Home Thoughts from Abroad

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 535, 23 September 1949, Page 11

Home Thoughts from Abroad

QW pleasant an idea someone had last week of reading from 4YA four letters from distinguished New Zealand students overseas. There is the seed here of a further development in radio as communication, as well.as entertainment. We have been guilty often enough in the past of ejecting our graduates barely fledged from the nest, and letting them find their own wings to fly. Perhaps if wé show more interest in their doings while away, they will be the readier to return to the nest. It was interesting to notice haw large this question of return loomed in the minds of these able young men and women, and heartening to find how many of them would come back if New Zealand could find appropriate work for them. There, of course, is the snag. The war proved the usefulness of radio in maintaining touch with soldiers overseas; its extension this way in peacetime’ is logical, But it is not so easy. The radio letter offers a real problem in presentation. Above all, it must achieve intimacy and for this it is just as dependent on the local reader as on the writer of the letter; Most of the voices 4YA used were appropriate, although one of the male voices sounded too mature for the part. The most successful both in matter and.in presentation was, I thought, the first letter jof R. O. Davies, New Zealand Rhodes Scholar, who had some interesting and critical things to say about the undemocratic ways of Oxford Colleges. What a heaven, though, fot our Honours students it would be to find themselves in a university where the enormous New Zealand ratio of students to staff had altered to about three to one in favour of the staff! A

Utopian thought,

K.J.

S.