A LESSON IN ECONOMICS

Te Ao Hou, June 1961, Page 9

A LESSON IN ECONOMICS The most important part of our stay at Matakana was the free day. This had originally been planned as a day of rest, so the children would be fresh when they reached Auckland. In fact, however, they stepped into the bus on Monday morning in a state of complete exhaustion; it took them two days to recover. Had this day been just a riot of play and entertainment? It had been that, but it had also been a day of intensive, if almost uncontrolled, learning. What was there to learn on Matakana Island? The people have farms, often rather large ones, on which there is good butterfat production, as well as a considerable acreage of maize and other crops. There are some good piggeries and poultry farms; winter feed is well provided for. To keep up this standard in the isolation of the island demands very hard work; people do work hard. There is a large pine forest which needs foresters, woodsmen, axemen, and mill workers. Many of the younger people who have no farms of their own are able to stay on the island and work in the forest. All these things were shown to the young visitors; the islanders encouraged the children to learn as much as possible about Matakana; it was for learning, after all, that the tour had been arranged. They visited the mill, they rode over the hills and beaches, and, most important of all, the Punaruku children watched the way of life of the islanders. In itself there is nothing exceptional about the Matakana economy but to our group it was a source of amazement. If they had stayed with city Europeans, in a still more modern environment, they would have been much less astonished, for

they could expect the clever pakeha to acquire everything, by means they could never imitate. However, at Matakana the outward conditions are very similar to Punaruku. There is quite an area of good land in the Whangaruru district, both around Punaruku itself and on the peninsula. This land, if well handled, could maintain many cows, grow more corn, and provide most of the things that are seen on Matakana Island. Yet Matakana is wealthy and Punaruku is poor. Why? This was the overwhelming question that met the children on that free Sunday. They did not all put it entirely consciously as a question, but they lived this other economy for a day, and a month later they were still talking about the differences: the horses on which they rode about were much fatter and sturdier than those at home; there was no blackberry on the paddocks; the fences were tight, the maize did not have the beetle as it did at home; the young people leaving for town often actually came back afterwards to get married and to live on the island—a thing almost unknown at Punaruku. Why all this difference? Of course there was no ready answer to this question; there was only enough time for the fact to become established and to gnaw its way into the mind. But that was hard work, and on the trip from Tauranga to Auckland there was as much sleep as geography. At the proper time our group, impeccable in their red blazers and uniforms, presented themselves in the marble halls of the Auckland War Memorial Museum.