Artist and writer passionate about the arts. I was born in Pāpua New Guinea, lived in Sydney briefly and have spent much of my life researching my Māori and Polynesian heritage in the Asia Pacific region. I have a Doctorate in Art History but began my professional training with a year at Elam School of Fine Arts, Auckland. My work as a Curator, as an educator and as an art historian feeds into my visual practice.
Credit: featured image above, Tim Laman, cape presentation form of Vogelkop Bird of Paradise, PeerJ , 16 April 2018
EM I NO PARADAIS LONG HIA
( + In memorium C PP & RMP)
26 September 2020
THE KUMUL struts out on patrol karanga atu e ia te SINGSING
In WEST SEPIK green calling into being sink hole black half disk LUKLUK pāua paint jig
St Heliers girl branch dancing paradise voyeur Em i gat laik
Porotī boy b-b-b-bobbing and sh-sh-sh-shakin’ and fl-fl-fl-flitting and movin’ and quaking mist fingers stretching down TORRICELLI’S rain drenched back
so that visibility is attacked at ANGUGANAK sad sack sky is covered near the bluff where village children stare wondering if there will be a returning mountain gazing on slashed grass strip below a single yellow sesna jumpily climbs high over braided ORPAN into a cloud hole asunción ‘attention all locals’ there will be no rapture KEI KŌNEI
TRUE, A ‘this is no paradise’
I WAS BORN IN PARADISE Niuean painter/poet John Pule once began a poem, at an exhibition opening I helped organise. Pule was talking about his home village Liku on the remote Pacific island of Niue. Recently perusing an archive of photographs I pondered my own beginnings in an equally remote area of the South Pacific. The image showed my parents and I on the Northern coast of Papua New Guinea at Moem beach at Wewak, the main port of entry into the Western Sepik. The picture featuring locals with outriggers is also shot in Wewak. My entry point to this thinking about beginnings and arcadia (as sometimes is the case) was a plant. I was busy photographing a bird of paradise ‘flower’ (South African in origin) which finally decided to bloom a few weeks ago. It’s arrival happily coincided with my sorting through research files including these references to Papua New Guinea. The puawai got me thinking about the wider issue of provenance and associative names. The sorting process led me back to my place of birth and the stunning birds of paradise (the natural point of inspiration I presume) that still survive in the more remote parts of Papua New Guinea and Northern Australia. I don’t know for sure whether I saw and heard the kumul when I was a child but when you consider the location in some of the images below its certainly possible, even highly likely.
My personal favourite is the Vogelkop Bird of Paradise native to the Indonesian run side of Papua. In my opinion it posseses the most spectacular show of colour in the male mating rituals. Its’ visual impact has to do with a half disk of the deepest black and almost florescent aquamarine streaks and dots at the centre and the base of the ‘cape’ used to flit, swish and lure the females. There is definitely another essay here about colour in nature, the copyright attempts by sculptor Anish Kapoor to own Vantablack (the world’s blackest black) and the ongoing backlash in England. This kumul is a worthy rival to Kapoor’s Vantablack. It is said to have the blackest colouring on earth with the microscopic structure of its feathers absorbing nearly 100% of the light hitting it. There are incredible images of birds of paradise in Attenborough’s films and the research work of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology featuring the fuller range of kumul in their expeditions in the northern western rain forests of West Papua. I also wanted to acknowledge Tim Laman’s breathtaking imagery of this rare and utterly captivating manu, he kumul.
I WAS BORN IN A WEST SEPIK VILLAGE CALLED ANGUGANAK later moving to Amanab closer to the recently occupied border of West Papua. My mother later told me this proximity to this zone of conflict provided opportunity to witness hospitals and schools going up in smoke on the skyline as the Indonesians were busy removing the earlier Dutch layer. I include some images from the vantage point of the house Dad built (at Anguganak I am assuming because the bluff – that rises sharply 300 metres into the air – sits prominently in a window in the background of one of the archived photographs).
