Akitio: A Country School and its Community

1

On the East Coast of New Zealand, between Cape Turnagain and Castle Point, and more narrowly, between the Akitio and Aohanga Rivers, lies that slab of country with which I am concerned in this study. The cluster of houses and homesteads at the mouth of the Akitio River may be called Akitio proper: in the following notes I will refer to this area, and the beach and farmland surrounding it, as Akitio. The present population of the wholepage 331 Akitio County is approximately twelve hundred people, of whom ninety- five per cent are farmers or farm workers. From the original Akitio Estate, bought from the Maoris by Sir Donald MacLean in the middle of the last century, sheep and cattle stations grew by subdivision, sale, bequest, and the settlement of returned soldiers. In early days Porangahau to the north, was a fighting pa; and over seven miles of coastal flats are still covered by the abandoned earthworks of the Maoris. One farmer at Akitio owns a magnificent collection of Maori and moa-hunter relics, including sharpening stones, axes, fish hooks, sinkers, needles, and even a small kumara god which the Maoris placed in their fields to ensure fertility. The Akitio coast was a highway for the Maoris, and the stones of their ovens remain buried in the sandhills, fire-blackened, with skeletons of men killed in some fatal ambush. They have left their names to the stations – Marainanga (‘many whitebait’), Moanaroa (‘long seacoast’), Huiarau (‘hill of the huias’), Wakawahine (‘the woman in the canoe’) – and gone elsewhere; though there is a pa and Maori school at Aohanga, south of Akitio, and much seasonal work on the stations is done by the Maoris.

In the memory and imagination of the present inhabitants of Akitio (and hence in the minds of their children) the pioneering and sawmilling days stand out as a Homeric era. The energy of the conquest spent itself in the destruction by fire and axe of the large totara and matai forests. Stumps are still standing on many river flats. Bullock wagons were used to bring wool to the coastal steamer until 1944. The bullock driver stood waist high in the surf, cracking his long whip, while the bullocks plunged out and pulled the wagons alongside the lighters. A wagon still rusts on the sand above the ruined beach jetty, of which the broken supports remain and one horizontal slab of timber pointing like a gun seaward. Until a bridge was built in 1914, draught horses brought the baled wool by dray from Akitio homestead to the river, where it was ferried across in a boat. This boat now rots in a pine plantation below the bridge, orange-coloured needles raining down upon it, mossy but solid still, with square-headed copper nails in its thwarts and small saplings growing through its hull.

The Akitio Estate was sold by Sir Donald MacLean to James Armstrong, grandfather of the present owner of Akitio Station. The first Akitio homestead, a one-storied house with a verandah, was built about 1876 and pulled down about the turn of the century to make room for the present homestead, two-storeyed, with lawns, stables, gardens, tennis courts – and within the house, a hall, a billiard room, a wide staircase, and servants’ quarters. In the private graveyard of Akitio Station stands a handsome monument inscribed thus:

In memory of / JAMES ARMSTRONG / born July 25th 1832 / at Henwoodie / Roxburghshire, Scotland: / and was drowned in / Akiteo River / September 1st 1880 . . .

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On another face of the monument is a further inscription:

In memory of ARCHIBALD ARMSTRONG / aged 24 years / who was drowned when / trying to save his uncle / JAMES ARMSTRONG . . .

Around this monument lie the graves of those who have lived and died on Akitio Station – the wife of a sawmill manager, a shepherd and his wife who came to New Zealand with the first Armstrong, two children who died of English cholera, a groom killed by a bucking horse, and a cook whose concrete gravestone bears no inscription because no one knew his name.

