NEW ENGLAND GIRLS' SCHOOL, ARMIDALE. N. S. W.
Speech by the Prime Ministe_ the Rt. Hon. Sir Robert Menzies
Well, my Lord Bishcp, I want to begin with a personal
explanation as we say, I have been misrepresented, I have
been in Armidale before. I even suspect that I made a speech,
but I know it was a long time ago, Long forgotten and, I hope,
long forgiven. ( Laughter)
The second sort of personal explanation I want to
make is that when the Headmistress was reading her report, I
misheard one word. Let me see I must look it up. I
thought she said " the second" when referring to Miss Young.
" The second is our Treasurer", I thought she said. ( Laughter)
And when everybody applauded, applauded and applauded I knew
there must be a mistake, because no Treasurer ever gets applause.
( Laughter) And then I saw it was " our treasure".
The next thing I want to say of a minor kind is that
I am greatly indebted to whoever it was who drew the thistle,
and had it put ( gesturing) ( Laughter) ( Applause).
Fortunately, it is only a dxawingo( Laughter) I suppose if it
hadn't been a drawing one of you well-behaved girls would have
arranged to have put it on the seat itself. ( Laughter)
I am grateful to the headmistress for having mentioned
me in conjunction with Sir Alec Home, the Prime Minister of
Great Britain because as it happens, he is the second-last
Knight of the Thistle to be created and I am the last and we
walked one behind the other to the Chapel of the Thistle and I
am sure that my Scots friend on the platform will be delighted
to know that when The Queen said to me, " How do you pronounce
your name?" L because she has to says " I demand or " I require
that So-and-so ( mentioning my name" be installed, I said,
" Mingies, Your Majesty, Mingies. It is only in Australia that
I am calied ! Menziess" 0 That's not quite true. ( Laughter)
That's a political approximation. Anyhow, Mingies I was in the
Chapel of the Thistle, and, for better or for Worseq I regard
that as rather an authentic thing.
The third preliminary remark I want to make is that I
was very interested to hear the school sing, " Let us now praise
famous men." which I had not heard before put to music, Then
later on when I heard all these splendid and warm remarks about
the staff, it occurred to me to suggest that your musical
composer whoever she may be ought to cast up a tune for Kipling's
version " Let us now praise famous men
Men of little showing
For their work continueth,
And their work continueth,
Broad and deep continueth,
Greater than their knowingi"
You remember? His " Schoolteachers". His " Let us now praise
famous men" was all about schoolteachers and there it was about
men teachers, of course because they " laid on us with whips,
laid on us with many whips" and, of course, you don't do that
here I imagine. ( Laughter) ./ 2
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Now, the Lord Bishop of Armidale . who, until a few
minutes ago, was na sque radip g rs P. friend of mine, has stolen
half my speech, or rather yesterdnhy I made a speech to a girls'
school and one of my chiel. themes was the impact of beauty and
the function of beauty in education. Well, he must have read
that in the paper ( Laughter), It's perfectly true, Even bishops
are capable of reading a sermon, ( Lauga-ter) Therefore, I w1~ nft
say much about it, but I do crave the privilege of repeating it
because I believe tremendously in the function of beauty in life.
The world has gone through a terrible century so far,
full of hatred, full of scandalous attacks by man on man, Dall
of ugliness and yet, you know, there is so much beauty in the
world and ii' people could learn to breathe it in to take it in
particularly when they are at school and carry il with them
through life, distilling a little of it for other people, letting
it colour their views of other people, making them more tolerant,
more anxious to look for tl-ie good than to seek out the evil I am
sure the world would do much better than it has because ugliness
has disfigured it,
But there is another thing that has gone on in this
century, All of us who are grown up are very familiar with it
and that is that we seem to have got cast adrift from our moorings,
from our intellectual moorings, from our spiritual moorings9
from our sense of values. It has been a very strange century so
far and you will all have some part to play in making it better
before it finishes. It is really, of course, completely true
that in this century, the developments of science and the developments
of tech~ nology, the developments of technical skill have
all gone on apace, This, I suppose, is the golden century of
science, why I can tell you girls looking at me with this
feigned respec'z with which you are now looking at me ( Laughter)-
that I can remember the first motor vehicle that ever came into
my part of Victoria, It was a gruesome thing called a motor
buggy ( Laughter). It had good old-fashioned buggy wheels and
so on and the driver sat up perched aloft. I can remember seeing
the first movie isn't this incredible that a man so young should
remember so far back ( Laughter), It seems only yesterday that
I was sitting in some open-air place because nobody could afford
to build picture theatres for a start. Now they can't afford
to keep thom open. I saw a film called " The Great American
Train Robbery". Everybody jerked like that. Fortunately there
were no voices and therefore even at that time of my life I found
it relatively easy to have a nap while the picture was on.
( Laughter) Aircraft this is all in our time, Wireless
television, all these things that we now take for grantea, of
course, have come in this century or for all practical purposes,
in this century. So that the other day, I could pick up a
telephone in Sydney and have a talk to Alec Home in London over
a telephone circuit through a submarine cable, just as if he
were in the next room.
