People are asking; ‘‘Whatever will Dunedin be like without the Exhibition?’’ It most likely will be hard for a while to become reconciled to the quiet days that will follow the sudden closing down of the gates. Most of us will be ‘‘all dressed up and no place to go,’’ for the Exhibition has become a real Mecca of pleasure and a centre of life.
Even after it is closed down memories of New Zealand’s great undertaking will linger for many, many years to come, especially in the minds of those children from the remote corners of the Dominion who have been brought to Dunedin on weekly excursions. It has had a wonderful educational value, and there is no doubt that in 20 or 30 years’ time these children, then grown up, will be the strongest advocates of exhibition excursions for the children. They know from experience.
Bathgate parks it
The chief feature of the annual meeting of the Dunedin Amenities Society was the resignation of the presidency by Mr Alexander Bathgate, who was virtually the originator of the movement and has been its life and soul, so to say, during the many years of its very useful existence. Mr Bathgate’s aesthetic ardour and devotion to the ideal of civic bounty furnished the primary stimulus of an enterprise which has never been quite valued by the local community. In recounting the work which the Amenities Society has performed for this city, Mr Bathgate made no allusion to his own services, but we may be allowed to supply the national omission with a word of emphatic and grateful tribute. We shall not say that there would have been no Amenities Society without Mr Bathgate’s initiative, but the Society would not have been formed so early and many valuable improvements in local conditions, which are now a salient public asset, might still be unaccomplished if it had not been for his public-spirited activity. The lesson is that the beautiful city should be made still more beautiful, and that substantial support should be given to an organisation which keeps that aim in view with single-minded zeal. — editorial
Monumental effort
Every day sees an additional step in the erection of the Dunedin War Memorial, and it is now expected that this monument to our dead soldiers will be ready for unveiling about Armistice Day. The present height is a little over 50 feet and there is another 40ft to climb before it is finished. It will be surmounted by an urn emblematic of sacrifice. To avoid the appearance of hollowness, the column is being tapered by means of an entasis; that is, a round curve instead of a straight slope. The base is 60ft in diameter, and the whole structure is octagonal in shape. A big lion, of solid marble, has been carved at the base, and there now remains some floral carving to be done.
— ODT, 31.3.1926