The first Armstrong was sucked down with his horse by a quicksand at the cattle crossing near the mouth of the Akitio River, while loungers on the verandah of the long-vanished hotel tried unsuccessfully to launch a boat. In the history of Akitio the river assumes early the character of an uncontrollable local deity, fished in, harnessed to float logs from the sawmills to the sea, but treacherous, able to rise thirty feet in twelve hours, destroying roads, bridges, stock, and even human life. In Akitio, as in any country community, the lives of children and adults are modified greatly by the natural surroundings. A farmer’s work, or school routine, can easily be disrupted by weather conditions. In the logbook of Waione School, kept since 1900 – Waione is nineteen miles upriver from Akitio – one finds continual reference to the effect of weather upon school attendance:

The roads are very bad and nearly impassable . . . (This statement, or its equivalent, occurs like a refrain throughout the logbook.) Unusually heavy rain for twelve hours caused the river to rise in full flood. Much damage was done to the mill property . . . Eileen H. has gone to town with her mother – their house had 5 ft. of water in it . . .

The winter attendance problem has been at times equally real in Akitio:

13/10/52. Took charge of school today from two sheep who were promptly evicted. Bus not running today as no licensed driver available. Children from Ora and Low-level being transported by parents’ cars . . .

1953. 9th June. School visited by Art Specialist. 1.45 p.m. School evacuated, heavy flooding . . .

June 15th. School bus not running, roads washed out. Low-level and Glen Ora children receiving lessons at home . . .

These extracts are chosen partly for their documentary value. The life of teacher, parents, and children must be seen against a natural background which is by no means static and may at times take control of the stage.

2

A school was built about 1906 at Akitio Station for the use of those children whose parents worked on the station. In 1909 a Mr Grant was teaching atpage 333 this school. At some undetermined date a new school was built where the coastal road climbs from Akitio beach towards Pongaroa, and the present school stands on the same site. The Akitio School has been opened and closed many times in answer to the needs of the floating population of the district.

The flexibility of outlook required of a country teacher and the courage to adapt to difficult conditions are developed in response to three main factors – isolation in one form or another, irregular attendance of children, and problems of accommodation. Mrs Berry, now wife of the manager of Glen Ora Station, taught at Akitio in 1934 and 1935. There were nine children at the school when she began teaching. Over the two years she was obliged to board with several different families. She was keenly aware of the lack of social life in the district. Dances were then held only at Pongaroa. Most of the men working in the Akitio area were single. In recent years, however, in order to hold their staff, the station owners have been obliged to build houses for married couples, and the school population has swelled, though it still fluctuates considerably. Eighteen pupils attended in 1953; in 1956, twenty-seven; at the end of 1956, thirty-three; at the beginning of 1957, twenty-four. A child may often attend school for five or six weeks, then leave when the father (a shearer, contract fencer, cowman, or scrubcutter) shifts to another locality. Hence problems of remedial reading are permanent in Akitio School.

When the school was rebuilt, in the winter of 1949, it was brought in sections from Kaituna in lorries. The roof of the old school was sagging, and the committee had decided that it would not last the winter. The erection of the new school was a community project. Labour was given free – this is typical of the communal activity of Akitio.

Fenced round with ngaio trees, under the bare sheep-nibbled hills and less than a hundred yards from the beach, the area on which the school building stands has been cultivated by the children. With stones carried from the beach they have built cemented terraces; they have made a flower garden and paved the playground with shingle. In the garden grow irises, marigolds, broom, native shrubs, hollyhocks, and lupin. The school itself is a one-roomed structure. New lavatories have lately been built, and shrubs supplied for shelter belts after discussion with nature study specialists. Such developments depend largely on the initiative of the teacher and his ability to co-operate easily with children, parents, and the School Committee.

Within the school two dozen children, ranging in age from five to thirteen, sit at their desks – at least, during formal lessons they sit, but in the freedom of the afternoon some child is usually on his feet – leaning over a desk, discussing project work with animation, sharpening a pencil – part of the slow natural circulation of the group. A projector, bought with community funds, stands on a cupboard in the corner; around the walls are pinned the inevitable drawings, newspaper photographs, and printed itemspage 334 of information. A black-eyed Maori infant in a straight dress looks up from the ‘book’ she is making, with a wide stare. The oldest boy in the school, nervous, quick-moving, intelligent, with hair so fair it is almost white, stands by the teacher’s desk with one hand on an open exercise book. The teacher leans over the desk, talking quietly and glancing up at intervals into the boy’s face. They are equals exchanging ideas. The smallness of the room, of the school itself, is what one notices most. Yet this one place, hidden in a dip between the hill and the sea, is in fact the hub of a great deal of the life of Akitio.

