MAORI GIRL

By Noel Hilliard. (Wm. Heinemann Ltd., publisher) Reviewed by Melvin Taylor

This Is An extraordinarily well-written, gripping novel dealing with a subject close to the Maori people—the problem of the young and unsophisticated Maori impelled by a variety of circumstances to leave their country homes and work in the city.

There is probably no Maori who has not met this problem, either in their own experience or through some one dear to them.

For this reason alone, quite apart from its entertainment value, Maori Girl should have universal interest and appeal in the Maori world.

Basically, Maori Girl is a documentary study of the stress and tragedy of city life swamping a young Maori, Netta Samuel. But it is much more, too. It is extra good entertainment, a pleasant way of passing the time. But it is much more than that, too. It is a powerful and moving drama as indeed is the real life story of the thousands of young Netta Samuels who must make their way in the cities, though ill-equipped to cope with the city which is equally ill-equipped to cope with them.

The story is told with a great depth of feeling and insight into the problems with which young Maori people and their parents are all too familiar. It is full of the human, warm and homespun touches that make it easy to identify one's self, friends and relations with the characters involved. I can hear many a Maori saying, “that sounds just like what happened to Kura, or Wai or Bubs,” for it is a story that has been lived many times though no other writer has seen it so clearly or painted it so vividly as Mr Hilliard.

This is the problem that administrators necessarily paint with cold statistics. This is the major Maori social problem of our time. This is the plight of the Maori people in their migration from country to town. This is that problem, in the raw, crying out for an answer.

Mr Hilliard paints the picture with a skilful use of words. He sets the changing scenes swiftly with a few lightning strokes of his word brush so that one naturally captures the current mood of his characters.

For those who have waited years for this theme to be dramatised, and there are many, I would say that this is it—the New Zealand novel of our time, in that it deals successfully with perhaps the major social problem of our time.

Mr Hilliard does not spell out the moral, he does not lecture. He simply tells the story which carries its own dynamic message, tinged with sadness, of the pitfalls of city life for those not armed to meet its thrusts.

THE POHUTUKAWA TREE

by Bruce Mason. Price Milburn, Wellington 7/6. Reviewed by Earle Spencer.

The Pohutukawa Tree by Bruce Mason, is a play about a widow of sixty, Aroha Mataira, who lives with her two children Queenie and Johnny, at Te Parenga. As her children grow up Mrs Mataira teaches them to believe in their Maori-tanga and in the Christian religion. When the play begins, Queenie is seventeen and Johnny is eighteen. The family works for Mr Atkinson who has fifteen acres of the best land in Te Parenga laid out as a citrus orchard.

The story is simple enough. Queenie meets a young man and falls in love with him. After three months she finds that she is going to have a baby but he refuses to marry her because she is a Maori. Mrs Mataira sends Queenie away to her people, the Ngati Raukura, at Tamatea, to have the baby. Johnny reacts violently to the family's unhappiness. He gets drunk and taking a taiaha, goes to the Church and smashes the stained glass window of the Light of the World behind and above the altar. He is charged with wilful damage and sentenced to three months' reformative detention.

The play makes it clear that the young ones, Queenie and Johnny, will outlive their troubles, but the double disgrace kills Aroha. The people of the community who know her and respect her cannot comfort her. She wills her death rather than have anything to do with their cheap alternatives. She is found at the end with the taiaha by two old Maori women dressed in black with black scarves around their heads. Ka to he ra, ka ura he ra.

The play was first produced in 1957 by the New Zealand Players Theatre Workshop at Wellington and Auckland. It has since been produced in 1959 on the B.B.C. Television Sunday Night Theatre series and in 1960 in New Zealand by the New Zealand Broadcasting Service, and recently, most successfully in Wales. Aroha Mataira and her children, the farmer Atkinson and his wife and daughter, the Reverend Athol Sedgewick, Claude Johnson, the land agent, and the others in this play have been introduced to millions of people. These people have seen and heard Mr Mason describe things as they are.

Roy McDowell, the grocer's son who refuses to marry Queenie, the daughter of twenty-five generations of the Ngati-Raukura, says, “Aw, what does it matter to my Mum that Queenie comes from a long line of chiefs. She's just a Maori to her.”

When Mrs Mataira is mortally sick Mrs Atkinson, the farmer's wife, says, “For nearly twenty years I patronised her, thought of her almost as a servant…. And when it comes to a crisis what do I do? Snip flowers.”

Clive Atkinson has a rough affection for Mrs Mataira but he wants her land. Johnny at eighteen loves horses and reads comics. And then there is Aroha Mataira herself, who minds her own business and who will not listen when the Reverend Athol Sedgwick says to her, “Forget greatness; forget history.”

Mr Mason has dedicated the book to the Maori people with these words, “Nga mihi me taku aroha ki te iwi Maori.”

I recommend it to you.

DUTCH CLERGYMAN JOINS MAORI SYNOD

A Dutch Imigrant clergyman has accepted an appointment with the Maori Synod. He is the Reverend P. H. de Bres who has been chaplain to the Dutch immigrants in the Wellington district since his arrival in New Zealand in 1954. Mr de Bres resigned from this position early this year. Mr de Bres, who is also the minister of St David's Presbyterian Church, Lower Hutt, has accepted an appointment with the Maori Synod, which he will take up by the end of the year. During 1961, he will devote part of his time to the study of Maori language and culture.