Now, all these things have happened and they are all
marvellous aren't they? One thing wrong with them is that they
dontt have much to do with people's character or tolerance or
understanding of human beings* In short, they dontt have much
to do with civilisation, They can be used as an aid to
civilisation, They can, of course, be used as the enemies of
civilisation. Aircraft yes, for a great and good purpose like
bringing me here ( Laughter); or for the purposes of destruction
of people. This is the great feature about this period of our
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history. All this tremendous devx Lopment in science, j_ applied
science, in understand-, ig o2 l' thin-gs as things, biut '-iow much
understanding of them as th.. iUs to be used and used for some
purpose? Now this has a great bearing on the school. This
has a great bearing on the attitude that-parents have towards
their children at school. There is a bit of a disposition, I
think I am right in saying, to want some early kind of specialisation,
to say, " Well, Rutia or whatever her name mighit be she
wants to do a particular thing in, life that is going to be a very
profitable thing to do. Let her concentrate on that," I hiope
not too soon. I am one of those people who believe that unless
the basis of education is right, unless up to a certain stage
people are really studying what I will call the human things in
education they can become narrow specialists, They can become
detached lIrom the values of civilisation, they can become indeed
a positive menace, becauso an irresponSible scientific expert
may be a great scientific expert but whether his contribution
to life is a good one or a bad one will, if he be a narrowminded
man, be something that will. have to be determined by
other people less narrow minded and more wise, and that means
that the whole process of education is a process of developing
individual people, developing them in a balanced way,
lowr on earth could we possibly have any sense of
judgment about contemporary events if we knew nothing about what
had happened in the past. I just don't understand how anybody
can profess to be educated, though he or she may have all the
degress in the world unless they know something of the history
of the past, unless they have some basis of judgment some
understanding that men and women are remembered for their impact
on life and that you will find this impact specifically or.
generally described in history. y_--t can _ g in history the errors
that have been made and the results that have come from them,
And now the study of English. I had something to
say about this in another place yesterday but I must say that
I am constantly astonished at the number of people who, when
they open their mouths to have a conversation or make a speech
or whatever it may be, think that anything will do. I have met
a number of boys out of good schools I say nothing about
girls; I'm not game to but I have met lots and lots of young
men out of good schools whose vocabulary was hopelessly
inadequate and who spoke a species of Hottentot ( Laughter) as
far as I was concerned, on the great principle that "' Anyhow,
you know what I mean" and anything will do or even Zhe famous
Australian slogan " It's good enough".
Now it's not good enough. There is nothing good
enough for the language that we speak. Nobody could ever be
perfect at it, but we can all try, we can all be conscious of
the fact that it's a wonderful language and a flexible language
and that it is not all long words but that the best words in it
are short words, clear-cut words, I don't know whether this
is a classical school, I know that Greek has disappeared from
the face of the earth, I think much to the misfortune of the
earth, but Latin staggers on. It used to be compulsory for a
number of courses at the university; now I think it isn't,
I don't know. But if people could even learn a little Latin and
remember it, they would understand their own language a lot
better and would misuse it less villainously.
Now, all this is quite consistent with doing physics
and chemistry, all these scientific matters. They are of
p tremendous importance. The sec'ond hal:' of this century wiLl
need more and more of e., lt. o cientific work than did
the first half and I i -rew . re get 1 0c greater civil,
ordinary, peaceful benefit fvero : Lt Dut a scientist who doesn't
know these other things, who . asnlt really taken time to get into
a line of communication with otrier human beings, learning from
them, sub-consciously, getting to. unde: cstand them, that scientist
will always be less than a great man, whereas the humanist, as
we say, who has studied all these other things, who has thriven
on history and philosophy and all these great exercises o: f the
mind, will be something less than academic if he fails to know
something about the problem of the scientist and fails to learn
something about the nature of the world about which he is
speculating. Now, that is all I want to say to you. It sounds
singularly like a bit of a sermon, but you know, I must say
that when I was going to speech days or speech nights and
sometimes getting a prize ( Laughter), we used to sit Aown there
and they always had some old politician on the platform
( Laughter); he was always a very distinguished old boy and he
always bored us stiff ( Laughter) and I took a vow later on
that I would never put myself . nto that position. I must say
it for myself I do it as seldom as I can. But I am a bit
lucky today because all I can tell you is whether it is the
superior nature of girls over the nature of boys I don't know....
if you had been I111 try it out this afternoon
( Laughter) but if you had been boys half of you would have
been yawning in my face by now. All I can say is that you are
the best I don't know about those others further back who
pay the fees ( Laughter). They are, in a sense, beyond redemption
( Laughter). What I have had to say to you is really wasted
on them. I am getting in early with you, on your minds, and I am
delighted to have had the opportunity of standing here and
looking at you, and if I may repeat before I sit down, ono
improper remark I made when I walkea into the chapel this
morning, my Lord Bishop not realising for a moment that I
was in he chapel and so I spoke to a couple of the girls in
the front row as I went by. Do you know what I said to them
and looking around I repeat it with emphasis I have never seen
such admirable hair-dos in a girls' school before. ( Laughter)