A Pastoral Paradise - The Royal Visit, 1953-54

• The Royal Visit, 1953-54
• The Popularity of the Tour
• The Queen and the Maori People
• A Pastoral Paradise
• A Loyal People
• A Great Place to Bring Up Children
• Itinerary
• Remembering the Royals
• Later Royal Visits
• Image and Media Gallery
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A Pastoral Paradise

Following her stay in Auckland and her visits to Waitangi, Hamilton and Rotorua, the Queen and Duke had a break for five days at Lake Rotoiti, and then flew to Gisborne and Napier. The theme for the next few days was the pastoral productivity of New Zealand. In Napier she was greeted with a two mile avenue of flowers and a visit to McLean Park where the highpoint was a display of shearing by Ivan and Godfrey Bowen.

The next day the Royal Couple visited Wattie's canneries in Hastings, the 'fruit bowl of New Zealand', before heading south by train to Palmerston North and seeing orchards and sheep farms. Then it was into Southern Taranaki where at Patea she was greeted with a bank of hydrangeas 99 feet long and six feet high. The train passed through dairying country to New Plymouth, where before leaving the Queen and Duke saw a cooperative dairy factory.

The image the Queen was intended to see was of a rich and productive land. The bush, unspoilt nature, did not play a major part in the tour. Rather New Zealand was presented as a land of gardens and farms. Although in other places the Queen did visit factories - the Ford assembly line in Petone, Lane, Walker, Rudkin clothing factory in Christchurch and the Roslyn woollen mills in Dunedin - all but the Ford factory involved processing the fruits of the land. Urban culture, in the form of art galleries or museums, was not scheduled, and in Auckland and Christchurch evening entertainment took the form of showing British films. Only in Dunedin was there any local high culture with a concert by the National Orchestra. Even the food presented to Her Majesty emphasised New Zealand's rural image rather than the people's culinary skills - the standard fare was roast lamb with mint sauce, peas and new potatoes followed by strawberries and cream!

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