Other formats

    TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

Fulbright in New Zealand

Chapter 1 — A Love Affair — with New Zealand

page 9

Chapter 1
A Love Affair
with New Zealand

"I didn't come to New Zealand because I was too happy. I came because of a dim sense that things had gone wrong. I was a little bored, a little restless, my writing often stalled, my thoughts muffled by small failures, small disappointments, attempts at love that failed . . . I wanted to view life through other eyes, to become aware of those assumptions that are the unseen cause of most of our failures, each of us as sure of our rightness as we are sure that June is the realm of summer days, and that birds fly south to escape the winter storm.

Learning to see again is a subtle thing, I've found. It's the fact that vegetables have different names and fruits I've never seen before fall from the trees in profusion (feijoa, tamarillo, pepino) ... It's the Maori novels I've been reading in which tradition is more important than progress. It's hiking in a jungle that is snakeless and cold and learning that camellias are a 'winter flower'. . . .

It is late September as I write this, and spring is what I'm spying on. There is a blush of flowers everywhere - magnolias, iris, rhododendrons higher than the house. This is no longer an anomaly I've come to accept the daffodils of August, the falling leaves of May. When letters from South Bend drift into my mailbox on paper thin as froth I think of you all there on the other side of sunrise, waking on a day that for me is already past. I think of the fire that is beginning to ignite those little maples near the campus post office and of the bushes that will soon flame along St Mary's Lake. I remember that next autumn I too will be walking down the long avenue of oaks, that russet-gold will be the right colour for October as it has always been. But I hope there will be a twinge of strangeness in it all."

Sonia Gernes, Fulbright lecturer, 1986

"Education is a slow-moving but powerful force. It may not be fast enough or strong enough to save us from catastrophe, but it is the strongest force available."

Senator J. William Fulbright

Prominent among the activities designed to foster international understanding and mutual goodwill is the Fulbright Programme, officially known as Public Law 584 of the 79th United States Congress. The Fulbright Act,

page 10

named after Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, who sponsored it through Congress, was signed by President Truman on 1 August 1946. It authorised the United States Government to enter into agreements with countries owing money on Lend-Lease during World War 11 or from the sale of United States surplus property at the end of the war, to spend these funds for educational exchanges between the United States and the countries concerned.

"Looking back, the educational exchange programme seems inevitable. Certainly, it crystallised hopes and needs, and was a response to pressures, widely felt as World War II ended. There was a passionate hope among all peoples that greater knowledge and understanding of one another could help assure peace. There was, too, a hunger among scientists and scholars to renew communications almost totally destroyed by war. Further, for Americans and perhaps for others, the war had ended a long period of isolationism, and the desire was strong to bring into their lives and classrooms knowledge of the countries and peoples overseas."

'International Foreign Exchange', Board of Foreign Scholarships, 1966

This new act was a trend-breaker in many ways, significantly different from previous overseas scholarships. Firstly, it put the exchange of teachers and scholars on a truly international basis. Secondly, larger funds were available than for any earlier programme. The act also initiated a programme that was definitely a two-way exchange, providing grants for study in the United States as well as for Americans to study abroad. It was truly bilateral — or page 11
Black and White photograph of Senator Fulbright

SENATOR FULBRIGHT

James William Fulbright was born in 1905, in the town of Sumner, Missouri. Educated at the University of Arkansas, he then, as a Rhodes scholar, studied and received another degree at the University of Oxford. After completing a law degree at George Washington University, he was admitted to the District of Washington bar, and served for a year as a special attorney in the United States Department of Justice. He taught at George Washington University from 1935 to 1936 and then at the University of Arkansas from 1936 to 1939. He was President of that university from 1939 to 1941.

A member of the Democratic Party, Fulbright was elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1942, and to the Senate in 1944. When he rose in the Senate to introduce his bill in late September 1945, Senator Fulbright displayed the political skill that his experience as a congressman, university president, law school lecturer and Rhodes scholar had given him. He had spent four years in Europe, three of them at Oxford, and had a driving awareness of the basic similarity of European culture and the links between the United States and the rest of the world. He knew, from his subsequent years at George Washington University and the University of Arkansas, how political pressures and educational needs are often at war with each other. His work as a congressman had laid the foundations of the acceptance of the United Nations in the United States.

