The Old Marae

Te Ao Hou, September 1966, Page 10

The Old Marae by Leo Fowler The marae is empty, for its people have gone to the city. All the young ones and their lusty young families are there. That is where the jobs are, and the big money, and the pakeha education, to say nothing of the pubs and the clubs and the T.A.B. They have a State House in a tight street way out in the suburbs, or the Department has built them one, handy to shops and the station, as part of Jack Hunn's planned, pepperpot integration. Even the old ones have gone, out of a hunger to be with their mokopunas, or, stealing away from the emptiness and the loneliness and the sense of desolation, they have turned their faces to the wall and to eternity, following the lost glories of their Maoritanga along the last path, to Reinga. When I go back, to sad, occasional tangi and follow some withered remnant of mortality to the burial grounds of the tupunas I feel, as I wet my hands, that I'm washing away old age glories which are mouldering, like the tenants of these neglected graves, into the oblivion of a people. I weep, less for old Kura or old Ropata, or for the mouldering bones that tenant this graveyard, than for the rich and vanishing tradition that is buried with them. My thoughts are echoed by some middle-aged mourner. “Poor old Kura, she's gone eh. We'll all be the poorer. I wish I'd listened to her, when I was younger. I remember, when I was a boy and we sat round at nights in the wharepuni, she and the old folks would keep going all night. Whakapapa and waiata, and the old, old stories, right back to the canoes. Oh, well. Think I'll sell the old place, no-one to live in it now. Get a new car I think, the old one's a bit small for all our kids.” Well, its an epitaph, of a sort. So, the old marae is empty, and weed-grown. The old meeting house is shut, with a chain on the door and a padlock that doesn't fasten; deader, in its way, than the tupunas up in the graveyard. It has no life except in the life of its people, and its people are scattered. It does not exist even in their thoughts for they never think of it, specially the young ones, the rising ones, who have never seen it and are never likely to, now. The roof is rusting and the porch could do with a paint. The window, shattered by young Hori's delinquent stone three years ago, is closed with a bit of old cardboard. Sheep have been on the porch. Cobwebs festoon it. The Manaia on the end of the maihi is cracked and broken. A hammer and nails, even a bit of fencing wire would have fixed it, if any one had been interested, but there isn't anyone to be interested. I might do it, from sheer resentment at the vandalism, the daunting, inevitable, unforgiving vandalism of time. In the cities and towns to which it young people have followed the bright beckoning of te ao hou there will grow a new Maoritanga. It will be a progressively diffused and diluted Maoritanga. It will take a long time, I hope, for all their Maori values to leach out but then time is long, and patient and all victorious. The language will go first. Language is a means to communicate and they will communicate more easily in English with their Pakeha neighbours, and workmates. They will communicate more easily, in English, with their children. Something of the language will linger on while the older generation lingers on. In a generation, or perhaps a decade, the odd Maori words and phrases will be hung on their speech as the old taiaha, the tattered kiwi mat or the old photos of the tupunas are hung on the wall, less for what they intrinsically are than for what they nostalgically recall. They do not listen to the few stories of the fewer old folk for it is less effort, and more entertaining, to look and listen to the TV. But on the old marae the old stories will linger as long as the old wharepuni lingers. The old stories are there, lovingly graven into the carvings. The carvings are the richest surviving repositories of the old lore, but the lore that reposes in them will become increasingly locked away because fewer and fewer will come with the keys of knowledge and understanding to unlock those riches. Who will know, or care, that the tekoteko is the eponymous ancestor of this hapu? Who will know, or care, that this figure may be identified by

its carved feather and basket as Porangahua, who returned to Hawaiiki to fetch kumara tubers and who returned to Ao-te-a-roa on the back of the great bird of Ruakapanga? Possibly a descendant of this marae will learn the old chant ‘popo’, but it will be a meaningless euphony of sounds, not understood and never even remotely to be associated with this carving into which some ancestor lovingly graved that proud story. Who will know or care that this effigy, by its chaplet of carved leaves, is marked as the bearer of the ultimate mana of these parts; or that one, by the hei poria carved on his breast, was master of the forests and the birds they contained. The forests themselves are not more utterly gone than is the fame of him, here depicted in forgotten effigy, who once ruled them. ‘Stone, steel, dominions pass’, and little enough is left of the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome. I am a pakeha and why should I grieve that a dozen or so carved slabs gaze into a fading past with their paua eyes. I have no papakainga here other than that which love and understanding of these old, forgotten, far-off things gives me. The marae is empty, for its people have gone to the city. But perhaps some ghosts remain, and perhaps I shall return, when I am able to, giving them back, in a momentary at one-ment with them, a fugitive, flickering segment of eternity. Mr Fowler, I wonder what has happened to your ancestral halls, ancestral burial grounds and villages. Have they succumbed to industrial cities? Are your ancestors bones being daily pounded by vehicles and machines? When did your ancestors lose their ancient skill of snaring birds? Why did your people leave their villages to start afresh in this land? Are you afraid that what has happened to you is happening to us? You have written a thought provoking article. What you say is true but what you have left unsaid is that this sort of thing is not peculiar to Maoridom, but is the fate of all people. It is the price that is paid for progress. It respects neither race nor creed. It is inevitable. I suppose the truth hurts. To return to the point of discussion. Maoridom is undergoing a dramatic transformation from an agricultural into an industrial society. The old social structure is disintegrating but the new one is yet amorphous. The agricultural Maori family in a rural setting was a group organised for community production and living. It was also the primary unit of social life in which the rearing and education of the individual was the responsibility of the tribe as a whole. Brought up and nurtured in the traditions of his tribe, the individual developed a pattern of personality which fitted neatly into the social pattern. Now that Maori society is being industrialized, population is more and more concentrated in cities, commercial and industrial influence is spreading to the countryside, the old social pattern is breaking up and the tribal system is disintegrating. Living in such an age, the youngster, and in some cases the parent, has no idea of the behaviour patterns of his grandparents' generation and may be unable to comprehend them at all; neither can he accept all the rules of conduct of his parents' generation and may be unable to appreciate their full significance. I again reiterate that this is not confined to Maoridom. Obviously your article has raised my defensive mechanism. It has also made me think of a problem that I have often thought about and left hanging on a sky hook. The Old Marae poses a question… ‘What are we going to do about it and how?’ The answer may parallel this story. A doctor said to his patient, “Hone, do you ever have trouble in making up your mind?” Hone replied, ‘Well … Yes and No.” Enough. N. P. K. Puriri