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Lord Bledisloe's Address at the
Auckland Travel Club Luncheon

Lord Bledisloe, Governor-General of New Zealand, in his inspiring address before the Auckland Travel Club on the 7th June, did a great service for New Zealand by the impressive and authoritative declaration he made regarding this country's claim to world supremacy in the diversity of her scenic attractions. The following verbatim report of the address is published by the courtesy of His Excellency.

Before becoming relatively immobile as Governor-General of this Dominion, I was for many years an unwearying globe-trotter. I believe that no living Englishman has travelled more extensively in different parts of the world on tours of agricultural investigation than myself, and in course of them I have met many interesting people and seen much entrancing scenery. Before coming to New Zealand, I was able to say with sincerity and conviction that I knew of no country with a greater variety of scenic loveliness than Great Britain, no County in it that excelled Gloucestershire in this respect, and no district in that County more beautiful than that which contains my own ancestral home. But my views are now entirely altered. New Zealand can claim, without fear of contradiction, to possess a greater diversity of outstanding scenic attractiveness than any territory of similar area to be found anywhere in the world. What is a little disconcerting is to find that most New Zealanders—even those of means who can afford to travel—know relatively little of their own country. They have yet to discover it—to assume the cloak of Christopher Columbus or Captain Cook —and put personally to the test the inexpressible joy of gazing with rapture upon the numerous aesthetic gems of their national heritage, with proud consciousness that it is their own Fatherland and trebly blessed by its having, moreover, an incomparable climate and flying over it the Union Jack, with its message of freedom, justice and noble ideals of character and service.

If your Auckland Travel Club is out, not merely to extend hospitality to visitors from other lands, but also to promote knowledge of your own land, it will fulfil most opportunely a muchneeded want. In order to instruct and guide others we must have knowledge ourselves. Your Tourist Industry could, by organisation and advertisement, be made the most lucrative of all industries in the Dominion and possess the advantage of being dependent for its profits upon Nature's bounteous gifts rather than upon human toil and the unsettling vicissitudes of commodity prices. In spite of her immense wheat industry, Canada derives greater wealth from her tourist traffic than she does from her wheat, and New Zealand has immeasurably more to show her guests in varied scenic beauty and natural phenomena than has the premier Dominion. The average visitor to your shores has never heard of any tourist objective in this country other than Rotorua. There is no more fascinating health resort in the world than Rotorua. But what does he know of New Zealand who only Rotorua knows? Have you not in this Dominion the Empire's loveliest mountain in Mt. Egmont, the world's most beautiful glacier in Franz Josef, its most impressive Fjords in Milford, Dusky, and Queen Charlotte Sounds, its most inspiring group of snow-clad mountain peaks in your Mt. Cook range, lakes lovelier than those of Switzerland in Otago and Westland (not to mention South Auckland), glow-worm caves which rival those of Slovakia, thermal wonders comparable with those in Yellowstone Park in America, and vistas of incomparable charm such as those which feed the eye from the heights of Mt. Tongariro, from the hills on the Waitangi Estate, looking out over your lovely Bay of Islands, or from the top of Paekakariki Hill overlooking Kapiti Island and the curving foreshore of the historic coast which faces it? Where, too, in the world can finer native bush be found than that which you possess, where grander giants of choice timber (so far as the ruthless woodman's axe has spared them) than those in Waipoua Forest, orr where birds with more melodious song than your tui, and your bell-bird, or with more splendid plumage than your kaka, your pukeko or your kiwi? What country outside Britain can show better high-roads for motor travel, or a greater choice of exceptionally good sport, obtainable at small expense? What other country has such alluring sun-bathed, flower-decked, winter resorts (comparable with the French Riviera, Madeira or Teneriffe) as Nelson, in the South Island, Tauranga on the East Coast, or Paihia or Russell in the Far North of this Dominion? Is there any country where the clear atmosphere and actinic light are more favourable to successful photography?

This newly established Travel Club has my warm sympathy and cordial hopes for its success in fulfilling its three main objects, namely: page 10 (1) Spreading among Aucklanders greater knowledge of the outside world and thus minimising the peril inherent in narrowness of outlook; (2) providing for the comfort, interest and reliable information of overseas visitors; and (3) securing proper respect for, and the due maintenance of, places and objects of historical importance. In this last connection I venture to refer to the two men between whom there was no friendly contact, but whose names will ever stand pre-eminent in Auckland and Wellington, respectively, in the early history of this Dominion—Captain William Hobson (New Zealand's first Governor), and Edward Gibbon Wakefield, the Empire's greatest colonising genius. Neither possesses a fitting statue, and their graves betoken inadequate appreciation of the difficult task which each accomplished in laying the foundations of ordered Government and a highly civilised community in New Zealand. Is there not scope for some salutary enterprise in this connection?

