‘Te Kōpua “the deep”, have you ever been at a point of crisis in your life where you have been brought to the edge…’
2021 for me has involved high highs and some lows lows. Life eh. The latter has involved enduring a 7 month long wait with a recruitment process for Curator Māori involving the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. I was shortlisted for the position back in March 22, went through their interview process ‘in good faith’ as the person in charge described it. Three referees were requested, 5 of my listed referees were actually approached with long detailed conversations reported back to me.
There was a person chosen unanimously by the panel and then…nothing for 3 weeks. Then on April 15, after requests for information I was told the gallery was taking ‘a pause’ in the recruitment process. On May 3 I sent a link to the chair of the search panel about keeping candidates engaged during recruitment processes. Obviously I was referring to myself. I was given the impression I should hang in there, ‘in good faith’. Those were the words I remember being used several times along with comments about what benefits there would be waiting for the gallery to go through whatever it was doing. This was all in a telephone conversation – nothing written down or official. The next time I heard from the Panel was 12 October, ‘As promised some months ago, I’m getting in touch…’ In the intervening five months of silence a whole lot of spin came out from the AAG in the Media that the Gallery needed to make other appointments first one of which, ‘Kaupapa Māori’, would directly be involved in the Curator Maori appointment process. The person appointed to such a position would bring a particular expertise, in the area of the Treaty of Waitangi and its relevance in the workplace, to the Gallery. Apparently this was a priority that explained the ‘pause’.
More Māori representation sounded strange to me because two of the three panel members in the March interview were Māori. One was a representative of Haerewa (the Māori advisory panel supporting Māori within the gallery) and the other had broader Auckland Council experience in ToW workplace related issues. More importantly when the appointed ‘Kaupapa Māori’ member sat on the 12 November panel he only had a small area in the interview questionnaire because he (as with the Deputy Director – also Maori and appointed several weeks earlier) had corporate but no background experience working in galleries, or in the arts industry or with curating Māori art specifically. Another wait followed and after a couple of weeks of no response to the interview and no request for referees I was inevitably informed another candidate had been appointed to the position.
What followed were a series of exchanges with an HR Manager who mentioned no commitment to the preferred candidate in the March interview had been made. After a number of letters and pressing her with a timeline, and arguing about the need to dialogue since the gallery apparently placed emphasis on partnership/conversational values and principles identified in the Treaty, some real information was squeezed out. I recall right at the end of my November 12 interview (the only chance one gets to actively dialogue) I asked the Director, why the protracted recruitment process and the long delays? No real or genuinely felt apology was offered, just a comment others higher up the chain, felt she (the Director) ‘apparently’ needed to be involved in the interview process. The HR Manager in a final proper response clarified the first process (where a unanimous decision had been made and references had been sought) had not been signed off by the Director. Bingo. Here was the issue that would have been useful back in April/May. Yes a clear rejection (i.e. we no longer want to proceed with your application) but something I could have coped with better than being kept hanging for much of the working year waiting for an interview that in the end most definitely was a formality, where something had already been decided and we were just going through the motions.
The wait and being left hanging was the issue, not the minor involvement that ToW kaupapa had in the final appointment. In the end only two of three original March panel members sat on the Committee and there was a strange addition to the Panel of the newly appointed Deputy Director also turning up (he asked one confusing question) to bolster, one presumes, the interview score so the numbers weighed in favour of the directorial position privately indicated in March. All in all there was no way anyone, even someone unanimously selected in the March interview and a previously preferred candidate, was going to successfully take on those odds in that November interview if the Director did not want them appointed. In my spirit I felt throughout that interview the outcome was already fait accompli.
Of course it was devastating to have the phone call from the person that had told me in March I should hang in there ‘in good faith’. However, the point of my kōrero here is not to dwell on my unhappiness with the rude and arrogant way AAGToT made me wait 7 months while they got their processes, response and alternative candidate worked out. I want to say that my referees for this position were amazing, incredibly supportive and that they always believed in me. Their response was they felt the long wait was unnecessary, the process dodgy, and it was the gallery’s loss not appointing me.
I am frustrated by the small number of industry people that keep cutting across and undermining me in the arts and in education. And that will be my ongoing process to find who slithers in the shadows. It still hurts and I am working through it but what I wanted to share here was a far more special moment that dramatically changed my thinking about this whole concern. My wife insisted on sharing a video she had taken of me talking about a month earlier about a painting that came out of a studio experience producing work for ĀTĀROA and the Mahara Gallery in Waikanae from May through to August. I was really reluctant to look at it. Although I am an educator and a presenter, lately I haven’t spoken much in posts. It was about 5/6 years ago I did some radio, television interviews and a short marketing film on my book MAORI ART, History, Architecture, Landscape and Theory (Batemans, 2015/2018).
