Other formats

    TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 9, Issue 11 (February 1, 1935)

Variety in Brief

page 48

Variety in Brief

Symbology is as old as the world and as young as a last year's issue of the “New Zealand Railways Magazine.” Before letters were invented, writing took the form of symbols. Its uses in legends and religions are well known. Sometimes it is used to hide meanings from all but the initiated, as in most lodges and on other occasions it cuts straight across all languages and speaks all tongues at once. The cartoon is one modern development which often needs no words to make plain its meaning. The advertisement is another. One of the nearest perfect advertisements from this point of view has appeared several times in the Railways Magazine and was on the back cover of the September, 1934 issue, “Tauranga for Winter Sunshine.” Except for the word “Tauranga,” to denote the address, words were unnecessary. There stands the central figure, a happy smiling-faced man, clad in whites and bathed in sunshine. He extends the hand of welcome to his less fortunate brother who stands in the shadow of winter. The little town in the left centre is reflecting sunshine, and white-winged yachts are sailing on the calm waters of the bay. A sun, so bright as to seem nearer than usual, casts its light over the whole picture. I have never seen Tauranga—was scarcely aware of its existence, but, because of this advertisement, it has secured a hold on my imagination, and I am determined to visit it some time. The symbology of the advertisement has delivered its message. Congratulations to the artist, whose name does not appear.—Katiti. [The design referred to was the work of Mr. Stanley Davis, Supervising Artist of the N.Z. Rlys. Studios.—Ed.]

* * *

I have recently acquired a New Zealand almanac for the year 1866, one of a series published by Mr. Geo. T. Chapman, of Auckland. The volume is a mine of information on matters nautical, pastoral and sociological, and provides some interesting sidelights on conditions ruling at that time. As a patriotic Aucklander, I was pained to read that in 1849 one discontented individual had declared that “Auckland was altogether rotten, delusive, and Algerine,” and that “if the Government expenditure ceased, and the troops were removed, Auckland would melt away like a dream.” Far from melting away, however, the population of the city, with the town of Onehunga and the suburbs of Epsom and Newmarket, had increased by the year 1866 to round about 17,000, and the writer of the Almanac heartily commends the late Governor Hobson for “his penetration and judgment in recommending to the British Government the isthmus between the Waitemata and Manukau, on which the city of Auckland now stands, as the site for the capital of this splendid country.” In a general review of the Colony's resources it is stated that “a very large proportion of the land in New Zealand is not adapted for agricultural operations, much is broken and forest covered, much open and poor. The forests are, however, very valuable, and their timber is the principal item of export from the Province of Auckland… At present copper is being worked at the Great Barrier Island, and gold is being systematically mined at Coromandel … coal is being worked at Drury, about twenty-two miles from Auckland, and near Newcastle, on the Waikato River… .” A glowing account is given of the wonders of the thermal region, and though an English and American tourist traffic was then undreamt of, it is confidently predicted that “in a few years Rotomahana will be one of the most frequented bathing-places for Australian and Indian invalids.”—“Pukete.”

* * *

Macauley's New Zealander is not heard of very much to-day, but once he was dragged into almost every argument on the decadence of England and was alluded to in many different writings.

He first appeared on the scene in 1840 in Macauley's essay on “Ranke's History of the Popes.”

The novelty of the idea of London as a second Pompeii made the paragraph become very well-known, but Macauley has been accused, notably by a modern English writer named Alpha of the Plough, of plagiarism. The charge is not without reason for Percy Bysshe Shelley in his introduction to his poem “Peter Bell the Third,” writes of London as an unpeopled marsh inhabited by bitterns, with St. Paul's and Westminster Abbey shapeless ruins, with “some trans-Atlantic commentator” viewing the desolate scene.

Charles Dickens speaks of him in an essay on “Arcadian London” in his “The Uncommercial Traveller,” where the traveller liked, “to stand in the Abbey Yard, like the New Zealander of the grand English History (concerning which unfortunate man, a whole rookery of mare's nests is generally being discovered), and gloat over the ruins of Talk,” and later, “Again New Zealander like I stand on the cold hearth soliloquising.”

John Forster, Dickens' friend and biographer, in his “Life of Charles Dickens,” says: “If the irrepressible New Zealander ever comes over to achieve his long promised sketch of St. Paul's, who can doubt that it will be no other than our undying Micawber, who has taken to colonisation the last time we saw him and who will thus again have turned up?”

Even Punch made fun of the New Zealander in an old article.

When James Anthony Froude visited the colony in the Eighties he predicted in his book “Oceana” that Rotorua would one day be the chief sanitarian watering place of the South Seas, and continued: “And it will be here that in some sanatarian salon Macauley's New Zealander, returning from his travels, will exhibit his sketch of the ruins of St. Paul's to a group of admiring young ladies. I have come to believe in that New Zealander since I have seen the country.”

In Conan Doyle's history, “The Great Boer War,” he describes the dramatic scene of the relief of Kimberley, when the advance posts of the relieving force met the Kimberley outposts and, being asked who they were, one replied: “I'm one of the New Zealanders.” Surely, says the author, Macauley in his wildest dreams never pictured his New Zealander as heading the force going to the relief of a British town in South Africa.

During the War, Macauley's prophecy was realised to the extent of our troops photographing St. Paul's from London Bridge, but London was as alive as ever and St. Paul's unscathed by war, and as strong as ever.—D.G.D.

page break page break