MAORI MEMORIES

Wairarapa Daily Times, 4 September 1936, Page 4

MAORI MEMORIES

(By J.H.S. for “The Daily Times.”)

HE ORA TE MAHI (WORK IS LIFE).

Here we inay have an hjfer of peace after war and of rest af™ toil. Idleness among the Maoris as it is among us to-day is the curse of humanity. The seeing eye of Sir George Grey discovered this soon after his' arrival. Large parties of friendly and enemy Maoris with a company of the 58th armed with picks and shovels were-e'rtgaged in cutting the road through the dense forests and inaccessible mountain passes between Ngahauranga and Porirua. Other tribes were busy on the bush tracks round Auckland. The Maori, worker received 2/6 per day and the chiefs who acted as overseers and animators 3/-. Competitions in felling and spliting trees, feeding the fires, and removing rocks were always accompanied by jokes, songs, antics, and laughter. Working teams in friendly rivalry took the place of tribal warfare, and the white land robbers were merged into their working companions. The Maoris gave lessons in their language, and eagerly learned the expressive vocabulary of the whalers and sailors with which to condemn a rival or charm a lover in expressive

terms.. Both sides forgot being waged between the races, and lived together as one. Raupgraha’s nephew, whose energies had gained for him the position of an overseer, taught our soldiers the devices of Maori warfare and gave them many a graphic lesson in the Maori .war dance. •

A half caste boy reared among, the Maoris left his mother’s tribe and.took up voluntary work among the soldiers, in Auckland. He slept in the bunks of men on guard, and shared the meals of those for whom he did all kinds of willing service, and was sent by them to the regimental school. When grown to manhood lie feelingly thanked some of those old soldiers who were then pensioners “for having saved lum from becoming a Maori,”. true Maori would ever admit vtjf. At both Auckland and Wellington, the Maori workers quickly acquired useful mechanical skill from the soldiers, and at Auckland they built a loop-holed stone wall twelve feet high round the military barracks, which in after years was the subject of commendation by a party of. visiting *Royal engineers. tm A school of work instead of academic learning would still be the salvation of the Maori race.