L'Envoi

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 522, 24 June 1949, Page 10

L'Envoi

URING his four years in New Zealand Sir Patrick Duff has been noted for the felicity of his public utterances, and his Farewell Broadcast was worthy of a man who has become known as a virtuoso in the field of the spoken word. He began facetiously, with an allusion to his flouting of the maternal] injunction to be seen and not heard, continued poetically, with references to "sprawling grey riverbeds with lupin and gorse gold among the silver gravel" and "the wall-eyed green lake in the crater of Ruapehu," and "the warm --E

sunny red ‘earth on the. gentle slopes near Pukekohe," branched out into patriotism when he referred to his impending return to a Britain "in her Elizabethan mood again, effervescing with vitality and resource," a Britain where "smiling faces are not rationed, and courage is not on points;" ended emotionally, with reference to the many friends and many places which he and Lady Duff would remember with nostalgia and regret. It was evident from the speéch that Sir Patrick is as far from being a New Zealander as\ at the beginning of his four-year stay-he referred to himself as a bloke instead of a joker and even then surrounded the word by inverted commas-but it was equally evident that, to use his own simile, he would go home with as much good New Zealand soil\clinging to his roots as sticks to the turnip dug up from a rich New Zealand paddock,