Item 04: Memoirs of a Colonial Boy by Robert Joseph Stewart, ca. 1971 - Page 429
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[Page 429]
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arrived in Wellington after a four-day, very stormy, passage across the Tasman in the old "Makura", having celebrated Christmas at sea.
The Statute of Westminster, defining the status of the Dominions had just been proclaimed (on the 14th of November 1930) in the British Parliament. It removed the last vestiges of our colonial subjection, and it seems a fitting event in which to mark the end of my youthful reminiscences of less independent years. How I fared during and after the great depression, which lasted for a few years, must be another story of more recent times; of an amazing atomic, electronic, plastic and computer age that followed the era of the internal combustion engine, which in its turn had succeeded the steam-engine and horse-and-buggy days of my boyhood.
Looking back, I can see that modern invention - the motor car, telephone, radio and household refrigeration - has considerably benefited the farmers, graziers, miners and other workers in the out-back, and their families, and has abolished the lonely isolation and primitive living conditions of their predecessors. I do not think, however that it has been entirely an unqualified blessing for residents of the towns and cities. First, the typewriter destroyed the art of good legible handwriting, then the telephone suppressed the social grace of good letter writing, next the motor car impaired good public courtesy and finally television has undermined the pleasure of pleasant conversation in the home.
The pace of human activity has been speeded up tremendously by present-day mechanical and electrical devices, but our physical and mental capacity to keep up with it all remains unaltered. Despite all the so-called labour-saving and time-saving inventions, people seem to have much less spare time than their forebears for meditation and relaxation: as Tolstoi the Russian writer and philosopher said many years ago, "Every new technological advance would tend to still further enslave mankind".
To walk any distance is now frequently considered a hardship and most people are gradually atrophying their nether limbs by constant riding in power driven vehicles, even in golf-buggies