In a town school, teacher and parents can be, and often are, comparative strangers. The teacher’s work, if he so wishes, can be restricted to the narrow field of contact with the children which is possible in classroom and playground, and to the time limit of an eight-hour day. In a country school no clear division of private and public function can be made: a country teacher is, whether he likes it or not, a member of the community. If he does not adapt readily to new circumstances, if he tends to be cold, suspicious, over-anxious, or timid in his dealings with people outside the classroom, his experience of country teaching can be calamitous. Sociability is the quality most prized in Akitio. In a community of widely separated families, social occasions are more than peripheral activity. The solidarity of the community, its common assault upon the isolation which each farming family must in some measure put up with, is greatly strengthened by every communal gathering. A country teacher may, if he wishes, guide or innovate such activity; for his own survival, he is obliged at least to participate.

I recall the Akitio teacher, Mr White, driving the red, squat school bus, up-hill-and-down, round the bluffs above the Akitio River. The bus was full of long-haired, clear-eyed country children, many of them barefoot, who sang in unison, ‘The Other Side of the Mountain’ and ‘Show me the Way to Go Home’. As the bus came up a steep rise, a herd of Polled Angus steers, escorted by four mottled dogs and a young man on horseback, blocked the road. Mr White exchanged news with the horseman. Their informal conversation seemed to me the expression of a permanent relationship which existed between them – between two members of the Akitio community in an environment where even the most casual contact had social and personal value.

I recall too a Saturday morning spent on the Akitio reef with Mr White and three children. We waded through pools and channels, through bushes of seaweed, over layered rocks, waistdeep and neckdeep. The two boys and their teacher, feeling with hands and feet first to the bottom, emerged with crayfish writhing in their fists. The girl held the sack ready for each crayfish. It was work and play at once. Mr White, who is by no means a ‘soft’ teacher, had the full respect of the children and did not lose it by disappearing under water. That rare thing, a natural ‘child-teacher relationship’, existedpage 335 between them. For me, it was a peculiarly real and wholesome experience. The crayfish, boiled the same day, were remarkably good eating.

3

The leisure activities open to a country child are vigorous and innumerable – riding in a Land Rover across the bumpy swamp; hunting opossums (there is a halfcrown bounty for each token, a strip of skin taken from the back and including the tail); catching tadpoles; climbing trees; riding wooden sledges down a grassy hill; fishing, swimming, paddling on the reef; catching crayfish and paua, or gecko lizards from under logs, and fearlessly turning over stones to catch and crush the poisonous, orange-backed katipo spider; looking after their pets.

Lately the Akitio children, by arrangement, spent a week in Wellington, and later, children from a Wellington school visited Akitio. It seems likely that the Wellington children had the best of the bargain. They rode horses, travelled in a ‘cage’ across a flooded river, bathed in the surf, held eeling parties, caught whitebait, hunted opossums, watched farm machinery at work, and held a picnic around a bonfire on the beach. The Akitio children remembered chiefly their visit to the Wellington wharves.

Though full evidence would be hard to get, I have a strong impression that country children are generally more stable, mainly because of their close acquaintance with the natural world. The births, deaths, and matings of animals, the docking of lambs, the branding of calves – these recurring features of farm life, experienced not erratically but in a yearly cycle, accustom the children early to an acceptance of facts of growth, pain, sex, and death which are either (imperfectly) concealed from town children or experienced by them in sudden leaps of knowledge without the sense of a regular sustaining pattern. It is necessary for a country teacher to recognise that the children whom he teaches may know more than he will ever know about many important aspects of their community and environment. At Akitio a boy of twelve may already be a responsible helper on his parents’ farm, milking, chopping wood, administering penicillin to sick animals; a girl of ten may assist her mother in farm and household work, and help her to prepare ‘demonstrations’ for the next meeting of the Women’s Division of Federated Farmers.

