MAORI MEMORIES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 5 September 1938, Page 3

MAORI MEMORIES

FLAX, GOLD AND KAURI GUM. (Recorded by J.H.S. for “Times-Age.”) Encouraged by the fine texture and endurance of the Maori-made flaxen clothing, experiments were made in Ireland, France and Australia, and a factory was established in Yorkshire in 1831, but it failed. Professor Lindley then gave the relative strength of the various fibres as; Silk 34, N.Z. flax 23, European hemp 16, European flax 11. Manufacturers decided that it must be cultivated and improved. In its wild state, the Maoris said there were ten varieties, for each of which they had a name, but the botanists then decided that eight of these were merely the product of different soil and climate. They decided that there was but one species and two varieties, one bearing a yellow flower and the other a deeper bronze. The former, growing mostly in the South Island, yielded a firmer fibre. Flax does not grow freely below latitude 47 in New Zealand. It is indigenous to Norfolk Island, this being regarded as another link in the chain of evidence that we were both once part of the legendary sunken continent of the Pacific. All interest in the experiments with flax ceased when the first few ounces of gold were found near Nelson, and later at the Bluff in 1854; then along the western shores of the South Island. The sudden demand for kauri gum on the British market in 1856, when the Maoris were deluded into selling gum lands at a shilling an acre, gave prosperous years in the North, where a single acre sometimes yielded £lOOO worth of this hitherto worthless substance. So assiduously did a band of foreigners clean up this treasure trove, that the only specimens now seen are in the Treasure House at Tikitere, for which an American syndicate offered many thousands of pounds, but the Government forbade its export as a native curio.