Te Kooti's Great Flag.

Stored away in a case in the Dominion Museum in Wellington is the principal flag carried by Te Kooti's warriors in their many fights and expeditions, victories and defeats. This is a really wonderful speciment of flag-making. It is a very long pennant, indeed nearly fifty feet in length, and four feet in the hoist, tapering away like a naval paying-off pennant. On the red ground are worked various patriotic and national devices—the crescent moon, a cone-shaped mountain representing New Zealand, a star, a heart and a cross. Several feet of the end of the flag were sheared off many years ago; it was originally fifty-two feet in length.

Its full history would make a thrilling narrative. Sufficient here to say it was made by the nuns in the Catholic Mission School at Meanee, Hawke's Bay, for the friendly Maoris who were fighting against the Hauhaus, was captured by Te Kooti in a fight at the back of Gisborne in 1868, and for two years of warfare was carried from one place to another by the rebels. It was recaptured at last in 1870 at the foot of Tumunui Mountain, in the Rotorua district, by Captain Gilbert Mair, who shot its bearer, the half-caste Eru Peka, and was given by Mair to Dr. Hector—afterwards Sir James Hector—then in charge of the Wellington Museum, and there it has been ever since, rolled up and boxed.

When our new Dominion Museum is built maybe there will be found space to exhibit these and other forgotten flags of our storyland. At present they are unseen, unknown.