Miniature Maori Village

Te Ao Hou, November 1964, Page 40

Miniature Maori Village To the wandering Kiwi however, main interest centres on the miniature Maori village, entered through a carved gateway flanked by a fence of sharpened stakes. The main meeting-house is as fine a structure as could be found anywhere in New Zealand. Of the other two Maori buildings, one serves as a museum for a representative collection of Maori artifacts, while the other is a smaller carved meeting-house in which films on New Zealand are shown. On the nearby lake is a carved Maori canoe. This last summer season, a group of young people from the Mormon Church of New Zealand were at Laie at their own expense, during the day working around the village and in the evening providing the grand finale at the Polynesian Concert staged nightly in the Cultural Centre's fine outdoor auditorium. Of the forty or so members of this group, about a third were formerly in the Te Arohanui Party which toured the United States with such success last year.

At the invitation of John Elkington, the party's leader, and Michael Grilikhes, director of the Centre, I was able to spend the best part of two days at Laie watching and meeting the group. During the afternoons they rehearsed around the meeting-house, made pois and carried on other crafts in sight of the public and chatted freely about their own country with any who stopped to talk. In their personal contacts with tourists, who are mainly American, these young people must have provided thousands of pounds of free publicity for our country.