Fulbright brought to the Senate not only a deeply held commitment to the ideals of international education, but also a profound recognition of the miseries that had been wrought by the War Reparations after World War I. It was the combination of these two concerns that led him to introduce the legislation that would use the debts of war to finance the pursuit of peace and international understanding.

page 12'bi-national' — based on formal exchange agreements between the United States and each participating country, and was administered in each of these countries by a bi-national foundation or commission set up under the terms of the agreement.

Another unique requirement of the act was that the programme, although administered by the government, was under the supervision of a Board of Foreign Scholarships, consisting of distinguished men and women appointed by the President from the academic and cultural world, as well as the government agencies immediately concerned. This Board was so designed to give assurance in the United States and abroad that the programme's essential character would be educational and non-political. Today, the 12 appointees of this Board select all Fulbright grantees and establish the policies and procedures for the programme in the same manner as they did first in 1947.

The initial meetings of the Board in 1947 and 1948 shaped other basic principles which now characterise the programme. One of the most significant was that it would rely heavily on private co-operation. Further, it was agreed that exchange grants would be awarded to teachers, professors, research scholars and students on merit alone: there would be no means tests. That merit was to be judged not only on academic or professional standing, but also on the applicant's ability to be an ambassador for his or her country. The goal of increasing mutual understanding was to be considered as important as that of furthering individual scholarship.

Both in the United States and abroad the announcement of the programme awakened immediate interest and inspired many requests for further information. Many of the eligible governments made it known that they wished to negotiate agreements. The Republic of China (then on the mainland) was the first country to sign an agreement, in November 1947. New Zealand was the fifth.

The agreement between the United States and New Zealand Governments was signed on 14 September 1948. The original agreement, together with an amendment which came into force on 9 March 1949, provided for the setting up of the United States Educational Foundation in New Zealand, which, under the general direction of the Board of Foreign Scholarships and the Department of State in Washington, administered the Fulbright programme in New Zealand.

John S. Service, First Secretary at the United States Embassy in Wellington, was the first Acting Chairman, and he, with Armistead Lee, who was then Second Secretary, did most of the work for the United States Embassy on the early negotiations. Armistead Lee did a lot of the legwork and his New Zealand secretary, Gwynneth Hall, drafted many of the communications to Washington on these negotiations.

Then, in February 1949, Earl A. Dennis, Public Affairs Officer at the United States Embassy from 1949 to 1951, arrived in New Zealand with, as he described it, 'the principal assignment of getting the Fulbright Exchange Programme under way':

page 13
Black and White photograph of Earl A. Dennis

Earl A. Dennis.

"The first, unofficial but extremely effective acting Executive Secretary of the Educational Foundation was my USIS secretary, Marie Luom. For some six or seven months after my arrival in New Zealand ... Marie and I were the Foundation staff. It took some time for the New Zealand Department of Education to give up Eric Budge, and in the meantime Marie and I had a tremendous amount of work to do to prepare for the arrival of the first contingent of American students, professors and research scholars who would be hoving into sight in time to begin the academic year beginning March 1950.

Housing in Wellington was very difficult at that time and to assist this invasion of American academics was a real challenge. How great we did not know until later. My wife, daughter and I came to New Zealand on very short notice from the United States Department of State.... We therefore came without our household effects and depended on renting furnished quarters of persons who had ‘gone home’ for the year, or who for other reasons rented their homes temporarily. As it turned out we lived in five houses and two hotels during the two and a half years we lived in Wellington. I developed a real antipathy for the Shaw Savill liner Dominion Monarch (a beautiful ship) because as I sat in my office in the Government Life Insurance Building and watched the Dominion Monarch cruising slowly towards page 14
Black and White photograph of Eric G. Budge

