Our People - Our Land

This is the third exhibition in the series showcasing the New Zealand landscape and the people who inhabit it. Some 85 million years ago the land on which this country sits broke away from the Gondwana supercontinent, and the primeval forces it was subjected to are apparent in the rugged Central Otago landforms in Bruce Hunt’s Geomorphology, Mt Kyeburn.

Through the relentless effects of erosion and human activity, the land has since been worn smooth, as in Brent Wong’s unidentified Hills & Dam, Lake Under Clouds.

Aotearoa New Zealand has the distinction of being the last habitable landmass to be settled by humans. The people arrived in two waves, the first – the ancestors of the Maori – from eastern Polynesia around 1300 AD. Jim Wheeler’s bronze, Pohutukawa – Matariki, acknowledges both the Maori New Year and the coastal evergreen whose crimson blooms qualify it as New Zealand’s native Christmas tree.

Prior to human settlement, this had been a land of birds, and Nigel Brown makes a plea for the conservation of the tui and kokako. Aroha Gossage records the ghostly remnants, at Pakiri in eastern Northland, of the vast cabbage tree and kahikatea swamps that once characterised this country’s lowland. Gossage also addresses the practices of the country’s original settlers with her Whanau Fishing Well, while another perspective is provided by Robert Jahnke’s bronze and wood sculpture, He(t)iko, of a fish on a plate, bearing the message ‘This is not a koha / It is a customary right’.

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