By Jonathan Fox

The Delegates sat about a rectangle of tables placed end to end, according to their university: Otago, Lincoln and Canterbury on one side; Auckland, Waikato, and Massey on the other; with Victoria at the end, facing NZUSA president Alister Taylor and his aids.

Seated in chairs ranged along the walls of Otago's spacious Room K about fifty observers—unofficial representatives, reporters, hangerson and the curious—kept their eyes on the centre, waiting for Easter Council to begin.

The delegates in the centre bustled in preparation. They scanned reports with executive speed, made little notes, whispered to each other, looked concerned. To a foreign observer totally ignorant of the New Zealand University Students Association and the pattern of its conferences, it was all rather mysterious. But it was obviously important.

Of course, it must have started days earlier, with the writing of the reports, with speculations, plans. Those delegates who had taken the Friendship from Wellington the night before had worked very hard during the flight. They pinned on their official delegate ribbons and stacked so many cyclostyled dockets on their little flight-tables that the hostesses were hard pressed to find where to place the coffee. By the end of Council, four days later, each student-delegate had been issued 8.31bs of cyclostyled summary and information.