Why Maoris Choose Large Centres

Te Ao Hou, Autumn 1953, Page 12

Why Maoris Choose Large Centres Maori workers prefer to remain as close as possible to their homes, hence, wherever possible, they move to towns within the area in which they live. Rotorua has become the economic centre of Maoris living on the Volcanic Plateau; Whakatane (397) and Opotiki (495) absorb many of the landless Maori workers of the Bay of Plenty. Both Te Kuiti (450) and Gisborne, regional centres for the King Country and southern East Coast respectively, have more than doubled their Maori population since before the war. Many Maoris living just outside the borough limits travel daily to work in all these towns. These towns, however, are not all always able to employ even those from their own districts who want work. Many, too, live in areas where there are either no towns or only towns in which industrial development is not far advanced. In all these cases Maori workers must seek work further afield. For the most part they prefer the major cities of the Province—Auckland, Hamilton and Whangarei (401), all of which lie in areas where the population is predominantly pakeha. They prefer to travel to these cities, sometimes hundreds of miles, because of the greater opportunities for employment there, and also because they are sure of finding there others from their own part of the country. In at least two areas where Maoris are numerous, in proportion both to land areas and to pakeha population, Maoris migrate in a steady stream to these outside towns. On the northern East Coast this outward movement is mainly to Auckland, and is due to the absence of an urban centre within the area and the overcrowded nature of employment in Gisborne, the nearest centre. The far north has six urban centres, but none is large; they cannot cope with the demand for employment from Maoris from the surrounding rural areas, and these must seek work in Whangarei or Auckland. Hamilton draws its Maori workers mainly

from the Waikato, but also from the King Country. Apart from the regional and industrial centres already mentioned only five other towns have over 250 Maori residents. The bulk of others live on farms or interspersed with pakehas in small rural areas, and on the fringes of the larger towns. The traditional pa still survives only in areas where farming is not a major activity for the Maoris, and where employment for wages can be readily obtained within easy reach of the settlements. The pa is probably best developed today along the shores of lakes Rotorua and Rotoiti, on the Volcanic Plateau and in the Urewera—at Te Whaiti and Ruatahuna. A few similar settlements are found in areas where most of the land has been occupied by pakehas for many decades, and the Maoris live mainly by working as labourers in primary and secondary industries—as in the Waikato, Matamata and Piako districts, in the vicinity of Opotiki and around Gisborne. The movement from pas to individual farms, to towns and to cities, and the high rate of increase of those Maoris who live amongst pakehas contribute to bringing Maori and pakeha closer and closer together. This inevitably gives rise to new problems. The most obvious and urgent of these problems arise in the cities. The acute housing shortage has forced the majority of Maoris to congregate in the poorer parts of most towns, where over-crowding and inadequate sanitary arrangements endanger their health and standards of living. During the last few years, Maoris have been constantly moving into the better residential areas in the various centres, and have been entering the trades and professions in ever growing numbers, but their places have been quickly filled by new arrivals from the country. Consequently, the urban Maoris as a whole have as yet been only partially successful in adapting themselves to pakeha conventions of urban life and industry. These problems are rendered all the more acute by the fact that everything favours the continued growth of the Maori urban population.