people Dr Paewai could if he chose—and he would probably not choose, being too busy with present needs to worry about past achievements—point to families out of debt, to homes built, to children educated, to bodies healed, to sports administered, to a community served with energy and selflessness in a hundred ways.

Energy and Drive Dedication to ideals lies at the heart of all he does. Astonishing, punishing, even frightening energy and drive is the secret of how he gets it done. An active, inquiring mind always open to suggestion, particularly when it stems from the United States which he knows well and admires, helps him to decide what to do. A morning I spent with him, caring for the sick, admonishing the wayward, encouraging the faint-hearted, arguing with the unconvinced, left me worn out. At one house it was pills and advice, at another it was a tin of paint and a direct order to put it on the laundry, at a third it was medicine and gentle, even tender, words of comfort, at the next a pane of glass and finger shaken at a broken window. At another place there was a discussion on educational policy in which his views were put forward with quite devastating bluntness. Then we climbed over a building project where men were working on a co-operative basis, ‘you help me build my place and I’ll help you with yours'. He left me to attend two meetings, four patients and a wedding. This is the pattern of all his days. He is the slave of his own high ideals and he is his own ruthless slave-driver. He charges at problems of economics, housing, education, health and equality with the same bounce and fire that drove him round a scrum in the good old days.

Suspicion of Exclusively Maori Institutions No analysis of Dr Paewai can omit his ideas on equality and integration. He is the great integrator. It seems to me that he looks with suspicion on every institution which is particularly Maori. Some pass scrutiny but those which do not can expect no mercy from his dissection. In the past he has expressed his condemnation of separate Maori schools, of separate funds for Maori welfare, even of the word ‘Maori’ in the name of the Maori Education Foundation. The concept of Maori and European as completely equal partners in all aspects of New Zealand life is very dear indeed to him. If that should mean the loss of some cultural attributes, sacrifices on the altar of complete equality, then I feel that this would trouble him not at all. Perhaps his ideal state would be a Utopia in which Maori and Pakeha would not only be equal in status but the same in culture. I have detected in him scarcely a flicker of interest in efforts to make an amalgam of cultures, to incorporate into the New Zealand European pattern aspects springing from the Maori past. Discussions on these lines move him little, if at all. Just as he is not a good public speaker—words limp along behind the racing thoughts—so he is not a good analyst of the abstract. He is too practical, too convinced of the magnitude of the immediate physical task to be bothered with academic niceties and cultural probabilities. There are houses to be built, there are jobs to be found or to be created—the estabishment of secondary industry is another of his activities. There are bones to be set and sores to be healed and ills to be cured. There are men to be shaken to a realization of their family responsibilities. There are widows and orphans to be cared for and comforted. There are debts to be paid and children to be educated. There is work enough for a hundred hands, let alone two. And in all this he is aided and supported by Hineapa his charming wife and their two sons and five daughters. For a household headed by a one-man hurricane it shows no sign whatever of wear and tear.

The Authentic Maori Leader Many Maori professional men and women cannot be leaders of their people except by example. Their work removes them from close contact with the everyday problems and aspirations of the ordinary man. Not so Dr Manahi Nitama Paewai. He is the authentic Maori leader. A man of splendid physique, of bubbling good humour, of strong and compelling features, his work is enobled by the honesty of his motives, the intensity of his convictions and the force of his moral courage. He is the Happy Warrior and there is no one else quite like him. Our Maori people could do with more cast from the same brave mould.