Anyway, there I was the other day being forced to look at myself talking about Te Ruki Kawiti and the fight atop Ruapekapeka in 1845 and his kōrero with Hōne Wiremu Heke Pōkai … and I was deeply moved! It was like a version of myself and the ancestors had spoken truth into my spirit and into my future and I was listening to it.
So friends have you ever been at a point in your life where you have been brought to the edge? Have you ever taken on the parāoa in the ‘deep’? How did you cope? I want to make the point that neither the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi, nor of the earlier more important 1835 He Whakaputanga (the Declaration of Independence) nor of current institutional visions and slogans offered much hope for me in this particular situation. What moved me were the events that followed the signing of the 1840 document just as it moved Hōne Heke to test the Union Jack and British sovereignty. What moved me was the unhappiness of Te Ruki Kawiti to put up with the constant reneging of the Crown and its unwillingness to truly share power and honour the rangatiratanga and mana of indigenous leaders. Te Kawiti’s actions at Ōhaeawai and Ruapekapeka show a willingness to go out into te kōpua ‘the deep’ and take on the resistance.
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
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, Mōteatea ‘lament’, A VocabularyBruce Connew, ‘Heke’s Pā’, A Vocabulary, Te Uru, Titirangi, Auckland, NZ
Bruce Connew’s ‘A Vocabulary’. Opening Saturday at Te Uru, Waitakere Contemporary Gallery, Titirangi, Tāmaki Makaurau, AUCKLAND, NZ, 12 December 2020 @ 4pm. The book, preview images and text are available through Vapour Momenta Press, 2021
Bruce Connew, Wakefield…’Author of the System of Colonisation‘, from monument, London, in A Vocabulary, 2020
For the last 2 1/2 years I have been working on text for ‘Bruce Connew, A Vocabulary’, However, both the artworks, my exhibition text and the accompanying book are now available and quietly on show prior to the more official opening this coming weekend. Yesterday, I got a chance to have sneak preview with the support staff at Te Uru, the artist, his partner Catherine Griffiths (the book and exhibition designer) and the Director Andrew Clifford. The show looks as good as I had envisaged it from the printed samples and jpegs that the photographer has been feeding me for many months now. It is a handsome catalogue and a fine looking exhibition. For those who live nineteenth century New Zealand history there are the familiar names in unfamiliar contexts. The monumental text from which these images have been extracted ends up strangely re-formulated. I have often wondered what the revolutionary exchange between Braque and Picasso felt like in Paris in 1907/1908 when a new language of Cubism was being invented. There is something unexpectedly exciting in the framing of monument text that is taking place in Connew’s work. Is it historical short-hand, historical pun, uneasy veneration…? A new vocabulary is indeed in formation…
Bruce Connew, Hori Kerei, ‘Sir George Grey’, A Vocabulary, Te Uru, Titirangi, AUCKLAND, NZ, Summer, 2020Bruce Connew, Te Kooti/Titokowaru, A Vocabulary, Te Uru, Titirangi, AUCKLAND, NZ, Summer, 2020
Detail, Connew, ‘A Firm Friend of the Europeans...’, A VocabularyTe Uru, Titirangi, AUCKLAND, NZ, Summer, 2020/2021
Kenny Willis (Kaiwhakahaere Whakaaturanga me nga Whakaurunga, Te Uru) preparing samples of my text, including excerpts from Mōteatea ‘lament’and the essay ‘Ka Kakati te Namu, Ka ora tonu te kōrero ‘the sandfly nips…the conversation continues’ in the accompanying book, ‘A Vocabulary’
Ka mate he tete kura ka tupu he tete kura
'When one red fern frond falls, another takes its place.'
he whakataukī
It’s New Year’s eve 2019 tonight. Aucklanders have fled the City for the beaches. They have escaped to Northland’s remote stretches of sand and to Coromandel’s ringed coastlines. This place is a ghost town. Driving around feels a little like going back to the empty suburban roads of the 1980s during other periods of vacation. Many indigenous cultures have different concepts regarding the arrival of the New Year. For our tūpuna it was the months of winter (late May/early June) and the appearance of the star cluster Matariki ‘Pleiades constellation’ that signalled the change. While June 10 was celebrated this year there was traditionally a longer, natural cyclic rhythm that brought cosmos and people together in celebration throughout tribal Aotearoa. Matariki was a time for the harvesting of natural resources, a time of reflection and a time of planning for the future.
