THE MAORI INVESTMENT SOCIETIES of TOKERAU

Te Ao Hou, November 1957, Page 27

The chair—Mr Steve Ngaropo, chairman, guided the meeting with a firm hana, finished the whole agenda comfortably a little ahead of schedule. He is flanked by Messrs John Booth (left) and Peta Waima (right). THE MAORI INVESTMENT SOCIETIES of TOKERAU Written and Photographed by Stanhope Andrews This was wintertime, and colder than Tai Tokerau has any right to be. The head of Panguru mountain was hidden in cloud, and a dour southerly wind pushed streaks of rain down the heavily bushed slopes above Waihou Valley. Dejected horses tethered to the fence outside the marae shifted weight from one hind leg to the other while cars hissed and splattered along the road. Everybody in sight was gum-booted or bare-footed in the slush. It was, on the surface, as miserable a winter's day as every fell on a country valley. It did not snow, but hail made a fair substitute. This was in fact the Saturday before Queen's Birthday, the time and the place for the first conference of Maori Co-operative Investment Societies in the Hokianga area…a meeting which didn't give a snap of the fingers for the weather and which did not end until after the sun came back two days later. Inside the whare hui, Waimirirangi, there was nothing to show that this was different from any other hui on a wet week-end. Electric light from a generator outside was reinforced by petrol lamps. Bedding was neatly laid out round the walls, and a tangled pile of muddy footwear of every kind and size stood in the entrance porch. A raised gallery at the rear made a convenient stopping place for workers from the cookhouse, and for others coming and going, without disturbing the body of the meeting. At the platform table at appropriate times sat Steve Ngaropo, Conference Chairman; Peta Wairua, Conference Secretary; John Samson, Secretary of the Lower Waihou Society; and John Booth, Research Officer of the Department. As visitors arrived they were greeted and replied to greetings in the traditional way. In short a visitor could be pardoned for thinking

The Conference hall he had seen it all before, though if he were a sensitive visitor he might have felt that here in the chants and speeches was a delightful and somewhat unusual sense of style and a specially nice touch of timing. There were representatives present from the investment societies of Lower Waihou, Panguru, Te Akau (Mitimiti), Pawarenga, Rawene, Motukaraka and Nukutawhiti (Rangi Point). There were visitors from all over Northland, and one party, comprising most of the directorate of the Te Kaha Dairy Co, came all the way from the Bay of Plenty. From Wellington, there was Mr Ron Crocombe, of the Department of Island Territories.