GONE TO ENGLAND TO STUDY Wide publicity was given to the departure of Mr C. M. BENNETT, Controller of Maori Welfare, to Exeter College, Oxford, last August, where he is studying for two years with the aim of obtaining a Doctorate of Philosophy. The subject of Mr Bennett's study, which was sponsored by the Ngarimu Scholarship Fund, will be to discover how other races are tackling acculturation and integration problems like those which face the Maori people. His research will take the form of a comparative study embracing, in addition to the Maori, one or two other progressive and somewhat similarly situated races. Also at Exeter College, Oxford, studying for a B.Litt. and residential qualifications for a Doctorate, is Mr IAN HUGH KAWHARU who earlier this year passed a B.A. degree in anthropology at Cambridge with second class honours. His subject is the role of the growth of economic individualism (especially with respect to land) in promoting shifts in social organisation among communities of the type of the Maori people. Mr SELWYN TE NGAREATUA WILSON has gone to England to study at the Slade School of Fine Arts. He was an Art Specialist with the Education Department and his paintings are thought very promising by the experts. Miss ESTHER RATA KERR has worked as a radiographer in the X-ray Department of Auckland Hospital and left to get further training, in hospitals in England to qualify ultimately for the degree of Fellow of the Society of Radiographers. It is a degree no Maori has previously held. When Miss Kerr comes back, she hopes to resume her work in Auckland hospital. All these three younger students were given a grant by the Sir Apirana Ngata Memorial Scholarship Fund Board to help carry on their studies. ⋆ ⋆ ⋆ A new Maori hostel is to be built on an elevated site near Parnell Rise, Auckland. Town Planning authorities have indicated that in the next five to ten years at least part, if not all, of the present site at the foot of Parnell Road, will have to be taken over to fit in with the town planning scheme for the area. The new hostel will accommodate 35 to 40 people, and should meet a long-felt need. A feature of it will be the facilities for Maori University students. It would have a library-study room where students can work in a quiet atmosphere.

A MAORI ADMINISTRATOR continued from page 12 an essential preliminary to far-reaching changes. Back at the office, he had of course to make sure of the details. A young and highly intelligent field supervisor was sent to the area; money was made available for regrassing and restocking; uneconomic holdings were amalgamated and three years later butterfat production from the area had more than doubled. He influenced his department officers in two ways. First, he insisted on full facts before reaching a decision and he had a rare intuition of the kind of facts that would prove to be relevant. Then, where predominantly pakeha officers have to deal with Maori clients, it is sometimes peculiarly difficult to find out just what the clients' real situation is. Genuine cases of hardship can be very shy and uncommunicative or say the wrong sort of things, while less genuine cases can seem dreadfully convincing. During the last ten years, the welfare division has done a great deal of this difficult job of getting at the facts, but a good deal of the impetus came from him, from the top. The fact that the Permanent Head was a Maori naturally did much to bring about a change in the department to the Maori people generally. It was this fact, too, that has had a deep influence throughout the Maori world and even among other Polynesian peoples. He became a symbol of the emergence and progress of the Maori, of the equal status of the two races in New Zealand. On the question of the future of the Maori, Mr Ropiha steered a wise course which to the casual onlooker might sometimes seem a vaccilating one. He could be very scathing about the sort of attitude which places the pakeha on a pedestal and then tells the Maori to become like him. On the other hand, he also had little patience with people who thought the Maori should somehow try to keep separate from the general life of the country. As he believed that the Maori should grasp every chance at social and economic improvement, so he thought he should be open to the spiritual, cultural, and scientific values of the pakeha. Mr Ropiha himself had the deepest curiosity towards all things of the spirit, went regularly to the National Orchestra, was interested in painting, liked to discuss the emergence of Asia. In practice, he was a champion of all kinds of Maori causes, whether their flavour was ancient or modern, judging each initiative not by any theory of the future of the Maori, but by the zest and vitality behind it. He could never forget that he personally had not reached his position in the traditional Maori way. In his youth, his ambiton had been to be a surveyor; he then had with all his force rejected the pa in favour of mathematics and evening study. Only at a later age had he returned to his people, had learned something of Maori oratory in his fifties and at the age of sixty he once said