The Christmas decorations were put up in Waikato Hospital the same morning my brother Mark arrived by helicopter. He had collapsed on the footpath near his home in the harbour town of Kawhia. He was found just after dawn. The ideatook hold that he had set out for a walk toward the beach – he lived in Kawhia for close to 30 years, and everyone knew his habits and whereabouts although few had ever been invited into his home, the former Bank of New Zealand, which he set up as his studio to paint day and night, night and day, a prolific and nationally significant artist who at 69 was approaching his peak.
The population of Kawhia is about 400. People were used to seeing him walking the ocean beach for hours. The town doctor would know he was there before he saw him: he recognised his unusual footprint in the sand. It was a nice theory, that he was leaving the house to do something he loved in the town that he loved, but it turned out to be false. In fact he was trying to head in the opposite direction, to his home, and had collapsed on the pavement at night and lay there till morning.
The thing about all and any Christmas decorations, no matter how tatty or forced or mean, is that they always work their little magic. They provided a jolly sight as we took a deep breath and walked inside the crisis unit. I felt cheered, and of course I took it too far, immediately entertaining the thought we might witness a Christmas miracle. He would wake up. He would smile, and say, “Well, I’ve felt better.” It was all on the table. News travels slow in hospitals and we didn’t know a lot. “He’s very sick,” the nurse said, when I called the hospital that morning. He was in an induced coma. I asked, “Is this fatal?” She said, again: “He’s very sick.” It was a loaded answer. They don’t say that sort of thing in hospitals unless they carry the weight of death.
There was the silver tinsel taped to the ceiling, there was an artificial tree. Waikato Hospital goes on forever, possibly takes up as much room as the whole town of Kawhia, and a lot of it looks wonderful – gleaming, sophisticated, professional. A lot of Auckland Hospital looks put together with clothespegs and drawing pins. Mark was in a good place and staff took wonderful care of him until he died just after 3pm the next day. “He went down for the count,” I wrote in his death notice, finally making myself useful. Mark was a boxing fan. We grew up in the 1970s when Ali fought Frazier and lost, fought Foreman and won, fought Frazier twice more and won both times, a golden period of heavyweight boxing, our childhood in Mt Maunganui glowing with the distant thrill of Madison Square Garden – he had a subscription to The Ring magazine, which became a foundation of his artistic vision. He loved the shape and motion of boxing photos, the mood of glory and defeat, the thick dark ink.
Year 7 Te Atatu Intermediate student Minka Braunias in 2018 with an abstract by her uncle Mark Braunias
The thing about grief at Christmas is that you’re walking in the wrong direction, kind of walking backwards, while the world around you is rushing towards gifts and happiness, sunshine and fun. He was in the 13th bed at the end of the ward. A patient next to him was encased in plaster and suspended by pulleys; she was stuck in a desperate pose, as though trying to claw her way out. Mark was taken out of his coma but remained in the same state as he was found on the footpath: unresponsive.
“He can hear you,” said the nurse. “Mark,” we said. “Mark.” He couldn’t hear anything. A doctor came that first day and confirmed he had a massive brain bleed. She showed an MRI scan. I said, “What’s all the white?” She said, “Blood.” She was otherwise quite light on information but half-way through a sentence she described the bleed as “catastrophic”. A specialist saw us later that day. She went further and closed the door on things, describing the bleed as “unsurvivable”. She thought that what might have happened on the streets of Kawhia is he felt a sudden headache, and then, she said, “Lights out.” I mentioned this later to an art writer in Christchurch. She knew and loved Mark’s work. She said, “He would have liked that phrase, used it in a title perhaps.” Lights Out, the farewell show by Mark Braunias.
Last Christmas I played Last Christmas by Wham! a lot on YouTube, in love with the video (the silly snowfights, George Michael’s deep hair) as much as the song. Christmas at Waikato Hospital was held in stillness and silence. We sat by Mark’s bed and looked at him for hours. He looked really good. The broad shoulders, the strong arms – the only thing wrong with him was he lay dying. I brought along a book. I read it out loud to him sometimes. “This is The Mansion by William Faulkner,” I told him. “I really think you’ll like it. It’s about a farmer in the American South called Mink Snopes, total white trash, bitter and resentful, driven mad by rich folks and his own stubbornness.” Mark loved the novels of George Orwell and the short stories of Somerset Maugham, portraits of ordinary people up against it. More than Ali or Frazier, or any of the boxing greats, he loved the tough guys who had a shot at the title and lost, returning to obscurity, like George Chuvalo, Jerry Quarry, countless others recorded in The Ring and in the mood of his art work. I repeated one of Faulkner’s sentences out to him five or six times. “A man can bear anything by simply and calmly refusing to accept it, be reconciled to it, give up to it.” I was asking him to refuse death.
Steve Braunias with his older brother Mark, summer holiday, circa 1964
Christmas is about family. He died with everyone at his side. He had been monitored overnight. There was no change. We waited for the doctors to get to him on their morning rounds. It was a long wait to get to the 13th bed and just as they approached it they were called to an emergency. I asked later whether a patient had died. “No, they saved her.” Life and not always death at a spotless hospital but the only thing to do with Mark was take him off life support. It was doing most of his breathing. We went away to talk about organ donations and when we came back the specialist said the machine was now doing all of his breathing. Faulkner writes of Mink Snopes, “That was the danger, what a man had to watch against: once you laid flat on the ground, right away the earth started to draw you back down into it.”