I referred just now to the inadequate acquaintance of New Zealanders with their own domiciliary environment. They are not peculiar in this respect. Out of the seven million people who inhabit Greater London not one in a hundred has ever seen the Tower of London, the National Gallery, or the British Museum. The bulk of those that have have been taken there by their country cousins, when on a jaunt to the Metropolis. It is the same in America. When I was touring there in 1926, besides visiting numerous farms, Universities and research stations, I managed, within six weeks, to travel about 15,000 miles and to visit places as far apart as Chicago, San Francisco, Detroit, Los Angeles, Minnesota, North Dakato, Washington City, Salt Lake City, the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, Yellowstone Park (with its geysers and hot springs), the Yosemite Valley, and the Rocky Mountains, and to enjoy the hospitality of (amongst other notable individuals) Henry Ford, Charlie Chaplin and Calvin Coolidge, the American President. Before sailing from New York for England I was invited by my host, a leading Presbyterian in the real estate business, to meet at lunch ten of the leading citizens of New York, all elderly men and all millionaires, in a restaurant on the 40th floor of the tall sky-scraping Equitable Building. After lunch I was asked, quite unexpectedly, in reply to the toast of my health, to describe shortly the area of my six weeks' itinerary. As I did so the faces of my hearers grew longer and longer with astonishment, until one of them exclaimed “I guess there's not one of us New Yorkers present who in sixty years has seen as much of America as Lord Bledisloe has in six weeks.” To which they all assented. Lack of means was not the reason in their case, but the dangerous habit of human immobility.

There is no doubt that travelling about our own country and, if we can afford it, about the world, not only conduces to human harmony, confidence and co-operation, but is mentally stimulating and highly educative. Sometimes it enables one to carry valuable information resulting from research or experience from one person or country to another. This has often happened to me in visiting farmers in different parts of the world. The most notable instance occurred to me when, in 1927, as Chairman of the Royal Commission on the Land Drainage of England, I went with my Commission to Holland to examine there the oldest and most efficient schemes of land drainage in the world, and incidentally to view the conversion of the bulk of the great Zuyder Zee into dry land—an engineering feat second only to that of the Panama Canal—which was then in progress. In the course of a speech of welcome from the President of the Dutch province of Over-Yssel, adjoining Holland's mighty marine lake, he stated that they were about to expend a sum of several hundred thousand gilders on research work, in order to discover how to eliminate from the drained land the various sodium salts (particularly sodium carbonate) contained in the sea water and thus enable economic plants to grow successfully on it. I was able to tell him, as the result of my visit the previous year to the twelve apostles of the Mormon community at Salt Lake City, in the State of Utah, in America, that this problem had been solved several years previously by Mormon research workers in Utah, and that if the Zuyder Zee scientists chose to apply to them for information, expenditure page 11 of an immense sum of money on duplicated research might be avoided. On that occasion, while in Holland, two sights impressed me considerably, apart from the mighty dams which shut out the water of the North Sea from the desiccated Zuyder Zee. One was an auction of Dutch produce intended for the British market which entered the auction rooms on a barge by a canal which passed through the centre of the rooms, the auctioneer's rostrum being on one side and about 200 bidders on the other: unlike your wool sales or those of the wheat pits of Chicago and Winnipeg which I have attended, absolute silence prevailed, the bids being made by pressing electric buttons under the desks of the bidders and registered on a large clock: like dial behind the rostrum. The other was the raising of grapes for London consumption in large greenhouses in the neighbourhood of The Hague; each greenhouse contained about 2,000 bunches of Muscat and Black Hamburgh grapes. No artificial heat was employed, and the roots of the vines were in pure inorganic sand or silica, the sole nutriment being derived from solutions of the necessary chemicals applied periodically with a watering can. I have never seen finer or cleaner bunches of grapes.

