I. PUNARUKU AND ITS SCHOOL

Te Ao Hou, March 1961, Page 20

I. PUNARUKU AND ITS SCHOOL It is reading period and I see two boys looking at the same book, while another one lies unused by their side. “Why don't you read the other one, Henry?” I ask. “Oh, I have read that one at least 20 times.” Both books are about fish. All books about fish are very well read in our library. The Ngati Wai The Ngati Wai traditionally like the water very much better than the land. On the water they travelled, fought, migrated, fished. Their main fortifications were on the Whangaruru peninsula, * Half way between Whangarei and the Bay of Islands. linked to the mainland by a narrow chain of hills and a swamp. That is where they used to grow their kumaras in distant days and also, after the Europeans came, their wheat, their sheep and their cattle. The peninsula and the island nearby were also the site of the first school, the first store. The first post office, although on the mainland, was along the beach among the rocks, near a jetty, but unreachable by any road. The modern era pried the Ngati Wai reluctantly from their rocky beaches and island to the new road they built during the depression. People started to live along the road because it was convenient. Those who happened to have lands close to it began to farm these and abandon their land on the peninsula. A school was opened along the road at Punaruku; now, instead of the children crossing the water to go to the old school on the peninsula, they had a new school in the new development area. Since the war the rapid move began out of the district to Auckland, to Whangarei, to the freezing works at Moerewa. The land-development scheme proved to be no success: the farms, often too small and too rugged, not always well managed, produced very little revenue and compared poorly with the economics of labouring in town. The fishing industry was badly knocked by the incursion of commercial trawlers into the Ngati Wai fishing grounds; when these trawlers were stopped, most of the fish had disappeaed. Although even now people spend much of their time by the sea, their catches poorly reward their time. During the war many had discovered they could be tradesmen; they preferred to continue doing what they had learned in the armed services, or war industries, rather than cope with the far harder life at home. Many houses began to stand empty, especially on the peninsula, once populous but now virtually deserted. The houses along the mainland beaches, with their difficult land access, followed next, although some are still inhabited. Lastly, even the houses along the road are falling into disuse as one family after another gives up its ancestral home. Many men, anxious to cling to their old life, left the houses inhabited by their wives and children, and went to work outside the district. Sometimes the wives join them: the children are left

in the care of a relative—grandparent, uncle or aunt, or older sister. The parents come back home when they can, but often this is only rarely. Problems of the High School Just after the war the Punaruku Maori School was made a district high school, serving not only the people along the road but also Ngaiotonga, where a new development scheme of the Department of Maori Affairs has just been established. Until then, those families who could, had sent their children to boarding schools, where some of them did well and passed their School Certificate. Although some of these children had good careers subsequently, many preferred, as soon as they had finished their studies, to take up unskilled jobs where they felt secure in a familiar environment. The high school did not, when first opened, have the same prestige as the boarding schools, nor were the scholastic results of these first years sufficiently encouraging to change the opinions of the people. It is not hard to see why. The boarding schools had provided the children with a way of life specially planned to encourage learning—regular meals and bed times, constant supervision, fixed study period for homework, an atmosphere of learning, a blotting out of all those influences of village life which might distract the children. In these circumstances the average Maori child has a good chance of success at examinations, although difficulties may set in when the children leave the cloistered atmosphere of boarding schools for the outside world. The failure of the farms has left behind a distressing listlessness and sense of defeat; the absence of so many parents increases the children's aimlessnes; the community, with its traditions and its economy in a state of collapse, suffers from acute cultural impoverishment. The effect of this on the attainment of school children, although hard to measure, must be severe. It puts unbelievable limits on working vocabulary, as well as on familiarity with the outside world, while the listlessness that goes with such impoverishment inhibits rather than encourages the inborn desire to learn.