Mark spent Christmas Day these past few years at the home of Kit Jeffries and his family in Kawhia. He was always welcome; they were both Kawhia icons, longtime fixtures in the North King Country landscape, not merely good Kiwi jokers who liked to talk about sport but good friends. He had a gift for friendship, for generosity of spirit. Two of his closest friends, art writer Richard Fahey and painter Peter Robinson, were at his bedside when he died. “The ground never let a man forget it was there waiting,” Faulkner writes at the end of The Mansion, when he finally kills off Mink Snopes, “pulling gently and without no hurry at him between every step, saying, Come on, lay down; I ain’t going to hurt you.” They took him off life support. They said it might take an hour to die. They warned it could be traumatising. Patients develop the awful condition known as “air hunger”, and strike terrible, lunging poses. But he slipped out quietly. It only took 10 minutes.
The funeral was held two days before Christmas in Mt Maunganui, that classic town of New Zealand summer. It was a beautiful day. The immense white cones of salt at the port sparkled like sand in the sun. I walked to the beach in the morning and looked out to sea. On the way to the church in Dee St, I called in at the St Vincent de Paul opshop and bought five tablemats decorated with photos of the Mount. Everything was in walking distance of the family home. We were in Mark’s footsteps, from his childhood to the grave, 69 years of a good life, the best years devoted to making art. His death inspired a Wikipedia page. I hadn’t known Te Papa held his work and only knew bits and pieces of his career – shows at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery and Tauranga Art Gallery, his work also exhibited at Jonathan Smart (Christchurch), Anna Miles (Auckland), Peter McLeavey (Wellington), Ann Packer (Whanganui), Space (Napier). He was prolific, determined, worked hard. “Painting is not a casual activity,” he wrote in his diary. “It takes the whole person over, your entire life. If you are a painter, that is what you are.”
Mark Braunias at his Kawhia studio with friend and painter Peter Robinson
It was too hot to wear my suit jacket so I draped it over one of the pews and gave the eulogy in a short-sleeved shirt. All of my writing life I looked to Mark as a model for his craft, his seriousness, his funniness, and felt inspired to try and operate somewhere in the same vicinity as his brilliance but knew I was never anywhere near as talented – the eulogy only came alive whenever I quoted from his diaries and emails, like this commentary on his years studying art at Ilam in Christchurch in the 1980s: “Lots of good parties and nights spent playing darts at the Bush Inn with Peter Robinson, Shane Cotton, Seraphine Pick, Allan Pearson and others. That’s where we REALLY learned our shit.” You could sense the excitement coming off that small reminiscence – a generation of great New Zealand painters developing their practice at the same place at the same time – and I could picture, too, his competitive intensity at the Bush Inn dartboard. He played every sport with a will to win that was almost hostile.
There was another farewell, another summer’s day in a town by the water, when a memorial event was held in Kawhia in January. All of the family travelled to be there. There was hardly any traffic on the Waikato plains or King Country hills. Possibly the most dramatic event in recent Kawhia life was the Facebook notice about a horse that was tied to a fencepost but managed to pull it out of the ground, and was ambling through town with a fencepost dragging behind it. A poster in the community noticeboard on the main road in town, Jervois St, was headlined, MISSING SINCE DECEMBER 9TH 2021. PHILIPS FAMILY, with a picture of Tom Phillips and his three children. They could be anywhere in the King Country. Mark wrote that the title of one of his recent paintings was inspired from a fictional character in a Somerset Maugham short story about “an outcast who lived in a foreign environment at the edge of a muddy pond”. There was something familiar in those lines. Mark living alone for nearly 30 years on the edge of the universe in Kawhia, looking out on to the pond of its harbour.
Tennis courts, Kawhia
The tide slowly came in that summer’s afternoon at the Kawhia Boat Club, where about 100 locals gathered to pay their respects. Kit Jeffries welcomed people to say a few words about Mark. There was a constant refrain – they talked of someone private and gentle, a slightly mysterious figure but always happy to strike up a yarn with people on the street. He played a lot of tennis on the local courts and drank at the sports club before it burned down. He gave a helping hand with concreting driveways. He drove terrible old heaps of junk and hated pretentiousness. He kept his front door firmly closed, and would leave town to take up artist’s residencies in places such as Invercargill and San Francisco. He was a painter’s painter, and many of his contemporaries looked over their shoulders at the brilliance of his brushwork, but he was also in love with drawing, and forever put off painting a masterpiece on canvas to draw on paper – he was working on six large works on brown paper in his studio when he died.
We stood in the studio and looked at his last strokes of genius. His back yard was all sunshine and fruit trees. He emailed painter Dick Frizzell in 2024 about what it was like to go from Kawhia to the Aotearoa Art Fair in Auckland, and be on show in front of hundreds of people. “I live in a cave,” he wrote. “Walking to the light made me realise the art world is not as cracked as I often imagine. But,” he added, “I still like the cave best.” He did his greatest work in Kawhia. It was where he stopped painting and stopped moving one night at Christmas, the emergency siren hooting over town the next morning. We heard it go off that weekend at Kawhia. Four long blasts, rising in pitch and volume, then fading to a dying fall.
