THE MAORIS AS I FOUND THEM

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 394, 10 January 1947, Page 6

THE MAORIS AS I FOUND THEM

MEETING THE MAORIS

R. SMITH was no doubt D right in calling my attitude to the Maoris romantic and my remarks about them "bloody nonsense." He has known them intimately for 30 years and I have not known one of them for 30 days in my whole life. It may easily be true, too, that the Maoris "saw me coming." But I also saw something when

I arrived, and it was not a case of seeing what I set out to see. I did not know till I got there that

the people of Hokianga were 60 per cent. Maori, and in any case I am myself wholly pakeha. My thoughts, interests, reactions and attitudes, if they do not completely isolate me from Maoris, keep me so blandly and selfishly white that partisanship of any other kind has no chance. A visitor who neither speaks Maori, reads Maori, nor thinks’ Maori, and has never tried to overcome these limitations, may be a very foolish observer of a Maori community but he can hardly be charged with excessive Maori sympathy. Anyhow he is worse than ignorant if, seeing much to admire himself, he accepts all the complaints and criticisms of other people. I saw a good deal in Hokianga that no friend of the Maoris .

would condone-land occupied and not used, gardens neglected while food was taken from tins, garbage infecting the water supply, and insanitary homes. It was impossible not to see those things, and I am not going to gloss them over. But I’m not going to be silent about other things either, whether I am a romantic or a simpleton for thinking that they mean what they looked like to me at the time. For example: everybody has been told that the money Maori women draw 3s children’s allowance Maori men drink. Some Maoris do, drink, but I did not see one drunken Maori north of Auckland. I heard two in Taihape making a loud noise in a hotel bar at half-past ten in the morning. They were not yet drunk but well on the way. If I had lingered in Auckland I should no doubt have heard a few more. But I passed through Auckland at five in the morning, and although I then spent three or four weeks North of the city and covered about a thousand miles I did not again see a Maori under the influence of liquor, On the other hand I spent a day in a district in which all the Maoris for religious reasons abstained from tobacco as well as from alcohol. But even when Maoris don’t drink, those who know assure us, they won’t work. Well, I did not expect to see Maoris working for the love of work or refusing money because they had not mets .

honestly earned it. I expected them to behave very much as pakehas would, and do, in comparable circumstances (including of course the absence of moral or social pressures in favour of diligence and thrift); and that is what I found. But I did see many Maoris. working. I saw more working than I saw _ idling. Many of the roadmen I saw were Maoris, and they were working hard; many of the railway surfacemen; about half, I thought, of the truck-drivers. I saw Maoris milking cows, and one Sunday morning, when I was driving through a stretch of about 15 miles in which there was only one pakeha farmer, I noticed particularly that the cows were all milked or being milked by seven o’clock and that most of them were in average condition. When I mentioned these things later to Dr. Smith he told me that I was as silly as an inspector of the Department of Native Affairs. "They call a man employed if they see him milking a couple of cows. A boy is employed who carts a can of milk to the factory. It is very likely that nothing else is done all day." "I’m not .suggesting," I replied, "that the Maori is a lowland Scot yet. What I am saying is that I’ve not seen him lying on his back and doing nothing aft all." "You have seen him milking half a dozen cows on a farm that would run 20 or 30; and if you were here for an-

other month or two you would see him drying them off when the grass gets short instead of providing supplementary feed." It was no doubt true, but it did not worry me. I did not ask myself whether the Maori is too lazy to grow winter feed, or too philosephical, or too thriftless. I was so happy to see him farming at all that his methods neither disturbed nor surprised me. I did, however, look carefully at his stock, and was surprised to find the facts very much better than I had anticipated. I saw herds of milking cows that had clearly been starved all winter and were still tucked-up and unthrifty. They were noticeable because they were exceptional. I saw illbred and underfed dry stock, but that again was not the general picture. And I saw none of the Maori horses of legend. I saw good hacks and bad, lively mounts and slugs, but they had all had sufficient feed, and if they had been "knocked about" as Maori horses are supposed to be, it had not noticeably disagreed with them. I watched several times when a Maori went to mount a horse that had been tied at a gate or a fence, and I did not once see the animal jerk up its head, pull away, or show any of the common -signs of ill-treatment. .I saw horses ridden hard on hard roads, overloaded horses, and mares being ridden that pakehas would have left out at grass with their foals, But in a country that is probably the kindest in the world to horses (after Britain), I saw nothing at all that even annoyed me; nothing certainly that I had not seen paralleled over and over again by pakehas.

