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Te Ao Hou, 1970, Page 56

times. The curious part is that although we both remember sore shins, we cannot recall hurt feelings. The girls envied the boys when a new teacher came and taught them proper rugby, just as the Whites envied the Maoris come muttonbirding time. But we could hardly separate our whaling forebears from their Maori wives! We had a rhyme, ‘sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me’, and we grew up used to taking knocks. That's another thing that seems to be dying out. Up north, where I now live, people are always going on about prejudice, discrimination, problems and so on — one European elder, a professor of psychology, has even said publicly that our biggest problem is that we don't now what a big problem we have. A southerner would not call that good psychology. He would remember the story of the hard-case old Bluff fellow (I don't know how many parts Maori, and it doesn't matter) whose lawyer made such a job of the case (I don't know what he was convicted for, either) that he got off. Later he was found sitting comfortably on the kerb, tears pouring down — he hadn't known what a poor old man he was till he heard that Pakeha fellow defending him. I don't think Mr Justice Tompkins would have taken that line. The kind of prejudice that scares me stiff is the kind practised by well-meaning Europeans — not those who square up to the fact that the Maori crime rate is higher than the European, but those who sound as if we should start up a new brand of Hauhauism to help matters. There is also a sort of do-gooding crusade that reminds me of people who bring me nourishing soup when I'm home with a sniffly cold — don't they think I can cook? Anyhow, I'd sooner have an orange! — the people who think friendship is a thing to be forced, instead of a thing that grows naturally between people who have the same interests, or even different ones, or who just happen to like one another without going into whys and wherefores or waiting to be told by experts that it's the right thing to do. Sheila Natusch