I dedicate my poem and the images, reclaimed and researched from family letters and fire damaged black and white photographs and 35mm colour transparencies my father took in the 1960s, to my mother and the paradise she pined for but to which she never returned. This strange body of material is the beginning of a range of investigative research work including the odd diary accounts of Australian field officers working in this region (Australia took over from the Germans until 1975 when PNG finally gained it’s independence). These documents, a more official background to our presence in Australian occupied PNG, involved variously taking census figures, ‘spying’ (the region shares a northern boundary that buffers Australia from Asia and which became a sensitive zone when the Indonesians annexed the region) and what can only be described as colonial – odd village – etic inspections, penned outsider observations.
My father accompanied some of these survey patrols to villages, ‘…that extended from Inabu to Amanab and out to the coast to Vanimo covering hundreds of miles of jungles, swamps and bush clad mountain ranges.’ The records of these gruelling trips are now available in the University of California, San Diego archive of PNG patrol reports and I have been matching them with personal letters. They reveal a great deal about the way in which outsiders are coming into contact with a beautiful and extremely complex range of tribal peoples who continue (thankfully) to occupy an incredibly remote yet increasingly threatened portion of the indigenous world. I am not making a statement here about precious ‘authenticity’. All cultures change and adapt. However, one hopes that indigenous Papua Nūkini peoples locate a future that suits and which expresses their uniqueness and not the ambitions of the many surrounding nations that want to commercially and culturally exploit their bountiful natural resources.
I say let the kumul sing and dance and jig and do his thing.
rangihīroa, 4 pink impatiens floating, 25 March 2018
as if to say e hoa, it’s just a scraggy old bush there
kaore ngā ahi kā kei kōna
anake ngā tauiwi e okioki ana
ae, koinā te kōrero he maunga ariki
but its roots were watered
with the tears of loved ones
it’s true that on this crowded hill
they too rest somewhere else
but in off shore breezes
this old lavender
knows no boundaries on this headland
crush its healing oil in palm
and you too will see memory
and loved ones
resurrected
upon the wind
Maunga Māngere titiro ki Maungakiekie, Māngere mountain looks towards ‘One tree Hill’, Tāmaki Makaurau, 2020
This short poem concerns a visit 13 February 2019 to the urupā at the top of Hillsborough. It is steeply situated with spectacular harbourside views across Manukau south to Maunga Māngere and west seawards out to Awhitu peninsula- south Manukau Heads. One of the nineeteenth century graves featured a remarkably hardy bush of lavender. I photographed a few of its many blooms. This extremely weathered and hardy shrub had been left to fend for itself but in the late afternoon sun a gentle breeze was picking up and the air around that grave was filled with the delicate scent of French Lavender. It occurred to me that a number of the shrubs and trees deliberately planted by loved ones involved broader narratives of connection. Was there something particular about the chosen plant? What might it have signified, what emotion is conveyed? Who were these people who planted these shrubs and how often did they return to pay their respects and perhaps just to talk…?
rangihīroa, lavender in heritage blue glass vase, 2019
rangihīroa, Tī ‘cabbage tree’ with kāroro circling, Te Atatū, 10 June 2018
I was told
kākaho was the proud one
spurning the love of pingao
as she wistfully sought his plumes
waving in the wind
exalted above the sandy ridge
and with her rich toothy, green grin
dragging her vines ‘cross hot sand
not an introduction she’d planned
but that wānanga is wrong
isn’t it Mr Tī?
the light that reaches over Ōwairaka, Maungawhau and me
casts long shadows where we stand
and you demanded I shoot you, not kākaho, early afternoon
‘the light is more flattering’
a rustle in your messy top
broad, bright fluttering green leaves
as you casually explained
heroic
I want frontal, central, imposing
and if the shoot doesn’t give it
use Photoshop
you know, more than the Nor-Western motorway
I am Te Atatū
Don’t worry Mr Tī, I replied nervously,
there will be no rivals – not even kākaho
rangihīroa, kākaho, Te Atatū waterfront, 2018
I have followed your client brief to the t…
harakeke sits at your feet submissively
and proud kākaho (toetoe stem) has been banished
to the edge of Waitematā’s cloak
outside the shot
oh and one more thing: a small detail I must confide
I squinted up his textured trunk towards the sun radiating
behind his crown
him looking down murmuring a deep single syllable ‘ae’
and then softly, so softly one could barely hear it
above the chirp of matata and the squeeky toy twittering of the tōrea
rangihīroa, Mātātā ‘fernbird’, Te Atatū waterfront
a shake began
leaves clattering nor-wester
and around his trunk
a ghost hand massaging wīwī and coercing marshland grasses
I cleared my throat, perhaps a little self-consciously now
if you look closely at the photo
there are kāroro moving around your crown
they were squawking and laughing at me trying to get the shot
He said, no
they are admirers singling me out.
