BUILT BY MAORIS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 288, 5 December 1932, Page 9

BUILT BY MAORIS.

OIiD-FASHIONED CHURCHES

"A peculiar' interest attaches to some of the old-faehioned churches dating back to the flrefc Bishop Selwyn's time that one sees here and there an the Waikato and elsewhere," states the writer of an article in the "New Zealand Railways Magazine." "They were built with funds subscribed chiefly by the Maoris and largely by Maori labour, and until the wars and the confiscation of native land their congregations were Maori. Now, never a Maori is eeen within their doors, for the pakeha, after the conqueet, took church as well as the land; and now they are the local parish churches. "One of these is the pretty Church of England in Te Awamutu; another is Rangiaowhia Church, three miles away. Yet another is the celebrated Volkner Church, in the middle of Opotiki town, once the worshipping place of the Whakatohea tribe. The only church I know that has remained wholly Maori through all the changing times since the 'fifties of last century is the massive native-built church at Otaki, described in a recent number of . the 'Railways Magaeine.' "The most venerable of all our New Zealand churches is the little English church in famous Kororareka, the modern township of Russell. It is very little ehort of a century in age; it wae there before New Zealand came under the British flag. But it lias been renovated, and in one way or another it does not possess the antique charm that the two old solidly-timbered Waikato churches mentioned hold for the eye." ,