Starting Hares

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 935, 12 July 1957, Page 31

Starting Hares

] DON’T think I’ve heard a discussion that started so many hares as the final one in the Liberty and Licence group. It was not only the most ani-

mated of the three I heard, but it sug- | gested innumerable possibilities for future discussions. I’d certainly like to hear arguments on, to take some of the statements made, Do New. Zealand writers suffer as much as they think they do? And is it impossible to be a healthy Bohemian in New Zealand? Eileen Saunders and P. Martin-Smith stood out on this panel, the former for her incisiveness, the latter for his fairmindedness. I did wonder sometimes whether, like most of us, the panel didn’t tend to belabour, if not dead, at least expiring, donkeys-New Zealand's Puritanism, its low standard of intellectual ideals, its cénformism and regularity of social patterns. What they didn’t comment on was the self-con-sciousness of New Zealanders which leads them to analyse, on radio panels and elsewhere, their own self-conscious-ness, with an intensity which even an American sociologist would find amusing. But the conclusion of Bernard Smyth, an admirable chairman, that liberty and discipline are inseparable was, if unexciting, certainly exemplary. Perhaps this is another New Zealand characteristic-to be exemplary, at the cost of excitement?