In such circumstances education must take a different shape from that pattern of social studies research, nature study expeditions, essays written about trips to the seaside with which a town teacher is only too familiar. The country community and environment supply the teacher with an embarrassing richness of material. The teaching of basic skills, perhaps, will need no change; but if a country teacher retains an orthodox approach to the less formal work of the classroom, he may find himself absurdly offeringpage 336 ‘information’ to children already in contact with a deep and real culture, who possess a knowledge of the history of their district and a sense of significance in their immediate present which his methods should amplify but not supplant. . . .

One notices how rarely their mothers appear as characters in the children’s stories. It is as if the active outdoor life of the farm, in which their fathers play the central role, occupies the forefront of their minds, while domestic life occupies the permanent, unacknowledged background.

Mr White, who has a strong interest in number work, has set a group of older children at work marking out areas to scale in the section above the school. Within the school buildings a ‘school shop’ was in constant use, particularly valuable to the children in a community without shops, where opportunities for the use and recognition of money is limited and goods are ordered by toll call to Dannevirke or Pongaroa. A school magazine had been established in which the children expounded their own theories about the origin of the huge deposits of stones which pile up on Akitio beach during the winter months. Their strong interest in, and familiarity with all types of machinery found expression in a detailed account of the working of the ‘Quickway’ diesel crushing machine with which a Dannevirke contractor, after he had bulldozed the stones into even huger piles, crushed them for use as road metal. The children have also exchanged news sheets with a town school in Masterton, and sent other written work to a sole-charge school in the King Country. The news sheets consisted chiefly of nature study material, written and illustrated. The Akitio reef is an inexhaustible treasure-house of just such material.

In the course of an ordinary week the children perform several plays developed from stories; and at the end of the year all sole-charge schools in the district combine for a Cultural Day at Pongaroa, where art and craft exhibits are displayed in the Community Centre building and each school ‘puts on’ an item. The art work of the Akitio children earned special comment from a visiting Fulbright scholar.

The methods used by Mr White to cope with special teaching problems are perhaps the stock-in-trade of every schoolteacher. But it is very noticeable that the function of Mr White in the Akitio community extends far beyond the minimum role of instructor and classroom disciplinarian. He is secretary of the social committee (a body entirely separate from the school committee) formed to organise games evenings, dances, and other social gatherings. These gatherings are usually held in the ‘landing shed’, a large barnlike structure built near the beach on the property of a local farmer, and used until the nineteen-forties for storing wool. He is projectionist for the films which are shown every second Saturday, also in the ‘landing shed’. The older children send out written notices for these showings, as for other social events:

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• Dec. 15th. An American in Paris, Gene Kelly, Leslie Caron.
• Dec. 26th. Above and Beyond, Robert Taylor, Eleanor Parker.
• Jan 5th. The Great Waltz, Militza Korjas.
• Feb. 2nd. David Copperfield, Fred Bartholomew, W.C. Fields.

In effect the children are liaison officers who make easy contact possible between the teacher as accepted organiser and their own families. To take on the role of organiser requires considerable social acumen, and a finger on the pulse of community feeling.

As the working year of the farmer has its regular cycle of activities – mustering, crutching, lambing, shearing – so the leisure pursuits of the people of Akitio follow a yearly pattern. From the end of January to the beginning of March, horse sports are held at Glen Ora station, at Weber, at Aohanga, and at Pongaroa. These meetings are advertised by poster:

WEBER / Combined Athletic and Horse / PICNIC SPORTS / To be held at Weber on Grounds Kindly Lent / by the Hales Family Opposite Weber Church . . .