ERIC G. BUDGE
In November 1971 the American Ambassador, Mr Franzheim, and George Laking, Secretary
of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, were joint hosts at a luncheon in Wellington's
Hotel Waterloo. The occasion was the presentation to Eric Budge of a distinguished Service
Award from the Board of Foreign Scholarships in Washington. Eric Budge was also retiring
after 22 years of serving the United States Educational Foundation in New Zealand. He was
the longest serving Director in the world.
     He had a great deal to look back on, on that November occasion. He had welcomed,
farewelled and supervised 490 New Zealanders who had gone to America, and 414 Americans
who had come the other way. The job had certainly had variety: he had dealt with
graduate students, university lecturers, research scholars and teachers, in occupations
ranging from accountancy to zoology, and the rewards, both tangible and intangible, had
been great.
    He saw a new awareness in New Zealand universities, a consciousness of the developments
in America and their ramifications and many advantages. Before the start of his
tenure there were scarcely any American-trained academics in New Zealand, but at the end
American or American-trained people were on the staffs of most departments in New
Zealand universities. Attending to the needs of Fulbrighters who had come at the start of the
American academic year and getting New Zealanders away by September for the northern
semester could be hectic at times, but the personal rewards were great too. Eric's great
attention to detail, and his willingness to help grantees won him many friends. During two
brief visits to the United States (in 1954 and 1964) he was a guest in the homes of many of
them. It was busy but immensely enjoyable — because, as he modestly says, Fulbrighters are
such first-rate people.

page 15the pier it probably had my landlord on it returning from his six month trip ‘home’ and I knew we would have to move again."

In mid-1949 Eric Budge was offered the job of Secretary. He was well qualified for the position, which he held until 1971. Most of the grantees would be coming to or going from the constituent colleges of the University of New Zealand, and as Assistant to the Officer for Higher Education Eric Budge knew all the senior administrators and was fully informed about the activities of their institutions. At an earlier stage, in the Department of Education, he had handled the exchange of teachers with other parts of the then British Empire.

The men and women who served on the Boards of the various Foundations were all distinguished in various fields. Each Foundation has a separate executive agreement with the United States, and is always bilateral, composed of distinguished national cultural leaders and educators and Americans from the United States Embassy and the resident American community. The Foundations, which administer the educational programme impartially and in keeping with the needs and interests of each participating country, work closely with the co-operating agencies in the United States in the day-to-day operation of the programme.

Here, from Earl Dennis, are the names of the first members of the Foundation Board ‘to the best of my knowledge and Ralph Vogel's recorder’:

"Honorary Chairman, Ambassador Robert E. Scotten Temporary Chairman, John S. Service, First Secretary, American Embassy Henry Miller, Wellington Representative of Firestone Tire and Rubber Company
Armistead Lee, Second Secretary, American Embassy Osborne Watson, Commercial Attache, American Embassy Clark Fahling, Wellington Representative of Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company
Sir David Smith, Retired Supreme Court Justice and Chancellor of the University of New Zealand
Sir Howard Kippenberger, Retired Major-General of New Zealand Forces in North Africa and Italy in World War II and National President of the New Zealand Returned Servicemen's Association, and World War II historian Frank Callaghan, Head of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research."

The negotiations had stressed that New Zealand should have a material role in the setting up of the bi-national Foundation, but, as Earl Dennis recalled,

"It took the calm, influential and judicial voice of Sir David Smith to put on the record that this was, indeed, a bi-national programme. For example: The selection agency in the US had recommended an American research page 16scholar (a professor of entomology at the University of Hawaii) for a research grant in New Zealand to do research on a rather obscure and not terribly important family of insects (the Psyllidae). In the Board discussions as to the Foundation's decision to award the professor a grant, a New Zealand member asked, ‘What possible value could research of this type be to New Zealand?’

After everybody else had his say Sir David made the clinching statement, and established the principle then, and henceforth, that the Fulbright exchange is a bi-national programme. It ran something like this:

‘Gentlemen, it is my feeling that if the recommending agency in the US has seen fit to recommend Professor X for this grant, who are we to judge the value of his research on the basis of our country alone?’ Professor X was awarded the grant. This is only one example of many, when Sir David's wise and judicial mind laid down some fundamental principles which governed future operations of the foundation programme."

Along with Sir David Smith, the other two initial New Zealand directors of the Foundation Board were Major-General Sir Howard Kippenberger and Frank Callaghan. Former Executive Secretary Eric Budge explained why the two men were chosen:

"Major-General Sir Howard Kippenberger was, I understand, appointed as one of the three initial directors of the Foundation Board on the basis that as the Foundation owed its origins to World War II it was appropriate to include one of the country's most distinguished soldiers of the war and one who, as Editor-in-Chief of the War Histories Board of the Internal Affairs Department, was still concerned with the effects of the conflict. Sir Howard had practised as a solicitor in Rangiora between the wars. He took a keen interest in the Foundation's activities and perhaps because of his legal training his observations were always to the point. He remained on the Board until his death in 1957 when he was replaced by Air-Vice Marshal Sir Arthur Nevill.

