Songs of the Land

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 466, 28 May 1948, Page 5

Songs of the Land

T is pleasant to be able to | make an appeal to our readers that ‘is not an appeal for people in "distress. The letter on this page from Mrs. Woodhouse may have something to do with spiritual hunger, but it is certainly not an appeal for the physically hungry or cold or halt or maimed. It is a request for songs, songs about mustering and snow-raking, dipping and droving, and it gives us great pleasure to pass it on. We are not sure that we want Mrs. Woodhouse to unearth a singer of "bush burns": if that sad necessity ever moved a New Zealander to song, it might be as well that it should never become a popular song (though Guthrie-Smith has celebrated burning in prose). But the danger is not that Mrs. Woodhouse will be overwhelmed with verses on any aspect of farming or embarrassed afterwards by their effect on national policy. It is that she will not be enabled to make her anthology truly representative: that the writers and collectors of such things will neglect to send them in, some through inertia and some because they are not sure of the value of the lines they have hidden away in scrap-books. It is readers who have made collections of their own -furtively, perhaps, and in any case diffidently-who are in the best position to help, and it will be a pity if they fail through shyness. While it is unlikely that firstclass verse lies hidden anywhere, there must be a_ considerable amount of material that is authentic in setting and feeling even if it is not distinguished in expression. In any case it would be worthwhile sending everything to Mrs. Woodhouse that smells of the shearing-shed or smacks of the bush; that seems to have been written not too far away from live horses and sheep and cows and dogs; or near the kitchen oven.