THE SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC SITUATION OF HAURAKI MAORI AFTER COLONISATION

districts practically continuously throughout the year.' A temporary hospital was set up at Paeroa (AJHR 1914 H3D. These conditions proved too much for the newly appointed nurse, who resigned after a year. The district nurse, however, had more success against typhoid in the district and the recently arrived smallpox epidemic had been effectively countered by vaccination (AJHR 1915 Hr. For the rest, these annual reports do not yield information which can be confidently related to the Maori population of the region.

5.iz Another limitation to the evidence is that only a few items come from Maori sources. The little that does questions the conventional view that Maori were suspicious of and reluctant to use available facilities, that tohunga were unaware of the benefits of European medicine and that Maori were fatalistic and careless of their own well-being. It does not support the view that Maori would have neglected better services, had they been available.

Maori use of general institutions

5.13 The evidence relating to general institutions which were, in principle, available to Maori as well as Pakeha—public schools, public hospitals, private medical practitioners, agencies of state such as the Charitable Aid and Old Age Pensions administrations—is fairly slight. A Public Health Department memorandum of 1906 perhaps reflects the general situation; it urges that, in the matter of Maori health, greater use be made of hospitals where they exist, and notes that while some provide good care, others 'fail somewhat' because Maori do not pay rates (MA mho). Two items relating to the Coromandel hospital are noted below; one suggests that it was not much available to Maori and the other that it was. One item of evidence (already noted) comes from a board school with a substantial (and unhealthy) Maori enrolment; the fact that the teacher had to send to Wellington for advice suggests that public schools were not usually reliable sources of Maori health care.

5.14 In 1906, responding to a Departmental inquiry, the matron of Thames hospital insisted that Maori and Pakeha were treated on perfectly equal terms; however, she was only able to point to two Maori cases being treated at that time (in a 5o bed hospital), one of whom had been operated on for appendicitis. But equality of treatment was not in evidence during the 1918 influenza epidemic. Initially the Thames hospital refused to admit Maori victims and justified its refusal on the grounds that more infection should not be introduced into the borough. The Hospital Board at length yielded to the protests of the district health officer and the district nurse and admitted the worst cases from Te Kerepihi, where one hundred Maori were ill. This, in turn evoked some settler protest (Rice, Black November, pp. 115-116, citing the Thames Star, 12 and 23 Nov 1918).

5.15 Again in 1906, a handwritten return shows that of the 667 Maori recipients of the old age pension in New Zealand, 5o lived in the Thames district (35 of them at Coromandel) at a cost of £1250 pa (MA zdzo). Whether Maori received assistance in kind or

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