The Meeting House
‘] HE other night Olga Adams spoke from 1YA on the Meeting House of the ancient Maori. This House, she said, fostered the communal spirit of the tribe,
satisfied emotionally their desire for decoration, and was the concrete expression of their sense of continuity of race. At that point I began to lose the thread of her talk, through being preoccupied with envious thoughts of the ancient Maori. We have, surely, the same emotional needs, but we make a poor shot at satisfying them. There is our Town Hall, for instance, and our War Memorial
Museum; one or them appeals to our pride and our aesthetic. sense, but neither-of them seems to touch us personally, There are the many local church halls of various denominations which we borrow when we want to put
on a play, hold a meeting, or run a kindergarten. We are tenants for a few hours and remove all traces of our tenancy when we go. We may live for 20 years in an old-established suburb without finding its heart, its focus, its core, for it has none. Or we may live in a newly planned suburb like Orakei-not the closely knit little Maori village in decrepit houses down by the beach, but the conglomeration of fine houses provided by the State on the hills above-and know that it is not a community and never will be one, for it has no Meeting House.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19450810.2.12.3
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 320, 10 August 1945, Page 8
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240The Meeting House New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 320, 10 August 1945, Page 8
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