Who Wants a Metropolis?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 890, 24 August 1956, Page 26

Who Wants a Metropolis?

| SECONDARY industry in the South Island is not very demonstrative. It’s there all right, and some of it has been there a long time, The woollen mills and freezing works were inevitable refinements of our early, simple sheep culture. Morning and afternoon tea culture, with four varieties of cake, brought the early establishment of biscuit factories, cake factories and baking powder factories, Pie cart culture (where to go when the pubs close) saw the development of mass production pie foundries. Later, with tariff protection, boot and rubber factories added their wares, Solid stuff. Nothing fly by night. Nothing to wave your arms about. The farmers still come to town on Wednesdays. But the North, and particularly Auckland, tries to tell us about it. There are little advertisements in the papers about the number of people dependent on secondary industry. A bus line runs a tour of -proud, potentially profitable undertakings like Kawerau and Wairakei ... » And yet, and yet, how metropolitan are we? Admittedly, any day is farmers’ day in Queen Street, You can’t recognise them en masse one day a week. Auckland ign’t exactly a market town. But our dealings with detail are still in country fashion. a —

"‘Dstving to Auckland, and in no hurry, I saw a list of motels, and wired reservations to two of them. I thought I knew about motels. In Canada, the U.S., and the tourist parts of Mexico, the motel is a specialised development of that old —

metropolitan institution, the hotel. In New Zealand, we have tacked the label motel on to that home-grown country refuge, the bach at the beach. Motels on the American Continent are run by earnest professionals who aim to make a buck, ours by easy-going amateurs who like a yarn with the guests. I didn’t do so well with my two wires, which were in ‘the terse and economic shorthand I learnt while sending and receiving reservation wires at a Mexican tourist spot. The first motel I’d wired was deserted. The friendly, easy-going owner had clean forgotten to put the reservation in his book and ‘had gone fifty miles for a day’s shooting. When he came back, late that evening, help and entrance had been provided by a friendly relation, and we all had a good laugh and a lot of talk about the whole business. The second wire was in the wrong shorthand. The motel owner had misinterpreted. the dates and scored a double booking. He was nice, too. He phoned a hotel which was willing to Provide accommodation at three times the price, and chattily offered a parting gift of citrus-"Come and see us again." Fair enough. Who wants a metropolis? Whose Ulcers? The way Aucklanders talk when they visit Christchurch builds up southerner’s feeling that life is pretty tense there. They sprinkle their talk with phrases _like "killing schedule" (sometimes say- | ing schedule as Americans do), "desk lunches," "tied up all day," "twentytous hour merchandiser," "in the ulcer bracket," "weekend sessions," and so on. You feel that by the time they get _to bed their nerves are sprung so twanging tight they must take sleeping pills to help them relax. In Christchurch, these Aucklanders hint, people are very English, and like the English, about two whiskies below par. When I moved to Auckland I was prepared to accept this as the truth, and knew my friends were trying to help me when they offered me whisky before dinner, However, I stuck to dry sherry, and observed, like a true jour--nalist, and sure enough, there were the pouchy eyes, the flaccid handshakes, the charcoal suits, the expense account dinners at any number of suave restaurants, the obituaries of brilliant executives who had not been fast enough on their feet to escape a coronary at the age of 38, It looked like the truth. Auckland- a grim town of tension under its lush green growth: Auckland-where hearts only break from hypertension. Encouraging for a journalist but sickening for a lover-of humanity. Then, as I was polishing those ulcerated phrases, an onrush of statistics demolished the whole edifice. The press reports the theft of a large quantity of benzedrine from an Auckland chemist shop. Benzedrine keeps you awake, the last thing my cream Aucklanders need, with their cafe espresso bars and their painfully acquired tension, The statistic that came from Christchurch was a sober report on the increased use of barbiturates in the Christchurch area. Barbiturates are what Aucklanders say they put themselves to sleep with, Quite the wrong thing for southerners already below par in zip, The survey showed that 27 times the amount of barbiturates were prescribed in May, 1955, over May, 1941. That’s a lot of tension. How long have they been worrying about the Shield in Canter-

bury, anyway?

G. leF.

Y.