Pacific portraits; Sir Peter Buck

But the court records radio sketches of men and women whose lives illustrate times and places south of the equator in the Pacific. The old map is laid aside new never goes out. Peter Brook. Program 11 and the series of Pacific portraits produced by radio station WAGA of the University of Wisconsin under a grant from the Educational Television and Radio Center in cooperation with the National Association of educational broadcasters.

Now speaking to you from Auckland New Zealand here is the planner and writer of the series Professor John Reed of the Pacific races none is proud of its past and the memories of New Zealand. The greatest navigators among the seed reaping Polynesians they were the Vikings of the Southern Ocean a thousand years ago these men of the Stone Age plain the vast seas and their long canoes marking like slingshots from their ancestral home how to make New Zealand their own. When the white man came the Maoris met fire with fire and friendship with friendship. A noble race full of ancient courtesies and battle chivalry they clung tenaciously to their old ways in their ancestral myths. Was it because the Maori was Hadiya and other Pacific people more finely tempered in the fires of war and adversity that the white man treated him with particular respect and question. Or was it because in New Zealand the white man was less predatory than in other islands. Whatever the cause white and brown races after early misunderstandings set down together in New Zealand

in harmony and peace out of the MLB came more than one great man a man of two races whose portrait we now sketch may stand as a sign of the future. One in which the natives of the Pacific will play their full parts in the western world of turbines and cyclotrons here in words from his own writings. Is Sir Peter Bach. This year when we celebrate the 250 anniversary of the founding again University we honor you. Henry Bock director of the Bishop Museum Honolulu professor emeritus of Anthropology

University. Both peoples and cultures of the medical doctor all are involved. It was so hard. You were brought in many places the water standing empty with better ration and affection. Yes university confers upon you the drug rehab doctor of our fallen. Ladies and gentleman I am deeply sensitive they are not employed on me today by their university for over two and a half centuries my friend is here has given delight to generations of students by which they have seen the truth. I agree. Maori and I'm sisters.

Also the need for the light of truth in an ancient chant they spoke of the long nights of darkness and ignorance despair by the coming of dawn and the light of the night wish it was words I carried in my heart. Like the rest of the night the long night and night agony. But now I know through all he's gone he's gone. I guess with these words Sir Peter Buck acknowledged his fourth honorary degree. It was a long way back from that academic

platform to the mud floors of his childhood. Here was a man who had pursued the star of knowledge across seas as wide as those his ancestors had traversed in the dawn of their history. My steering guides to the horizon but to the horizon before us ever ever drawing the sort of doubt the line of dread to the horizon below our ship must go. My ancestors came across the horizon of the sea is to New Zealand from their legend rap home. They came in great canoes hollowed from trees packed in these craft were men women and children dogs fruit calabashes of water dried fish

coconuts and hydrated and pounded into powder over phosphorescent sea where everything seemed on fire past menacing water spouts joining savage sea and solemn sky through the perilous play of lightning in the funder and squalls. They nosed their way towards the islands that the mighty navigator coupe they had discovered in 950 A.D.. While Henry the seconde sat on the throne of England the canoes followed towards the islands of high mist the land of the Long White Cloud and the bright red colored trees of the saw's flamed. Well come to them down 5000 miles of sea. The Mallory surged in three great waves to possess New Zealand and as they ploughed and planted in their new home they bore tribal names from great ships which had carried them tell you new We Are Our talky

team. They carved their elaborate wood carvings on the smooth they called green stone. And they danced and sang. There is no dance more graceful than the poit as the little bells of flax on a cord Twellman spinning the hands of the maidens and with rhythmic song fluttering hands and swaying bodies. They tell the stories of the great migrations and the perils of the voyages on the wide ocean. Every delicate gesture every dip every inclination of the head every cadence of the voice conveys its meaning to me. But the Maori was a fighter as well as a hunter tribe waged war on tribe to the

sound of the dreaded haka or war chant. They had a shrieking tattooed warrior streaked with war paint storm the stock into fortified pods on the hill tops with club and spear they fought with tireless courage and the victors feasted on the bodies of their. I am. Right. But I am a man of two races. It must be remembered that I had the good fortune to have a Maori mama and father in the footsteps of Captain Cook the white man strode out of the north. He brought his know how his culture and his machines. He smashed the Maori civilisation with mallet and musket. Sometimes he fought the Maori for his land and the Maori fought back spear against gun club against cannon but some of the

packages as the natives called them married the quiet brown dark eyed soft spoken Maori maidens. My mother was a full mother ever and I got to try it. She had the arresting name that is tidings that reaches far. I was given the name. Had been street with a long rays of the sun. One race Tehran Bureau My father belonged to a Northern Irish family so I am entitled to his family name. Another race Peter Buck. From barefooted half caste and a Maori hut to a knighthood and a proper sorry old chair this is a giant step. But the distance from one place to another is only as long as a man's will makes it. Peter Buck almost did not have the chance to will his destiny when he was a boy in a