Older children are allowed to compete at these sports meetings. The events are tests of speed and horsemanship – jumping, turning around obstacles, ‘threading the needle’ (in which event the horseman carries an iron ring to his partner, waits till it is threaded, then races to the end of the paddock). Since both children and adults are usually expert riders the standard of performance is high. There are also purely athletic meetings. At Glen Ora the sports day often finishes with a dance in the woolshed.

Anzac Day is celebrated on the school premises with as many as fifty participants. Flower shows are held regularly in the ‘landing shed’ by the Women’s Division of Federated Farmers; and the children also hold yearly a small flower show. The major event of the children’s year, however, is the Pet Show, for which they prepare for months beforehand, training and grooming horses, pet lambs, dogs, budgies, and magpies. Finally comes the New Year Dance in the ‘landing shed’, during the camping season, a festival at which three hundred may attend. But the gatherings which play the largest part in holding the community together are the regular weekly games evenings, held each Wednesday night. Farmers and farm workers, men and women, mingle to play darts, deck croquet, indoor bowls, and table tennis. Money collected at the games evening is handled by the social committee, who give a grant of about thirty pounds to the school each year. Children come with their parents and sleep under blankets in the cars. I remember seeing one boy asleep on a pile of dry seaweed [‘Agar’ seaweed collected on the Akitio beach and sold for jelly-making at £17 a bale] in a corner of the ‘landing shed’; his father roused him at the end of the evening and led him out by the arm, still half-asleep. As in a tribal group, the children of Akitio participate from an early age in adult gatherings.

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Since there is no hotel at Akitio, most of the people keep drink in their houses; and most of the men would rather have a drink at their own or neighbour’s fireside than spend an afternoon at the bar in Dannevirke. In this their drinking habits compare favourably with those of townsmen. The whisky bottle is a symbol of that sociability which they value; and their womenfolk seem on the whole to accept it as such. They too have their ways of overcoming the pressure of isolation which is always present in the life of a country community. One woman, the wife of a station manager, sitting at the wheel of a new car on the road below the school, expressed it very clearly. ‘I get books from the library,’ she said, ‘but I can’t settle down to read them. I always want to be up and doing. There’s a homestead built further back on the place, out of sight of the road – but it wouldn’t do me, living there. I like to be able to see whatever’s passing on the road.’

However well-equipped her kitchen, however large the wool-cheque, however modern the car and radio may be, without regular neighbourly contact the life of a country woman would be unendurable. Thus sociability and participation in local affairs are not simply matters of private choice and liking; they are an essential groundwork making community life possible. In this context of necessary activity the Women’s Division of Federated Farmers occupies a special place. The Akitio Division, formed in October 1954, meets every second Wednesday in the month. The meetings are held either in the ‘landing shed’ or in the home of one or other of the members. Children under school age accompany their mothers to these meetings. The immediate practical aims of the Division include work for CORSO, making soft toys for Dannevirke Hospital, knitting, preparing for and holding flower shows, ‘demonstrations’ (for example, of the making of table place mats), and of late the financial support of a child in Lebanon. Members from Akitio attend the ‘birthday parties’ of other Divisions in Pangaroa, Waione, or Horoeka. The attainment of a sense of solidarity as a group, a keeping up of morale, is plainly the central aim and function of the Division.

The deep mutual dependence of members of the Akitio community tends to reduce feuding and harsh gossip to a minimum; and the sociability of the parents is reflected in the children’s attitude to one another. Allowing for the aggressiveness natural to their age, the Akitio children seem singularly helpful to one another. The elder children look after the younger, drawing them by degrees into the working routine of school as they have already drawn them by example into opossum-hunting expeditions, the gathering of shellfish, and innumerable other activities.

