POWER IN THEIR HANDS by A. S. FRY Reprinted from the New Zealand Listener of 21 October 1960 Maori linesman at work, Rotorua. (N.P.S. Photo) NEXT TO THE NAMES of the reigning sovereign and the current Prime Minister, the most revered pakeha terms in the modern Maori vocabulary are probably Vickers, Caterpillar, Euclid and International. No sooner had the Honourable Robert Semple ushered in New Zealand's bulldozer age than young Maori men began leaping at the chance to manipulate all that exhilarating power. At the controls of a growing regiment of heavy machines they have been pushing their country around ever since. The most conservative estimate is that half of all earth-moving machinery in the North Island is nowadays driven by Maoris. Many overseers choose Maoris for the work in preference to pakehas, regarding them as more skilful, and a demonstration driver for the Ameican firm of Caterpillar—no mean operator himself—is reported to have called them the best in the world. By adopting in such numbers a job calling for mechanical aptitudes, the machine operators have done much to destroy the popular image of the Maori as an agricultural man. Indeed, in a way he could not have foreseen, they are affirming what John Gorst, in The Maori King, considered the Maori attitude to land in pre-European times: “The land was little valued by them as soil; they cared only for what we should call territorial dominion, and it was for this, and not for mere soil, which could not at the time be exchanged for money, that they fought in early days.” A man slicing into a hill, with 300 horsepower at his command, might well enjoy an illusion of territorial dominion. A more prosaic explanation was advanced by an Englishman overseeing an earth-moving job: “They may have thought, ‘Oh well, the pakeha's botched up our country, we'll finish it!’” Outside his prefabricated office the machines were inexorably resolving pastoral hills and gullies into a gently undulating suburbia. During a break enforced by rain, some of the Maori drivers explained how they came to the job. “I've been driving machines for 15 years,” said one. “I was bulldozing fire-breaks at Taupo for a while, but it got a bit tame and I started looking for a faster machine. Down here I got me on to one that was faster, but it couldn't pull a hen off its nest. A Maori, once he gets it in his head that he wants to learn a thing, he'll go to it. He's cheeky about it. If you say to a Maori, ‘Don't do that’ or ‘Don't go there,’ when your back's turned that's just what he'll do. I got on to a job that way once—with a foot on the off-side and then a 300-feet sheer drop. I don't mind telling you I was frightened. A pakeha wouldn't have done that. “With Maoris, the bigger the machine the more interest they show in it, and they're quick to pick it up. A chap may be only a labourer, but