AROHANUI KI TE TANGATA THE OPENING OF THE MEETING HOUSE OF GOODWILL TO ALL MEN

Te Ao Hou, December 1960, Page 31

AROHANUI KI TE TANGATA THE OPENING OF THE MEETING HOUSE OF GOODWILL TO ALL MEN BY CELIA AND CECIL MANSON Mr and Mrs Manson have been writing together for nearly twenty years, and their historical articles are well-known throughout New Zealand. It rained and it rained. All through the night before the Saturday appointed for the opening of the great new Meeting House at Waiwetu the bitter southerly rain poured down. It swelled the little Waiwhetu stream and sent it racing mud-coloured and reflecting no stars, bank to bank through the sudden fields of Te Whiti Park opposite the Meeting House. It turned the floor of the great marquees into a quagmire, a muddy paddling pool. The buses kept rolling in through the night, bringing the tribes from farthest east, west and the north. From four on Friday afternoon, the voluntary helpers, Maori and Pakeha, had been hard at it, feeding the constantly arriving guests. At one in the morning, they were still at it, paddling round in bare feet in steadily rising water. At two some of them had gone to bed for an hour or so to be up again at four to be present at the dawn ceremony of lifting the tapu from the Meeting House. Between four and five a crowd had been gradually assembling in the rainy darkness in front of the marae. Car lamps and lamps from the buses bringing visitors from their billets shone on the angry Waiwhetu stream emphasising the dark masses of the Eastern Hutt hills beyond. The carved figure of Maui, high on the twenty-four-foot front pole of the Meeting House, dominated the marae. His paua shell eyes glittered in the light from a bare electric bulb fixed below. Suddenly he seemed to stare beyond the marae into the darkness. Gradually, as the faint light of dawn began to throw the eastern hills into black relief, the eyes took on a different, bluer hue, still staring, but the glitter had turned to a shine which put the warmth of life into them; they seemed to be looking forward as though waiting for the glory of a sunrise. Nature was working a stage effect with superb efficiency. But no shafts of sunlight came yet; only a greyness seeping through the black. Everything seemed grey, even the Maori elders who sat on the porch, huddling forward a little under their rugs in the bitterly cold air. One of these elders was Ihaia Porutu Puketapu, leader of Te Ati-Awa-No-Runga-I-Te-Rangi tribe of Waiwhetu. This was the man whose sixty-year-old dream had now come true. Wrapping his striped blanket closer about him, he got up and walked back and forth, waiting. This was to be his day. “We are sorry to have to tell you all who have been so kind as to come at this early hour, that owing to the rain, the dawn ceremony will have to be postponed for one hour ….” (Continued on page 34)