The other initial New Zealand member, Frank Callaghan, was permanent head of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. His background was in botany but he had acquired a wide knowledge in many scientific fields and was very helpful in assessing the relatively large number of applications in those fields, especially in the early years.

The DSIR put forward proposals to have US research scholars and its officers from time to time applied for awards to go to the United States, but he was quite neutral when this happened and let the facts speak for themselves. He remained on the Board and its Screening Committee until 1969."

The selection of candidates for exchange grants was the result of several screening processes. In the United States enrolled students applied through their Campus Screening Committees, which forwarded suitable applications to the Institute of International Education in New York, while page 17those not enrolled could do this of their own accord. The Institute's National Screening Committee reviewed all applications, sending those it recommended to the Bi-national Commissions or the United States Embassies abroad. The Bi-national Commissions submitted the applicants for whom satisfactory placements could be made in each country to the Board of Foreign Scholarships, and the Board made the final selections.

American teachers, lecturers and research scholars were selected in a similar way, except that no campus or state committees were involved. For teachers, the Office of Education, not the Institute of International Education, was involved as the preliminary screening committee, and for lecturers and scholars, the Conference Board of Associated Research Councils.

The selection of New Zealand grantees, in effect, reversed the processes. The Foundation in New Zealand was the first screening committee. It sent its recommendations to the appropriate contract agency (the Institute of International Education, or the Office of Education or the Conference Board) and to the Board of Foreign Scholarships. The Board made all the final selections and awarded the grants.

Eric Budge described the early days of Fulbright in New Zealand:

"The American students all received a maintenance allowance as a single person, payment of tuition fees, and reimbursement up to a certain amount for incidental expenses plus a travel allowance for field projects.

Applications were selected by the Institute of International Education in New York as the State Department's agent. The Foundation had the final say but in practice we accepted all those we could place with confidence and graduate status at one of the university colleges or occasionally elsewhere. Research scholars were in the programme from the outset. I believe we were the first to feature them, with programmes sent to the State Department listing perhaps three or four openings at university colleges for one or two awards as lecturers and perhaps twenty openings for five or six awards as research scholars.

If approved by the State Department, which usually happened, they would be sent to the Conference Board of Associated Research Councils in Washington, which would advertise them and send the papers of the best applicants back to the Department to be sent on to us for our choice.

Most of the Foundations settled for visiting lecturers to help out with their problems in getting good quality staff at their universities. In time some would learn that the Fulbright programme was not able to and would not want to induce good quality staff to go to indifferent institutions.

We had the problem of the different academic year. The majority of the Fulbright Foundations are in the Northern Hemisphere and New Zealand would have been the first in the Southern Hemisphere.

It did not occur to the State Department in Washington that New Zealand might have a different academic year and the 1949 batch of US graduate students were sent down in September. That is, except for Lois Brean, a page 18student from Maine who had been in touch with Victoria University College in Wellington and insisted that as classes would begin in March she would arrive there late in February 1950. Earl Dennis commented that people from Maine were always very precise. She lost out, however, as the other students had their awards extended with a virtual holiday until March.

The students both ways soon adjusted, but it was not so simple especially for American senior people thinking of coming as university lecturers. For them March was an odd time to start and they would usually have to be back at their home institution by early September, whereas the New Zealand institution would want them to stay until October or perhaps November. However, this problem was solved to a large extent, incidentally.

It was a requirement that senior grantees be based at an approved university institution. But the Colleges of the University of New Zealand were mostly teaching institutions with only a handful of staff engaged in research which earned recognition outside New Zealand. On the other hand, scientists of world rank were asking the Conference Board of Associated Research Councils in Washington about the possibility of coming to research laboratories under the control of the New Zealand Government's Department of Scientific and Industrial Research and the Department of Agriculture. The leading laboratories were the Grasslands Division of the DSIR headed by Dr Bruce Levy who was probably the world leader in his field; the Ruakura Animal Research Station headed by Dr McMeekan, who, among other things, had built up a herd of identical twin calves which provided untold research opportunities, and the Wallaceville Animal Research Station where Dr Cunningham was also a world figure.

When Frank Callaghan heard about these individual approaches he suggested that the Foundation state a case. The State Department accepted the arguments and the three research laboratories were approved as were other laboratories when the occasion arose.

I doubt whether the significance of this approval was recognised at the time, but it had most beneficial effects in several ways.

