The Way at Maraekakaho.

“There's one of my guests,” said Sir Douglas Maclean, as we met a swagger on the hill road inland from Hastings, Hawke's Bay, when we were driving back from a visit to Maraekakaho station one day towards the end of 1928. And my good and kindly friend told some anecdotes of his experience with swagmen in his half-century of ownership of the big sheep-run. “Some of the very best men we ever had on the station,” he said, “came here with swags on their backs. A good class of fellow we always took on if we had a job going, and some of them were there for years.”

The standing instruction to the station manager was to give food for tea and breakfast, and a bunk, to every swagger calling there. And sometimes Maraekakaho entertained in the cottage set apart for that purpose as many as twenty—once there were twenty-two—swaggers in a night. Most trampers looking for a job, whom one encountered on the road from Napier and Hastings to the hill country, were bound for the patriarchal Maclean estate.

That day at the station homestead, lying well to the sun among its great shelter plantations and orchards, Sir Douglas took me first to see the community heart of Maraekakaho. Here are a school and a church hall, on a green terrace above the clear little river that flows past the homestead and the woolsheds. Sir Douglas had the church hall put up at his own expense, and he and the residents furnished it. It was the social gathering-place on week days as well as Sundays. Here the Maori word “marae” was particularly appropriate.

Maraekakaho wool goes to the rail-head.

The marae, or village assembly ground, the square among the houses, was the gathering-place of tribe or hapu. And along the river bank the “kakaho,” the toetoe or pampas grass, once waved its plumes abundantly; hence the place-name which puzzled so many of the overseas and colonial visitors to the Maclean estate.

The chief showed me with mingled pride and sadness the roll of honour of the station and district in the church hall. There were many Highland names on it, good names such as Duncan McPhee, and the list was headed by a Maclean, young Captain Algernon Donald Douglas Maclean, who died at Napier in 1923 from the effects of war service. He was the chief's only son.

At the entrance to the homestead grounds were other buildings which went to make a little township on the station—a post-office and store, and an accommodation house for business travellers. All formed part of the big business of running a great wool and meat and pure-bred stock estate.