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New Zealand's Centennial Exhibition

Wellington, the Capital City, provides the stage for New Zealand's Centennial Exhibition—a great setting for an epic display. The fifty-five acres of flat land—part of the isthmus dividing Evans Bay from Lyall Bay—now carries in settled array the sweep of buildings, the avenues, the lakes, roads and gardens that make up, in contour effect, a bold general impression of what the Exhibition and its approaches will look like from the adjacent hills.

But only those who have seen what has been done in the past year by promoters using modern display methods in countries other than our own- at the Empire Exhibition, Glasgow, the Golden Gate International Exposition, San Francisco, or the World's Fair, New York—can have any idea of what the final effect of New Zealand's Exhibition will be, when the bands play, the flags fly, the lights blaze, the crowds assemble, and playland and showland spring to joyous life.

In a preview arranged by the Exhibition Company directors more than two months before the opening date, some notion of the internal arrangements for displaying the country's progress was gained by visitors, who were impressed by the forward state of the various buildings and equipment.

Craftsmanship of the highest order has gone into the construction of every part of the various structures. It seems that these New Zealanders who are busy building the place are taking pride in seeing that the housing of exhibits shall be on a standard worthy of the present generation and of a quality which is in itself a tribute to their forebears. The workmanship is such as might be expected in a place intended to last till the second hundred years is ended, rather than for a mere six months of hectic life.

Over three hundred years ago Lord Bacon, writing of “Masques and Triumphs” said: “Let the scenes abound in light, specially coloured and varied….” The Exhibition authorities have followed Bacon's advice to a degree hitherto unimagined in New Zealand. Out in the open by night, glowing and brilliant globes and patterns throw a snare of colour and brightness over all the grounds and buildings, and reflect in placid or shimmering pools the interplay of richly-hued lights and designs that make for human fascination through the sense of sight.

Here, facing the midway, waterfalls of large proportions cascade in measured leaps from the ramparts, tinged all the while to rainbow radiance as they spray and foam across their chasms; and, from the centre, fountains of ever-changing loveliness play laughingly in emulation. For this is New Zealand's playland and showland in one comprehensive whole, and it is right that the setting should make for gladness and rejoicing when the country celebrates and records its century of progress.

That progress, economic, racial and cultural, is seen when the various halls are entered, and is pictured in a way to vividly impress upon visitors the rapid, sure, and widespread developments of the past century, and to foreshadow the paths of further advance.

It is a pageant all school-boys and school-girls in the Dominion should see to fire their imaginations for their country's future good. Older people should see it, too, as a reminder of the times they have survived and as a promise of good things to come.

It is well to become Exhibition-minded when it is now known that the Exhibition to open on the 8th November will be for New Zealanders, and in the words of the immortal Barnum. “The Greatest Show on Earth.”