‘THE LONG SHADOW’
© Rangihīroa Panoho, 2020-2023. No part of this document (text or imagery) is free to be copied, plagiarised or shared for publication or for uses neither intended nor agreed on by the author without his express permission. Details for writing to the author are as follows: blueskypanoho@icloud.com
‘ĀTĀROA presents a richly informed and passionate response by Panoho to a critical time and events in our history that remains vital to gain a fuller understanding for our future.’
An exhibition involving photography, paintings and wānanga concerning Ngā Pakanga Whenua o Mua ‘NZ Land Wars’ first shown at Mahara Gallery, Waikanae, 2021. Portions of the exhibition, along with taonga from our family collection, were re-installed at St Luke’s Hall Mt Albert as part of the 150 years celebration of the Whare Mihinare in Ōwairaka, 16 October 2022 and more recently within Whetū Mārama whare wānanga at the Kupe Waka Centre outside Taipa in the far North (10 December 2022 – 10 February 2023). Ngā mihinui ki a Paul Simei-Barton, ko Te Ihi Kikorangi Toka Panoho, John Panoho, Jim Cox and all the other friends and whānau that helped make these shows happen. They are a huge undertaking and my heartfelt thanks.
MAHARA GALLERY, Waikanae, 24 JULY – 18 SEPTEMBER 2021
Artists talk, MAHARA GALLERY, Waikanae, 21 August 2021 (postponed due to COVID lockdown)
- This exhibition features photography, painting, poetry and field research at Northern Wars sites
OPENING 24 July 2021
Preparation for ĀTĀROA in a 105 year old cinema converted studio space in late May/June/July/August 2021
Below the latest version (central panel) of the 9 metre long Ngā Mahi Aroha ‘Acts of Love’, 2021 before it was rolled and stored and the fresh canvases recently coated with tinted gesso ready and waiting for the paintings that explore ideas originally set out in the work on paper.
I mea au i tu ai koe ki te riri kia taea te ika o te kōpua, kahore i te patihitihi nei ano, kua karanga koe KĀTI.
‘I expected when you took up arms that you would go out to catch the fish of the deep; now, only in the shallows, you are calling out for peace.’
The reference in this painting to TE KŌPUA ‘the deep’ is to the whale (or the British army and navy) that arrived from Poihākena ‘Sydney’ to avenge the sacking of New Zealand’s first capital Kororareka and to restore what they saw as law and order in Te Tai Tokerau in what would become known as the beginning of the ‘Northern Wars’. Recovering from wounds sustained against Tamati Waka Nene near his pā at Te Ahuahu Hone Heke arrived at the end of the battle of Ruapekapeka in early January 1846.
Interestingly Heke also used ‘te ika o te kōpua’ as a metaphor in his prolific correspondence to British leaders and missionaries. Writing to the newly appointed Governor George Grey he said,
‘God made this country for us. It cannot be sliced; if it were a whale it might be sliced. Do you return to your own country, which was made by God for you. God made this land for us; it is not for any stranger or foreign nation to meddle with this sacred country.’
My aesthetic point of reference in ‘Te Kōpua’ is to the work of Dutch artist Matthias Sallieth (1749-1791) whose sperm whale engraving was interpreted by engraver Hendrik Kobell and Diederik de Jong in the whaling manual ‘Nieuwe beschryving der walvisvangst en haringvisschery’ (Amsterdam, 1792).
To me the parāoa ‘sperm whale’ is a reference to the scale of the undertaking that both Heke, Kawiti and many other leaders realised when they took on the British in the various pakanga whenua o mua around Aotearoa. The incredible bravery required to take on the big fish of the deep is a profoundly moving legacy abundantly evident in any of the major NZ Land Wars sites that one can still visit today. This includes places like Ruapekapeka and Ōhaeawai in the North, Te Rangihaeata’s stand at Pāuatahanui outside Pōrirua and Rāwiri Puhirake’s stand at Pukehinahina (Gate pā) and many of the other parekura throughout the North Island
The Ātāroa panorama above and details of the work in the following nine images are part of my preparation for ĀTĀROA which opens in around a month at the above Kapiti gallery. The 9 metre long painting which I have been working on the above Kingsland studio, for the last month, is designed to open up conversations concerning Ngā Pakanga Whenua ‘NZ Land Wars’ and the Kapiti/Wellington and Te Tai Tokerau regions. Over the next month I will post images of the remaining work that grows out of this opening and which will feature in the show. Ātāroa suggests, as I have already done so in my writing, that Ngā Pakanga Whenua o Mua involves troubled unresolved histories that continue to cast long shadows into contemporary New Zealand. One of the key issues that the painting ‘Ātāroa’ describes is the loyalist/separatist strands of hapū and iwi allianaces which involve very different responses both to the past but also to the future. My thanks to Creative New Zealand for the opportunity to research and paint this wānanga. I look forward to the opportunity of exhibiting and of talking to this painterly research in the Wellington region later in the year.
