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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 3

Family Breaking Up in N.Z., Says Poet

Family Breaking Up in N.Z., Says Poet

New Zealanders had lost the capacity to share each other; to become involved with one another’s problems, the poet, James K. Baxter, told more than seven hundred and fifty young people in Christchurch last evening. He was the final speaker in a series of twenty weekly discussion evenings on matters of concern to young people, which have been attended by more than three thousand in the Dallington area.

In what he described as the headless advance of commerce and technology, New Zealanders were losing sight of the need that everyone had for involvement with one another, Mr Baxter said. Society was like a chair with four legs – the community, the family, the Church and the Government. What was understood once as the family was breaking up and there existed no communal feeling to stop this. If a community had problems with its young people, then only by sharing these could they be solved, Mr Baxter said.

‘Each family is issuing different instructions. If they put their heads together, in a street or in a community and parents agreed what they wanted done than the kids would accept this, a community decision.’ Only when the page 371 family could rely on the outer circle of the community could the break-down of family life be avoided.

Mr Baxter likened this example to the practice on the Maori marae where a tribal committee made decisions and they were strictly adhered to.

For too many families, Mr Baxter said, family life was constrained and unfriendly. Many existed in a ‘claustrophobic’ manner having no interaction with others outside a restricted circle. ‘Man, by nature is communal, but we are denying this at almost every turn and in its place we are expecting the Government to act as father, mother, Church and leader. Institutions were beginning to take over the formative tasks and the reformative roles once the prerogative of the community and the family.’

Mr Baxter cited the large numbers of young Maoris in the country’s prisons.

‘The big fish (cities) are swallowing the little fish (country areas),’ he said.

No matter what the individual regarded as ‘the Church’, it, too, would have to change. Mr Baxter said many Church leaders would be exceedingly wary of the priest who took the concern of his parish seriously enough to open his home to those in need. Actions of this type would shatter the idol of

respectability, he said. ‘Many are not happy to see acts of mercy done because it involves getting into it up to your neck and sometimes this can be messy.’

1971 (655)