which would last until 5.00, say; then we'd ride another six or eight miles to the next school, throw our bags on the teacher's verandah and go over the whole process all over again. On our first trip it took six weeks to get from Opotiki round to Ruatoria, and when I got to Ruatoria I wrote to my wife and said ‘never again’. Because not only was it a daily grind but the teachers were hungry for information about what was going on. They knew nothing. They were completely isolated and could sit up till three in the morning talking education. Marvellous, but I can't think of anything more tiring. Now, two or three years after I started that stopped. It simply stopped because the roads began to be opened. The men were grabbed for the Ministry of Works and so on; the men went away and the interest went away. One of the things that was done in your time was to try to put more emphasis upon Maori things, to try to restore in the Maori people themselves a pride in their Maoridom—in their own ways of behaving and believing. What steps did you take in the schools to try to do this? Well, I often think back to those days; because this meant a tremendous change in policy and I was able to persuade the director and the department that some change in policy was desirable. I felt that we should make these schools Maori schools as far as we could. If I only knew then what I know Fletcher and Ball fording a river at Te Kaha now, I don't think we'd have had any problems, but I didn't know enough, and I grasped the superficial things. I said ‘Let the kids talk Maori, let's have Maori legends, let's have Maori songs, haka, and dance, let's have Maori crafts in the school, but at the same time, of course, we've got to teach them English because they've got to live in this new world’. Now, these were superficial things because they didn't go down to the deep drives in the Maori heart, what the child picks up in the Maori home in his early years. However, they were wonderfully effective in that they did revitalise the schools. They attracted Maori leaders—Sir Apirana Ngata was a tremendous helper, and he would come with us to our refresher courses, bring a whole gang of Maori men and women along to demonstrate flax weaving, tukutuku, taniko, carving and Maori songs and haka. But they were still English schools, with an English curriculum and with English teachers teaching the way that they'd been taught. Getting back to the language aspect, I wonder if you, or the department, gave any thought in the thirties to bilingual schools, or even starting off the teaching in Maori rather than in English? It's been thought of, right from the very beginning, right from 1879. But in my time there was very little desire for it from the Maoris—that the Maori language should be taught in school. Ngata himself said that Maori children had got to learn English. So there was not a great deal of pressure there. I may say there was exactly the same thing in Samoa when I was inspecting over there. They wanted English because the English language brought everything the Englishman had; all these wonderful things they'd never seen before. Secondly, as far as I was concerned, I didn't speak Maori. Let's admit it—that probably had some influence; how much I don't know. The great majority of the teacher's residence because that night speak Maori. The training colleges were not interested in the Maori in those days at all. I don't think thye knew the Maoris existed. I say this flatly and I mean it, and it wasn't their fault because the Maoris were not in their sight, they were so isolated.