In the first place, the grantees coming to the laboratories could forget about the New Zealand academic year, so timing a visit became so much simpler. Secondly, it soon became obvious that the offer of a research award with the prospect of publishing papers of consequence was much more attractive than a lecturing appointment. This meant that the university colleges could, in many fields, not only overcome the problem of the different academic year, but also get better applicants by asking for research scholars rather than lecturers. And thirdly, as things developed, the US grantees, whether at research laboratories or at university colleges, of their own accord and with the Foundation's encouragement, saw most of the New Zealanders in their fields throughout the country. And they were normally very willing to give occasional lectures in those areas in which they had special knowledge. A condition of considerable mutual ignorance gradually changed to a state of considerable mutual respect.

Initially I was quite unenthusiastic about science grantees hobnobbing page 19together in their labs. This seemed to have little to offer in terms of Fulbright goodwill, compared with sending a visiting lecturer who would probably associate with hundreds. I was seldom wrong in my judgement, then, but I certainly was, in this case.

They were mostly quietly spoken people, some a little shy, but of considerable stature well beyond excellence in their field, and somehow one felt better for having met them. Reports from their host institutions were most complimentary, always, not only about their research work but also about the way in which they had fitted in socially with others at work and the area in which they lived. When I visited the institutions and asked people about them, their eyes softened as they replied.

I have told the State Department officers at conferences that these research scholars never put a foot wrong as Fulbright grantees.

There were too many to mention but a typical one was Professor Merton Love who came from the University of California at Davis, perhaps the leading Agricultural College in the United States. He was one of five grantees brought down to give papers at the Sixth International Grasslands Conference held in Palmerston North, in 1956. He was based for his nine month stay at Lincoln College, where he became a kind of benevolent godfather. Scientists there and on the Soil Conservation Council had been agitating fruitlessly for years for a high country research station. His enthusiastic report resulted in the birth of a Tussock Grasslands and Mountain Lands Institute. Its name and functions have changed in the course of time, but its activities are now controlled by Professor O'Connor, a New Zealand Fulbright scholar from Lincoln who took his PhD at Davis.

Professor Love was a Rotarian and so had a double duty to go out and meet people. He must have spoken to hundreds.

I referred to Professor Love as a typical grantee. He was one of a procession of senior grantees from Davis, which would have sent more than any other university in the United States, all of them in a field related to farming. Farming was then very much the life blood of the community, and agricultural scientists from around the world wanted to be at Grasslands, Ruakura, Wallaceville, Soil Bureau, Massey University College and Lincoln College. Grassland specialists, soil scientists, foresters, biologists, microbiologists, entomologists, parasitologists, veterinarians, etc. came as Fulbright grantees and most gave at least as much as they got. The gain to New Zealand is not measurable but it must have been considerable.

The Foundation's firm policy of offering awards in our strongest fields had full support from sponsoring institutions though it did run counter to the State Department's desire for an even spread throughout all fields. And some of the American members of the Board wanted grantees to be brought down in areas where New Zealand was well behind. We soon found out that good grantees are seldom interested in areas of weakness. However the scholars who came were certainly not confined to the pastoral and agricultural field. Lecturers and research scholars in fields outside agriculture and other sciences included accountancy, adult education, page 20American history, architecture, criminology, dentistry, economics, education, engineering, geography, German, home science, law, library science, literature, mathematics, medicine, physical education and religion.

The Conference Board of Associated Research Councils assessed the academic standing of the grantees accepted by the various Foundations. This Foundation was listed in the top bracket. This meant that the grantees coming to New Zealand were regularly rated as highly as those going to Great Britain."

It is difficult now to imagine a time when ‘Fulbright’ was not yet a household word, yet, as Doreen Galbraith, Personal Assistant to the Executive Secretary/Executive Director from 1949 to 1983, recalls,

"In those early days we worked under very trying conditions attached to the American Embassy — lack of office space and a terrific amount of paper work, so different now — and the pressure was terrific and there was always the mad rush to catch the Pouch to the State Department. However, it was all rather exciting; they were very happy days in those early years before the Embassy moved off to The Terrace and we were left high and dry in Government Life on our own."

And what about those first American Fulbrighters? How did they feel about coming to New Zealand — and how did the New Zealanders they met feel about them?

