"THE PAST HAS ANOTHER PATTERN"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 556, 17 February 1950, Page 5

"THE PAST HAS ANOTHER PATTERN"

Sir,-The criticismsof my article in Joseph Stephens’s letter in your issue of January 27 arise mainly from misunderstai.ding, for which I am _ partly responsible. Sacrificing clarity to brevity, I wrote that in the 1900 period "very few New Zeaianders wrote books, and very few read them." What I meant was that very New Zealanders read the books that the very few New Zealanders wrote. This is indicated in-a reference to conditions aftet the first war-"for the first time New Zealanders began to be really interested in’ New. Zealand books." To say that New Zealanders did not read in those distant days would be silly. Possibly the people of Otago, children of the manse, read more than those of the north, but in the Bay of Plenty pioneer settlement where I was born there was a public library, and most homes had books. I did not say New Zealanders did: not write books in the pre-war period, and I quite agree with Mr. Stephens about the quality of some of the books written then. From time to time I have tried to do justice to those authors. In his last sentence, the construction of which is muddled, Mr. Stephens seems to say I regard Gallipoli as New Zealand’s birthday. I do so in respect to the developrnent of a stronger national consciousness. I am well aware that. good’ work was done before that date in the arts and in life generally. Mr. Stephens wonders -what pioneering women would believe what I wrote about life being more leisurely, its tempo slower, I was not referring to the pioneering period, but to New Zealand life im general in and about the year 1900, When tlhe colony had had sixty years -of development. The word "leisurely" means not only "having leisure," but "proceeding without haste." I am sure that nearly everyone who remembers that time would agree with me that the whole tempo of life has quickened. No change that I have witnessed seems more obvious.

ALAN

MULGAN

(Wellington).

Sir,-In reply to the letter of Joseph Stephens in your issue of January 27, stating that "the people in the backblocks of the North Island may have done very little reading before the First World War," I should like to state that in 1875 or thereabouts the Auckland Provincial Council made a grant of officially stamped books of a very high literaty standard to all its country settlements. As a youth living in Paparoa in the backblocks of the North Island, I became, in thé late ’seventieés and onwards, intimately acquainted with the works of Carlyle, Macaulay, Cervantes, Adam Smith, Dickens, Scott, Thackeray, George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte; Jane Austen, Motley, Prescott and many others. Mutual improvement sociéties of the. day held discussion groups, and stimulating debates restilted. We had ho opportunity of getting away to a city for higher education, but I venture -to say that some of those disctissions would not be out of place in a gathering of students. today. It is good to reflect. that even before the days of Carnegie the Auckland Provincial Council was donating libraries for the use of the people. This surely

proves that long before the end of the century a high standard of reading was not unusual.

R.

HAMES

(Auckland)_