Salient. An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria University College, Wellington N.Z. Vol. 20, No. 14. September 26, 1957
College Clubs–Still Talking
College Clubs–Still Talking
Schubert
The Music Society will be having two more student concerts before the end of term. The programmes include performances by chamber music combinations and a performance of Schubert's "Shepherd on the Rock", by Susanne Jones, which should be a highlight. Green. Ronald Gibbs and Robina Dorothy Freed, one of V.U.C.'s betterknown composers, will be having a group of her songs performed.
A series of weekly lunch-hour recitals has been arranged for the third term. The first of these, a recital of Schubert songs sung by Sybil Phillips, with Frank Gurr (clarinet) and Frederick Page (piano) merited a much larger audience than attended. Few of the musically-minded around the college seem to realize that the Music Room is second to nothing in Wellington as a venue for chamber music.
The programmes for the remainder of the term include the following:—Britten's Lachrymae for Viola and Piano, with Jean Munro and Frederick Page; a Mozart Sonata for Violin and Piano, with Vivienne Dixon and Frederick Page; Vaughan-Williams's Sonata for Violin, with Francis Rosner, and the Battok Unaccompanied Violin Sonata, played by Malcolm Latchem.
In the Tararuas
On Friday. August 8. Varsity revealed a diabolical plan to get rid of surplus idiots; the Tramping Club encouraged a party to go on a Southern crossing (in at Otaki Forks, cut—if you're lucky—at Kaitoke). Well. I suppose we all have to die some time.
And so a high-octane party of fifteen men, one girl, and Keith Walker, assembled outside the Railway Station late on the aforementioned night in preparation for a weekend in the Tararuas.
After leaving the truck half-way along the road to The Forks, the party led by David Somerset walked to the Cottage (1½ hours) and thence up a vertical ridge in the bright moonlight to Field's Hut (3100ft; 2 hours). Those carrying my sedan chair found it especially hard—that always weeds out the unfit.
At 7.30 next morning the party set off for Kime Hut (4600ft). Far to the west lay snow-capper Egmont, rosetinted by the rising sun. The wind rose to 75½ m.p.h. gusts, the temperature dropped alarmingly, and the rain came [unclear: dqpn] disgustingly. It was a really hard Kime. However, the Heine brothers amused themselves by taking colour photographs of snow. Kime Hut turned out to be a cold, half-rotten, draughty, wet poorly-lit shack, with piles of snow in the bunks—it made one glad to be alive. The party divided into two at this stage: those who wanted to go on, and those who wanted to go home. In the true spirit of the second Elizabethan age. Des. Griffin. David Ogilvie, Bryce Evans, and two Hutt Valley guys, from the first Elizabethan age, headed off over the central range to find their way out the Towherangienakau (1 stutter badly) Valley by 8 o'clock Sunday night. Des reported afterwards that the Central Ridge was very queer country—if one wasn't going up. one was coming down, or sometimes vice versa.
The others winded their way back to Field's Hut; at one stage, as the weather cleared, they had a capital view of Wellington so clear that the gleam of cars' windscreens around Oriental Bay could be picked up. One chap with good eyesight even managed to sec someone swotting on the lawn outside Victoria.
Game seemer fairly scarce, though Graeme Caughley claims to have spotted seven Roger's thesauri down one valley.
The same party left the hut next morning and reached a desired farm house by 2.15 that afternoon aided by Ken Shanks's highly accurate compass and 5-Vol. pocket edition of 7 figure logarithms. From there two taxis were phoned for and we got to Otaki by 3 p.m. Some then hitchhiked home; others waited for the 4.35 bus.
Before shooting myself I would like to dispel any naive illusions about conduct on these trips: we really Do rough it you know. Conversation is certainly not restricted to politics, weather, and philosophy, but embraces the Fine Arts. Anita Ekberg, the Languages of Ancient Europe, Anita Ekberg. Fish Prices in South Africa, 1924, 25, and Anita Ekberg. Mealtime is a simple affair: we completely dispense with the fifteen courses.
But there is always the consolation that one's diet is scientifically planned. Every person on this trip received exactly 8543 calories per meal. I know—I had to count them out.
