THE ORAKEI MAORIS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVII, Issue 20563, 14 May 1930, Page 12

THE ORAKEI MAORIS.

CLINGING TO THE PA.

QUESTION OF RIGHTS.

A SITUATION OF PATHOS

The embankment of the waterfront road through Orakei cut off a view of the sea. but the autumn sun streamed down upon a group of Maoris as they discussed their situation on a verandah in tho settlement. On tho slopes above, but out of sight, fine new homes are rising—pioneers of what is to be a model suburb. Upon Ibis little flat the Orakei people, part of the great Ngatiwliatua tribe, sit and dream of ancient rights and what they arc persuaded are modern wrongs. One or two of tlie houses are spacious and architecturally good. Most are poor unpainted whares, which, nevertheless, servo their purpose. Perhaps they would have been better as homes if the old Maori system prevailed, though possibly light and air would have been deficient. But light and air do not seem to matter very much on a bright autumn day when the wahines and the little folk may comfortably squat on the grass and watch the ships from Sydney and the motor-lorry of the pakeha milkman from over the hill. Why worry when Nature is kind and the mounds in tho garden patches, are full of kumaras and tho man of the house has a job of work on tho road! People of tho Soil. But one feels a sense of pathos about it ill. These aro tho people of the soil. In it their dead aro sleeping. They " belong " in a manner which tho restless, drifting colonial pakeha cannot understand. It is their ancestral home. Three generations or four takes them back to a day before tho white wings of the colonising Anglo-Saxon appeared in the gulf " with anchors hungry for English ground." One sees in a vision the Orakei of old, the canoes on the beach, on just such a pleasant day of peace, a ton of fish drying on the pohutukawas instead of two-thirds of a schnapper upon a stunted peach tree. Alas, for the Maori whoso lands aro in the wake of an expanding city.

Of course, the Maori was paid, and paid well, for the land which is to be the site of a new suburb. But the idlo gentlemen upon the sunny verandah aro not concerned about that.

" Why," says one, " was the money not paid to the Land Board, which would have kept it safe for us?" "Why, indeed?" their pakeha friend echoes. "The lawyer pay out the money and the Maori soon has none. The law say pay the money to the Land Board and we get — what you call i(< —the interest. Anyway, the paper say we have squandered £BO,OOO. What about tho money for the lawyer and the lessee ? Easy for the pakeha to blame the Maori. The Maori doesn't smack up his wages any more than the pakeha. He doesn't go to the freo meal place. If he is hungry and has no money ho gathers the mussel and the pipi." St. Stephen's School Site.

" And I'll tell you something," said one, with somo display of emotion that contrasted sharply with the laughing geniality which had prevailed. " There's land in the city that was never bought from tho Maori, but has been sold by the pakeha. I dunno about titles. That's true, anyhow. Yoii know St. Stephen's School ? Tho Maori gave the land long time ago for tho school. Now it is to bo shifted away to Bombay, among the puriri. Tho children going to -St. Stephen's seo tho shops and that is going to school, too. What they learn about things in the back blocks ? " Napoo, the Maori," said another. But the real question of the moment is whether tho Orakei Maoris, who number about 100 young and old, are entitled to the 38 acres on the flat which their settlement occupies. They maintain that they did not sell this area along with the 700 odd acres for the suburb; that in every purchaso an area for a home is reserved from sale, and that qven if the young people would not mind going elsewhero the old people would never consent to leave tho place where they were born and where their dead aro buried. "It's the cemetery that is the biggest thing," said one. Well, over this matter they are waiting for the sitting of the Land Court when the matter will be contested. They want their 38 acres to reside on, but probably the most distinct idea in their minds is whether a typical Maori settlement in the centre of the model suburb and beside the waterfront highway is in keeping with tho best ideals of townplanning. It is their placo they say, and thero they want to live and die. Kaipara Sandhills.

"Oh, ves," one laughed in reply to a. question. "We WOT offered land at Kaipara among the sandhills, as a home, but that's no good. .We would not tako a thousand acres anywhere for our 38 acres." , f What .are the legalities of the question will bo" decided by those competent, 'to judgo, but whatever may be the judgment there is no escape for the ordinary observer from the pathos of the situation. It is not merely tho pathos that arises with the old cry "landless," but from the knowledge that proximity to the white man long ago turned tho Orakei Maori away from his old customs and made him for the most part, n city labourer when necessity made him work. There was a day when largo areas of the Orakrii slopes wero cultivated for wheat. Some of tho men remember when n threshing plant, owned by tho lato Eight lion. W. F. Massey, before politics claimed him, visited the district to handle tho grain'. But cultivation ceased and oven tho systematic fishing which might have made tho community largely independent of tho pakeha has not been practised for generations. Relief Work and Barter.

And to-day one finds that with unemployment in the city affecting tho Maori as well as European, there are numbers of young Orakci men working in the country upon unemployment relief jobs and occasionally a wahina may be seen upon tho road burdened with a kit of knmaras for salo or barter.

Possibly their situation is no worse than that of many other Maori communities. Probably they feel that p'oximity to tho city, particularly when the completion of tlio waterfront road will bring them within two or three miles of tho post office, is a decided advantage, but over and abovo all these considoiations is a strong objection to leave ancestral soil. The Maori does not understand' the pakeha's readiness to "sell out" at a price.