"ONLY A BEGINNING..."

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 417, 20 June 1947, Page 7

"ONLY A BEGINNING..."

}{ARDLY had the foregoing article reached The Listener office than Colin Morrison himself walked in, having left Hong Kong just a week earlier. "I saw the sheep take off in Shanghai," he said, "and later I saw them on their new grazing grounds in Kansu. — In Shanghai they were a three days’ won-der-the papers describing, under fivecolumn wide headlines, Operatidn. Bopeep: New Zealand Gift Sheep Aristocrats Airlifted. But in Norih-West China -which is a long panhandle of oases stretching into Central Asia between the enormous mountains of Tibet and the Gobi. Desert-they are regarded as a continuing miracle. Local inhabitants. show them off to visitors from further away, explaining that they produce 10 pounds of wool a head instead of the local one-and-a-half average. ("The shearings from 500 local sheep look just like a pile of dags in the corner,’ says Rewi). And every dusk while I was in Shantan I saw them driven tinkling in through the city gates and along the streets to their corral in Alley’s com-

pound, to be returned to pasture each morning at dawn. "The Provincial Government, too, is delighted with them, for they are the start of new life- clothing, weaving, dyeing, farming-for the whole

region. General Kuo, who was Chief of Staff of the entire Chinese armies in the war against Japan, _ entertained Alley and me at Government House (as I suppose you'd call. it) in order. to express his delight and gratitude to the people of New Zealand for the yzift. He told me, too, how the province is benefited by Alley’s spirit as well as by his schemes, and begged me to hurry up sen&ing the New Zealand

doctor, and other helpers for Alley that CORSO has promised... ." After that we wanted to be reassured, that it really was Alley who owned the sheep and not the Kansu Government. "They are all his," explained Mr. Morrison, "and the wool they produce will be shorn, processed, spun, and ‘woven by the capable young fellows who make up his school. They learn by doing. in that place, and will make grand practical leaders in village modernisation wherever they go when they leave him and a new lot of peasant youths take their place. By selling the cloth that the boys will weave and dye from our Corriedales’ wool the school will help to pay its own way just as it does now by selling the pottery they make and the flour they grind. That will be just as big a benefit to China in the long run as clothing a region that to-day lives in tatters even although its winters fall sometimes to 40 below zero." "A very satisfactory end to an eventful story," we commenied, "End? No-only a beginning, I hope," exclaimed Mr. Morrison. "And I don’t mean only the beginning of better things for Kansu. Because -do you realise — this gift is the very first thing that New Zealand has done for its own pioneering son, who certainly is one of the world’s great men to-day. Americans, Canadians. and British have all given him a lift along at times. But those Corriedales are the first hand’s turn that we have done for him. So we must send, as soon as another opportunity occurs, the rest of the 50 head we originally promised him, And meanwhile there’s a more immediate and urgent job. CORSO has undertaken to send Rewi three helpers and to maintain them for two years at least-a doctor, an industrial chemist, and a machine-shop. instructor. And, since the doctor who is going has a qualified nurse as wife, that will make four | New Zealanders plus Alley-a combination, surely, that will do great things. First-clags people have offered and now are waiting only on transport and the finance which CORSO hopes to raise, If more money comes to hand than is needed for their passage money, ‘keep,’ and out-of-pocket allowances, CORSO will send, more people, So please don’t write ‘Finis’ to this Epic. Make it ‘To Be Continued.’ "