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Salient: An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria University, Wellington. Vol. 24, No. 3. 1961

Gentlemen—A Toast

Gentlemen—A Toast

From March 31 to April 3, several hundred university sportsmen and sportswomen will descend on the wolf in the fold (I mean exactly that) and display a tempting array of athletic and social talent. Such sports as criquet, roeing, baasketball, athletiks, swiming and rifles of some description (I think) are likely to be indulged in. Tournaments are very enjoyable, and as Dunedin has a reputation to uphold in this department, a classic tournament can be expected.

Now, Dunedin—as you know—is reputedly the only university city in New Zealand and I'm inclined to think that perhaps it could well be.

Consider Victoria, a junketed mess of bricks, concrete and decaying sandstone, plunging madly up and down precipices, clinging desperately to the rotten rock hills of a senseless city, and what have we? No. Consider Christ-church. A meandering mass of quads and cloisters, a congerie of architectural musings, spattered along characterless urban streets and buried in a perpetual mist which enshrouds sodden parklands and melts disconcertingly into a nightmare of museums, colleges and universities.

Auckland! No. Just a polygastric, egotistic, nonentity.

Ah now, Dunedin. Here indeed are the Elysian fields, and, so to speak, the Mt. Olympus. Neglect for a moment the Students' Union, the physiotherapy school, the hospitals, the home-science school and a couple of others and let us concentrate on what remains. A university—aye, a real university. Learning simply plunges at you from the old stone buildings picturesquely bordering the weed-choked, muck-filled Leith. Such an atmosphere of old-world scholarship as one would associate with Oxford or Cambridge. Now, don't get me wrong I really do like Dunedin. And with that in mind, I present my (copyright) "Maxims for athletes and others."