MAORI MEMORIES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 15 October 1940, Page 9

MAORI MEMORIES

TARGETS FOR ENEMY. (Recorded by J.H.S., of Palmerston North, for the “Times-Age.”) The memories of a young child are mental pictures which never fade, and are more vivid than those of yesterday. Yet they are quite unconscious, and only what the voice of a long since departed parent or older sister had impressed upon his crystal brain cells. Thus am I privileged to reproduce from my mental photos of 1860 onward. One of these is the brilliant red uniforms, each with white shoulder straps crossed back and front, ammunition waist belts, all gleaming in the sun as targets for the Maori muzzle-loaders supplied by our own people. These living marks to be shot at we named “bull’s-eyes,” “centres” and “outers,” according to the vital organs within each. By this time the vivid pictures of the Taranaki-Wanganui fighting, only 30 miles north of us, gave place on a larger scale to those in Waikato and Auckland. Twenty miles from that embryo capital city to south and east lay nature’s own impregnable Maginot Line oi mountain range clothed with forest trees 60 feet high and 5 feet in diameter. Gardens in the forest clearings, fish in the streams and rivers, and birds in abundance, formed an unlimited food supply available only to the forest rangers. Urged by long generations of genuine reverence and love for their true gods, the land and the forest, made by the hand of the Great Architect for the sustenance and shelter of his “only children,” the Maori people, no sacrifice was too great for its defence. It is and always will be an unsolved problem why a thousand warriors indifferent to danger or death did not, there and then, walk into the little town of Auckland and slay the few hundred intruders with tomahawks.