Whetoi Pomare II – Ngāti Manu rangatira whose people occupied the major Bay of Islands pā site Ōtuihu, which once stood at the mouth of the Taumarere River. Otuihu was destroyed by the 58th and the 96 regiments who were ferried there by Te Nōta ‘North Star’ at the beginning of the Northern Wars. After surrendering himself and waving a white flag, while his people evacuated, Pōmare was chained to the mast of the ship. Te Nōta and Herehere ‘to be bound or imprisoned’ have been passed down as names amongst descendants to remember these hara ‘offences’ and the larger losses which need addressing.
The following images are preparatory works from which a final selection will be made for the show. I will also be adding to this selection the works that I currently am completing in the Studio over the next month.
he pare pupuri ‘rembrance garland’. My contribution to the memory of wars involving Aotearoa both locally and overseas. Tomorrow is ANZAC day when we remember soldiers from New Zealand and Australia who fought and died in the disastrous Gallipoli campaign in 1915. Both that conflict in the Dardanelles, North Western Turkey and on the Western Front deserve our focus over the last century. Many New Zealand families and towns and settlements throughout Aotearoa bore the burden of their rangatahi dying or returning seriously wounded or affected by that particular battle site.
It is the view of David Reynolds, Professor of International History at Cambridge University, that the Great War is under appreciated in its European context. He sees the 1914-1918 conflict as creating the environment that precipitated the second world war. Reynolds uses the useful metaphor of the shadow in his revisionist history. Here’s a link to a good BBC documentary for those who may be interested:
Reynold’s reading of the Great War got me thinking about the impact of the nineteenth century land wars in Aotearoa. I believe that the shadow cast by the earlier Māori/pākehā conflicts at sites like Ruapekapeka, Rangiriri, Ōrakau, Gate Pā, Te Pōrere and many other battles is also a long one. This ata ‘shadow’ is one that reaches across the twentieth century and it continues, for Māori, to be experienced in the 21st century. It is a malevolent darkness whose central grievance is the loss of enormous amounts of land and resources around the whole of Aotearoa.
I include an image featuring the balcony of one of New Zealand’s governors most involved in conducting war with Maori during the land wars. The fretwork of the balcony of his Kawau mansion in the Hauraki Gulf is in silhouette. Raupatu means ‘to conquer, overcome, take without any right.’ Governor Grey epitomises the complexity of nineteenth century politics and its impact on Māori since that time. Grey rightly could be considered a patron of Māori arts and literature. He built the largest and most comprehensive collection of Māori traditional knowledge ever assembled in written form. He cultivated friendships and alliances with all the paramount leaders of his time. He was also present while the British were pounding my ancestors who were supporting Ngāti Hine at Ruapekapeka. He ordered the invasion and the confiscations of vast lands in the Waikato and elsewhere. He ordered the stealthy kidnapping and temporary imprisonment (effectively the trampling of the mana) of Ngāti Toa leader Te Rauaparaha and more pertinently in 1845 with the unjust arrest and temporary imprisonment of tā tātou tupuna Pomare II shortly before the British forces bombed our Ngāti Manu stronghold Ōtuihu…
It is this raupatu, this taking of the land and the trampling on the mana of Māori peoples that is at the heart of the separatism and the protest movements that continue throughout the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. Te Rarawa rangatira Nōpera Panakareao famously remarked prior to signing the Treaty of Waitangi (1840) that he saw the document as giving the shadow of the land to Queen Victoria while tāngata whenua were to retain the substance. He couldn’t have been more mistaken. The wars that developed around the land throughout the nineteenth century (and particularly in the 1860s) in Aotearoa proved the opposite to be the case. The long shadow cast is one with which Māori must continue to contend economically, physically, culturally, socially, psychologically…
Reynold’s conviction that the Great War impacted the world more profoundly than is commonly understood has then local application. A more careful examination of the Land Wars of the nineteenth century would help clarify a great deal of the misunderstanding and underlying conflict that hampers tāngata whenua and tauiwi efforts to understand and respect one another.
excerpts of rangihīroa text for Mōteatea and essay, ‘Kakati te namu…‘ from Bruce Connew, ‘A Vocabulary’ 2021, Vapour Momenta Press
10. Rāhiri at Whiria, Pākanae, Hokianga te whanga, wānanga, 2020 (right), 345 x 380 mm
12. rangihīroa, Ōhaeawai, 2020 (right), ink on paper, drawing, 170 x 155 mm
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
piwakawaka
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 refused to count the cost
raised to his last battle
near fields in which he 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
no mention of their name
or that settler greed for land
was largely to blame
for a war they never asked for
how else could one explain
an eternity of loss within
a deep gnawing pain
and when archaeologists visit
he wishes he could yell
and call
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 mimi
and summer comes and summer goes
and the pōhutukawa bleeds
scarlet in the morning
10 shades of crimson
when the sun retreats