MAORI MANNERS

7 ~~ UT my most lasting memory of the Maoris of Northland is the superiority of their manners. There must be Maori vulgarians and Maori louts, but I did not meet them, Every Maori I spoke to was courteous. Every one was obliging, and I thought naturally kind. Once I had to turn to them for assistance when my engine developed a short

circuit, and I was about equally astojiiished by the trouble they took for noth-

ing (since they refused payment) and the mechanical knowledge they displayed. I talked to Maoris over the fence and on the roads, in hotels and stores, and occasionally in their homes, and the impression was always the same: that their manners are better than ours, their breeding more ingrained, their dignity more> secure. I was not foolish enough to think that they always liked me; but there was grace even in their toleration of me, and on one occasion when they were probably all actively hostile they received me politely and endured me for two hours with a dignified courtesy of which I mysélf in similar circumstances would have been quite incapable. I don’t want to qualify for another phrase of Dr. Smith’s-the helplessness of the fool who has never taken the trouble to learn his ABC-but I would sooner risk that than shirk saying that (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) if the Maori is being demoralised by ixdolence and easy money that is a sign ‘that he is already half pakeha, and that before we convert the other half we had better make sure that we know what we are doing. an Se rN

INQUEST

Ld be HE trouble with these people, the doctor told me before the inquest started, is that they say what they think you want them to say. |

~ she constable thought the trouble was that they were

ail tars, ihe coroner was judicial and non-committal. "What we have to find out," he emphasised, "is whether they made any attempt to get a taxi." The trouble the spectator thought he saw was two races talking to each other over 30 centuries of time. The issue itself was quite simple, A child developed dysentery. The nurse told the parents to send it at once to hospital, and offered to take it in her own car. The parents said they would wait till the afternoon and get a taxi. Late that night they sent urgently for the doctor, and when he arrived the child was dead. Why had they not taken it to hospital? A simple question, but the answer goes back three thousand years, Perhaps they were afraid of the hospital. Other children had gone there and died. Theirs would die too. Perhaps they felt that the child would die whatever they did and that it would be better if it died at home. Perhaps the tohunga secretly forbade the hospital. Perhaps they thought that a taxi would not coms without money. Perhaps they did not believe that death would come so soon-thought they had another day.

Perhaps they resented pakeha advice and pressure. There are many possibilities but no certainties. The coroner did his best, the police constable his best-a good and kind job, I thought, in both cases. But Mary, the young mother, sat on her mattress on the floor, her legs under a blanket, her eyes wandering from the constable to the sheet covering her dead baby, cautious, frightened, pathetic, the

centre of the proceedings and aware of it, and never for a moment off guard. Her story took 20 minutes ‘to extract and amounted in the end to what everybody knew. Reuben, the father, was on the witness stool for 15 minutes and added nothing to Mary’s story. He wore a Christ-like beard, and I found myself wondering as I watched him what pakeha of 22 could wear such clothes and retain such dignity and power. He neither hedged nor hesitated, answered all questions gravely and with a kind of confidential candour, carrying the constable gently back to the point from which he started. A grandmother was called, two or three aunts, and one man whose rela-

tionship I could not discover, but their stories, though they began at different points and appeared to take different courses, left the key question precisely where it was. What the nurse had said was true. She had told them the child was very sick and that it must go to hospital. She had offered to take it. Perhaps they did not understand that she was willing to wait till they were ready. Yes, a taxi had been in the valley that afternoon. Two had been. But they weré for other people. If other people had ordered them they were not for the baby. Someone else they had tried to get could not come. They had thought of a man they knew who had a truck, but when they tried to ring him they could not "raise Central." It was a very serious thing not to do what the nurse said. She said get the baby to hospital at once. It was very sick. They knew they had nothing to pay. They thought it would be soon enough after dinner. They had things to do. There was church that day. It was a good hospital. Maoris went to it and got é¢ured. No, they gave the baby nothing. It was too sick. What the finding was in the end I don’t know. The doctor stayed as long as he could, and when he went I went with him; but it was plain before we left that the gulf would not be bridged. The constable, as we went out, was talking earnestly to the whole room about the necessity to use the facilities the Government had provided-free hospitals, free doctors, free nurses, free schools. "None of these things cost you a penny, and you don’t use them. I warn you that you’ve got to use them. We can’t do anything now about this baby. But there are other babies, and that’s why we’re here to-day." It was why they were there, but it was also why they were going away without the full story,