MAORI SETTLERS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 112, 15 May 1933, Page 5

MAORI SETTLERS.

LAND TRANSFORMED. MR. J. S. JESSEP IMPRESSED. DEVELOPMENT NEAR ROTORTTA (By Telegraph.—Own Correspondent.) ROTORUA, this day. Mr. J. S. Jessep, deputy-chairman of the Unemployment Board, and a member of the newly Constituted Native Land Development Board, when interviewed after a day spent with Sir Apirana Ngata, inspecting the work accomplished in Maori development

areas in this district, was most complimentary in hie remarks concerning what had been done. He had been shown, he said, large tracts of country that not much more than twelve months ago were wastes of stunted manuka scrub and fern, hut to-day present a picturesque landscape of green pasture with fat wethers and bullocks grazing about the cottages of newly-settled farmers.

This transformation has been effected a few miles from Rotorua with almost a miracle of celerity and at astonishing low cost by groups of Maoris from various tribes in various parts of the country.

Mr. Jessep, wlio has had personal experience in breaking in large tracts of land, said he knew something about the cost of such work. Anyone with similar experience would share his surprise when informed that Maoris, working under contract, had brought the same areas from scrub to pasture for £2 per acre. He referred to his previous statement that the Unemployment Board was spending £166,000 annually on relief work for natives. This money was much more usefully directed toward the settlement of natives as individual settlers on their own land, which was not now under cultivation.

Mr. Jessep left yesterday morning for the Urewera Country to investigate reports of distress among natives on the two settlements there, and if necessary provide relief works.