"MAORI WITCHERY."

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 224, 21 September 1929, Page 7 (Supplement)

"MAORI WITCHERY."

TALE OF KING COUNTRY LIFE. ADVENTURES ON MAIN TRUNK SURVEY. OLD MAORI CONDITIONS.

(By J.C.)

Most books of the historical, novel or semi-fictional type about New Zealand and Maori life have been engaged with a period rather remote, and with people of a before-the-wars primitive character. Here, by way of a change, is a story whose .action takes place in comparatively recent times, the period of the transition in the King Country from purely Maori conditions to the beginnings* of pakeha settlement and pakeha roads and railways. ''Maori Witchery" seems too circumscribed a title for this novel by C. R. Browne, just published by Dent's. A tragedy in the story is the. slaying of the narrator's wife by "makutu," the black art, and the tohunga's cruel method of treatment dipping in an ice-cold river; But the main theme is the inexorable process of attrition of the Maori's natural rights by pakeha civilisations and pakeha law, and the inevitable call for the "'opening up" of Maori lands regardless of the wishes of the Maori people.

The scene is the southern part of the King Country, centring in Taumarunui, that well-named valley at the meeting of the Wanganui and Ongarue waters, "The place of deep shade." No dates are given, but the period is obviously 1880-18S4, when the Kingite tribes within the Rohepotae made their final ineffectual efforts for the preservation of that region as a purely Maori territory, and at last consented to the survey of the route of the central railway. The narrator, who describes himself as having heen in charge of the survey, has this much justification, that he is evidently familiar with survey work in the pioneering days and took some part in the adventurous opening up of the Southern Ngati-Maniapoto and upper Wanganui country. Some of his lively experiences can be identified as those which actually befell Mr. John Rochfort and his party in the first flying surveys of the heart of Maori Land. Moffatt the Powder-maker. 'An incident which forms the chief themo of the first part of the book is the killing of William Moffatt, a renegade pakeha who 3ad lived at Taumarunui and who had made gunpowder there for the Hauhaus. W T hen he returned after serving a sentence in Wanganui gaol for selling gunpowder without a license, he was intercepted just before he reached Taumarunui and was shot and tomahawked. His offence against Maoridom was that he had been prospecting for gold and was negotiating for the sale of Maori lands to the pakeha.

The author here is on quite authentic ground. Moffatt, as described in articles in the "Star" not long since, was killed, after repeated warnings, for trespassing on the Aukati, the proclaimed frontier of the King Country. The date was 1880; it was the last "political murder" in the King Country. Wahanui and Ngatai. Mr. Browne has taken as his leading Maori figure the Chief Ngatai, of Taumarunui, a ■ great patriot and a patriarchal head of the people. Ngatai was a fine, clear-cut character, and a reader cannot but join in the author's admiration. But those who know much of King Country history in that period well within the .recollection of the older generation will not endorse his description of the rank held by that herculean chief Wahanui, who was the most important man in Ngati-Maniapoto in the 'eighties. The author makes Wahanui occupy a subordinate position &t Taumarunui, a«, Ngatai's "counsellor," and draws him as rather a figure of fun. The facts were quite the reverse. It was Wahanui (who did not live at Taumarunui) and his fellow-chiefs, Taonui and liewi Maniapoto, who sent instructions to Ngatai to kill the pakeha Moffatt. Ngatai was simply the chief of the southern part of the territory. When the action of a story concerns well-known figures in recent history, it is wise to respect the verities as much as possible, especially in such a book as this, in which the author prefaces his story by stating that he has endeavoured as" far as possible to keep to the actual facts. That much being said, one is free to praise the general fidelity to life of Mr. Browne's descriptions of Maoridom as he saw it, in the days when native authority was still supreme soutn of the Piiniu Biver and west of Taupo. In the Early 'Eighties. Strange dramatic happenings befell in remote kaingas in that far-out land, where the only missionaries were Hauhau priests and where never a policeman was seen, and pakeha surveyors were a class accursed to be rounded up and imprisoned and threatened with the contents of-a double-barrelled gun. Social life, marriage customs, feasts, tribal councils, the varied scenes of pleasure, turmoil and death among the people aie drawn with a faithful pen; if there i» any exaggeration it .s perhaps in the amount of gun-play that goes on; but many a tragedy occurred in the Maon outback that was never reported across the frontier. There are stories oi hvpnotic influence, and there is a sufficiently diabolical tohunga, who comes to the necessary bad end. "The Morepork of the Bush." Among the figures that enter the storv, many of tlieiu as picturesque as any" Red Cloud or Uncas of American Indian stories, is the Chief Peehi Hitaua Turoa, of the Upper Wanganui people; his home was Ngatokorua, on the Waimarino Plain. It was seldom that wo saw this tall white moustached old warrior come out. of the King Country , the present reviewer heard Maoris describe him as the "ruru-noho-motu, the bush-dwelling owl. He and his brother came out of their isolation in 1901 to join in the Maori welcome to the present King r.t Rotorua. Mr. Browne describes C him here as he saw him in the eighties in his rough little kainga, close to the railway survey route:

Peelii Turoa was an aristocrat who ruled his people with an iron hand concealed in a velvet glove. He always S& ve °" e the impression of a man who ousrht to be wearing dress clothes, with the ribbons of some order across his breast. Perhaps the haughty poise of his head had something to do with it, or his handsome, Cleau-cut features, or his easy, cynical style of conversation, or perhaps nil three together; but the fact remains that Peelii would have graced any great lady's drawing room, and would probably have ielt unite at home there. Instead of which, fate had made him chief of a tribe of .Maoris dwelling on the plains of Waiiii.iriiio, miles away from anywhere. And li" was quite content and happy, although his elder brother, Topia Turoa. had four wives to Peehi's two, and paid State visits with a retinue, whereas Peelii generally 'lit unaccompanied and dispensed with i; .:::.;:i:iy. Peelii lived the simple life, with sometimes a scarcity of food, but it satistied liim. and he never changed his dress for dinner.

On the Manga-nui-a-te-ao. The most perilous experiences on the lonr* survey were the encounters -with the warrior tribe called Patu-tokotoko, whose homes were at Ruakaka and other villages on the wild river called Manga-nui-a-te-ao, flowing rapidly i'rom Mount Ruapehu to the Wanganui. Here-shots were fired and the surveyors were captured and held for a time, and were threatened with death. "It's no use threatening me," said the narrator. '•'lf you kill me or send me back the Government will only send someone else, and with an armed force behind him." (That was John Roclifort's reply when guns were presented at him.) But surely even the Patu-tokotoko, though given to war dancing and gun firing, were not cannibals in ISSI, or thereabouts, as Mr. Browne declares they were. The times are out of joint there. The Old and the New. Hospitality —even the Patu-tokotoko fed their prisoners well —generosity, chivalry, good nature, were some of the native virtues on which the narrator builds his chapters. There were many pleasant features about that primitive old bush life. The author lives in the past; he speaks of olden conditions as if they still existed: They have no rent or taxes to pay, the only collector who coines their way being Death, and him they do not fear. As long as the potato crop is not a failure there is always plenty to eat, and there are wild pigs and birds in the bush, besides young sprouts of fern, which they call pikopiko, growing wild, and many other makeshifts. So the Maoris are perfectly happy living their own lives.

But that remote, free-roving life that so suited Peehi Hitaua and his people is done. It is not easy for the Maori to be perfectly happy when he is dunned for hospital bills and county rates; forbidden to shoot a pigeon in his bush; to kill a wild duck or that rascally opossum without a license; when pakeha politicians are bawling him out for failing to spend laborious days in destroying the ragwort that the pakeha himself brought here; and wheii'some Maoris have not an acre left on which to grow ragwort or anything else. ♦"Maori Witchery: Native Life In New Zealand," by C. R. Browne (J. M. Dent and Sons, London).