days, most of the old ladies with a moko live in the parts of the country where Maoris have kept most to the old ways: in Ngaruawahia and in the Ureweras, for instance. There are still many more of these old ladies than most pakehas would imagine, but the moko is not nearly as common as it was a few years ago, and nowadays most people probably associate it with wrinkled, peaceful old faces and a quiet, serene, old-fashioned way of life. The only time now when we see the moko on young faces is at Maori concerts where the performers have drawn it on their faces with greasepaint. These marks are almost always clumsy smears which look nothing at all like the old patterns, and serve only to make handsome faces ugly.

A Sign of Aristocracy In the old days, moko was not at all like this. It was a sign of aristocratic birth; as James Cook noted in 1762, tattooing was ‘peculiar to the principal men among the New Zealanders’. It would have been quite impossible for a slave, or any other person of low birth, to aspire to possess a moko on his face, although practically all men except slaves were tattooed from their knees to their waist. Another early traveller, the Frenchman Dumont d'Urville, wrote in his diary that ‘A New Zealander one day examining the seal of an English officer, noticed the coat of arms engraved on it and asked him if the design was the moko of his family’. And Te Pehi Kupe, whose facial moko is on the inside cover of this issue of ‘Te Ao Hou’, said much the same thing when he explained to his English friends that the marks on his forehead represented his name. He also drew for them the corresponding forehead marks — the ‘names’ — of his brother and son. Even though we have no really adequate explanation of the full meaning of moko, its general significance is clear. Distinguished families possessed marks which belonged to themselves alone, and these were handed down from father to son. Always, though, there were differences; no two moko were ever the same, and the designs allowed for infinite variations. A famous man's moko would be known far and wide, by his friends and by his enemies. Many old stories show that this was so. When, for example, Hatupatu, the youngest of three brothers and his father's favourite, was going with his brothers on an expedition to avenge the burning of the Arawa canoe, his father secretly taught him the tattoo marks of Raumati, the leader of their enemies, so that it would be Hatupatu, rather than his two brothers, who would gain the honour of finding and killing Raumati. Wearing a moko was like having your name written on your face in very beautiful writing. It was also a way of showing that you had reached adulthood, for it was only at puberty that boys and girls were allowed to be tattooed. No girl of good birth was regarded as fit for marriage until this was done, and until then, no boy could consider himself a proper warrior, a person of some consequence in his village. So they endured the terrible pain stoically, sustained by their pride and by the knowledge that henceforth, they were no longer children: they were men and women. In this way, the ceremony of tattooing served as an initiation rite: as the sign of their transition from one role in society to a different role. All so-called ‘primitive’ societies (that is, societies, such as that of the Maori, which did not possess a written language or an elaborate technology, and which lived in comparatively small social groups), had initiation rites of some kind. They served the purpose of bringing home to the boys and girls concerned, and to their relatives and fellow villagers, a sense of the importance and finality of their change of status. Usually, as with the Maori, the initiation rites were accompanied by prayer and pain, and by This Maori chief's drawing of his moko is on a land deed in the possession of the Hocken Library, University of Otago.