Work for Te Taou

Te Ao Hou, September 1962, Page 45

Work for Te Taou One of the first of the Te Taou people to work regularly in the forest was Kelvin Povey, who began there in 1952. Mr Povey, who traces his descent from Renata Aperehama, soon put his skill with machinery to good use. Together with Mr M. Jonas and Mr I. Lloyd, he invented a planting machine for the marram grass. This small machine, mounted on a Ferguson tractor enables two operators to plant five acres of marram a day. Mr Povey later helped to perfect a larger machine, a multiple of three machines on one frame, which is towed by a D.7 and plants eighteen to twenty acres of marram a day. Six men, many of them of Te Taou lineage, sit under cover in this large planter. Today, many people of Te Taou work in the forests. Every day more of them are tending the pines for eventual milling, while others drive gang and supply trucks, and Durban Pairama is an all-round driver of note, handling at various times the

grader, heavy trucks, the D6 and D7. All the Maori men working in the Woodhill Forest have some Te Taou connection or have married women of this hapu of Ngatiwhatua. Still more people will be needed in future and for our young folk this great project, which is so intimately connected with their past, will be a wonderful place of employment in the future. Apart from regular workers, whole families often take a hand in extra work in the weekends, packing marram and lupin seed, making a happy Te Taou occasion of the job. This then is how many of our people live today. With homes on our ancestral reserves we work in a Pakeha economy on the land that was once the sandy domain of our people. Some may mourn the past and the fact that we cannot now offer visitors to the marae at Reweti our traditional shellfish, but all admit that the reclamation of the dunes has brought us nothing but good. In the forest and on the sand we work in harmony with men of other races who still respect our customs and wishes. The old wahi tapu are all fenced off today and left unplanted, and the seaward face of Oneonenui has been set aside as a tapu area because of the hundred Waikato who were once slain there. The future of Te Taou is ably guarded by the men of the State Forest Service. They, with Te Taou among them, work forever with the sound of the ocean in their ears, fighting a constant battle on the ancient sandhills with the sand continuously cast up by restless Tai Tama Tane.