S O M E N O T E S
rangihīroa, Te Atatū shore line looking north-east towards Northcote
This is a revised post from 10 June 2018 and concerns two things – conservation and conceit against a backdrop of images taken on one of a couple of waterfront walks at Te Atatū ‘sunrise’. The dialogue is based on quite a different indigenous story concerning the native plants kākaho and pingao which similarly occupy the threshold domain between Tangaroa (the sea) and of Tāne (the forest). There are no sand dunes in the tidal mudflats of Te Atatū so I have singled out the most prominent native on location – tī, the native cabbage tree – for a more narcissistic version of the role kākaho demonstrates in the traditional story of unrequited love.
The setting is suitable for love but perhaps not self-love. The Waitematā tide was in and there was a view across to Chelsea Sugarworks, Northcote and further to the East – the Viaduct and the three Tāmaki maunga (ko Maungawhau, Maungakiekie and Ōwairaka) rising in the distance behind the rumbling northwestern motorway as it heads towards the Rosebank, Avondale turnoff and further on the Te Atatū turnoffs.
My short dialogue involving Mr Tī had been brewing for quite a while since I first encountered the delightful story of pingao and kākaho in a publication produced by weavers who harvest the native fibre for their mahi ringa (tukutuku, kete and whāriki) and who also belonged to Ngā Puna Waihanga during the 1980s. I once accompanied a ranger in the Kaipara to gather the material for a meetinghouse, involving tukutuku utilising pingao, called Ihenga in Rotorua that celebrated ancestral traveller’s connection to the large northern harbour and to sites around Te Tai Tokerau. Weavers who use the material, as with those utilising harakeke, are intimately involved with the maintenance and care of the sedge and its surrounding ecosystem. Utilising the ‘eyebrows’ of Tāne means they must care for their resource if they are to access the beautiful sedge for their work. It is important to note here that perched in such a vulnerable position this plant continues to exist in an increasingly fragile state on New Zealand coastal sand dunes. As I understood it these weavers were exemplary kaitiaki, truly practitioners of the whakataukī:
Manaakitia ngā tukemata o Tāne ‘caring for the eyebrows of Tāne’
rangihīroa, pingao, Whāngārei Heads, 2020
The following account of kākaho and pingao is one of a number that tell the compelling love story:
‘From her home she [i.e. ko Pingao] looked up to the land and saw the young and handsome kakaho dancing on the sand dunes. Each time the kakaho made his appearance Pingao became more and more enamoured. Finally she asked permission from Tangaroa to leave the sea to meet her lover. Tangaroa granted her permission with words of warning that she would never make it.
However driven by blind love, she left the seaweed and crawled across the hot sand. As she struggled up she began to call to the kakaho – but he was interested only in himself. He was in love with his own shape and did not answer pingao’s calls. In desperation she called back to Tangaroa, who could do nothing but shower her with spray. And there on the sand dunes, the pingao remains to this day.‘ Rangitane wānanga
For those sceptical regarding nature speaking. It’s not so much that nature talks perhaps more that we should listen. In my version singling out the tī is appropriate as it is a special tree whose name is contained within that of my Te Uriroroi affiliation with Porotī. It was there (outside Whāngārei on the way to Kaikohe) that a special ceremony was held to marry our ancestors with Waikato women and the cutting of the tī was the sign of the tomo ‘marriage negotiations’. This may relate to the raids of southern tribes on Whāngārei (Ōparakau, Parihaka, 1828) in retaliation for the raupatu conducted by Hika and our ancestral leaders who accompanied him in Tāmaki, Waikato and in Hauraki. So my choice of images is, as with any tribally based Māori, biased. Murua mai āku hara nei ne!
