The World in Our Homes

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 535, 23 September 1949, Page 10

The World in Our Homes

E were first made aware of the potentialities of wireless when Kingsford Smith flew the Tasman. Recollection is at once vague and vivid. Vague becatfse of time and vivid because of event. Details of reception and announcements are dim, but the sense of excitement, of discovery, are remembered. We followed the course of the Southern Cross ‘with the aid of earphones and cat’s whisker. We were all on board the aircraft, sharing the hazards of storm and darkness. The adventure was ours as well as theirs, History was being made that night and we were part of it, It was no longer a story happening to others, but an important event brought so close that its reality was on our own hearth, We were participators rather than onlookers. The haphazard results of the cat’s whisker and the earphone have been replaced by high-powered efficiency. The home without a radio is now the exception, and with the daily, hourly, familiar impact, how different has become our attitude towards it! Since Kingsford Smith’s flight, we have taken part in many such adventures. Dictators have strutted and stopped, armies have trampled and destroy- ed, kings have died; we listened in to the blitz over London and to the bombing of Berlin; heroism and atrocity have exalted or depressed; there was the epic of Dunkirk and the fall of France; there were signs and portents and voices, all coming out of the air and into our homes in a way that they had never done before. And the initial feeling of excitement and discovery has gradually given way to a uniform, almost too casual, acceptance. We listen in now, absorbing or discarding according to our different tastes, all that the wireless brings to us. Our pleasures and prejudices in enlightenment or entertainment are limited only by the range of our sets or by our own capacities and interests. We rail at this, delight in that, but we seldom think of the immensely widened horizons that are made possible for us. Familiarity may not have bred contempt, but all the same we do tend to take the good things for granted. These thoughts arose out of a 15minute programme the other night ‘when we heard the voices of Clara Butt and Caruso, the violin of Kreisler, one after the other, In time of peace we can listen to the greatest artists the world has to offer,

or we can identify ourselves with a cricket match as it is being played thousands of miles away. In time of war our. suburban street is brought to the __ battleground. And we have come to accept all this as a matter of course. Radio is now as much part of everyday liying as is the telephone, the motor-car, electric-

ity, or the newspaper, but its power to enhance our susceptibilities, to broaden our appreciation, is much more enor-mous-if we like to use it. We have lost, in the main, the capacity for wonder. We accept far more stolidly than did our parents the manifestations of ~change. So much _ has altered for us in such a comparatively short space of time that we have become blasé with a plethora of new ideas, new ideologies and the bewildering progression of scientific invention. To my comparatively simple mind, however, there is still something akin to black magic in the thought that by the mere switching of a knob, the whole compass of the earth and the arts can be brought within the narrow boundar-

ies of my four walls,

Sycorax