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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 62

Social Life

Social Life.

Social life in New Zealand is freer, less conventional, and more full of leisure and recreation than at home. The climate is conducive to outdoor sports, and the eight-hour day of labour allows so much leisure that the games of Old England are played with an ardour and persistence unknown to the toiling masses here. In Auckland alone, with a population, including suburbs and the other side of the Waitemata Harbour, of 60,000, we had no less than 50 clubs or associations for cricket, football, tennis, bowls, athletics, boating, yachting, and such like. The mayor of a town in New Zealand, being elected directly by the ratepayers (as in the United States), does not like to incur unpopularity by refusing a holiday or half-holiday on the occasion of a visit from an English or colonial cricket or football team, inconvenient though it often was in Auckland, when such a visit happened to fall upon the monthly "mail day."

There is much spontaneous and informal hospitality shown to strangers, and much inter-neighbourly good-fellowship. It is well for neighbours to live on good terms with one another, if only for one reason, and that is, the deplorable frequency of fires, for the towns are built of wood, as a rule. Of late years, American recreations have been introduced into New Zealand, such as roller-skating, moonlight riding parties, "surprises," calico balls, and so on. Nor am I acquainted with any country where "presentations" are so frequent and liberal.

New Zealand is emphatically a musical colony. Almost every house or cottage contains a piano, harmonium, or violin, and some performer upon one or other or all of these instruments. Some surprise and gratification was expressed by the Right Hon. Lord Sandhurst, who, in company with my friend, Chief Justice Way, of South Australia, called on me, en passant, at finding a number of Auckland youths practising Mendelssohn's part songs with me. He had thought that the public-houses and billiard-rooms would have absorbed their evenings. But there is a widespread desire for culture and self-improvement among young colonials, and I have always done my best to foster it. In Art, again, there is so much talent displayed in the pictures of amateurs shown at the Annual Art Exhibitions in the four chief cities, that I am certain that if ever Macaulay's New Zealander should sit upon a broken arch of London Bridge and sketch the ruins of St. Paul's, he would execute an uncommonly good drawing!