THE POHUTUKAWA TREE

Te Ao Hou, March 1961, Page 51

THE POHUTUKAWA TREE by Bruce Mason. Price Milburn, Wellington 7/6. Reviewed by Earle Spencer. The Pohutukawa Tree by Bruce Mason, is a play about a widow of sixty, Aroha Mataira, who lives with her two children Queenie and Johnny, at Te Parenga. As her children grow up Mrs Mataira teaches them to believe in their Maori-tanga and in the Christian religion. When the play begins, Queenie is seventeen and Johnny is eighteen. The family works for Mr Atkinson who has fifteen acres of the best land in Te Parenga laid out as a citrus orchard. Bruce Mason, [Barry Woods, Photo] The story is simple enough. Queenie meets a young man and falls in love with him. After three months she finds that she is going to have a baby but he refuses to marry her because she is a Maori. Mrs Mataira sends Queenie away to her people, the Ngati Raukura, at Tamatea, to have the baby. Johnny reacts violently to the family's unhappiness. He gets drunk and taking a taiaha, goes to the Church and smashes the stained glass window of the Light of the World behind and above the altar. He is charged with wilful damage and sentenced to three months' reformative detention. The play makes it clear that the young ones, Queenie and Johnny, will outlive their troubles, but the double disgrace kills Aroha. The people of the community who know her and respect her cannot comfort her. She wills her death rather than have anything to do with their cheap alternatives. She is found at the end with the taiaha by two old Maori women dressed in black with black scarves around their heads. Ka to he ra, ka ura he ra. The play was first produced in 1957 by the New Zealand Players Theatre Workshop at Wellington and Auckland. It has since been produced in 1959 on the B.B.C. Television Sunday Night Theatre series and in 1960 in New Zealand by the New Zealand Broadcasting Service, and recently, most successfully in Wales. Aroha Mataira and her children, the farmer Atkinson and his wife and daughter, the Reverend Athol Sedgewick, Claude Johnson, the land agent, and the others in this play have been introduced to millions of people. These people have seen and heard Mr Mason describe things as they are. Roy McDowell, the grocer's son who refuses to marry Queenie, the daughter of twenty-five generations of the Ngati-Raukura, says, “Aw, what does it matter to my Mum that Queenie comes from a long line of chiefs. She's just a Maori to her.” When Mrs Mataira is mortally sick Mrs Atkinson, the farmer's wife, says, “For nearly twenty years I patronised her, thought of her almost as a servant…. And when it comes to a crisis what do I do? Snip flowers.” Clive Atkinson has a rough affection for Mrs Mataira but he wants her land. Johnny at eighteen loves horses and reads comics. And then there is Aroha Mataira herself, who minds her own business and who will not listen when the Reverend Athol Sedgwick says to her, “Forget greatness; forget history.” Mr Mason has dedicated the book to the Maori people with these words, “Nga mihi me taku aroha ki te iwi Maori.” I recommend it to you.