trict Council for help in solving your own problems.

Elections next year Under the new Maori Welfare Act, all Maori Committees (they used to be called Tribal Committees) will come up for re-election next year on the last Saturday in February. To be on the New Zealand Council a member must first be elected to his local Committee and then selected to go on to his Executive, the District Council and finally the New Zealand Council. This means that you govern the Council because you elect the Committee members from whom the Council is chosen.

How the Council affects you The Council is dealing with very many matters, such as the effects of the Town and Country Planning Act on rural Maori housing, the protection of Urupa from desecration, the conservation of sea-foods, the law affecting Maori land. If you are on your local Maori Committee you will soon see some of the results coming through to you in the form of data papers and newsletters that will tell you in detail what is being done and that will ask for your views to be carried forward by your delegates to your Executive. The Council is out to win your support by doing what you want it to do and by being your mouth-piece in all matters that affect our well-being.

More than £1,800 has so far been given to relief funds for injured victims and dependants of the victims of the Brynderwyn Hills bus disaster, in which 15 Maori people were killed on their way home from the reception to the Queen at Waitangi. At Onehunga £607 has been collected for the family of Mr Peter Tapene, who was a borough councillor. At Helensville, a fund organised by the Lions Club stands at £400. Lions Clubs throughout the country have been sending in cheques to this fund. In Whangarei £383/12/10 has come forward, and in Auckland a concert realised about £370, including a donation of £24 from the Auckland branch of the Women's Welfare League. Further Auckland donations should be sent to Mr P. B. Taua, Secretary of the Auckland District Council, care of the Department of Maori Affairs.

The Old Place This is the place where the old people lived. They caught the birds, stored them in their own rich fat, grubbed fern root, loved, mated, buried their dead in the rocks and crannies and on the high cold hill. Here came Uenuku, broke the tapu of the chief's spring, left his deed in a proverb. Here the old man hauled a totara, with his own hands hewed a ridge-pole fifty feet from the sound red heart. There by the alien pines his house stood, silver-grey in its dotage, and his church there where the six-foot fern sways brown and dusty; all vanished in the scrub fires in the years when no one cared. So I park the landrover, climb the slope, push aside the broom, hope for a sign from the past from the old dead people. But there is no more comfort here in the fierce bright silence than the rasping tut finds in black bark and the hard pine needles. Harry Dansey