ranghīroa, ‘Melanie Picked big Leaf‘, [student graffiti on native leafs] Manoa Campus, University of Hawai’i, January 1999‘Stupid x3 Marco’, Dendroglyph, Ngā Mara Hainamana o Kirikiriroa, 2021
He Kōrero Tairitenga
Te Uru, Waitākere Contemporary Gallery, Titirangi, 13 February 2021
rangihīroa, Ātarangi, Hato Mikaere, Ōhaeawai, tata atu ki te Pū o te Wheke
I
W I L L
N E E D
W O R D S
rangihīroa, Northern Wars, 2020, coloured inks on paper, matai me Japanese cherry
rangihīroa, ngā parekura o Ngā Pakanga Whenua o Mua, Ruapekapeka, 1845/1846rangihīroa, The Road to Ruapekapeka, 2020He rua tūpāpaku mō ngā hōia Ingarihi i hinga ki te parekura kei kōnei St Michaels, urupā, Ōhaeawai, 2021
Tafanua as a kōtiro, Hunua Room, Aotea Centre, 14 July 2022
TAFANUA.
Performance and hākari ‘feast’, Hunua Room, Aotea Centre, Tāmaki Makaurau, 14 – 23 July 2022 Directed by Tausani Simei-Papali’i and brought to life by Tala Pasifika Productions and Pacific Women’s dance collective Ura Tabu. Costumes: Shona Tawhio.
I attended the first showing of ‘Tafanua’ last night at the Hunua Room with my wife. The whole performance was deeply refreshing. I would go so far as to say ‘Tafanua’ was a spiritual experience because of the values you could feel being gently pushed at one as an audience. If fa’a ‘the Samoan way’ (i.e. culture) is based on the principles of alofa ‘love’, faaaloalo ‘mutual respect’ feosia’i ‘reciprocity’, fetufaa’i ‘sharing’ and felagolagoma’i ‘mutual support’ then I sensed, without fully being able to explain why, these values or tikanga were present and bubbling. There simply isn’t any other way to describe it and we, Aucklanders, are lucky to be at the epicentre of a creative performance fabric that is being woven before our very eyes on our stages. Go and see this performance, it will move you and you will be confronted with the challenge to interact with these wonderful performers. Go and support the ongoing development of these extraordinary outpourings of creativity and generous sharing of wānanga, Samoan narratives, legacy, tā rātou kupu ‘their stories’. It’s only on for a short 4 nights from tonight. Don’t miss out (14 Jul – 23 Jul 2022). Plan an evening in town, it is 2 hours and 30 minutes with a 20 min interval. Parking is available at the Civic Centre (Entry from Greys Ave) and the venue is the Hunua Room, on level 1, Aotea Centre.
A fair and supportive response to my Ngā Pakanga Whenua o Mua mōteatea and pito kōrero in Bruce Connew’s ‘A Vocabulary…’
Review by Paul Diamond interviewed by Catherine Ryan on Radio New Zealand. The particular part of the sound byte concerning ‘A Vocabulary’ starts at 2 minutes…
The show ‘A Vocabulary’ is still on at Te Uru in Titirangi for another couple of weeks. And I just signed another 60 books this morning so I know there are now more books available from Te Uru, Waitakere Contemporary Gallery. There is also a panel discussion planned with Bruce Connew, myself and the typography artist Catherine Griffiths who designed both the book and the exhibition, prior to the completion of the show at Te Uru (details to come). Best Rangihīroa
P.S Nice to know I am still a curator, perhaps Māori Curator 🙂
See also Bruce Connew’s interview on Radio New Zealand with Kim Hill ‘NZ’s Colonial Memorials’ 19 December 2020
Book signing today with photographer Bruce Connew and writer Rangihīroa Panoho. Connew’s accompanying exhibition of photographs and the artist’s book available at Te Uru, Waitakere Contemporary Gallery, Titirangi, AUCKLAND, NZ. Copies of ‘A Vocabulary’ sold out on the night, these are part of the next batch from the binders.
