At a time when 157 Maori and several Pakeha children were forbidden and punished for speaking Te Reo Maori at Whakaangiangi School, by the then Pakeha Principal John Charles, not even a mile down the same road, Mr Bill Walker, Pakeha owner of the local native timber mill company W J Walker & Sons, was actively encouraging his Ngati Porou employees to speak Te Reo Maori, so that he could converse fluently in it with his employees and clientele, the majority of whom were Maori. My Dad, Wi Wanoa, was one of those 157 Ngati Porou tamariki who suffered the strap, and other physical abuse for speaking Te Reo Ukaipo o nga Matua Tipuna o Ngati Porou.
My grandfather, Ben Wanoa and my great-grandfather Matauru Wanoa, were the two employees who participated in training Bill Walker in Te Reo Ngati Porou. My Papa Ben Wanoa, noted all this activity in his 1947 pocket-size Farmer's Diary, as he was a farmer as well as a worker in Bill Walker's native timber mill. So, while there were Pakeha educationalists of that era who actively opposed the use of Te Reo Maori, there were Pakeha business-owners in that time-frame who adopted it as a second language because of the huge financial advantage it afforded them with their Maori clientele, and the rapport it gave them with their Ngati Porou employees.
The biggest customer of the mill was the Maori Affairs department, who bought timber by the truck load for Maori housing on the East Coast. Unfortunately technology for treating the timber for Bora didn't exist at that time.
Te Tai Rāwhiti | Gisborne | Gisborne | 1950-59 | Story is by tangata whenua
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