THE MAORI HOUSE

Evening Post, Volume CXXVIII, Issue 145, 16 December 1939, Page 10

THE MAORI HOUSE

A COMPROMISE, BUT A GAIN

Many people, looking at the new meeting house in the Exhibition, would say that it was neither a Maori house nor a pakeha house, said Sir Apirana Ngata at the welcome ceremonial to invited guests at the Exhibition on Thursday. That was true. It was a mixture of the two. The Maori house that Captain Cook saw and wrote about was partly dug into the ground. Air was completely excluded, and light was almost completely excluded. The people crawled in through doors about two feet high, and inside they were able to partly recapture the warmth of the Polynesia they came from. Now the Health Department wanted the Maori to breathe fresh air, the insurance companies would not let them thatch their houses with native grasses and toitoi. The Mayor of Wellington had bylaws about the strength of buildings, stresses, etc., so that really the house was built to comply with all these things. In effect, in a hundred years the Maori had been able to keep net very far behind the pakeha in all the rules of health and decent living demanded of the citizens of New Zealand "In a hundred years the Maori has ceased to sit on the ground," said Sir Apirana. "The house is built for Maoris who are no longer able to sit on the ground, and do not recline against the walls. As the Maori has been moved up to sit on chairs, so the building has been moved up. I do not know of any better indication of the progress the Maori has made in a hundred years than this building."