MAORI MEMORIES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 8 September 1938, Page 9

MAORI MEMORIES

DEPOPULATION. (Recorded by J.H.S. for “Times-Age.”) In every civilised country not materially affected by immigration, females are more numerous than males, yet we found an excess of males in every Maori Pa. In 1851 at a Bay of Islands village there were 45 young bachelors and 18 spinsters. Of children under 14 years, 55 males and 37 females. In Otaki, Manawatu,, Rangitikei district, the adult Maoris numbered 998 males and 846 females. This disparity of the sexes is all the more remarkable when we know that every sheep farmer finds more ewe lambs than wethers at each yearly docking. Actually fewer girl children than boys die in infancy whilst more men than women are slain in tribal Maori wars. How then are we to account for the discrepancy? Possibly it may be among these primitive warlike fellows, that fighting men are more needed and more highly valued than women, so they are more carefully nourished. Smoking strong native grown tobacco (torori) by young women is believed to have had harmful effect, the universal consumption of the introduced potato and the neglect of more nutritious food; also the consumption of spirits and beer certainly counted in the anomaly. Eight new introduced diseases, including scrofula, measles, and consumption were factors in the problem of depopulation. Six hundred years ago the Maori numbered 1000; four hundred years later, there were 100,000, the descendants of twenty different tribes. Now, isolation through lack of facilities for travel has resulted in the marriage of relatives. The royal houses of Europe, to whom no “plebeian” wife could be introduced, have almost disappeared.