Suntanned and Carefree

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 930, 7 June 1957, Page 10

Suntanned and Carefree

N November, 1956, a sumptuous French journal, Réalités, published a curious characterisation of this country. New Zealand is seen as the realisation of an Old World dream. She is safe, distant, and without racial tension or class bitterness. Standards of living and of health are idyllic, while the climate is both mild and stimulating. The inhabitants-sun-tanned athletic pakehas and gay, complex-free Polynesians — combine symbolically in national addiction to Rugby football as well as in a political democracy ‘based on complete equality. Yet, continues the Frenchman, the medal has its reverse side. This young, fair, and promising country is ruled by a spirit of rigid conformity. To deviate from the norm -to be noticed-is a major disaster. All initiative lies crushed, and no artistic or intellectual life is possible. Over a community newly born, and with all the physical opportunities for a rich life, there hovers the dead hand of | intolerant mediocrity.

| Let us note some of the facts. Packed houses consistently greet the National Orchestra, whose standards are high both in programme building and -_performance. High ranking overseas artists have played serious music toaudiences greater than they have drawn in New York, and it seems that more contemporary music can be heard in Wellington than in London, played to larger audiences. Composers working locally — not expatriates — have won recognition here and overseas, not because they express something of the spirit of the country (though this is true, too), but on professional merits. The amount of drama staged-profes-sional and amateur, and ranging from Shakespeare and Jonson to contemporary American and New Zealand writing -has presented an almost embarrassing proliferation to keen theatre-goers. Inevitably, the highest achievement is lacking. No one could expect to find Covent Garden or the Opera of La Scala in New Zealand. Nevertheless, a first-rate opera group has produced Menotti operas (among others) under the baton of an erstwhile conductor of Sadler’s Wells Opera.

Réalités is right: New Zealand towns are readily distinguishable from Paris and London. But what of Englishmen and Frenchmen who cannot plunder the cultural resources of their great capitals? Compared with Paris, New Zealand as a whole may be provincial, well fed, complacent. Compared with provincial France and England the judgment is not as plain. Réalités has missed the point both in its praise and its blame. For an old world observer, New Zealand has indeed neither a class struggle nor racial tension. New Zealanders know that, in so far as these things are so, they have been achieved by past effort and must be preserved by constant vigilance in the present and the future. Cultural achievement must be measured, not by comparisons with Paris, but by observing what kind of a fist New Zealanders make of living in their own coun_try. Our Frenchman did not stress what some would class as the greatest practical problem of New Zealand city life: the bleak ex-

panse of empty weekends for those who do not try to mix concrete or grow cabbage. Nor, not having known New Zealand in 1926 and 1936, could he gain any inkling of recent change. For good or ill, it is becoming vastly more natural for a_ significant number of New Zealanders to dress and design their houses and even to think according to personal judgment, to attend concerts and produce plays, to write poetry and paint, compose music, play the fiddle and study their own history. They continue to be vast consumers of books and _ serious periodicals, and are even learning to drink wine with their meals. In our turbulent old Western world, cultural health seems often to depend on the existence of a lunatic fringe of dare-devil individualists; here, as in more material things, New Zealand has remained characteristic of that broader world whose civilisation she not unworthily shares. She is an example of a solid basically contented bodypolitic, whose outward stolidity conceals from pessimists and superficial observers a ferment of challenging problems and a not insignificant supply of human

gadflies.

F.L.W.

W.