ThE THIRD ADELAIDE FESTIVAL OF ARTS
AT ADEL,. IDE, SOUTH Ai73TRdJIA
Official Opening b_ the Prime Minister,_ the Rt., Hon. Sir Robert
Menzies. K, CH; QC; MP.
My Lord Mayor, Mr, Premier and Ladies and Gentlemen
As her most inadequate substitute, I would like to
read to you right away a message which 1er Majesty The Queen
Mother invite d mo to convey to you on this lovely and memorable
occasion. She says this:
" As Patron of this, the Third Adelaide
Festival of Arts, it is a great sorrow to me
that I can't be with you today at this Opening
Ceremony. I have learned with pleasure of
the outstanding achievements of the two previous
ventures. You may indeed look with pride on the
results of your original idea, for the Adelaide
Fcstival of Arts is no longer an experiment but
an established feature in the cultural life of
Australia with an ever-growing reputation
oversea s.
To all those who have been associated
with this Third Festival I cffer my congratulations
and my warmest good wishes for its success.
S igned ELIZABETH REGINA."
( Applause)
Sir, I have stated that I was an inadequate
substitute. I had a little to do originally with the proposed
visit of Her Majesty because your Premier asked me on one of my
visits to London to find out, a little delicately, and of course
I am famous for my delicacy, whether there might be a favourable
response to an invitation. All I can tell you is that the well
known and lovely eyes of Her Majesty The Queen Mother lit up with
pleasure at the very thought of it. I know that she is genuinely
tremendously sorry not to be here. She was looking forward to it.
All I can say, as His Excellency the Governor-General said the
other day in his speech at the Opening of Parliament, is that all
of us will regard her visit not as cancelled but as merely
postponed. Her Majesty, I don't need to say to any of you has
an assured place in our hearts. Long long ago in this country,
she captivated the hearts of millions of people and they still
have the warmest place in their memories of her. She also
challenges the mind stimulates the imagination. She is really,
if I may say so, with all humility one of the very great women
of the century in her own right, ( Applause)
She, herself, in the Message that I have just read
to you, indicates one reason why she wanted to be here, Of course
there is a second reason. She really has a very soft spot in her
heart for Australia. She has now on at least two occasions, very
happy memories of this country and of the people of this country
and it is not to be wondered at becauso we, as a people, have
always made it clear to her in what deep affection we hold her and
this produces inevitably a feeling of warmth in her own heart, a
feeling of pleasure in her own mind. She will indeed be desperately
sorry not to be here.
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She mentioned that this Festival is an imaginative
effort. It began this is the third occasion now it began no
doubt as an experiment. It was enormously to the credit of
Adelaide and its citizens that it was an experiment made not in
the largest city in Australia but in a city which had imagination,
some understanding of what the arts mean in the history of the
country. Those who began it must have wondered, just as those
who began the Edinburgh Festival wondered. Edinburgh is not the
largest city in the United Kingdom; it is not the largest city
in Scotland, but the Edinburgh Festival now has a name that rings
around the world, one of the great artistic events, not only in
the history of Edinburgh or in the history of Scotland but in the
history of the modern world.
And Sir I speak without exaggeration when I say
that this Festival in Adelaide is not only unique in Australia,
is not only becoming extremely famous in Australia but that it
attracts world figures, world names in the fields of art in all
its various manifestations. And therefore this Festival has made
the name of Adelaide, the spirit of Adelaide, the imaginative
understanding of Adelaide well known all over the English-speaking
world and I have no doubt that by the time the sixth Festival has
been organised and put on, it will have a fame that extends to
every continent in the world.
Now Sir, this is a wonderful thing for a city to
achieve when it is not one of those cities with millions of people,
with vast accumulated wealth, but a comparatively small city
though the capital of a great State. And this, therefore, is
a remarkable achievement. I hope that every person in South
Australia has a just pride in it. I hope that we will all feel
immensely gra-eful to the people who organised it, who have
succeeded in the remarkable feat of bringing so many people from
so many places. All I ask that you give to me is a slight
suggestion of credit for the fact that whatever the other limitations
on the powers of the Commonwealth may be, we have legislative
authority over meteorology ( Laughter) and since I know that there
would be some people who would blame us if it were raining today,
all I ask is a humble meed of praise for the magnificent day that
we have brought with us. ( Laughter) ( Applause)
Sir, I myself am immensely sorry and so is my wife,
She is even more sorry because she is what they call a balletomane.
I am immensely sorry that we shall have to be away from here
tomorrow, but so that you may understand some of the rigours of
life from the point of view of a battered old Prime Minister, may
I tell you that tomorrow night I have to deliver a nost learned
lecture lasting for forty-five minutes or fifty minutes out of
Melbourne and that on Monday morning I go to Sydney to open the
Annual Conference of the Graziers' Association, so that I may
condole with them about the disastrously low price of woolo
( Laughter) Sir, I need to say no more. The procession waits;
it is headed by the Scots Guards band, and I am told if I don't
stop, it will start and once it starts, nobody will want to hear
one word from me and nobody will. ( Laughter) Therefore, Sir in
acknowledging the honour that you have done me in the regrettable
absence of Her much-loved Majesty The Queen Mother, I declare the
Festival open and in declaring it open and wishing it all success,
I would rather like to be able to connunicate with The Queen
Mother, if I may, as her representative on this occasion and tell
her that by their applause the people of Adelaide sent not only
their humble duty but sent her their love.
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