fields, race-tracks and Rugby fields in every community; pipe bands, pubs, jigs or horn-pipes and choral groups - we have rugged ranges and sounds like lochs and their mountains, rolling country and green fields and river plains like your south of the border, strange rock formations akin to the Giant's Causeway. and misty. snow-capped mountains.

Yet, to emphasise that Kiwis are no longer British but independent with their own country, we also have our own accent (would you have guessed it?), an Arbitration Court for settling strikes, Maori cuisine (sea foods, kumara or sweet-potato and, sub-tropical fruits), a thermal region of boiling mud-pools and sky-soaring geysers which give us goo-thermal power, glow-worm caves, mountains that climb over twelve thousand feet, flightless birds that cry 'kee-wee' and lay an egg one fourth the size of themselves, Maori villages or pas and old forts, the only living representative of the dinosaur age (the tuatara that lives for 300 years), thick 'bush' vegetation ranging from huge 1200-year old gum-producing Kauri trees to a myriad variety of ferns, earthquakes, volcanoes that erupt, smoulder or are extinct, fishing for anything from the average five pound trout to the over nine hundred pound black marlin or mako shark, hunting for deer, wapiti and wild pigs, and the fashionable jewellery of Greenstone jade or gaily-coloured paua shell.

Why all this in 'The Cottonian'? Because, while here, we can give you the 'inside story'; because two insular nations as we are must learn to understand that foreigners have reasons for their differences and the meeting of races should lead to mutually beneficial influence rather than conflict; because another main problem of this age, the generation gap, is mirrored in us two - for a parent shouldn't desert its chick to feather its own Common Market nest (especially when that chick so directed its external interests for its mother's sake during her two crises of this century that it became dependent on the mother), while neither should the chick, in realising its own identity and individual approach to life, forget what it owes to its parent: and because ,,,, we jumped at the proffered opportunity.

N and G Clark

THE NEW BIOLOGY LABORATORY

A major event in the 1968-69 year for the Fifth and

Sixth Form Biology classes was our moving into the new laboratory early in the second term. In this spacious, well-windowed room no longer were we studying cockroaches and winter twigs of horse-chestnut among choral. stry odours and bottles, physics equipment and geography maps. Experiments were now able to be set up and left for later observation, and there was plenty of bench space with sockets for microscope study. In addition there was an electric wall-heater, a preparation room and a new system of storage using movable trays.

Gradually we settled in and the room began to appear more like a laboratory than a bare classroom. The

walls were brightened with instructive charts, the shelves filled with chemicals and library books and, the sine qua non of Biology, living plants and animals arrived to take up residence. The latter were not always successful

Mrs N Clark, the Headmaster, His Grace the Archbishop, K T Spray. at the official opening of the new Biology laboratory on Association Day 1969

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