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Salient: Victoria University Students' Paper. Vol. 29, No. 3. 1966.
Denis Glover: a rambling survey
Denis Glover: a rambling survey
"You'll All be in a rat-race in ten years—though you may smile now," Denis Glover told an overflow student audience last week.
He was speaking at the first lecture in the Political Science Society's First Term lectures.
Four hundred students packed the theatre, and another two hundred listened by loudspeaker extension in the common room.
Taking as his text the prophet Nahum ("Woe to the bloody city— it is full of lies and robbery"), Glover began a rambling survey of New Zealand society ten years from now.
"Phony Maori"
"In the next ten years the lies will be larger and the robbery will be much smoother," pronounced Glover.
"In ten years everything will be much bigger, more, and worse."
He attacked the glorification of Maori culture and the European's attempt to modernise and rationalise the Maori tongue.
He foresaw a time when New Zealand was closer to Japan than to the United States or Great Britain.
He impliedly supported a lowering of the voting age to 18, and an extinction of voting rights when a person accepted universal superannuation.
Glover's Wit
Quotations from Denis Glover's speech last week:
On New Zealand: "… united in one small nation only by a ferocious determination to get forms filled in —forms in quadruplicate. …"
On Vietnam: He foresaw the American troops leaving about 1970 or 1971. "… by then half the population is half-American. …"
On Newspapers: "… in the 1971 New Years Honours list the editor of the Dominion got a box of cigars because for the first time since 1906 a copy of the Dominion appeared without any awful literals or misplaced lines. Of course, the circulation fell away immediately. …"
On Language; He foresaw in 1971 that "… the Dominion now turns out a bilingual paper: One column in broken English, the other in phony Maori. …"