Newspaper Article 1984 – Maori village comes alive

Maori village comes alive

A group of school children were transported back in time to a small Maori village hidden beneath the Hawke’s Bay Art Gallery and Museum yesterday.

If they were to survive the morning they had to quickly learn how to make fishing lines out of flax, how to carve with adzes, how to drill with string-powered wooden drills how to cook kumara and Maori bread.

The twenty-nine children and several parents from Waiwhare School, 55km from Hastings along the Taihape Rd, were the first group take part in the museum’s main education activity programme for this year.

The museum’s education room has been painted to resemble a Maori village and and groups will live there for half-a-day at a time.

Mrs Ceri Coles, a main organiser, said this programme followed on from last year’s colonial history in action programme.

She said the museum believed children learned more by doing things but in this case the parents were learning as much as their children.

The children were using artifacts straight out of the museum and replica tools and examples of work.

Two Maori women had agreed to help teach flax weaving and the museum had called on many people in the Maori community to help get things right, Mrs Coles said.

Photo caption – Lesson one … Eight-year-old Peter Shields [Sheild] gives Marcus Schaw, five, an original interpretation of a traditional Maori moko. He is watched by (from left) Mark Worsley, 5, Arron [Aaron] Wallis, 7, Deon Holgate, 7, Vicki [Vicky] Barnett, 5.