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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 9, Issue 10 (January 1, 1935)

The Wisdom of the Maori

page 47

The Wisdom of the Maori

The Old Garb.

The modern Maori only reverts to the rapaki, the easy-going kilt fashion, when he is called upon to dance like mad for the delectation of the pakeha. In between times he is expected to be a perfect model of the conventionally trousered European. But here and there, in small villages in Maori districts, an ancient man of a now well-tamed fighting clan clings to the shawl or blanket equivalent of the Highland garb. Wise old fellows, they know where comfort lies, and decline to be slaves of the white man's upsetting ways. One of the last—perhaps the very last—of these stout conservatives was Hotu Paku-Kohatu, the venerable chief of the Ngati-Kinohaku, a section of the Ngati-Maniapoto tribe, who died in the King Country recently. He was about ninety years old; he had seen much of wild life and dangerous days; a thoroughgoing old patriot and warrior. All his life he wore the rapaki, and in the new age, when the hand of pakeha progress transformed the King Country he retained his love for the old ways of life and the old costume in the kainga, and abroad, too, when once in a while he visited the town of Te Kuiti.

The Patriarch: A Picture of the Past.

The olden Maori has been called a savage by those who only saw one side of him, but if so-called savagery consists in a condition unlike modern civilisation then the Maori of the past represents a superior state of society. The defence of poison gas in warfare publicly uttered by an English scientist—it was recorded in the cablegrams lately—prompts one to turn with relief to the tales of old New Zealand and the South Seas before the “savages” were civilised. The scientist declared that poison gas was the most humane way of laying out an enemy. I wonder what my old Arawa acquaintance, Te Araki te Pohu, would have said about such things as mustard gas had be encountered them in the course of his war-path activities! The Maori tongue would have failed to express the abhorrence with which a straight-out gun or tomahawk fighter would have regarded such a diabolical torture.

A Stone Age Relic.

I must describe Te Araki; he lives in my memory as a perfect type of the warrior who was born in the stone age of New Zealand, and who lived to see almost every vestige of the pre-pakeha, or say pre-Waitangi Treaty times, overlaid by European ways of life and by the machines that displaced man-power. He was, I should judge, five or six years short of the century when he died peacefully soaking in a warm spring, his beloved puia bath, at Owhatiura, on the shore of Lake Rotorua. He lived into this twentieth century; he was born, I estimated, about 1813, before the first coming of the apostle Marsden to the Bay of Islands. That Rongo-pai gospel of the missionary did not reach his part of the country until he was a grown man, and indeed already a veteran of the warpath. I wish our overseas guests who come to New Zealand hoping to see a tattooed Maori of the warrior brand could only set eyes on Te Araki as I knew him. He was a perfect product of the age when every Maori was a trained soldier and athlete. His features were strongly cut, with a true Jewish nose—the fine “ihu-kaka,” like an eagle's beak, that so curiously persists in some Arawa families of aristocratic lineage.

The Warrior's Moko.

He had the keen shrewd gaze of the vastly experienced, the wise eye of the sage and the mystic. His face was closely and deeply carved with tattoo lines; the moko was so pigmented that his face seemed almost black. I have never, indeed, seen a Maori face more artistically and carefully and deeply moko'd than that patriarch of Owhatiura. His hair was white and long; he wore a long but thin straggly white beard. Yet for all his years that the snowy hair indicated, his tall square-shouldered body was still erect. He looked the old soldier, without a pound of needless flesh.

When I first met him he was working away quietly and alone in his potato garden; when he straightened up for a talk he told me all the younger ones were away at a football match. He lived in the past. He had long outlived all his old comrades. He told me of great chiefs of the past under whom he had fought in the cannibal wars. He had fought against the celebrated Te Waharoa, when that famed and feared warrior invaded Rotorua with his army from Matamata and Waikato. That was in 1835.

But long before that, even, Te Araki had seen fierce battle. He was a boy of nine or ten when Hongi Hika and his Ngapuhi musketeers descended on Rotorua from the North, bringing their canoes up from the coast with ferocious determination and tremendous toil. That was when Mokoia Island was captured, in 1823. Boys went on their first war-path at twelve or thirteen in Maoridom; and Te Araki's fighting expeditions ranged from the South Taupo country to the Bay of Plenty coast.

The good old man had a curious pagan philosophy of his own, and his stories shed for me some new light on the ethics of the primitive polity.

The Storming of Te Tumu.

His most dramatic tale of all was a thriller, as he told it, the fire of old-time glittering in his eyes. Indeed, his eyes blazed; his muscle-knotted lean old hands clenched, and out poured a flood of narrative. It was the attack by sixteen hundred warriors, the full fighting strength of the Arawa, against Te Tumu pa, the Ngai-te-Rangi stronghold on the coast sandhills between Tauranga and Maketu. The patriarch was sitting with a blanket about his shoulders; he threw it off and gave it a twist round his waist for freer arm action. He described the war-dance when the army gathered at Ohinemutu from all the country round. What a terrific spectacle it was—sixteen hundred naked men of arms, black-tattooed on body as well as face, leaping as one man, and shouting their battle-song! “We were filled with the fury of war; our song was like thunder!” He described the assault of the pa. “The defenders fought desperately. They shot down many of us. But at last we broke through and over the palisade. There I was, hacking away with my long-handled tomahawk—like this!” The victory and the pursuit—the chase for miles along the shining sands of the Bay, and then the great war-dance in the conquered pa.

That dance of jubilation—the Old Man of Owhatiura forgot his years, and went through it all again, and chanted the peruperu words as he showed how the warriors held their guns and long tomahawks and taiahas before them horizontally, with both hands, and quickly raised them at arms' length above their heads, and down again in exact time to the roaring song.