COOK ISLANDS ANNIVERSARY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 24, Issue 623, 8 June 1951, Page 13

COOK ISLANDS ANNIVERSARY

EXT Monday (June 11) marks the end of the first fifty years of New Zealand administration in the Cook Islands. Why was New Zealand interested enough to want to go to all the bother and fuss of annexing the group: fifteen islands (Niue has a separate administration), with a total area about a quarter that of the Chatham Islands, scattered across 850,000 square miles of the Pacific? This is one of the questions that Dr. Ernest Beaglehole, Professor of Psychology at Victoria University College, will discuss in three talks from 2YC on The Cook Islands: Fifty Years of New Zealand Administration, Listeners will hear in the first talk how the islands became New Zealand territory, (They were actually annexed, of course, some months before their new form of government was established.) Professor Beaglehole discusses Seddon’s | ripening wish to annex the group and. Parliament’s subsequent decision to do so after a debate in the House of Representatives which lasted till a quarter to three on a Saturday morning. He sketches in a background, too, of European influences on life in the islands from the time they were discovered by Cook. The New Zealand administration, Professor Beaglehole makes it plain, faced some pretty big headaches when it took over the islands. It looked like another case of smoothing the pillow of a dying race. But it turned out otherwise, and in his second and third talks Professor Beaglehole shows how social, political and economic problems of the islands have been solved or have solved themselves during the fifty years since annexation. These talks on the Cook Islands will be broadcast by 2YC at 7.45 p.m. on Mondays, the first of them on June 11, With the talks 2YC will also broadcast three programmes, Songs from the Cook Islands. The first, at 7.25 p.m. on June 11 (immediately before Professor Beaglehole’s first talk), makes some comparisons between the music of Cook Islanders and Maoris. It suggests that Cook Island harmony is nearer than that of any other island group to Maori harmony, though there is a much stronger European influence in Maori music. The songs (and some dances) are linked by comment, These programmes were produced by the Shortwave Division of the NZBS, which has already broadcast the first from Radio New Zealand.