The Gumfields.

Partly from the unsatisfactory nature of the land laws, occasionally from the failure of his crops, and very often from an innate love of change of occupation, the Maori throughout the northern district betakes himself to the gumfields. The gumfields are scattered over an immense area, extending from the Waikato to the North Cape. Wherever throughout this area the kauri is growing, or has grown in former times, the gum is found in more or less payable quantities. Surface gum has long since disappeared, and the article has now to be dug from the ground, where it has either exuded from the roots of the trees, or, falling from the tops, has been buried by landslips or by deposits from volcanic eruptions. Gum-digging may be roughly divided into two classes—viz., that on the “winter fields,” or the high tea-tree ranges, where the ground is too hard to work in dry weather, and that on the “summer fields,” or low swampy situations, where digging would be impossible during the wet season. Unless very hard driven, the Maoris seldom resort to the winter fields, but throughout the summer and autumn they are to be found all over the Auckland Province wherever the gound is in a fit condition to be worked.

The attraction of gum-digging is, of course, the hope of an immediate cash return, as the gum has a very high commercial value; but the return in the case of the Maori is usually very trifling. In contrast to the European, and especially the Austrian—who work in a more or less energetic and systematic manner—his operations are of a very desultory and superficial character. At starting he is generally in debt to the store, and the output of gum scarcely pays for the cost of the provisions consumed on the field. Meanwhile the living arrangements are most uncomfortable and unhealthy. The Maoris generally go out in parties—men, women, and children together. A calico tent, a light frame covered with sacking, or a raupo whare of the rudest description serves as a dwelling for each family. To be out of the wind it is often placed under the shelter of a clump of tea-tree, in some low, moist situation. Living on scanty rations of unaccustomed and unwholesome food, drinking bad water, working all day in the swamp, and exposed at night to the