(Abridged.—Ed.)
Public Confessions
A shockingly small number of students heard a series of extremely interesting talks in the lunch-hour of the week of September 9-13. The so-called Inter-faculty talks are an annual scries of half-hour periods in which a prominent young exponent of most of the College's disciplines attempts to apologise for his kink in that direction, and give his hearers a clearer idea of what students in other faculties do when they are studying, or else is given an opportunity to ride his own special hobbyhorse for the mystification and benefit of the audience. And the way in which this was done last week deserved a far better response than it got.
On the Monday. Mr. Jim Ritchie gave a rapid analysis of the current rapid developments in psychology, in which theraw material, "behaviour." is recorded and explained in terms either of General Systems (statistical analysis, and so on), or of motives (the Freudian, Jungian hunting ground), or from a sociological point of view. He then went on to mention some work in this latter field that he himself had done among manual labourers, where he made some significant discoveries about the similarities and otherwise of the makeup of Maoris and pakehas.
The second speaker. Mr. Keith Walker, an honours English student, discussed the "useful" functions of English scholarship in maintaining a serviceable and attractive language suitable for both technicians and poets, in providing accurate texts of worthwhile works of literature that would otherwise be corrupt or lost, and in giving readers precise and clear understandings of the meaning of words and phrases in the writings of preceding centudies. He claimed further that the discrimination a good critic brings to bear can help as to get hold of what our worthwhile but obscure litterateurs are (or were), getting at.
Listeners on Tuesday heard an explanation from Mr. O'Neill, a new lecturer in Classics, of the decay in the study of classics and in the esteem in which a classical scholar is held. If, said Mr. O'Neill, classics students read the works of Antiquity for their intrinsic merits as books worth reading, and not as material for minute textual quibbling, or as examples of the melodious cadences obtainable in obscure and extinct languages, and further if these students attempted to lead their lives in emulation of the great men of whom the Classical writers tell, then perhaps what is now an ossified, ivory-power survival discipline may revive and be again a valuable influence in the education of men for employments other than university teachers.
Mr. O'Neill was followed by Mr. Bede Rundel, who gave a taste of what philosophers do by [unclear: divssing] the relationship between certainty of the mathematical or logical kind, everyday empirical certainty, and contingency, the area outside that of logical certainty. To his chagrin, the philosopher finds that he's got to put up with the possibility of error (however remote, it's still there), unless he's prepared to pay the price of saying nothing worth saving.
For Wednesday's single address, by Mr. R. A. Bell, on Chemicals from Natural Sources, the Salient reporter was unable to be present, and he has been unable to find anyone who was there: we trust Mr. Bell didn't address an empty room.
Mr. Humphrey, who is doing a doctorate in physics, took as his subject for the first of Thursday's pair of talks the "Difficulties of Research in New Zealand." The main troubles were availability of radioactive materials, for his experiment on neon in excitation states of between 4 and 10 million electreon volts, in the exact form required, and the lack of much valuable "experimenting technique." know-how derived from familiarity with simliar pieces of apparatus, which is built up in laboratories where there are many people doing research, but which is sadly lacking in New Zealand. Local research vs as also hampered to some extent by a limited budget, which ruled out experiment in many fields where the cost of equipment is high, and by the experimenting tradition in the colleges, where a bias for nuclear research affects the direction of much research undertaken for degrees.
Mr. Ramsey does systematics. He is a Ph.D. student in the Zoology department and is engaged on the identification of mites found in the soil of Brother's Island. This systematic research, the labelling of different animals, was the most basic branch of zoology, and although in Europe and elsewhere this was far enough advanced to permit researchers to branch out into experiments in physiology, genetics, and so on. New Zealand was still too far behind with the systematic classification of her many unique species to be able to give much time to anything else.
On Friday. Dr. Stone of the French Department described the University City of Paris, an international student living quarter, where he spent some years while a student at the Sorbonne. Built in the twenties and thirties (with more expansion still going on), this self-contained block of hostels (26 already built), restaurants, and theatres is an idealistic experiment in race relations. There are hostels especially for many overseas countries, and students from virtually everywhere live together in the University City, along with about an equal number of French students. It has worked well, but not as well as might be partly because of the fantastically high pass standard at the Sorbonne, which makes everyone work too hard, and partly because French students tend to be very individualistic and don't appreciate much the demands on their individual freedom that genuinely corporate life must make.
