Altogether the seminar passed forty-nine recommendations for the Council to work on. Some of them can be put into effect with little difficulty. Others will provide us with plenty of work for the months to come. District Councils, Executives and Committees throughout the country will have the opportunity to follow up the seminar recommendations if they find them acceptable. This first Council seminar was confined to one major subject—Maori social progress, the direction it is taking and the snags that delay it. There are, of course, many other questions that need to be examined in the same careful way, land problems being one of the most obvious. It will be up to the new Council, which will be chosen following the re-election of Maori Committees in February, to carry on the work so ably started by the 24 members at present serving on the Council.

Term of present Council ending The last meeting of this first New Zealand Maori Council will be held in Rotorua in March. It will be a public meeting where anyone may present matters for the Council's consideration. At this meeting the President will make a report on the Council's work from the time of its inception so that all may see what has been accomplished and what remains to be done. It takes time, of course, for a body such as the N.Z. Maori Council to establish itself firmly, but we believe that a sure foundation has been laid and that future Councils will be able to build on it successfully.

? Ruahina Edwards, who is ten years old and lives in Wanganui, was most excited to learn recently that she had won a trip to Noumea for two, with £50 spending money thrown in. Ruahina won the trip in a New Zealand-wide essay competition held in conjunction with the show ‘South Sea Island Festival 1963’, which visited many districts last year. The subject of the essay was ‘Why I want to go to Noumea’. There were 80 entries, many of them written by adults. Ruahina explained in her essay that she would like the trip so that she could give her mother a holiday (her mother, Mrs H. R. Edwards, is a teacher at Durie Hill School). She is thrilled that now she will be able to do so. They hope to go in the May school holidays; it will be the first time that either of them has been overseas.

Ponga and Puhihuia The Story So Far The tribes concerned in the story are Nga-iwi at Maungawhau (now Mount Eden in Auckland) and Ngati-Kahukoka at Awhitu and Tipitai (on the South Manukau Heads). Ponga, a young chief from Awhitu who is not of very high rank, and Puhihuia, the beautiful high-born daughter of the chief of Maungawhau, fall in love when a party of young people from Awhitu visits the people of Maungawhau. They secretly agree that Puhihuia will return with Ponga; she runs after them as they are going overland to their canoe at Onehunga, and they reach the canoe in safety. During the voyage back home, the young chief in charge of the party (he is the son of the chief of Awhitu, and of much higher rank than Ponga) tries to win Puhihuia for himself. When she rejects him, he becomes very jealous of Ponga. The canoe arrives at the beach at Tipitai, and is met by the people of the pa. While it is still in the water, this young chief tells his father that Ponga has treacherously stolen Puhihuia from her home and that she must be taken back there at once, as her people would otherwise come to take her by force, and to avenge themselves for the insult. (There has in the past been fighting between the tribes.)

A Difficult Decision All the people of Awhitu know that the people of Maungawhau will come for Puhihuia, and their chief has to make the difficult decision as to whether to send her back; if she does stay, it may well cause the death of many of his people. Finally, mostly because of her high birth and the ties of blood between the two tribes, he allows her to remain with them as Ponga's wife. At the beginning of this last instalment the people of Awhitu are awaiting the arrival of the warriors of Maungawhau. Readers may be interested in the photograph of a painting of Mount Eden, once Puhihuia's home, on Page 26 on this issue of ‘Te Ao Hou’. The young artist Selwyn Muru portrays it as it appears to him today, some three hundred years after the events in this story: a tall hill with a dark crater, in the midst of a sea of red tin roofs.