Of all the men whom the War made famous, perhaps the greatest is President Masaryk of Czechoslovakia. The son of a poor coachman, and himself a farrier, his ambition from birth was to emancipate the peasants of Northern Austria-Hungary and Moravia from the racial thraldom which had prevailed there for four hundred year. Having educated himself as a child and gained entrance to Prague University, where he won high distinction, he found in the Great War his opportunity, and made the most of it, with the result that Czechoslovakia is now a separate self-governing State and one of the largest in Europe. Apart from our own Monarch, he is probably the most loved man in Europe. When in Bratislava, in 1926, I visited Masaryk in his beautiful palace at Tapolcany—a palace which belonged formerly to the late Emperor of Austria and is still full of his priceless furniture and works of art, just as he left it. I found Masaryk the most dignified, well-educated, statesmanlike, and best-dressed man in a position of supreme authority whom I have met anywhere outside the British Empire. His simplicity of life, human sympathy and consuming love of his fellow-men explain the reverence in which he is universally held by his compatriots. Although over eighty, he is remarkably active; he rides regularly every day, and there is no better horseman in Central Europe than he.

What more can I say in this short half-hour regarding incidents, places and people whose varied attractions and peculiarities have enriched my life and developed an insatiable appetite for greater knowledge of the world, and travel as the surest means of appeasing it? Time fails me to tell of such things as the world's loveliest natural harbour at Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil; El Capitan, its most magnificent cliff composed of white granite and rising perpendicularly 3,000 feet from a pine-clothed plateau of similar altitude in the Yosemite Valley; the dazzling natural colours of the stratified rocks of the canyon of the Yellowstone River; the intriguing beauty of the great curtain of the American Falls at Niagara when ingeniously illuminated at night with coloured electric lamps; the inimitable taste of the multi-coloured frocks of the Slovak peasants as they proceed to church on a Sunday morning from their picturesque long-eaved cottages beneath the glorious Carpathian Mountains; the calm serenity of Lakes Como and Maggiore amid their vine-clad hills, broken only by the soft melodious serenade of some romantic Italian boatman; the perfect natural setting of the placid Bay of Spezia, the Italian Naval Station in the Riveria, immortally associated with the memories of Byron and Shelley; the sublime craftsmanship of the Leaning Tower of Pisa; the dignity and symbolism of the King's Kava ceremony in your own Mandated Territory of Western Samoa; the vast ensilage crop of brilliant sunflowers (twenty tons to the acre) on the Prince of Wales's Ranch page 12 in Southern Alberta; the perfect framework of Lake Louise, in the Rockies, Canada's chief beauty spot; the scenic splendour and adventurous irresponsibility of Monte Carlo; the great petroleum fountains in Southern California, not to mention the snake-farm at San Paulo, where hundreds of venomous reptiles are kept for the preparation of an immunising serum for snake-bites; the woolly pigs of Eastern Ruthenia; or the Zebu cattle of India, with humps like camels, which are being used in Central America and Northern Queensland for crossing with British breeds to prevent constitutional deterioration in tropical climates. I select a few illustrations only, just to stimulate the imagination!

In conclusion, I would beg of those who have enjoyed the immense privelege of world travel to grasp opportunities of sharing their knowledge and impressions with some of the thousands who have not had the same good fortune. Six years ago I was asked by a friend if I would give a lecture on America, illustrated by my own photographic lantern slides, to a mass meeting of work-people at a People's Institute in North Kensington—one of the slummiest districts in London. I have never addressed a more crowded, a more ragged, or a more enthusiastic audience. They kept on crying out for more, and my agreed hour spun out to two and a half hours. At the end of it, as I was leaving the overpoweringly stuffy hall, the gangway was blocked by the outstretched arms of an elderly, shock-headed man of immense stature and gleaming eyes, dressed in an old flannel shirt, and a brilliant red tie, who accosted me as follows: —“You don't leave this hall, guv'nor, until I've given you a bit of my mind. For forty years I've been a revolutionary—a Bolshevist —because the likes of you can see God's beautiful and wonderful world and we poor devils can't. But now it's all changed guv'nor. I'm discontented no longer. For you and I have been fellow travellers this evening in the great outside world—mates, so to speak, on a long and lovely journey in a far-off land. You've made one old man happy for the rest of his life.” No experience in my life has touched me more deeply or given me more food for thought. I suggest that you may deem it worth while to include within the activities of your Travel Club the turning into happy “Fellow Travellers” of the many around you whose mental outlook is spacious, although their lot in life be cramped, who have, like, ourselves, the “wanderlust,” but, owing to straitened circumstances, have to keep it eternally suppressed. The cinema is doing good in this respect. But the personal contact of the traveller can do much more.