one room Country School an Anglican Archbishop predicted the end of the brown man. The Maori res is sick unto death but today there are just 40000 Maoris in New Zealand. Finality has been achieved and the number of natives will soon reach a vanishing point. But the germ of men is of tougher stuff than that of the dodo or the dinosaurs. There is an essence beyond the metabolism which defeats the prophets of gloom and Peter Buck. This essence was to try and making him more than a man apart and assign a symbol if you like of a future different from that which Archbishop Welsh foresaw I think he did so that when I was punished for some error in school I ran away to the village and took refuge with my grandmother and she smoked a pipe beside her

talk. She told me of happenings in her girlhood and I learned tribal history from her. Yeah and you did reset my dial. You did great. I was particularly fond of the tattooing. She had the also duct had four women tattooed on both her lips and her chin was covered with an artistic design. In addition she had beautifully executed spirals on either nostril and somewhat curved lines on her forehead but arched upwards from the inner angles of how I tattooing. The culture of the savage. A fern walled hut and c'est re-elections limitless genealogies stretching back to the Sun Father. Here was the lore and life of the Maori confronting the technology of the whites.

The race is sick unto death. As white heads wagged over the dying race Peter Buck was growing to manhood. When his mother and grandmother died he went with his father making a meager living catching rabbits and working as roust about this was the level to which white society condemned the Maori. But there was one way of escape. They all take college founded by an English clergyman for a boy is to the spirit of TLT college. I bow my head in reverence. For that spirit has done more for me than tongue can tell. The Reverend Samuel Williams knowing that the way to maintain the spirit of a race was to preserve its faith in its own heritage and establish the school to allow the Maori to absorb the white man's learning without sacrificing his own traditions. Peter Buck entered in 1896 with the savings from his ten shillings a week as a rouseabout set up Iran and I got on minister of the crown. Oh boy. So now a minister of the Crown was an old

boy and the Rev.. Bennett BISHOP Oh and Sir Peter Buck showing at his studies at Greek and Latin at football at the Maori. Given the chance I could beat the parquet at his own game. As a successful school days drew to a close Peter Buck's mind turned to the major problem of his race disease. The Maori had survived war famine and the elements but he had no protection against the white man's deadliest present bacteria for babies perished for every white one in epidemics the natives died like flies. Tuberculosis clogged at brown bodies sleeping now in white men's clothes and not in the traditional cloaks. In 1899 Tehran Bureau of entered medical school I remember well when a fellow Mary and I entered first the top two

precincts of the medical school. We saw at the top of the stairs a notice offering various prices for Maori skulls Televisa and complete skeletons. We read it with horror and almost abandoned our quest for Western medical knowledge. But he had determined to fight the diseases of the Maori with the science of the whites sun of two races he would blend the knowledge of one with the understanding of the other. After school I joined the government service as a medical officer to the Maoris. I visited various villages and was received with the courtesy which still takes the form of old time ceremonies. The people gathered in the open space before the assembly house and tears were shed for those who had recently passed away. The Maori tiny and the iris wake are similar in principle. And on such occasions my two halves could unite as one. The sun burned Hibernian the name jestingly applied to the hearty cheerful volatile

Maori by the earlier settlers had become a reality in Peter Buck. He carried his broadening vision into the New Zealand Parliament where At 31 he took his seat as a representative of the Northern moderates to the solemn councils of the package. Peter Buck brought not only wisdom but also generous moderate humor. When a daylight saving bill was debated He spoke to the assembly. I cannot say that I agree with the assumption in this debate but the idea of daylight saving originated with the European. In fact it is a Maori idea going back thousands of years to our great system our U.S. in those days the sun moved so quickly over the sky that people did not have time to cultivate the land. So moey and his brothers prepared a great new set of vines and going to the hole in the east where the sun came from. Smith here the sun could not struggle

since his arms were tied and had to obey when we ordered him to cross the sky more slowly. I I have no option but to support the principle so plainly in origin and in practice. Deeper interests were now absorbing him. He was peering below the surface of things to find the pattern of his races past and future. A fellow member of parliament remembers him occupied the same bench in the house. It was interesting to observe the literature that Peter was absorbed in. One day it would be a volume of poetry another work of Venter apology. It was somewhat embarrassing to sit in a confined chamber and find one's bench measuring the distance between one's ankle and his kneecap and remarking. I thought so longer in the tibia than the Polynesians.

But the lamps were going out in the First World War the Maoris responded to the call of Britain with the throbbing of ancestral memory memories of centuries of battle memories of proud traditions. In the heart of Tehran to heroin as in all his race there still lurked the warrior spirit which was to carry the Maoris valiantly through two world wars and their own battalions on the fields of France the shores of Aleppo lie and the deserts of Africa. I saw Peter back at.

