Te RONGO is an exhibition of paintings showing at CRAVE café 6 Morningside Road, Auckland 1 July – 2 September. The show opened at 5.30 pm on 1 July 2026. Te RONGO considers the way in which human beings connect with place. It does so by looking at ‘ngā rongo’ the word our ancestors used to describe touch, smell, hearing and spiritual sensibility. The tātaritanga ‘sensory filter’ Te RONGO employs involves two local trails. The sediment trail left by the tītiko (after which the local waterway is named) and the drifting patterns left by rangatahi on the surface of a local carpark. These two tauira form the sensory background to natural environments, flora, fauna, organisms and ancestral wānanga ‘narratives’ explored in the exhibition. Te RONGO grew out of two previous Albert/Eden art sponsored shows, Tāne Motumotu and He Mauri, which looked specifically at local botanical identity. This show began as an exploration of ancestral and botanical identity around the Waitītiko River as it currently exists around the Roy Clemens walkway and it expanded to include the local streets, businesses nearby and along Morningside Road.
Roy Clemens walkway alongside Waitītiko
In Ōwairaka, one of Auckland’s busy central city suburbs, what would we sense if we closed our eyes? From the bathroom window I see three blood red lights alternately pulse over cranes on a construction site down Morningside Road. At night the only names present are emblazoned in huge graffiti across surrounding walls: PHYSIO et al. Up Morningside Road in the early hours rangatahi are out marking territory. Round and round they drift and burnout in the local carpark. Then nothing. Just darkness and the low hum of the nearby motorway.
When light peeks through the curtains from the East a chatter of small birds nesting high up in Kentia and Windmill palms and rustling through honeysuckle hedges announces daybreak. They are not natives. Later a tui claims ownership of the hood from the perch of a huge magnolia tree. Around the end of the working day rangatahi ‘young people’ head along Morningside Road like Spielberg’s ‘Jaws’ soundtrack hunting imaginary audiences. Heavy base and drums thump. They mark territory. Occasionally the wind brings the roar of lions down at Waiōrea into the living room.
In summer I pass the unbearably sweet scent of privet in a local hedge. Two pūkeko play on a lawn on the way to the gym. Down at ‘Simplicity’ a foreman blows a whistle to announce a heavy load being hoisted high above the local skyline. Workers in high vis gear, bright orange and helmets nonchalantly walk beneath these moving mountains. Meanwhile a roadside sign in concrete outside announces a buried river ‘flows to the sea’.
drifting patterns , St Lukes, 2025. Photo: rangihīroa
John Guise Mitford, Ōwairaka 1845, watercolour, Alexander Turnbull Library
Somewhere hidden in the folding volcanic terrain of Mitford’s watercolour is the Waitītiko meandering beneath the terraced slopes of Maunga Ōwairaka. The scene is in some respects a starting point for my exploration of the processing of local environment. The columns of fire in the foreground and mid-foreground are signs of Pākehā clearing the land around the mid-nineteenth century. The language of the painting typifies a pictorial civilising of whenua common at the time. What is clear in this depiction is the land involving Kingsland, Sandringham, Mt Albert and Morningside is a basin surrounded by maunga like Ōwairaka in the distance. This area was a major watershed, a filtering mechanism for these high points.
Mitford suggests, almost trepidatiously, the monumental task ahead. Fences are erected, territory is individualised. The taming of the land appears to begin. My show adds to this processing of the environment but perhaps more reflectively by considering how other natural local organisms worked with an ancient natural legacy and alternatively with a dramatically changed contemporary environment. What are we now to make of the concrete and steel neighbourhood laid over the top of Mitford’s vision and how does one find a way back to the original waterway that once dominated the local watershed: the very symbol of a local environmental identity? My vision is not particularly concerned with early colonial Auckland but more broadly with a continuum of time involving ancient Māori presence and a contemporary youthful identity that has sprung up two hundred years later in the very same space.
H Zell, tītiko ‘amphibola crenata’ different arrangements of empty mollusc
Te RONGO involves an exploration of the sediment trail left by the tītiko (after which the local waterway is named). It might be said that the tītiko processed its’ environment which began in the kāhui maunga ‘the volcanic hills’ surrounding Ōwairaka that feed into the underground rivers and matapuna that eventually emptied into Tāmaki’s largest wetland. The mollusc ‘amphibola crenata’, ‘…sifts through sediment for organic matter such as microscopic algae, bacteria, and detritus, leaving distinctive…trails on the mud surface.’ Throughout the show there are representations o ēnei makenu ‘of these trails’. It is these distinctive curvilinear patterns left by the tītiko on the banks of Waitītiko that comprised visual evidence of a broader tātaritanga ‘processing’ at work. Indeed this local region, surrounded by Tāmaki’s volcanic mountains and Watītiko’s matapuna ‘wellspring’ near Ahurangi down the length of its’ waterway to Waiōrea and out to the Waitematā at Tokaroa, is all about processing wai and the way in which it is filtered. The tītiko then played a unique role, as a breathing organism, in both filtering nutrients and contributing to the very heart of local identity.
The second area that interested me was the drifting patterns left by rangatahi on the surface of a local carpark. These tauira ‘patterns’ caused by the burnouts and drifting of vehicles are also in their own way a processing of the world these young people occupy. The screeching of tyres and the acceleration are the audible/visible manifestation of this filtering. There is also the point that local residents must also process this activity! It is loud, it is audible and it is definitely present.
Might I suggest this activity is both temporal and intangible and also possibly marginal. That is to say the drifting often takes place in the early hours of the morning. The boom of the car stereos seems to coincide with the ends of working days and trips to the local shopping centre. Is it possible to make a connection with the tītiko and a wider conversation about belonging? The unique thing about the mudsnail is it neither belongs wholly to the environment of Tangaroa nor to that of Tāne. It is a liminal species caught between two environments – the water and land – belonging wholly to neither. That indeterminacy is both a challenge to understand and a profoundly adaptive quality that defied specificity. One is left with the conclusion that the only way to measure it is to do what the tītiko does and accept the environment through our senses. And that is te rongo ‘perception[s]’ moment.
