It wasn’t till I researched 1968 for my book on Helen
Clark that I remembered what a cutting-edge figure the
Duke of Edinburgh was back then. We all know that
those were the high hippie days of free love and free
spirits but I’d forgotten about free mingling, at which
the Duke excelled. When he visited Auckland in 1968
the New Zealand Herald led the paper with this huge
front-page headline: DUKE MINGLES FREELY WITH
TEENAGERS AND SOIL SCIENTISTS. Awesome. And
when he landed at Auckland airport, in a twin-engine
Andover of the Queen’s Flight, the Herald was right
there, in the finest journalistic tradition of eyewitness
reportage: ‘As the aircraft taxied to a halt by the
welcoming party the Duke could be seen at the controls
wearing dark glasses and an earphone headset.
Wearing a single-breasted brown suit, he stepped
briskly from the aircraft into the bright sunlight to be
welcomed by the Prime Minister, Mr Holyoake.’
Brown, brisk, bright. Sigh. There was poetry in the press
in those days. It is not all, I fear, that has changed for
the better.
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1 comment:
I'd be more than happy if the NZ Herald simple reported the new properly.
Their selective boosterism of the NACTional agenda the past few years has served the people of Auckland poorly.
A hundred stories on the cost of the ETC and not one I can recall about the cost of doing nothing about climate change.
That's just one issue.....the same applies to most of the rest as well.
Poetry without integrity is useless nonsense.
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