Other formats

    TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 12, Issue 6 (September 1, 1937.)

The New Maori Farms

The New Maori Farms.

Under the Government scheme for re-establishing the Maori on the land good progress has already been made. The Maori farmer, I have observed particularly in the Rotorua and Bay of Plenty country, can farm industriously and well when he is given a fair show and assisted with advice and capital as the pakeha settler is assisted. I have not seen any farms better managed or kept more free from noxious growth than some of the group settlements started in the Rotorua country that was a waste of scrub and fern only a few years ago. The Horohoro small farms, already productive beyond all expectations, are a lesson to very many of our less thorough pakeha farmers. The grand old walls of mighty Horohoro, mountain of fame and poetry, stand guard over the new homes and wellkept farms below, where bright streams coil through grassy fields, all Maori. The scheme has cost much money, but the expenditure is well justified.

There are far too many of the Maori people leading a hand-to-mouth existence, or depending on the sustenance scheme; they are willing and anxious to work and their greatest wish is to be established on farms of their own. Land and money are needed, and the scheme for providing both has been worked out well by the Native Department. The Government is taking up the problem of decently housing the people in those districts most in need of it.

There would not be any necessity for State action, of course, if the old independent primitive life of the Maori could have been restored. Some tribes, within one's own memory, possessed a vast range of country, and were self-contained, and could subsist and thrive without any pakeha supplies if need be. But the old Maori life can never be restored completely, and the Maori himself has changed. Problems of today are being grappled with successfully, in one district after another, and the Maori farmer of the new order will become an increasingly valuable part of our national life.