John Taiapa and Carving Today — continued from page 31 and his party of six carvers would be sent, say to Mangahanea Dining Hall, while Pine with another similar party was at the Rotorua school, busy on the carvings for the Wairoa hall. Pine was then shifted to Putiki, and John to Wairoa. And so the two groups travelled around from one place to another, staying on tribal maraes, fed by the local people, sleeping in meeting houses. Wives and children accompanied the carvers who constituted a sizeable busload when they moved from one marae to another. At no place was there any privacy or any respite from the traditional Maori way of living. John built a very comfortable home for himself in Rotorua but he was rarely there; most of the time he, his wife and his children were on the road—‘a travelling circus’, as John now calls it. In this way the family were brought up, although some years ago the ‘circus’ atmosphere stopped when John refused to accept the marae type of accommodation any longer and insisted on staying in hotels or guest houses. But this was as late as the fifties. In the thirties, the carvers' rate of pay was adapted to the times. Qualified men got two shillings an hour, Pine Taiapa only was paid 2s. 6d. Students got 25s. to 35s. per week. It was only later that the contract system was introduced whereby a carver puts his price on the whole of a job—something like £4,500 for the woodcarving on an average fully decorated meeting house. Today, some arrangements are on an hourly basis, others on contract. John Taiapa prefers contracts; he still has a scale of charges worked out by Sir Apirana Ngata shortly before his death and clings to this price list when asked for quotations.

THE ART OF MODERN MAORI CARVING There are many books describing the elementary techniques of carving, the proper forms of the spirals and the decorative patterns and all the other conventional features of Maori art. But these conventions, added all together, would still never make a carved meeting house. The carved house is the supreme representation of the history of the tribe; in the absence of a written literature this history was set down in the form of pictures in wood, each picture being a supreme moment in the lives of the ancestors. The modern carver, just like his forebears, aims to tell a tribal story in striking pictures. Some of these pictures are already traditional, like Tamatekapua, who is always shown on stilts. The carver who first thought of this picture wanted to show the old chief in one of his most characteristic activities: he was known as a very ingenious thief and it was said that he would never leave footprints behind; so he was represented on one of his thieving expeditions walking on stilts to avoid recognition. To-day, every carver who wishes to know Tamatekapua shows the stilts: they have become entirely traditional and in fact the stilts are the feature by which Tamatekapua may be recognised in any Arawa meeting house. Similarly traditional is the representation of Hine Amaru, seen in the Waitangi meeting house. As John Taiapa told me, she gave birth to a child from the armpits and this miraculous event is shown in any carvings of that ancestress. In treating such subjects, the Maori carver has much the same task as the Christian artist of the middle ages reproducing moments in the life of Christ: tradition determined precisely what should be on the picture (e.g., the three black Magi had to bear opulent gifts standing in front of a cradle and there had to be haloes round the heads of the Magi and of the Divine Child). Yet within these limits an artist can still do powerful work as he relives the old story and expresses it in his own way and with his own individual skill. At the end of the Middle Ages, European art moved in a quite different direction and one can already see

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