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This extract originally appeared in Te Ata o Tū The Shadow of Tūmatauenga: The New Zealand Wars Collections of Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2024) on pages 380-381.
This extract was authored by Athol McCredie.
The passive resistance movement centred on the Taranaki settlement of Parihaka, and its invasion by colonial forces in 1881, has provided inspiration for many artists and exhibitions over time. . .
The first full art exhibition on the subject was by Selwyn Muru at the Dowse Art Gallery in Lower Hutt in 1979. But equally significant was the Māori kaupapa that Muru brought to the exhibition, especially its opening. Muru ensured it was run in a completely Māori way, and it became ‘a crash course in Māori culture’ for the gallery.1 The local newspaper reported, ‘There’s never been an opening like it. Maori pleasures, Maori anger, remembrances of old hurts, protests at present injustices – they were all wrapped up in a night at The Dowse Art Gallery, Lower Hutt, that went on, and on, and on . . .’2
Over 700 people are believed to have attended an evening that included a pōwhiri, a hāngī, a play by Rowley Habib and readings by Hone Tūwhare. Mattresses and blankets were spread, marae-style, around the gallery walls. Muru’s view was that an art gallery was an appropriate place to have a conciliatory gathering of races: ‘Art and literature are inseparable in the Maori world . . . Our galleries must reek with human odour. They have become too sterile, with paintings like icons, not to be touched. They should be touched.’3
Dutch–New Zealand photographer Ans Westra, who knew Muru from photographing him in the 1960s for Te Ao Hou magazine and who had photographed hui and other Māori events over the previous two decades, made sure she was present. She always declared herself to be apolitical, and certainly she was no activist, but her determined, career-long record of protest actions of all varieties reveals the direction of her sympathies.
1 Director Jim Barr, quoted in Athol McCredie, ‘Going Public: New Zealand art museums in the 1970s’, unpublished Master’s thesis, Massey University, 1999, p. 181.
2 See Claudia Orange’s seminal work, The Treaty of Waitangi (Allen & Unwin, Wellington, 1987).
3 Maori Messenger: Te Karere Maori, 1 January 1844, p. 3.