Humanities on the Land

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 397, 31 January 1947, Page 11

Humanities on the Land

i\TOHN GREEN, the BBC Director of | Agricultural Broadcasts, in his recorded talk "Land Sense" laid a finger on an important split in our development; laid a finger on it, but did not, I thought, explore. His task was a plea for young New Zealand farmers to see their way of life (farming is not just a job) as an art as well as a science. He put his case convincingly, emphasising the sense of the past which European farmers have, and urging us to make use of our part of that heritage. This seems to me admirable but almost impossible. The English farmers who settled in Canterbury at the end of the 19th Century did their best to make another England, But as the children grew It was something different, something Nobody counted on. We aren’t articulate enough apparently, to tell each other what we have turned into, nor has the changing process continued ‘long enough for anyone to do much measuring, but in a land of tin roofs and six o’clock closing, with china animals on the window-sill and a subscription to the Digest instead of bookshelves, it is hard to see a blossoming of the humanities. There are farmers who read other things besides butterfat prices, and think about more fundamental problems than welding the draw bar of a tractor, but they don’t have much time. The five-day cow has not been developed to fit into the forty-hour week; the agricultural revolution has not yet caught up on the industrial revolution.