OUT OF THIS WORLD

New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 725, 5 June 1953, Page 15

OUT OF THIS WORLD

LAND where the mothers of young children are equipped by Nature with four pairs’of hands, an Arcadia of self-milking cows, a world where men have no vote and all institutions are run by women, an imaginary Hudson Bay territory, a cricketers’ para-dise-these are some of the fabulous lands described in a series of talks to be broadcast shortly under the title Imaginary Journeys. The six speakers, G. R. Gilbert, A. R. D. Fairburn, Sarah Campion, R. T. Brittenden, Bruce Petrie, and Denis Glover, were each asked to describe a visit to some country that existed only in their imagination, What Utopias did they discover in their imaginary journeys? Sarah Campion describes her visit to Mailand, where the tyranny of time has been routed and where the chief craft and industry is the rearing of children. So venerated are the mothers in Mailand, she says, that Nature has been persuaded by "centuries of prayer," to bestow on them additional] arms which develop during their first pregnancy. "I have observed," she says, "one Mailand mother holding her newly-born infant on one atm, guiding the tottering steps of the next sibling with another hand, buttoning up the coat of a third, and wiping the nose of a fourth. while at

the same time giving the remnants of the breakfast porridge to the cat and retoving a fleck of egg from the breadwinner’s tie before sending him to his daily toil." A. R..D. Fair burn’s Autarkia is "the last word in modernity," a completely self contained 20th Century state whose only trade is a two-way traffic with the Sahara in which blocks of frozen

heat are exchanged for the dried heads of politicians and university professors. "Perhaps the greatest triumph to have been achieved so far in this astonishing country," he says, "is that women have by this time completely got the upper hand. No male is permitted to own property, propose marriage, run a bank account, give up his seat to a woman in a jet-propelled bus, go fishing on

Sunday, smoke tobacco, choose his own library books, sit about in braces, or do any of the other things traditionally associated with masculine privilege. It is ten years since the vote was taken away from men. . . The work of Government is all done by a permanent and hereditary bureaucracy, consisting mostly of women, under the direct personal command of Madame Onions, the female Dictator." One of ".utarkia’s outstanding accomplishments, Mr, Fairburn considers, is

its organisation on a gigantic scale of soil erosion activities. Water is pumped into huge dams on the tops of hills and sluiced down the valleys. "This is in accord with the unceasing national campaign to get rid of dirt. Behind it lies, however, the further intention of preventing the illicit production of food." The food industry is, of course, like everything else in Autarkia, a State monopoly.

G. R. Gilbert went with his father-in-law to Lansankerston, "a tiny trading post on Hudson Bay." Here he observes the "violent collision between the stone-age and contemporary techniques, where all food comes out of tins and the Eskimos write with typewriters and go to the pictures in the evenings. Father-in-law (who has been labouring around in a_battery-heated Arctic suit) so falls in love with life in a centrally-heated igloo that he decides to spend the winter there. In Denis Glover’s Parenthesia the cows milk themselves, the sheep are never shorn, and the wheel has been abolished so that there are no motorcars, no bicycles, and mo modern industries. Civic dignitaries .are elected "for their charm and humour," and life generally is devoted to the pursuit of happiness rather than the pursuit of money. The inhabitants laugh at his description of life in New Zealand, because in Parenthesia there’s not a milkbar or a petrol pump to be seen. "Gracious living flourished among them, and gastric ulcers wete unknown." These Imaginary Journeys start from 3YC at 7.34 p.m, on Friday, June 12, and from 1YC on June 23, j