MAORI MEMORIES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 25 October 1940, Page 2

MAORI MEMORIES

HARVEST KOTINGA). (Recorded by J.H.S., o£ Palmerston North, lor the “Times-Age.”) In Sir George Grey’s days the Waikato Maoris had three flour mills driven by efficient water wheels, numerous working bullocks, ploughs, threshing machines, drays and draught horses and canoes to carry their output of produce down the rivers to their little sailing craft anchored in the harbour. Auckland was their principal market for muka (dressed flax), pigs, potatoes, maize, wheat, barley, oats and vegetables. Back they came laden with gaycoloured shawls, shirts, sugar and tobacco, and —alas!' —casks, cases and kegs of rum, the sole cause of their downfall. All their mills, stock, bridges and comfortable homes have gone with their defeated ambition and energy. Yel in their fertile lands, top-dressed by centuries of dried foliage, sunlight and rest, our English grasses and clovers flourished like weeds. Their only provision for winter were potatoes, stored in pits lined with dry bracken fern, wheat and maize in baskets packed in patakas (food huts) on high legs to keep away the hordes of kiore (native rats). Melons and pumpkins in great supply, free from blight, were devoured as they matured. With no animals or parasites to destroy them, the peaches and apples on every river side flourished in thousands, forming veritable Gardens of Eden and delight for Maori and White. This virgin soil, turned by the plough for the first time, was so fertile that a week's work with a pair of bullocks produced a year’s food. So harvest time was a leisurely picnic. The men sat in the sunshine on the bracken fern smoking torore (raw tobacco), in merry mood; the women, more subdued, scraped potatoes with a pipi shell and tended the umu (earth oven), and the lads and lasses did the work as school boy play.