pressing my gratitude I said I must leave. Then Mrs Spencer interrupted me and said, “Please stay a little longer.” The old man hadn't clued me up on this one, so I resumed my seat and sat on until well past midnight. ‘I caught a taxi back to the Y.M.C.A., wrote a letter to Kani Papa telling him of my debut, and was eagerly awaiting my next visit to the Spencers. ‘The weeks went by, the months, and it wasn't until two years later when I returned home and was telling Kani about that wonderful evening, that the truth was revealed to me by my Kani. ‘“Aue boy, I should have told you that when Mrs Spencer said ‘Please stay a bit longer’, she was only being polite, and what she was really saying was, ‘the sooner you leave the happier I will be’.” ‘ My relative looked at me and said, ‘Well, that was in the olden days. Things are much different now and I think the Gov's got something.’ He looked at me and smiled. ‘See you later. Be around Sunday with the Missus and kids. I'm off. Got to get the double.’ —Na ‘Townie’

A NEW VISION FOR THE NEW WORLD Following a dinner for 200 guests last October, and a public meeting early in December sponsored by the Otara Maori Tribal Committee, a ‘steering committee’ to commence the big project of a Maori, Pakeha and Island marae was formed. This project is the idea of the Otara Maori Committee whose president is Mr Rangi Kiro, and secretary Mr Richard Kake, both of Otara. The original aim was the provision of a marae for the Otara area to cater for the growing population and provide a recreational and cultural centre of learning for the great number of Maori children, youth and parents who have migrated to Auckland and are, because of employment and our twentieth century, living virtually divorced from the home maraes throughout New Zealand. This project when presented met with such enthusiasm that it quickly snowballed beyond the first plans, and it was decided to make it a multi-racial centre, inviting Islanders and Pakehas to participate, co-operate and take an active interest, and to extend the boundary to include the whole of Manukau district. It is too early yet to say with any accuracy just how it will be, but a modern marae is planned, with a Whare Runanga being representative of all the major canoes, and with facilities for tangis, huis, weddings, recreation, culture and the learning of arts and crafts. The late John Waititi, used the word ‘marae’ in his text books, Rangitahi I and II, as a ‘plaza or courtyard’, a word used in this sense by both Maori and Pakeha, yet in the deeper sense, the traditional sense of time past, still held too by many present-day elders, as something more than just a courtyard but ‘tapu’ in veneration for the now most important rite, the tangi. This is true, and when a person