All visitors to Horohoro lay a fern twig on this sacred stone. Hine, the lady of the mist, gave it supernatural powers, and it is known as her ‘knee’ (Te Turi o Hine Ngawari). The Hon. E. B. Corbett also placated the stone when he visited Horohoro in 1955. (NPS Photograph) THE MAN AND HIS WORK

THE HON. ERNEST BOWYER CORBETT The ancestry of the Hon. Ernest Bowyer Corbett goes back to the first European pioneers. His mother was the grand-daughter of Hansen of the brig Active, who brought Marsden to New Zealand. His great aunt, Hannah Hansen, was the first white child born in New Zealand in January 1816. Mr Corbett was born on a Taranaki bush farm at Okato in 1898 and now he is retired from politics he lives again at Okato. More than most white New Zealanders he feels intimately part of his corner of the country; he likes to be known as the man from Taranaki; Egmont is his mountain. Okato was then a predominantly Maori community and Ernest Bowyer, one of a family of ten, went to the Puniho School which had a predominantly Maori school and later to the Okato State School. After leaving school, he joined the Post and Telegraph Department, then worked in a dairy factory. But farming was in his blood and he took on a place half in bush, half in scrub, with a mud road for access, cleared it and brought it into production. In 1922 he married Miss Doris E. Sharp; took her to the farm on a sledge. From an early age his interests went out to public life as well as farming. The Oxford Dairy Company, the National Dairy Association, the Dairy Industry Insurance Company all owe a good deal to the activities of Mr Corbett, and so do numerous social and sporting organizations. What spare time remained Mr Corbett spent gardening and climbing Mount Egmont. In 1943 he became Member of Parliament for Egmont and in 1949 Minister of Lands, Forests and Maori Affairs. In his Lands portfolio, Mr Corbett was responsible for important and far-sighted legislation to prevent undue land aggre-