Black and White photograph of Doreen Galbraith by the sea

Doreen Galbraith.

page 21

It was a surprise, perhaps, to find that many Americans thought that New Zealand had a kind of mystique. Fulbright researcher James McEnteer wrote of this attitude in an article titled ‘The Playing Fields of Eden’, published in the New Zealand Listener of 17 October 1987:

"Tourists aside, the Americans who fall under the spell of Kiwi magic and feel compelled to visit New Zealand are of three basic types: the gold diggers, the space travellers and the utopians ...

The gold-digging tradition is the oldest of the three. By 1797 the Yanks, as sealers and whalers, had arrived in force. As the Oxford History relates, it
was an American sealer, O. F. Smith, who ‘discovered’ Foveaux Strait in 1804. By 1839 about 80 American deep sea whaling ships plied New Zealand waters. Americans established businesses ashore too; men like William Webster, who ran a large-scale timber milling operation in the Coromandel in the 1830s....

Gold diggers are a prosaic and predictable lot compared to the American space travellers.... Yankee space travellers characteristically have only the vaguest notion of how or what or even where New Zealand really is. But it is precisely this lack of information which attracts them here; space travellers seek adventures in the Great Unknown."

If an American in 1987 can find New Zealand ‘the Great Unknown’ then New Zealand in 1949 must have seemed an adventure indeed. The trailblazers found a small country, one-fifth the size of Texas, a string of islands more or less the shape of Japan, but with a population that numbered only 1,725,267. Furthermore, New Zealand, most disconcertingly, reversed everything: faucets, light switches, the rules of the road, the seasons. For many of the Americans the overwhelming sensation on arrival was that they had stepped back 40 years — not ‘space travel’, but ‘time travel’. There were frontier-style wooden houses and shops with awnings, in rows along dusty roads, and there was a frontier-like dependence on what the land provided.

‘New Zealanders may be the most hospitable people in the world,’ wrote one American. New Zealanders were also perhaps the most obsessed with watching and taking part in sport. They were fanciers of horse-flesh, too, and seemed oddly willing to hand over their hard-earned cash to a strange institution, the totalisator. They also played a totally mystifying game called cricket, and gave up countless hours of sleep to follow the progress of their teams on radio. It was a land of milk tokens, Aunt Daisy and two kinds of radio, of roll-your-own smokes and athletes who advertised alcohol and tobacco. New Zealanders were royalty-watchers, too — and those Americans who were here in 1953 became royalty-watchers too, although not necessarily from choice. ‘Wherever we went,’ wrote one, ‘SHE was there and we waited and waited . . .’ New Zealanders, too, were complacent about what they thought of as a happy racial situation, but many of the Americans wondered. ‘Pakeha and Maori,’ wrote one. ‘Together and yet maybe not...’

page 22
Black and White photograph of Professor Elmer Sholer with National Park personnel at the top of Craigieburn in 1965

‘One of life's great experiences’ — Professor Elmer Scholer with National Park personnel at
the top of Craigieburn, 1965.

And then there was the 40-hour week. At that time it dominated conversations — and lives. Shopping had to be done on overcrowded Friday nights instead of on leisurely Saturday mornings. Instead of supermarkets and drugstores there were crowds of little dairies, groceries and butchers' stores, and even the labels were written in a different kind of English. Of all the problems, however, transportation was perhaps the worst. Many Americans found they had to buy a car, and the problem was how to afford one.

Cars in New Zealand at that time were unexpectedly expensive. Those who wanted new cars had to produce overseas funds as a proportion of the page 23price. Because of this, second-hand cars were often even more expensive than new ones, and ancient cars were kept on the road. ‘Future grantees,’ wrote one American in his report, ‘should be told more about the availability of automobiles, the cost, the rate of depreciation, driver's licence requirements, and the requirements in regards to change of steering.’

Wives and families had to make adjustments as well. They found a world of kindergartens at the age of three, school at five, free milk and apples at ‘morning teatime’, school dental nurses, broadcasts to schools, school uniforms, single-sex schools in the cities, and accrediting for University Entrance. ‘Pounds, shillings and pence,’ wrote one Fulbrighter, ‘remained a mystery to the end.’

"Then there were the male adjustments: pub crawls and smoko, even when the job in hand was urgent. One Fulbrighter described the ‘six o'clock swill’ as ‘an exciting and impressive custom’. Then there were the holidays, camping and beaches at Christmas. Fred Addicott, a 1957 research scholar, and his family have recollections of a camp in Queenstown, and their arrival in a cold and drenching rain.

