FAVOURED HOUSEWIVES

New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 553, 27 January 1950, Page 5

FAVOURED HOUSEWIVES

Sir-The age of the housewife has arrived! The trumpets may have been muted to the somewhat more mellifluous tones of Chopin, but the air is loud ‘ with triumph. For the world, via broadcasting, via 1YZ Rotorua, apparently recognises that the Housewife and the Housewife alone possesses (unplumbed) depths of cultural taste. Consequently, the Housewife gets nearly all of the music and most of the less flagrantly unintelligent talks available from the station, leaving the. non-housewives to pant thirstily along upon a very few weekly momegts of intelligént listening. Is the Housewife to be regard as the only intelligent section of the community? Station 1YZ concentrates upon feeding the startled Rotortia Housewife’s appetite for music (need I append: GOOD?). Dare the NZBS take the* responsibility of fostering the intelligence of one downtrodden section to so great a preferential extent that it may eventually become the mastersection, thereby forming a matriarchy? Amazonic Rotorua! Is this a further attempt at flamboyant tourist attraction: the theme of life in Rotorua? j I feel humbled; more, I feel neglécted. Are the workers to be regarded as superfluous? The working female is .overlooked as purely parasitical, the working male as incidental, to Life’s Function. Nobody blames the programme staff, or the policy supervisor, for a jaundiced

outlook. Perhaps it is natural to suppose that a Rotoruan has a somewhat barbaric taste in sound, and forms so loose an interpretation of language that he takes the word music to embrace Vera Lynn, Sydney Torch, Friml and Four leafed Clovers. May I falteringly plead our by no means humble but perhaps too civilised cause? As a clean-limbed, upright Rotoruan, I hesitate openly to admit the possession of any musical taste. I shrink from the use of the word Culture. But beneath my proverbially (and necessarily) bluff exterior, I like music. NZBS help me, I like it! Do I stand condemned because of my _ coincidental qualities of liking music and being a worker? There are other workers in_ Rotorua (despite malicious rumours). Not every one of them is a moron. They pant ¢agerly and provincially for each Monday night, when they may hear, bar elections and acts of God, one major work, Sometime they may even hear some Beethoven, For dinner music (occasionally as much as one half-hour) they hear music which for lack of an even more damning word I must call Nice. Innocuous. On Sunday mornings they are treated with the same condescension, with occasional brief breaks out of what is timidly ete the Light ‘Classics. One feels that 1YZ, in appraising the essential function of life, is overlooking a collateral fact: we have at our disposal what has come to be known as a Civilisation. Must we. ignore it? In the absence of a resounding New Zealand constitution as abundant in glorious cliches on the theme of Rights as is the worshipped American one, may I brihg to my aid the pre-French Revolution phrase: Liberté! Egalité! Fraternité! May I emphasise: Equality.

S.

(R otorua).