Page image

One Wellington girl with a fascinating and responsible job is Miss Pamela Ormsby, shorthand-typist in the office of the Hon. E. H. Halstead, Minister of Industries and Commerce. a great deal of time to settle in and become accustomed to the requirements of life in town. Therefore, I would think that the average Maori student entering University requires at least one year before he can even begin successfully to tackle his course—for most Maoris full-time attendance should be aimed at: there are too many adjustment difficulties for him to face in the city which preclude his chances of success on a part-time basis. On the other hand, at the Training College, the Dental Clinic, Trade Training Centres and the Hospital, there is a continuance of a degree of institutional discipline and supervision and seldom do those places produce failures amongst Maori students. It might be argued, that the University failures are due to the fact that the course is much stiffer than the others. Yet, judging from the students' educational background. I think that their adjustment difficulties are far more important than any intellectual ones. Despite these difficulties we can find today a greater number of Maoris in all walks of life who sport a University degree than was the case 10–15 years ago, but a lot needs to be done to make all our people a little more education conscious.

HOUSING Slow but pleasing progress is being made in regard to housing. It is impossible to obtain an accurate estimate of all the houses built for or occupied by Maoris in 1956, but the Department of Maori Affairs has reached a new record by building a national total of 527 houses. In certain towns also there is a pool of state rental houses made available for Maoris. Add to these the houses that Maoris have got from other sources and the number must be the most satisfactory so far. The Maoris in Wellington and Lower Hutt have obtained their fair share of these, and as a parson it has been pleasant to me to note the good number of parishioners who a few years ago eked out an existence in rooming houses and now have their own homes. I contend that the terrific improvement evident in the behaviour patterns of the urban Maori of the Wellington area is, in its largest measure, due to better housing conditions. We have two neighbourhoods where these new houses are grouped together which provide an interesting background for the comparative study of evolving community patterns. In both these communities the people are in danger of preserving their Maori entity less with the norms and mores of a truly Maori culture than with some of the worst pakeha behaviour patterns. It is I think true to say that week-end parties are much more robust in these two centres than in any other part. Also in these two Maori communities there is practically no social interaction between the Maori adults and the rest of the neighbourhood. Yet, at Waiwhetu, a very large number of second generation young people reaching adolescent age have made wide contacts at the local High Schools and in sporting bodies and acquired a much more sophisticated type of deportment and behaviour pattern, so that they are unconsciously demanding new standards within the home, and in my five years as a resident of the Waiwhetu Maori community, social and domestic improvement has been beyond all recognition due I feel to these new demands on the parents. On the other hand the majority of Maori householders are scattered about amongst the community at large and as their parson I find them completely at ease and fairly satisfactorily integrated with the pakeha neighbourhood community: (continued on page 51)

Log in or create a Papers Past website account

Use your Papers Past website account to correct newspaper text.

By creating and using this account you agree to our terms of use.

Log in with RealMe®

If you’ve used a RealMe login somewhere else, you can use it here too. If you don’t already have a username and password, just click Log in and you can choose to create one.


Log in again to continue your work

Your session has expired.

Log in again with RealMe®


Alert