TE AO HOU THE NEW WORLD

Te Ao Hou, September 1955, Page 1

TE AO HOU THE NEW WORLD published quarterly for the maori purposes fund board by the maori affairs department No. 12 (Vol. 3 No. 4) More Maoris than ever are going abroad. Before the war the Maori who had seen other lands was quite a rarity but it is no longer so. The pakeha New Zealander's remarkable thirst for world travel has caught on among Maoris of all ages. The Maori clergy assembled at Otiria recently expressed the view that any clergyman going on an educational tour abroad should be granted leave. The Maori Soldiers Fund has set aside £10,000 the profits of which are for Maori scholars doing post-graduate studies—and we may expect most of these studies will be done overseas. It is good to see that this contact of Maoris with peoples abroad is not confined to Europe but is also beginning to include Asia. The largest number of Maori contacts with Asia have been through the occupation of Japan and through K-force, but over the last few months the M.W.W.L. representatives at the Pan-Pacific Women's conference at Manila (as well as, in some measure, the Moral Rearmament delegation) have been brought together with some of the finest brains of Asia achieving a cultural exchange on a very high level. More than that, the report of this conference by Miss Mira Petricevich, secretary of the M.W.W.L. and a delegate to the conference, has made a large representative group of Maori women understand correctly and sense deeply what bonds were being forged at Manila. Her report was further enhanced by the sincere testimony of Mrs H. D. Bennett, an executive member of the league who also attended the conference. No New Zealander would agree that New Zealand is in any way part of Asia but nothing could be more important today than to foster the growing fellowship between the Asians and ourselves, by policies such as the Colombo Plan and by social, cultural and intellectual contacts. To the Maori, this fellowship may even have added attractions, because it is so widely recognised that the Maoris' remote ancestors were themselves Asians and that cultural and language kinships can still be recognised. Today's great struggle in Asia to develop backward village communities and raise huge populations to western economic standards is perhaps faintly echoed in the Maori adoption of European educational and economic standards. One of the main lessons Miss Petricevich brought back was ‘a realisation of our own good fortune’. This too, if it does not generate into complacency, can be a spiritual gain. New Zealand's rapid progress and modern way of living is to no small extent due to the travelling habit. Travel has also given us some understanding of other nations and makes it easier to solve common problems. Maoris are now reaping the same advantages as other New Zealand travellers. Nothing can help us more in our own task than a widening of our horizons and a correct understanding of the place we occupy in the immense, rapidly unifying flow of world history.