Celebrating the legacy of a master carver

Book cover of Rauru : Tene Waitere, Maori Carving, Colonial History. Photo / Supplied

This handsome and unusual book brings together the efforts of an historical anthropologist (Professor Nicholas Thomas), a major photographer (Mark Adams), and two contemporary Maori carvers (Lyonel Grant and James Schuster) to focus on the work of Tene Waitere of Ngati Tarawhai (1854-1931) - hardly a household name but convincingly presented here as the most innovative Maori carver of his time.

One of the things which made Waitere unusual is that as well as making work for his own people in a traditional environment in and around Rotorua, he was also alert to the commercial possibilities of the expanding tourist trade and produced many of his works on commission for European clients, including C. E. Nelson (a hotelier in Whakarewarewa), the Tourist Department of the New Zealand government, and many tourists and collectors from overseas. One consequence is that some of the major pieces he worked on have ended up on the other side of the world. Several of these works are fully documented in the book both photographically and in the text.

One of the first meeting houses he worked on was Hinemihi which sheltered several people, including the carver, during the calamitous eruption of Mt Tarawera in 1886 which buried the fabled Pink and White Terraces. Subsequently it was bought for 50 by a Governor General, Lord Onslow, shipped to England and reassembled in the grounds of his country estate in Surrey where it still stands. Adams' richly resonant colour photographs show both the desolate site where the house originally stood, and then, incongruously sited under the branches of a spreading oak tree, in the immaculately manicured grounds of Clandon House.

The book derives its title from Rauru, a whare whakairo (meeting house) commissioned by the self-styled "white tohunga" Nelson for use in the tourist trade at Whakarewarewa, as shown in several contemporary photographs in the book. An innovative feature of the carvings, especially those done by Waitere - one of several carvers who worked on the house - was that instead of depicting the ancestors of a specific iwi, as usual in such buildings, his figures came from general Maori mythology, such as a striking poupou of Maui fishing up Te-Ika-a-Maui and being crushed between the thighs of Hinenui-te-po, the goddess of death.

For several years Rauru served as a showcase of Maori culture for Europeans, but around 1910 the house was sold for 1500 to a famous ethnographic museum in Hamburg, Germany - the Museum fur Volkerkunde - where, as the "Maurihaus", it remains one of the star attractions.
Again, Adams' evocative photographs contrast the original site in Whakarewarewa - now a bland slice of suburbia - with the location in urban Hamburg.

Around 20 fine, large photographs are devoted to the house. Particularly impressive are several triptychs (a form which Adams especially favours) documenting both exterior and interior views.
Other carvings by Waitere ended up in London, including a superb small waka gifted to the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall and York (the future King George V and Queen Mary) on their visit to Rotorua in 1901, now languishing in the ethnography store of the British Museum in Hackney, East London.

Another Waitere piece was an elaborately carved pouhaki (flagpole) gifted to Edward, Prince of Wales, in Rotorua in 1920 which stood for years near the naval dockyard at Portsmouth until it was recently moved for preservation to the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at Cambridge University, where Professor Thomas teaches. Both works and their sites are richly documented in Adams' photographs.

Other photographic sequences show important works by Waitere found in parts of New Zealand, including the Ohinemutu Marae, Rotorua, the Buried Village, Te Wairoa, Whakarewarewa and Te Papa Tongarewa (a remarkable three-headed To Moko panel). Thomas' text and Adams' photographs are usefully supplemented by lengthy interviews with James Schuster, a descendent of Tene Waitere, and Lyonel Grant, a leading contemporary carver working in the same tradition in which Waitere was such a key transitional figure.

Their contributions add valuable colour and authenticity to a fascinating account, through the lens of a highly gifted practitioner, of the circulation of indigenous art within a global context of empire, tourism and trade. In the editor's words: "It is about history, about interpreting history visually, and about what is made of history now." It's an informative and thought-provoking book.

* Peter Simpson is an Auckland reviewer.

* Rauru: Tene Waitere, Maori Carving, Colonial History
Edited by Nicholas Thomas with photographs by Mark Adams and interviews with Lyonel Grant and James Schuster (University of Otago Press $120)