Go to National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa Go to Te Ao Hou homepage
No. 68 (1970)
Previous Section | Table of Contents | Next Section
– 55 –

One Black, One White, and Two Khaki

The taxi driver, as it happened, was Maori. I asked if he would drive me to the Aramoana.

‘The AramoAna?’

‘Yes, thanks, the AraMOana.’ I tried to flow it together. Perhaps we were both doing our best to be polite. The driver said the word the way he hears it, and I said it as my grandmother would have; it sounds pleasanter, and more like the way of the sea. I must say radio announcers on the whole make an effort to get this word right, too.

At school in the south, we learned about the Treaty of Waitangi, with the tang part pronounced as in the English word rang. My father knew better; his mother, brought up on Ruapuke, had spoken Maori so fluently that a later generation of part-Maori people used to consult her on finer points of pronunciation and meaning. The sad part was that the old Murihiku tongue, like the full-blooded southern Maori, had not survived as such. But, just as the old words were still used for many things that were part of our Foveaux Strait lives — inaka, kaeo, rara — so that race itself lived on in modified form. The European traders and sealers had unwittingly brought the germ of diseases for which the Polynesian had built up no resistance, but the new stock of half-caste children was vigorous and alert; and, since the new ways had come to stay, it was no bad thing that they included Pakeha notions of hygiene and medical care — if only to combat the Pakeha cold. Few full-blooded Maori children, or their parents, had survived that.

The girl I sat next to at school, and played with, and went swimming with, came partly of Maori origins, partly European; my Maori-speaking grandparent was the daughter of an English dressmaker and a German missionary. Later, Rena and I went to wartime first-aid classes. We meet perhaps once in six years, and write once in a blue moon, but the old warmth remains. When we played footy or supplejack hockey down on the beach at low tide, it was sometimes on the same side (boys against girls), sometimes opposite (Maoris against Whites) — an expression that would be outlawed in these enlightened

– 56 –

times. The curious part is that although we both remember sore shins, we cannot recall hurt feelings. The girls envied the boys when a new teacher came and taught them proper rugby, just as the Whites envied the Maoris come muttonbirding time. But we could hardly separate our whaling forebears from their Maori wives! We had a rhyme, ‘sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me’, and we grew up used to taking knocks. That's another thing that seems to be dying out.

Up north, where I now live, people are always going on about prejudice, discrimination, problems and so on — one European elder, a professor of psychology, has even said publicly that our biggest problem is that we don't now what a big problem we have. A southerner would not call that good psychology. He would remember the story of the hard-case old Bluff fellow (I don't know how many parts Maori, and it doesn't matter) whose lawyer made such a job of the case (I don't know what he was convicted for, either) that he got off. Later he was found sitting comfortably on the kerb, tears pouring down — he hadn't known what a poor old man he was till he heard that Pakeha fellow defending him. I don't think Mr Justice Tompkins would have taken that line.

The kind of prejudice that scares me stiff is the kind practised by well-meaning Europeans — not those who square up to the fact that the Maori crime rate is higher than the European, but those who sound as if we should start up a new brand of Hauhauism to help matters. There is also a sort of do-gooding crusade that reminds me of people who bring me nourishing soup when I'm home with a sniffly cold — don't they think I can cook? Anyhow, I'd sooner have an orange! — the people who think friendship is a thing to be forced, instead of a thing that grows naturally between people who have the same interests, or even different ones, or who just happen to like one another without going into whys and wherefores or waiting to be told by experts that it's the right thing to do.

Sheila Natusch