WRY CUPS AND CROOKED
SAUCERS
SKINNY MUTTON AND "HIGH"
BUTTER.
(N.Z. Times.)
The Times reporter, boiling with
indignation, approached a man with a foot-rule and a large pan in his hand. The
man was an architect—cum— bricklayer—carpenter—builder.
"I see," said the inquirer,
that the Governor has been saying that architecture in New Zealand is
contemptible, that the dwelling-houses of this fair land are eyesores, so to
speak, and that for sheer ugliness there, is nothing to compare to a Dominion
cottage as it were."
The architect measured off a piece of
land three feet six by seven and a half. He intended to erect on that piece of
land a two-storey six room house. Being a philanthropist he would only charge
31s 6d a week rental.
When asked if it was true that the
house he intended to erect out of fourth-class timber (and as little as
possible of it) would be the worst kind of a blotch on the scenery he was
intensely angry and said several columns of things about the fearful price of
timber and labour, the decline in the birth-rate, and threw in a few
reflections about Baltic and Oregon pine.
In the course of a voluminous
statement, he said that it was absolutely unnecessary to erect houses that were
beautiful because no one in New Zealand demanded beautiful houses, and if they
did so this was no reason why a builder should build beautiful houses. When the
reporter told him that there were people in this vast world who would refuse to
house their dogs and horses in the weatherboard boxes with which this city
abounds, he said that the poor landlord had to live somehow and if he couldn't
live honestly—at this point he exploded violently and the reporter had to
leave.
Another reasonable soul who was about
to stick fifty pounds worth of timber on the side of a scraggy hill —the whole
when erected to be purchasable for eight times its value— snorted defiantly.
“It isn't only the houses in New
Zealand that are shoddy. We depend almost entirely on the outside world for the
manufactured goods we use. We pay first prices for third-class goods. Did you
ever see a real good cup and saucer, a shapely frying-pan, a tip-top saucepan
(etc., etc., etc.). The Home manufacturer, and his German relative and his
generally Continental cousin see us coming. The point is that it is too far
away to the other side of the world to send rubbish back, and so in disgust the
colonial shopkeeper sticks to it and adds 10 per cent, to the selling price to
heal his anger."
"I know that the houses in New
Zealand are the jerriest built houses in the world," said a man with
shavings in his hair, "and that New Zealand carpenters do the worst work
in the world (not because they are not skilled workmen but because the bosses
hustle them along to finish a job.) But we only follow precedent. New
Zealanders don't understand having anything decent and why should we give 'em
good goods? The New Zealander has for years and years subsisted on 'seconds' in
the way of tucker. His best butter goes Home. He takes the scrag mutton because
the London market won't have anything but prime, for which it pays only
two-thirds of the price we pay for the scrag. If we ever raise anything decent
—and we can raise the most decent things in the world—we pack in a box and ship
it Home, where the people sniff at it and buy it because they can't afford to
pay the price for Home-made stuff. As for the houses nobody in the country has
ever yet demanded real comfort and that's why they don't get it.
“The New Zealander is absolutely
unappreciative of beauty. He doesn't know that his bush is the most beautiful
thing in the arboreal line this side of Kingdom Come, until some foreigner
comes along and tells him so. He shaves the bush down, by the million acres,
and when he wants a breakwind he plants some forlorn-looking foreign specimens
that are as near being an eyesore as anything can be that the Creator turns
but. Any old box of a house will do for the Colonial. He doesn't roar if the
wind comes through the weatherboards and blows his candle out. If he roars the
landlord tells him to quit, and gets another tenant in at an increased rent.
Other countries have a habit of thinking of to-morrow and the day after. The
New Zealander thinks only of to-day. He doesn't care how soon a house falls
down if he has left it and he never has cared twopence about the appearance of
anything except himself. He will wear a six guinea suit and gleefully drink out
of a cracked penny cup for which he has paid sixpence. His wife will pile a
heap of expensive gauds on herself looking out all the time on a backyard
twelve feet square and which the jerry builder has left in its native state.
She doesn't care. He doesn't care. Why should the jerry builder care?"
The reporter was speechless and
forgets now whether he agrees with the infuriated persons he interviewed or the
calmly condemning governor.
"Ugly Houses," Marlborough Express,
Volume XLII,
Issue 224,
21 September 1908,
Page 6