Mr.——of the Geology Department, mildly surprised his audience by giving an exposition of how we see, which would have seemed more appropriate for a physiologist, a psychologist, or a philosopher.
It was nonetheless, worthwhile and illuminating to hear. Its burden was that by habitual automatic processes the mind imposes an intelligible order and pattern on the raw material of blocks of colour.
Perhaps symptomatic of the failure of students to take advantage of this chance of getting some understanding of fields outside their own was the way French students left straight after Dr. Stone's talk and were immediately replaced by scientists who hadn't bothered to come until a geologist was speaking, thus effectively demolishing the contact for which the talks were designed.
Fossil-Hunting
On a recent Friday night, 16 heavily-eroded Charlies of the Geol. Soe. set off in two rental vans for three days of field geology in the Wairarapa.
Next morning, after a buttered bread and saveloy banquet, the vans headed for the seaside, pedalled by Gary Orbell and Barry Webby. we observed large-scale slumping there of lower tertiary sediments. On the way one of our drivers, getting a shock at seeing cow-cockey driving a late-model Mercedes Benz, put his van into a ditch, uttering "struihiolaria"! It wasn't the sheep in the back seat that upset him but the horse in the front. Wading a river brought out some interesting personalities; John Lewis evidently thought he needed a second baptism, as he gave us a demonstration on how to cross a river fully-clothed using the Lewis craw Land that Goddamned Yankee started to take his boots and socks off (he's been in the Marine Corps). Seeing our pained looks he hobbled through with only one boot off, and on the way back walked straight in with both boots on (Our [unclear: acolian] friend sure was a butte.) Mr. Bradley of 'the Geology Dept. gave an interesting dissertation on the geology of this area both on this day and Sunday.
On the Saturday night after an interesting slew (where Did my bag of specimens get to?) we had a round-the-candle discussion on continental-drift. hypotheses. and other rare fossils. Despite protests by us that he was too tired. Barrs McKelvey insisted on relating his adventures in the Urewera. Some people got so interested on hearing his stories that they left the room, otherwise they couldn't sleep, they said.
Sunday morning found us looking at fossil-beds; fossils I discovered didn't bite but were hard very-dead organisim. There were plenty of examples for all—two helpings if you were hungry. Some spent that night drinking lemonade, others a pleasant-smelling, light-brown liquid which seemed to have an interesting physiological effect: conversation ranged from Bach to red-hot jazz (Alva's Bach is worse Ilian her bite).
On the Monday, travelling at speed (or faster) we returned to the coast, then off over the hills, the delicate aroma of Ngauranga telling us we were finally home.
As I had never done any geology. I was a little apprehensive when I began this tour, but at no stage was I at a loss to understand it. I soon got used to eating off a water-table and saw more horsts than even the most experienced. (I have a sneaking suspicion that some of the more moraine students used to cheat at this game. They would yell out hog-back" when I knew damn wel there wasn't a pig for miles.) However. I did learn some things I didn't know before: sinkholes have nothing in common with plugholes, a bergschrund in not a dog. and if you don't play the game, and pinch other people's fossils they will say you are graben. Furthermore, you mustn't mention bottom-set beds in the presence of ladies!
I astly thanks to the committee for organising a really gneiss trip, and providing us with much data on strata, Information on sedimentation, and knowledge of palacontologe.
Those who went were Alva Challis. Jill be Fort. Roger (Idaho Martin. Peter Webb. Barry Webby. Barry McKelvey. Hank Van der Heufel. John Lewis. Tony Allen. [unclear: Gry] Orbell. Michael Heine. David Mill. Graham Gibson. Michael Hall. Alec Malahoff, and Chris Horne.
—M.H.H.
To A Liberal
You were a gallant speaker.
For freedom and for right.
You were no common coward—
Until you saw the fight.
—C.G.W.
(From "Spike." 1933.)
I am Truth.
But truth is rude.
Pass by prude.
For I am nude.
—A.V.
(From "Spike." 1938.)