The standard of literacy in the Akitio community seems reasonably high. Though naturally the interests of country children are turned outwards, many of them in Akitio read widely and enjoy buying books on a trip to town. The local Country Library Service is managed by Mrs White. Books on travel and biography are favourites; and one farmer, through the librarypage 339 service, has made a study of Polynesian mythology. Mrs White is also an active member of the Women’s Division of Federated Farmers; and one entry in the logbook of Akitio School indicates that her duties at times extend further: ‘15th August 1956. Richard Berry broke his leg in the playground. I took him to the Dannevirke Hospital. Children taken by Mrs White and Miss L. Thom for the day. Full report furnished to Board.’ The situation of a country teacher’s wife would be difficult for a woman who insisted on having every amenity of town life. At their arrival in Akitio the Whites lived for six months in shearing quarters while the present schoolhouse was being built; and though they now occupy an attractive modern house, there are no shops in Akitio, there is no kindergarten for younger children, and no immediate contact with relatives. One sees from the window of the house a bare, open coast dotted with clumps of karaka trees bent by the southerlies. The windows cannot be kept clean in winter because of the spray that blows up from the sea. Medical attention depends principally upon the visits of the District Nurse. A teacher’s wife in Akitio, if she were not apt at making contact with her neighbours, could suffer severely from isolation. But Mrs White has adjusted readily to the life of Akitio and would be loath to leave.

4

Since the greater part of the life of the children of Akitio is spent at home, it is essential to include in these notes some sketches of their physical environment. The country near the coast is very rugged. I remember climbing the steep hill above the Marainanga homestead – so steep that not even a Land Rover can get up it. The homestead itself, which I could see below me, is one of the oldest in the district. Thirty years ago two full-time gardeners were employed there, and probably at least two maids. At the side of the house stands a strongroom, curved like an air raid shelter, where jewels were once kept and money for the payment of staff. A wooden plate on the wall near the office, with two crossed flags and the name PLEIADES, is a relic salvaged from a boat wrecked, probably for the sake of insurance, at the turn of the century, the bones of which, black and mussel-covered, still project above the water at low tide on Akitio beach. Four blue glass bottles stand on a shelf in the office, hand-grenade fire extinguishers patented in 1884; a map on the wall, made in 1895, has unformed pencil writing upon it, scrawled perhaps by the child of a station owner when her governess was not looking. The homestead is two-storeyed, high and red-roofed, with fruit trees at the back, grapes in a verandah greenhouse, and piles of timber cut in the yard.

A jeep is pulling a trailer along the road beside the pine plantation. A man is sharpening a circular saw in the woodyard, while a younger man tests the engine. The chugging, panting sound rises up the hill to me. From the top of the steep grassy face I can see the Akitio coast from Cape Turnagainpage 340 to Castlepoint, gigantic hundred-head cabbage trees, breakers drumming on the beach, the elbow of the blue-green river and its outlet cut in the sand; and nearer at hand, the circular sheepyards on the green level flat, dog kennels under macrocarpa branches that stretch horizontally for thirty feet or more, and two great boulders fallen from an old slip on the face, one halfway to the belt of pines that surrounds the homestead, the other leaning as if stopped by the paddock fence.

The manager of Marainanga and his wife (father and mother to the Whites when they first came into the district) occupy only a part of the homestead, which was built for a family of eight or nine in the days when there was no shortage of staff. Their youngest child goes to Akitio School. I remember him curled up with a book in an armchair in the large sitting-room, stocky, vigorous, and alert, while his father explained to me the cycle of the farming year on Marainanaga Station.

In January and February the sheep are mustered to finish weaning. The sheep are also dipped, and the poorer stock is culled from the better and disposed for the ewe fairs. These are dry months.

In March the rams are freed among the ewes and sheep are mustered for grazing purposes. March is usually a lean month. If rain comes it will lead to good growth, though facial eczema may increase among the ewes. In April the cattle are weaned and stock is shifted for feeding. In May and June the sheep are crutched. In July the breeding ewes are sorted and put into lambing paddocks. (The time of pregnancy of a ewe is 21 weeks.)