The line we occupied was enfiladed by Turkish rifle fire. In and around the trench the Maori's what he simply was in command and a splendid figure he looked. He appeared to have managed to wash and he certainly got a clean shirt. The how he obtained it remains a mystery. The shirt was open and one could see the firm brown chest. He was picking shorts and stock. Standing among the Maoris was the incarnation of physical fitness and leadership. He returned to do Zealand prouder still of his Maori blood so that the Maori can hold his own with any race in the world and not merely the dark ones. It seems to me that the Maori race is the only Polynesian branch that is struggling to maintain its individuality as a race and molding European culture

to fit its requirements. The molding was not easy. As post-war director of my task was to teach his race the white man's precautions against disease. But the old ways had stubborn roots. Your daughter is very ill my friend I know it and you know she has been cursed by power all time I enter no no no no my friend she has tuberculosis. She must be moved to a hospital. She stays in this hot on the damp floor she will die she will die unless time hunger spell is strong enough to overcome the spell of my and I know my friend in the old days there were medicine men are cured by today we have lost the old wisdom of herbs the white man has found it again. Why should you reject the wisdom of your I'm sesterces body is cursed I say what is a hunger can cure her. Your medicine is useless.

It was an uphill fight. But Buck and others worked tirelessly lifting their people out of the Stone Age by pop science. What was the result. When I was with the Department of Health the Maori population was about 45000. Then it rose to fifty thousand and we thought that was wonderful. Today in 1936 it has reached over one hundred and twenty five thousand. This is extraordinary. No longer are the pluckiest closing the eyes of a dying grace that is becoming extinct. Man. The first phase of his work was crowned with success a new phase was beginning. Peter Buck's knowledge of anthropology and of Polynesian ways led in one thousand twenty seven to an invitation from the Bishop Museum in Honolulu to join the staff. In a great bound Tehran Bureau and moved from Malory huts to the great halls of learning.

The hero a descendant of the great Tanguay Polo friend and companion of Chiefs lofty mountain sheltering tree. Sir Peter Buck doctor a doctor of science. Doctor of Medicine. Man of two races. The most famous authority of his age in Polynesia. So Peter Buck looked always to the future seeing a new pattern emerging in the Pacific. I don't honorable place for his people in the years to come. Created by our planet has passed away and the new world is in the process of being fashioned their stone been destroyed and the temple and shell trumpets have long been silent. The divine family of the sky and the earth

mother have left us the great voyaging have crumbled to dust the sea captains and the expert craftsman have passed away to the spirit like the regalia and symbols of spiritual and temporal power. I've been among the museums of other peoples the glory of this stone age has departed out of Polynesia. That is latest high. Net. Had become the symbol of the triumph of his race over the depredations of the white man. I have gained. I have acquired. Three years before he died. He returned to New Zealand to receive the accolade of knighthood with his investiture fresh upon him he went alone to sit in the empty meeting house where he had played as a child

70 years before. A friend who came to call for him found him there weeping. The old net is laid aside the new net goes a fishing. Peter Buck was a main strand of the new net in him. The blended wisdom courage and poetry of the Maori and the know how and the technology of the white point of the way to a new dawn in the southern ocean. He had made the reproachful term half caste a proud badge of honor. To my despondent fellow half caste. I can truly say that any success I might have achieved has been largely due to my good fortune in being a mongrel amalgamation will go on in spite of what anyone say. People are human and you cannot control their emotions so long as the

start from evil side is good. We have nothing to fear. The thing we must be careful not is that we as Maoris maintain our i'm not and Press TV So that our share of the contribution may be worthwhile. 10 days before he died in 1051 after a long struggle against cancer he went to a medical conference in Honolulu not as Sir Peter Buck but as Tehran the hero of his ancestral Kiwi feather cloak on his shoulders and his green stone may Ray in his hand. He saw himself as the future of his people. The synthesis of all its history as an earnest prophet of a braver tomorrow in the Pacific. And he would have said Amen to the words of his friend fellow Maori. So I have red noses with the lip pinchin tattooed women of my race. I have kissed the painted face of the modern flapper.

I have seen the flickering stone lamp of the Maoris superseded by the tallow candle of the park here and that in its turn flashed out of existence by the harnessed powers of the mighty rivers the electric light. I have heard the rhythmic paddle of the Maori war canoe drowned by the throbbing of the modern speedboat. I have seen the wings of the ancient clay group in sanitation to the birdman of the twentieth century. I have spoken and listen to voices through the air. So when I went my way to that mythical Vale of the I can say that I have heard and seen wondrous things and close my eyes in content and so forth Maori land will be the cradle of a new race whose predecessors knew the steel and yet the Stone also. Old that is laid aside and that goes off.

And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And here is Professor Reed to say a final word. The Triumph was not only a crime for the most intelligent resourceful and tenacious of the brown skinned races of Polynesia. It was a triumph for the developing human relations between the conquering races and the cocket proudest himself of his merry black back is himself a source of pride to both races whose blood in his noble. Portraits radio sketches of men and women whose lives illustrate times and places

south of the equator in the Pacific Ocean. These programs are produced by radio station WAGA of the University of Wisconsin under a grant from the Educational Television and Radio Center. Professor John C. REED of Auckland University Auckland New Zealand is the writer and planner of the series production by consummate music by Don they claim these programs are distributed by the National Association of educational broadcasters. This is the National Education all radio network.