THE DREAMING ISLANDS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 918, 15 March 1957, Page 11

THE DREAMING ISLANDS

Sir,-In the absence of Mr David Goldblatt, now some 12,000 miles away and thus probably deprived of a sight of The New Zealand Listener, I am constrained to comment on your editorial "The Dreaming Islands," contributed by M,H.H. Your leading articles have often refreshed one humble reader by their quality and objectivity-why then this somewhat petulant outburst against Mr Goldblatt? I am loath to think it was because he had the effrontery to describe our New Zealand landscape as "extremely ordinary" yet "eerie" or that he spoke of our "shanty towns." Many widely travelled people from ~ the northern hemisphere have expressed rather similar views to me, After all these are surely matters of individual opinion; as M.H.H. so sagely remarks, "we do not possess the landscape.’ Why then the pother? Can it be that the cause of your seeming ill temper lies in the fact that, both while in New Zealand .and in his London address, Mr Goldblatt found us too regimented and too docile .about it -too anxious to emphasise security in a land which Providence has clothed with so much opportunity-too smugly proud of our bureaucracy and our quasi judicial bodies: in a word, too much like a country of half-baked socialists? Perhaps M.H.H. was leaping to the defence of these things when he wrote of

Mr_ Goldblatt’s "somewhat peculiar views on liberalism" and made no attempt to specify the "peculiarities." We may be "The Dreaming Islands" but I would hazard the prophecy that unless some less self-satisfied attitude than that apparent from M.H.H.’s contribution is adopted towards the warnings of such as Mr Goldblatt, we may well suffer a nightmare in our sleep.

H. SALTER

NICHOLS

(Auckland),