PANGURU Progress in a Northland Community

Te Ao Hou, December 1955, Page 6

PANGURU Progress in a Northland Community A CAR GENTLY SLITHERS to a stop on a remote North Auckland dirt road. In gumboots and beret, a young man casually swings out, strides the fence, and walks across the paddock to yarn with a Maori farmer. It may be a social chat or business. Probably it is both. For the young man is John Booth. Maori Affairs Department anthropologist and research officer. For over a year now he has been working with the Maori people on the picturesque northern shores of the Hokianga harbour, on community development schemes. The project takes in four back-country Maori Catholic communities, spread around the base of Panguru mountain, thirty miles from the main road. Here, in Motuti, Panguru. Waihou and Mitimiti live 800 people of the Te Rarawa tribe. The Minister of Maori Affairs. Mr Corbett, chats to a local elder, Mr Matiu Witana. Mr Tame Anaru is on the left. Community development is a new word for an extremely old activity. In pre-pakeha days, the more outstanding Maori chiefs practised it. In their wisdom, they saw solutions for the problems of their people, and their communities were the richer for their work, With the coming of the pakeha, many new problems grew up and again these were grappled with in the traditional way by the best of the Maori leaders who found techniques such as Maori land development to improve the lot of their people. Yet the need to find new ways of meeting the challenge of modern life remained acute in many places. The more isolated Maori communities still do not find it easy to catch up with present-day economic and educational standards, not because they do not want to, but because they are far away from the more central parts of the country and because the techniques already worked out do not yet fully provide for their needs. It is necessary to find further ways to improve their living conditions. It is necessary, in the economic sphere, to use the untapped resources—land not fully productive, additional occupations and industries, but it goes further than economics; it is also necessary to use fully the brains of the people, to make life in the community more interesting and stimulating.