Little Criminals: The Story of a New Zealand Boys' Home by David Cohen

which provoked a brawl inside what had until that point been described as the department’s most modern institution.
    Things were slightly more peaceful 8 kilometres down the road from Kohitere, at Hokio Beach School, a smaller unit housing up to 34 younger boys in just the one dormitory (with extrassometimes put in the dining room) for anything up to two years. Even by the elastic standards of the time Hokio was something of an embarrassment for the department. It was later acknowledged that the institution had been all but ‘uninhabitable’ since opening in 1941; its buildings, which had been thrown up in an ad hoc manner over the years, set amid rolling sandhills and rough scrub, were dilapidated and the wind-swept exterior looked as if it hadn’t seen a lick of paint in the decades since it began life in the 1920s as a retreat for staff at the Weraroa Training Farm, back in the days when staff used to bring the occasional boy down for a weekend. Theirs was a busy workload. At this point the Child Welfare Division, which oversaw these boys’ residences, operated 22 district offices staffed by just 181 officers and a similar number of clerical workers to process admissions.
    Hinting at what was to come, Peek wrote of the ‘disturbingly high’ delinquency rates, especially among Maori boys, sugesting as he did that Epuni might yet play some part in arresting a problem he believed had been spiralling since he assumed his position in 1948. By the definition of the day, which had a Maori person as one of ‘half Maori blood’, the country had just 1660 Maori boys who had attained the age of 16 in the previous year; of these, 319 boys — 19 per cent of the total — had made at least one court appearance for a ‘serious offence’ (the term was never quite defined) during their lives.
    Maori boys living in rural and small-town areas did no better than their urban counterparts, Peek noted, adding that among delinquent Maori youth there had been ‘a much higher incidence of unsatisfactory living conditions, evidenced by overcrowding and broken and disturbed homes than among non-Maoris’. And while lack of good schooling did not tend to characterise young Pakeha delinquents, he wrote, the same couldn’t be said of the Maori youngsters; unlike their non-Maori counterparts,‘educational retardation’ was all too common among the Maori boys now coming before the courts.
    ‘Such facts,’ the superintendent concluded in his annual report for the year, ‘are a challenge to all who deal with Maori boys … to try to understand the special strains and temptations to which many of them are subjected, and to give them the greatest possible measure of personal help.’
    In light of these perceptions, and the Maori character that Epuni and its four sister institutions would quickly acquire, one might naturally suppose a high degree of outside Maori involvement from the start. According to one popular version of the official record, the new institution long enjoyed strong links with local Maoridom. As this narrative has it, Epuni from the start benefited from the input of respected Maori figures and the ongoing presence of supporters drawn from the local Waiwhetu Marae. The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography celebrates the late Ralph Love, a Te Ati Awa leader and a prominent public servant of the time, as one of a number who ‘helped establish’ the institution.
    Alas, as somebody once said, myth is what we believe naturally but history is what we must painfully learn and struggle to remember. And the tease between the two is as evident in this corner of the early Epuni narrative as the wider context in which it was established.
    A search of the official documents and media of the time, for instance, fails to unearth any specifics on Love’s pivotal role at Epuni. Pressed for further information, the author of the Dictionary piece, Catherine Love, who is also the subject’s daughter, directed me to historian Dr Claudia