SCOUTS’ MAORI HOUSE.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LV, Issue 43, 18 January 1935, Page 2

SCOUTS’ MAORI HOUSE.

CARVINGS DONE IN CITY. When the contingent of Boy Scouts from Palmerston North left for the great jamboree at Melbourne they took with them carved panels and other items to be used in the erection of a Maori meeting-house that had been executed by Mr J. M. McEwen, of Palmerston North. The work was nearly all done in the city and each piece had a definite meaning with its own story attached to the representation. The uprights on each side of the front of the meeting-house were carved, the left-hand upright being fashioned in a representation of the fishing from the sea of the North Island by the famous Maui, the fish being shown between Maui’s feet. The representation on the right-hand upright deals with a happening in Hawaiki which led to the migration of the Arawa canoe to New Zealand. The story goes that Tama te- Ivapua desiring vengeance on another person, mounted stilts with his brothers and robbed the fruit from the hated one’s berry trees. The figure on the upright depicts Tama te Kapua on his stilts. The figure at the head of the gable to the uprights, are conventional a representation of a chief ancestor of a tribe, and in this case the representation would relate to Lord BadenPowell, the originator of the Boy Scout movement. The paintings on the sloping panels, maihi, from the gable to the uprights ,are conventional designs of the kowhai-ngutu-kaka (kaka beak). These paintings were carried out by Mr L. G. Callis, of Palmerston North. The extensions of those panels, which project bevond the uprights, known as pern, are fashioned in the conventional representations of the human hand, three fingers being shown. In that connection it is interesting to note that in the East Coast the Maoris used three fingers and the thumb for their representation, while only three without the thumb were used on this coast. Although Mr McEwen had but a week in which to fashion the carvings, and that in his spare time, it was due to his skill that the Boy Scouts from the Manawatu left New Zealand with excellent representations of the designs of carving that have been known to New Zealand for many hundreds of years.