“Today, in spite of the so-called ‘drift’ of many Maoris to urban areas and occupations, four out of every five Maoris live in the country. “Some thirty or more years ago most Maoris lived in pas in which all the houses were within a few hundred yards of the meeting house and of one another. Nowadays most Maoris no longer live in such exclusively Maori settlements.” These are among the conclusions drawn by Miss Joan Metge, a lecturer in geography at Auckland University College, who has made several years' study of places where Maoris live in the Auckland province. She has given Te Ao Hou the story of her discoveries, and drawn the revealing map shown on the next page. Here is what she has reported: THE CHANGING PATTERN OF MAORI POPULATION by Joan Metge # # At present maoris do not live in any numbers in those parts of the province which are mountainous, forested, or otherwise naturally unsuited to farming development. In such areas there are few settlements and villages are widely scattered. Such as there are occur where the land is most favourable for farming, as in the coastal bays of Coromandel and in the Ruatahuna valley in the Urewera, or where forestry work is available, as in the Taupo area, in the Rangitaiki Valley and around Te Whaiti. There are large tracts where neither Maoris nor pakehas live—the Raukumara Range, the Ureweras (except for Ruatahuna and Te Whaiti), parts of the Volcanic Plateau, the dissected hill land of the southern King Country, and interior Coromandel. Maoris are also absent from such districts as those of Maungatapere, Warkworth and Helensville-Kumeu in Northland. A few Maori families are found at the edges of such areas, or are scattered. Over the rest of the province Maoris are widely though fairly evenly distributed, except for a number of small areas where many live closely together. In the extreme north they are closely settled about the coastal inlets of Whangaroa, Whangape and Herekino, at various points on the Mangonui Peninsula, and in a crescent from Ahipara through Kaitaia to Waipapakauri. Similar concentrations are found on the bayhead plains of the East Coast—Hicks Bay, Te Araroa, Tokomaru, Tolaga and Waipiro Bays—at the southern end of Tauranga Harbour, and around Te Puke and Maketu. Four other places are also notable for their dense Maori population—Mangere (Manukau County), Pukekohe (Franklin), Waahi, near Huntly (Raglan) and Tokaanu (Taupo). In the country areas, therefore, there is, broadly, the same distribution of Maoris as before the war. This does not mean things have not changed in the country. In those areas of dense Maori settlement where Maoris out-number the pakeha, the Maori population is not growing as fast as it is in most other areas. As a result, the concentration of Maoris in the far north and on the East Coast, north of Tokomaru Bay, though still remarkable, is less pronounced than it was in 1936. This situation is marked in the far north. There are actually fewer Maoris living on the shores of Hokianga and Whangaroa Harbours than there were before the war. Indeed, since 1945 any increase in the Maori rural population in the far north has been confined to the Kaikohe, Moerewa and Kawakawa districts. Today, the Maoris no longer equal the pakeha in numbers in the rural districts of the far north. This trend is not nearly so apparent on the northern East Coast. The population is still increasing there, and, what is more, is increasing a good deal more rapidly than the pakeha