In August and September lambing occurs and cows calve. In the latter part of September the young lambs are docked. In October ‘dry’ sheep are shorn – that is, wethers and those ewes which are not feeding lambs. In November and December the ‘wet’ sheep are shorn. Calves are marked and branded. The bulls are let out to the cows.

Those events are part of the boy’s permanent environment, the unconscious education which he acquires every day of his life. Since there is no secondary school nearer than Dannevirke, it is likely that he will eventually go to a boarding school where he will learn many things unrelated to his early experience. But if he becomes a farmer in later life the knowledge which he has taken for granted and even forgotten will rise again in his mind as soon as the smell of a stable enters his nostrils.

From the top of another hill, on Te Tumu Station further inland, the station owner showed me the two-mile-wide belt of clay gashes which heavy rains had made, moving across the land like a scythe. Erosion after heavy rain is a constant problem for the Akitio farmer, and has been ever since the bush was cleared. On Te Tumu Station a tractor with hydraulic lift was shifting the stumps of timber that remained on the river flats. A topdressing plane took off from a strip beside the river. A plume of superphosphate fanned out behind it and drifted down on the hill paddocks. Incredibly large silver-page 341beet plants grow in the homestead garden; but the soil on the ridges requires regular top-dressing. In 1956 a high flood rose on to the homestead lawn. The course of the river has now been changed by bulldozing. ‘It may not be for the best,’ said the station owner, ‘you can go too far against Nature’. At evening a flock of mallard ducks which he had tamed flew down to the back lawn to be fed by him.

Each station is in a large degree self-contained and self-supporting. Sheep for the cookhouse are killed on the station, and other food, brought by van from Dannevirke, is kept in stock in case of isolation by bad weather. Yet each farmer shares the problems of his neighbour – how to prevent facial eczema among ewes; the need for rotational grazing; whether to use concrete posts or totara for fencing, or, as at Te Tumu, stainless steel chains. The farmers have in most cases an aerial map of their property, essential for efficient topdressing, marked with the names of paddocks – ‘Front Sawpit; Back Sawpit; Pohai; Trig; Hundred Acres; Rough; Brodie’s Holding; Hikurangi; Whare; Spring Flat; No. 1 Cadmus; No. 2 Cadmus’. The children look at these maps over their father’s shoulders and join as they grow older in the discussion of tactics – to preserve stock, to increase the fertility of land, to avoid disease. A wet season increases footrot. Cold, dry weather kills parasites. Thus the children acquire an extensive and mainly unconscious knowledge of their environment. It would be superfluous for a teacher to instruct them formally in these aspects of Social Studies.

5

I have already suggested one possible reason for the vigorous community life of Akitio – namely, the constant need of the people to band together against isolation. One other possible reason I will put forward tentatively. The society of Akitio is not sharply stratified into classes. Though incomes vary, the possession of a large income in Akitio is comparatively unimportant as a measure of social status. Even in the early days when station owners lived like country squires with many retainers, it seems likely that they valued a way of life much more than any monetary reward. Today a more democratic relationship prevails. In their leisure-time pursuits employer and employee mix on an equal footing, and the wife of the fencer knits with the wife of the station manager. The middlemen of an urban community, those who are concerned with ledger work and the sale of goods, have no immediate place in Akitio. The chief division of status occurs between the ‘settled’ and the ‘unsettled’ members of the community, between those who have lived long in Akitio, whether they are owners, managers, or station hands, and the floating population who have no special attachment to the district. Despite the use of farm machinery, the society of Akitio closely resembles a pre-industrial society. Its cohesive power is very great. One would expect the pressure uponpage 342 the individual to conform to group behaviour patterns to be equally great. Yet this is not so. Individual traits and eccentricities are readily tolerated; or so at least it seemed to me on brief acquaintance. Inevitably the children who come from this environment develop initiative and stability at an early age. The teacher who comes to them solely to instruct will defeat his own aims; but the man who is prepared to learn from the children and the community they represent will not be disappointed.

1957-58 (168)