THE MEN OF STONE.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 142, 18 June 1929, Page 6

THE MEN OF STONE.

Dunedin, we are told, is to have the peculiar pleasure and privilege of securing one of the famous stone statues from Easter Island, the subject of so many scientific speculations and any number of books. However did the Otago folk manage to get ahead of us? Surely one of those big images of red volcanic tufa, looking far away with wide, inscrutable gaze, would be just the thing in front of our Auckland Memorial Museum! A vast amount has been written about solitary Rapanui and its gods and old chieftains done in stone. There is just one point of interest to us which has not been remarked upon previously, so far as I have noticed, and that is the similarity of place nomenclature between Easter Island and our own land of the Maori. From a list of the statues and the stone platforms on which they stand I have taken a number of names which are exactly Maori. The names were put on record by the American expedition in the Mohican many years ago, long before the Routledges' time and the later visit of our Professor Macmillan Brown. One of the largest figures in stone is called by the natives Kiliikihi-raumea. Another is Ohau; this is a particularly large statue standing on a wide platform. Other groups and single figures are called Ahuroa, Maiki, Te Tonga, Vai-mangeo, Motu-ariki, Tongariki (a very large platform or marae with fifteen gigantic statues on it), Onetea, Ivai, Ivirikiri-roa, Tutuira, Ue, Kope-iti. Very nearly all of these are familiar names in New Zealand; and Tutuila, in Samoa, has its close likeness in Tutuira. With the substitution of our Maori "w" for "v" Vai-mangeo is a place name at Rotorua; it is the locally-called "Alum Creek," which flows from the Ariki-kapakapa hot spring and is led under the Wliakarewarewa roadway; the meaning is "pungent water." Another Easter Island name, Marotiri, one of the bird islets, is identical with the Maori name of the Chicken Islands, off Whangarei Heads. It is curious to find a closer likeness between the tongues of the remnant of Rapanui's native people, the furthest east outpost of Polynesia, and that of the Maori than there exists between Maori and other Pacific races relatively close to us. Isolation lias preserved the pure Maori language away yonder half-way to South America, while other peoples in groups comparatively near to us have dropped consonants and in other ways altered what must have been the original tongue. And, returning to that Dunedin statue, I hope the authorities, whoever they arc, have taken the trouble to learn its native name and something of its history. If not, it won't be difficult to invent its story and pedigree. Writers on Easter Island shouid always be equal to a little thing like that. —J.C.