Flowers of Speech

New Zealand Listener, Volume 25, Issue 632, 10 August 1951, Page 11

Flowers of Speech

FEEL the ZBs would have made a better job of the programme I heard from 2YC recently, The New Zealander as Orator, which halfway through seemed to me to fall a victim to its own thesis that "a country gets the arts it deserves," Having decided that (a) New Zealanders interpret "the good life" in material rather than cultural terms, dnd (b) that the two-party system of government is not conducive to oratory since neither party is open to conviction, the writer was content with only two post-Seddon examples-a moving but not outstanding memorial speech of Sir James Carroll in 1926, and the exordium from one of Sir Carl Berendsen’s UN speeches. What this half of the programme needed, I decided, was a live wire with a taperecorder picking up the flowers of rhetoric so prodigally flung on streetcorners, in the law-courts, at revival meetings, anywhere, in fact, where the converted still bear in mind the orator’s main purpose, to convince. (I realise, of course, that the listening public might have been petrified at seeing the Me-dusa-head of controversy so boldly raised.) The first half of the programme was, however, exciting, and the recon--structed examples of old colonial eloquence were all the more convincing to_ Wellington listeners delivered as they were by Aucklanders Anonymous.