One Black, One White, and Two Khaki

Te Ao Hou, 1970, Page 55

One Black, One White, and Two Khaki The taxi driver, as it happened, was Maori. I asked if he would drive me to the Aramoana. ‘The AramoAna?’ ‘Yes, thanks, the AraMOana.’ I tried to flow it together. Perhaps we were both doing our best to be polite. The driver said the word the way he hears it, and I said it as my grandmother would have; it sounds pleasanter, and more like the way of the sea. I must say radio announcers on the whole make an effort to get this word right, too. At school in the south, we learned about the Treaty of Waitangi, with the tang part pronounced as in the English word rang. My father knew better; his mother, brought up on Ruapuke, had spoken Maori so fluently that a later generation of part-Maori people used to consult her on finer points of pronunciation and meaning. The sad part was that the old Murihiku tongue, like the full-blooded southern Maori, had not survived as such. But, just as the old words were still used for many things that were part of our Foveaux Strait lives — inaka, kaeo, rara — so that race itself lived on in modified form. The European traders and sealers had unwittingly brought the germ of diseases for which the Polynesian had built up no resistance, but the new stock of half-caste children was vigorous and alert; and, since the new ways had come to stay, it was no bad thing that they included Pakeha notions of hygiene and medical care — if only to combat the Pakeha cold. Few full-blooded Maori children, or their parents, had survived that. The girl I sat next to at school, and played with, and went swimming with, came partly of Maori origins, partly European; my Maori-speaking grandparent was the daughter of an English dressmaker and a German missionary. Later, Rena and I went to wartime first-aid classes. We meet perhaps once in six years, and write once in a blue moon, but the old warmth remains. When we played footy or supplejack hockey down on the beach at low tide, it was sometimes on the same side (boys against girls), sometimes opposite (Maoris against Whites) — an expression that would be outlawed in these enlightened