While the heavens are a natural place to turn to this time of year (i.e. Bethlehem – the morning star and the Christian narrative) I am a Māori art historian and Māori art is full of natural cyclic symbols that may prove useful to this discussion. My book MAORI ART looks at the metaphor of rivers in our ancestral thinking as a way of considering the flow of history in our artforms. It may have been a short essay I wrote recently on kōwhaiwhai based artist Sandy Adsett that made me more aware of a rauponga fern sending out pitau shoots over the last couple of weeks. Photographing the fern immediately brings to mind one of the key design modules in Māori art – the koru and it is this motif, its history and its natural origins, that is the focus for the remainder of this short essay. The koru, I suggest, is actually a good metaphor for acknowledging the New Year.
There are many natural sources for the koru. While the spiral is commonly used by many cultures throughout the world the koru and its particular usage by New Zealand Māori is unique for a range of reasons. Firstly, it represents an aesthetic shift in Polynesian design history. The koru, and its many different manifestations in te toi whakairo ‘Māori woodcarving’ and kōwhaiwhai ‘Māori rafter painting’, constitutes a deliberate movement away from the angular forms and patterns that were part of the proto Polynesian aesthetic (particularly present in pottery, tapa and tātau) to a uniquely curvilinear form. The koru developed and flourished here in Aotearoa as our ancestors became increasingly isolated from their Hawaiki (i.e. their various Pacific homelands).
Sandy Adsett, Ngāti Pahaurewa and New Zealand Historic Places Trust restoration, HINERINGA meetinghouse, Raupunga mārae. Photography: Haruhiko Sameshima (commissioned by author) 19 January 1994, destroyed by fire 2007.
Secondly, the koru is a response to the equally unique natural environment found here in Aotearoa. The shape of the previously described unfurling fern frond is one commonly referred to as a source of inspiration for the koru. The pitau is embryonic and full of potential and that is what probably attracted our ancestors to the architecture of its growth. It suggests in its coil that life involves all sorts of possibilities. Life is potential. Tomorrow is another day that will unfold in a way that may be completely different from today. The unfolding fern frond also suggests a point of return in its circularity. It speaks of natural cycles, continuum and a returning…
Just the right motif, I say, to introduce the new year that so many around the world celebrate.
Nā reira, e ngā whāea, e ngā mātua, e ngā tamariki, e ngā kaipānui o ēnei rangataki. Hari tau hou, Happy New Year!
rangihīroa, fern without stem, 2019
Cookie Consent
We use cookies to improve your experience on our site. By using our site, you consent to cookies.
Used by Google Analytics to determine which links on a page are being clicked
30 seconds
_ga
ID used to identify users
2 years
__utmb
Used to distinguish new sessions and visits. This cookie is set when the GA.js javascript library is loaded and there is no existing __utmb cookie. The cookie is updated every time data is sent to the Google Analytics server.
30 minutes after last activity
_gac_
Contains information related to marketing campaigns of the user. These are shared with Google AdWords / Google Ads when the Google Ads and Google Analytics accounts are linked together.
90 days
__utma
ID used to identify users and sessions
2 years after last activity
__utmz
Contains information about the traffic source or campaign that directed user to the website. The cookie is set when the GA.js javascript is loaded and updated when data is sent to the Google Anaytics server
6 months after last activity
__utmt
Used to monitor number of Google Analytics server requests
10 minutes
__utmc
Used only with old Urchin versions of Google Analytics and not with GA.js. Was used to distinguish between new sessions and visits at the end of a session.
End of session (browser)
__utmv
Contains custom information set by the web developer via the _setCustomVar method in Google Analytics. This cookie is updated every time new data is sent to the Google Analytics server.
2 years after last activity
__utmx
Used to determine whether a user is included in an A / B or Multivariate test.
18 months
_gat
Used to monitor number of Google Analytics server requests when using Google Tag Manager
1 minute
_gid
ID used to identify users for 24 hours after last activity
24 hours
Vimeo is a video hosting platform for high-quality content, ideal for creators and businesses to showcase their work.
Used to detect if the visitor has accepted the marketing category in the cookie banner. This cookie is necessary for GDPR-compliance of the website.
179 days
LOGIN_INFO
This cookie is used to play YouTube videos embedded on the website.
2 years
VISITOR_PRIVACY_METADATA
Youtube visitor privacy metadata cookie
180 days
GPS
Registers a unique ID on mobile devices to enable tracking based on geographical GPS location.
1 day
VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE
Tries to estimate the users' bandwidth on pages with integrated YouTube videos. Also used for marketing
179 days
PREF
This cookie stores your preferences and other information, in particular preferred language, how many search results you wish to be shown on your page, and whether or not you wish to have Google’s SafeSearch filter turned on.
10 years from set/ update
YSC
Registers a unique ID to keep statistics of what videos from YouTube the user has seen.
