The Old Marae by Leo Fowler The marae is empty, for its people have gone to the city. All the young ones and their lusty young families are there. That is where the jobs are, and the big money, and the pakeha education, to say nothing of the pubs and the clubs and the T.A.B. They have a State House in a tight street way out in the suburbs, or the Department has built them one, handy to shops and the station, as part of Jack Hunn's planned, pepperpot integration. Even the old ones have gone, out of a hunger to be with their mokopunas, or, stealing away from the emptiness and the loneliness and the sense of desolation, they have turned their faces to the wall and to eternity, following the lost glories of their Maoritanga along the last path, to Reinga. When I go back, to sad, occasional tangi and follow some withered remnant of mortality to the burial grounds of the tupunas I feel, as I wet my hands, that I'm washing away old age glories which are mouldering, like the tenants of these neglected graves, into the oblivion of a people. I weep, less for old Kura or old Ropata, or for the mouldering bones that tenant this graveyard, than for the rich and vanishing tradition that is buried with them. My thoughts are echoed by some middle-aged mourner. “Poor old Kura, she's gone eh. We'll all be the poorer. I wish I'd listened to her, when I was younger. I remember, when I was a boy and we sat round at nights in the wharepuni, she and the old folks would keep going all night. Whakapapa and waiata, and the old, old stories, right back to the canoes. Oh, well. Think I'll sell the old place, no-one to live in it now. Get a new car I think, the old one's a bit small for all our kids.” Well, its an epitaph, of a sort. So, the old marae is empty, and weed-grown. The old meeting house is shut, with a chain on the door and a padlock that doesn't fasten; deader, in its way, than the tupunas up in the graveyard. It has no life except in the life of its people, and its people are scattered. It does not exist even in their thoughts for they never think of it, specially the young ones, the rising ones, who have never seen it and are never likely to, now. The roof is rusting and the porch could do with a paint. The window, shattered by young Hori's delinquent stone three years ago, is closed with a bit of old cardboard. Sheep have been on the porch. Cobwebs festoon it. The Manaia on the end of the maihi is cracked and broken. A hammer and nails, even a bit of fencing wire would have fixed it, if any one had been interested, but there isn't anyone to be interested. I might do it, from sheer resentment at the vandalism, the daunting, inevitable, unforgiving vandalism of time. In the cities and towns to which it young people have followed the bright beckoning of te ao hou there will grow a new Maoritanga. It will be a progressively diffused and diluted Maoritanga. It will take a long time, I hope, for all their Maori values to leach out but then time is long, and patient and all victorious. The language will go first. Language is a means to communicate and they will communicate more easily in English with their Pakeha neighbours, and workmates. They will communicate more easily, in English, with their children. Something of the language will linger on while the older generation lingers on. In a generation, or perhaps a decade, the odd Maori words and phrases will be hung on their speech as the old taiaha, the tattered kiwi mat or the old photos of the tupunas are hung on the wall, less for what they intrinsically are than for what they nostalgically recall. They do not listen to the few stories of the fewer old folk for it is less effort, and more entertaining, to look and listen to the TV. But on the old marae the old stories will linger as long as the old wharepuni lingers. The old stories are there, lovingly graven into the carvings. The carvings are the richest surviving repositories of the old lore, but the lore that reposes in them will become increasingly locked away because fewer and fewer will come with the keys of knowledge and understanding to unlock those riches. Who will know, or care, that the tekoteko is the eponymous ancestor of this hapu? Who will know, or care, that this figure may be identified by