Wendell Willkie One-World award, The first talk was of course of particular interest to farmers: Mr. Green has visited Canada, the United States and Australia and has just spent a month in New Zealand visiting farms here and comparing his impressions; he is director of the farm services in the BBC and a farmer himself in Gloucestershire. He spoke of the New Zealand farmer learning from the British farmer and _also of the British farmer learning from the New Zealand: he sounded extraordinarily impressed by the wealth, the goodness of our farmlands and he issued a very strong warning against greed — greed which in a few dozen years could overwork those rich lands and turn them into greenless wastes "where no birds sing." Mr. Green’s talk was something to sit and brood on; but there wasn’t much time, for the dynamic Mr. Corwin began to speak in his quiet, incisive tones at 9.30. Where Mr. Green sounded a warning Mr. Corwin sounded a hope for the part New Zealanders could play in the one-world future he foresees. "Why should } reat poems and paintings and symphonies have to be imported to this magnificent Dominion?" he asked, and suggested that New Zealanders should exchange students with other countries (he mentioned England, America, Russia and China) in the effort to achieve the One World specifically envisaged by Wendell Willkie but contemplated in general by many before him. This talk was, to me, a model of everything a radio talk should be. |