Who said people aren’t reading or buying books! This one is beautifully made. A gorgeous thing. Typography and exhibition design by Catherine Griffiths. Cloth, case-bound, 604 pages, section sewn, round spine, ribbon
written for the opening of Bruce Connew, ‘A Vocabulary’, Te Uru, Waitakere Contemporary Gallery, Titirangi 12 December 2020
E ngā mate. Ka mahara tātou ki ngā mumu Māori e takoto ana kei raro i ngā parekura o ngā pakanga whenua o mua. Haere, haere, haere. Haere ki te poho o te Atua, haere ki Hawaikinui, Hawaiki roa, Hawaiki pāmamao.
rangihīroa, Hato Mikaere, Ōhaeawai
The parekura sits silent no noise at all just the chatter of a tui wrecking putiputi down by the hall just the wind murmuring across the fertile plains he swore he heard their voices around Ngāi Kuku’s last remains
down by the river where the fighting pā once stood or was it just the twittering of pīwakawaka in the woods
the scale of the loss disgusted him it explained why he refused the spirit path to Rēinga instead he would choose to guard over bones and taonga and mourn unmentioned loss hidden from a nearby cenotaph that counted not the cost
raised to his last battle near fields where he had toiled he read the text again and again as if it would reveal some other truth or meaning that might possibly transcend a vocabulary of forgetting bronze letters that won’t bend colourful adjectives murdering rebels, barbarous savages
he struggled with the message they were a people worth forgetting
Indeed not a word of his hapū’s bravery not a mention of their name or that settler greed for land was largely to blame for a war no native asked for how else could one explain an eternity of loss within and this deep gnawing pain
and when archaeologists visit he wishes they’d hear him yell Haere mai E hoa, haul your trig over here, man Yeah map us brother, draft us on that plan
but the grid only measures trenches so we’ll always be missed except by manuhiri that want to take a piss
and summer comes and summer goes and the pōhutukawa bleeds scarlet in the morning 10 shades of crimson when the sun retreats
He pōhutukawa ko tahiHe pōhutukawa, e ruaHe pōhutukawa, e toru..
Some notes regarding ’10 Shades…‘
My wife’s people, Te Aupōuri, live near Cape Rēinga in the ‘far North’ of Aotearoa. They along with other Muri Whenua iwi, like Ngāti Kuri, consider themselves gatekeepers to Te Rerenga o Wairua ‘the leaping off point of the Spirits’ at the northern extremity of Aotearoa. Many Polynesian Islands in the South Pacific have these points of departure. This role of kaitiakitanga ‘guardianship’ at the exit of ēnei wairua ‘these spirits’ journeying to Hawaiki has created family histories where ghost stories are common. At times the Spirits stop along the way and there are visitations. The narratives told at night of encounters with the spirits are the most frightening. These wānanga ‘narratives’ are cherished and remembered and passed on with great relish and drama by the skilled storytellers of Muri Whenua.
10 Shades…then , in essence, is a ghost story taken from the point of view of a toa ‘Māori warrior’, he mumu Māori, who decides not to take the well worn path to Rēinga and determines to remain instead with his whānau and the warriors he fought with on a Ngā Pakanga Whenua o Mua battefield. In the poem one of the greatest struggles the central character has is accepting a memorial inscription raised near the battlefield. History, so the saying goes, is written by the victors. While this may be partly true these are also the days where indigenous voices outside the majority culture may also contest such histories.
rangihīroa, have you ever tried to read water? 2018
If the ancestors’ eyes what might we see, if their hands what might we touch, if their ears, what might we hear? Whakarongo ki te tai. E tangi hāere ana. ‘Listen to the tide, lamenting as it flows on.’ Words radiate a ring path, skimming thin, slicing obsidian smooth — a face. Like the tohunga ‘spiritual expert’ scanning the pools of Te Waiāriki — have you ever tried to read water? Can you feel their thinking about movement, sound, rhythm, light, space, distance, surface and … silence? In these words and their sounds:
