Clear Thinking

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 505, 25 February 1949, Page 8

Clear Thinking

HE morning talks from 4YA have improved so much recently that it is becoming imperative to arrange morning tea for ten sharp. One of the best talks was Renate Rex on "What is There About New Zealand?" She spoke her perfect English with just enough hint of a foreign language to make the listener aware that her statements about New Zealand were the result of her own observation as a new settler here. She gently chided disgruntled immigrants who can’t like New Zealand because it isn’t exactly like "home," wherever "home" may be, and she hoped all such would realise that they were’ indulging in wishful thinking if they expected an earthly paradise in a land peopled with plain men and women without wings sprouting from their pullovers. These are the people who complain because letters are not delivered to the door, because our University colleges are not Oxford or Cambridge, because they can’t get servants or buy on Saturday anything they forgot to get on Friday. With a glance of mingled pity and disdain, the speaker left these people to stew in their own juice and sleep in beds they had themselves made, and passed on to a more constructive view. She pointed out what we do have in New Zealand, good food, healthy atmosphere, material prosperity and a simple and unhurried pace of living-a splendid basis, surely, on which to build the Utopia dreamed of by native New Zealanders and recent settlers alike. Intellectuals who complained of cultural loneliness, she suggested, must defeat pessimism by banding together to create that culture which seems now so lacking, or so thinly-spread that it is little more than a veneer. This talk in itself, as an example of clear, unbiased, optimistic thinking, was one worthy of being heard, not alone on a Friday morning, but from all stations at a quarter-to-nine on Sunday evening; and I wish I could quote it in its entirety.