"The best booking that we had been able to get turned out to be a thoroughly saturated square of turf on which we then struggled to set up the modest tent lent by Day's Bay friends. By the time the tent was up and reasonably secure we were cold, wet and not in the most cheerful of moods. As we gathered inside to consider how we might arrange ourselves for a night on the soggy grass, a camp neighbour appeared at the doorway and said, ‘Here, I thought you might be able to use this.’"

‘This’ turned out to be a glowing portable kerosene stove. Other campers gave the family hot drinks and dried their wet sleeping bags. ‘Thirty years later,’ Fred Addicott writes, ‘the memory of that visit and those thoughtful and helpful South Islanders is still warm in our hearts.’

"It is my impression," said 1953 Fulbright scholar Kling Anderson, "that New Zealanders and Americans have much in common. They believe in the same things and are striving for the same major attainments. Differences in our ways of life are mostly limited to the relatively unimportant, minor, things, and are overwhelmed by the similarities. Each nation can contribute much to the knowledge and culture of the other, and, therefore, emphasis on such exchanges as these Fulbright Scholarships needs to continue or even increase to strengthen the bonds of understanding between us."

Howard Critchfield was in New Zealand in 1947, before the programme here started, as a visiting lecturer in geography at Canterbury College. He was ‘picked up’ by the scheme and given his return fare home, and notes with pride that he was probably the first Fulbrighter to arrive in this country. The first to be brought out to New Zealand, however, was Dr Olaus Murie, as Earl Dennis explained:

page 24
Black and White photograph of four men, including J.B. Treves, standing and talking in an Antarctic setting

‘Seven months of summer work in the Antarctic was arduous, demanding and a great
personal as well as professional experience’ — J. B. Treves.

"With John S. Service acting as temporary chairman of the Foundation, one American grantee, Olaus Murie, a distinguished American naturalist and high-ranking officer of the Wilderness Society, had already been awarded an Education Foundation grant and had already arrived in New Zealand before I arrived. He was investigating the population of American elk (wapiti: 20 of this species had been donated to the Government of New Zealand by President Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt in 1909). This population was released in the Sounds area of the South Island and Murie was already there, with a small party of New Zealand wildlife experts. Murie was active in the environment movement in the US and many of his opponents here considered him pretty far left, politically. This was seized upon by certain elements in New Zealand (who had their own Communist problem page 25with Messrs Barnes and Hill of the Longshoremen's Union). They dubbed Murie a Communist, which was echoed by the rising pro-McCarthy faction in Washington and between the two factions gave the Foundation in Wellington and the Department of State here a hard time, for a while. It blew over. Murie was certainly not a Communist and was not in the South Island to capture and take home with him a few pairs of Notornis — a supposedly extinct species of bird which had just been discovered alive and well in the South Island. The anti-Murie group in New Zealand had gone so far as to accuse him with that intent."

If Dr Murie was aware of this controversy, he did not seem to let it affect his project here, or stop him from talking to as many New Zealanders as he could. Fiordland is perhaps the wettest piece of real estate in the temperate world; it also has the unenviable record of 48 gales per annum. ‘More rain and nasty weather than I could have anticipated anywhere in the world,’ he told reporters. His team companions were, he said, ‘a great bunch of people.’ His wife, too, spoke to the media, in the Fulbright tradition that was only just starting, and gave a talk on radio.

Geologists, too, were happy to experience New Zealand landscape and weather. Coming here did a geologist's record no harm at all, for New Zealand geomorphology is famous — 'There is no way I could ignore that scenery in my profession,' wrote one — and Professor Cotton at Victoria University College had a world-class reputation. One American geologist, Charles Rich, came for a nine-month grant and stayed on for four and a half years. Then, in 1962, he was back for an Antarctic Expedition.

‘My graduate students,’ reminisced 1955 scholar Harry Schwarzweller, ‘used to say that one of the requirements for getting a PhD with Schwarzweller was to patiently see his New Zealand slides.’ One of these students, Tom Lyson, developed more interest than mere diplomacy demanded. Exactly 30 years later he was awarded a grant himself, and went to teach in the very same New Zealand city. ‘I'm very pleased about that,’ Schwarzweller wrote. ‘It somehow suggests to me a continuity — in my love affair with New Zealand.’