A PAKEHA IN MAORILAND

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 6, Issue 16, 20 October 1942, Page 4

A PAKEHA IN MAORILAND

Sir,—Your representative seems to have got lost somewhere in his Maori legends. Ihe great mass of tumbled pea'ks with vast unchartered valleys of which even the Maoris know little holds no mysteries to our Pakeha Government deer stalkers. As you- say possibly the secret of Maori stamina is good food and plenty of it but it is also the secret of many a Pakeha headache through, listening to the "inborn oratory, of the treasurer of the Marae Committee when it comes; to payment |ior the Gangantuan meals; provided in true Maori hospitality." When you were so lost in the wilds 200 miles from the orderecl world you needed only to turn around to see the township of Wairoa from that pah, less than 30 miles away. Still, I can quite understand your difficulty in sleeping in a Maori meeting house. It would he the same as. some of your memories. You must be still catching them or should I say scratching. Yours etc., "TUHOES WITHOUT* GLAMOUR'" (Our correspondent seems to have something of an axe to grind on. the subject of the "Tuhoe" Maoris. The article he mentions w T as written on life in the Urewera as the; writer found it when a guest of the tribe. Pakeha headaches through lack of payment for the "'gargantuan meals" mentioned are probably more than offset by recollee-. tions of comfortable profits made at the expense of these self-same Maori clients in a hundred and one other directions. Indeed we have oftert heard it referred to as open victimisation. In any case our knowledge of the local business fraternity indicates that the majority of business men of this town appreciate and. value their Maori customers, particularly those from a distance: who have not absorbed the guile of the Pakeha to the same extent as those having a continual contact with Europens. The hint of uncleanliness we can assure our correspondent is: born of his own disordered surroundings and. we regret his misfortune in possessing such a ready understanding of the habits of "scratching" and '"catching" for we can assure him that we are strangers: to the practice as were also our Maori hosts. Ed.)