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| Clunes,Auckland |
After spending three months travelling throughout New Zealand in an Australian built Holden car , author Frank Clune published the l956 book ROAMING ROUND NEW ZEALAND, which did a great job promoting the country. Packed with statistics, photographs, distilled history and colourful observations, endpaper maps it strongly suggested Australia and NZ should form closer economic ties.
Early in the piece, he noticed that in Auckland newspapers were sold in lolly shops , milkbars and all sorts of places. At some street corners there were unattended piles of newspapers on the pavement with a cash box and a sign to take one and pay . Back home in Australia , " the Land of Ned Kelly ", he wrote the customers would souvenir the papers, the cash , and the box .
The extraordinary claim was made that the honour system had been tried on Sydney's trams , but discontinued when the box and a tram disappeared !This would have confirmed the popular Kiwi belief that Australia was full of convicts and thieves .
In the provincial city of Hamilton, in the North Island , he counted 12 real bookshops , not just newsagencies , well stocked with the latest English, Australian and New Zealand publications. This was an eye opener , he wrote, compared with the average Australian provincial cities , most of which had only one or two first grade bookshops.
Clune considered Hamilton one of the solidest provincial cities he had ever seen , a model for some Australian cities he could mention , which could not expand "because local bumbles are bogged down in the ideas of Grand-dad's days".
In the South Island, at Dunedin , which had the first university in New Zealand (1871), had the best Polynesian collection in the world , the Hocken Library with its fine collection of books on early NZ and the South Seas , he browsed among the bookshops, bought some volumes , one McNab's The Old Whaling Days .
Dunedin , he wrote, had produced two writers of world fame , one Douglas Hume , penned The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (mentioned previously in this blog ), written and published in Melbourne in 1886, then reprinted in London 1887 ; it had become one of the best sellers of all time , more than a quarter million copies sold within a few years .
The other was poet Thomas Bracken , said to have been author of one of the most quoted poems ever written , Not Understood , first published in a Dunedin paper . Bracken himself was not understood , not much known about his life. It was thought "Bracken " may have been a pen name . He also wrote the national anthem , God Defend New Zealand , first published in Dunedin in the l870s.
To back up the impression that New Zealand often appears to be way ahead of Australia , one of the many interesting people Clune met in his travels was a former director of Bank of New Zealand and managing director of Dominion Breweries Ltd., Henry Joseph Kelliher , farmer, brewer, journalist and economist ; author of the "Kelliher Plan" for banking reform , he had recently been instrumental in having a Royal Commission appointed to inquire into banking, credit and currency in NZ.
The book was dedicated to "My Cobber" Bill Walkley, a New Zealander , who had crossed the Tasman Sea , adopted Australia and become managing director of one of its biggest companies , Ampol Oil .
At a farewell dinner in Sydney before Clune and his wife set out to New Zealand , Walkley, after whom the Australian Walkley Award for Journalism is named , pointed out NZ had been the first country in the world to give women a vote; Lord Rutherford had split the atom and Field Marshall Rommel had said Kiwis were outstanding as shock troops .
Walkley went on to say main exports from New Zealand to Australia were racehorses and writers. In return , main exports from Australia were Melbourne Cups , other racing trophies , and books .
