Ten years ago, when Grant Ranui returned home from the eastern Bay of Plenty to live on the family block in Pyes Pa, he became aware that much of his family history was muted. His ancestors had not spoken about what was also an important part of Tauranga history.
“It was all hush-hush and wasn’t taught in our schools,” says Grant.
Grant’s predecessors had lived in a peaceful established village near Taumata Road. Surrounded by their plantations and gardens, this wasn’t a fighting fortified pa.
Taumata Marae chair Grant Ranui. Photo: Tracy Hardy.
It was 1867, and his forebears had been growing their whole year’s food supply through the late summer. Fields of maize, kumara, marrows, pumpkins, melons, tobacco and potatoes surrounded the village. It was considered some of the best agricultural land in the district with 80 acres of potatoes producing 12 tons to the acre.
On February 3, 1867, the whole of Te Taumata was destroyed. The militia spent three days demolishing the thatched houses and cultivations. It was reported at the time that 60 men set fire to the crops.
In August 1864, Governor Grey had promised three-quarters of the land marked for confiscation in Tauranga would be returned to Māori. About the same time a few ‘Ngaiterangi chiefs’ were persuaded to ‘sell’ the Katikati and Te Puna lands. In actuality, the resident hapū of those areas were not privy to the sales and vigorously protested.
In 1867 disputes over additional lands being surveyed for confiscation by the Government led to further military action and the destruction of forest villages, crops and plantations on the edge of the bush inland from Tauranga. This ‘Bush Campaign’ followed a scorched earth policy of the Government, designed to drive Ngāti Ranginui from their homes and devastate their livelihoods.
The Wairere Track: Te Tirohanga, an old Pirirākau settlement above Whakamarama and Omokoroa
Since January 2017, to mark 150 years since the attacks on their ancestor’s villages, local hapū have been holding commemorative events which include the erection of memorial pou at Taumata, Te Irihanga and Whakamarama.
The 150 year commemoration of the invasion of Te Irihanga by troops and kupapa was held on January 18, 2017. A dawn powhiri took place at Te Irihanga followed by a further commemoration at Wairoa Marae.
Two weeks later on February 4, buses left Judea at 4am for the predawn commemorative celebration and unveiling of Pou Whenua at Taumata. Ngāti Ruahine & Ngāi Tamarāwho came together to commemorate 150 years since Government forces attacked their kāinga – homes.
James Muir, Western Bay of Plenty Mayor Garry Webber, and Tauranga City Councillors Larry Baldock and Terry Molloy attended both Te Weranga events.
“The thing we got to learn from this is that the pen or the word, the reo is mightier than the patu,” says Garry. “We have got to understand that we can work things out without fighting and I think that is the critical thing we have to learn from the past.”
A memorial pou now stands at the beginning of Taumata Rd to acknowledge their tūpuna who resisted the invasion & confiscation of their lands and were punished for it by the Crown. Akeake Marae at Taumata hosted the people who gathered with a pōhiri & delicious breakfast to celebrate the newly reopened wharenui Te Reinui Ao.
“We don’t forget what happened in the past nor hold animosity about what happened,” says Grant. “The following year after the crops were destroyed at Taumata was hard. We pride ourselves on being able to provide for our families. The ability to be resilient is an important message that we try pass on down to our kids. We want them to grow up knowing about the bush campaigns.”
Starting at 7am on Saturday April 8, the public are invited to attend a ceremony and dedication of a memorial pou at Puketoki Reserve, Whakamārama followed at 9am by a whakanoa and breakfast at Tawhitinui Marae, then at 11am the telling of the story of Te Weranga, and finishing with a Hākari at noon.
Car Parking on Saturday April 8:
There will be signs to guide you. The Māori Wardens will also be there to help.
Puketoki 7am:
– for manuhiri and kuia/koroua, a field is available for your parking on Leyland Rd, directly before Puketoki Reserve on the right
– Tauranga Moana whānau, please park at Tāwhitinui Marae and use the three provided shuttles. They will be going back and forth between the marae and reserve from 6:30am.
Tawhitinui 9am:
– please follow the instructions of the Māori Wardens for appropriate parking.
The Street Prints Mauao Festival, Tauranga’s first street art festival, has 18 artists from around New Zealand and the world painting 16 large scale murals on buildings in the laneways and alleys of downtown Mount Maunganui. Based on the theme “Land and Sea”, it starts on Thursday 10th December and is run by Jah and Lovie Smith with sponsorship by Creative Tauranga and Eves Real Estate. It culminates in a Saturday festival (12th December) in Coronation Park from 11am – 5pm with food stalls, live music, games, giveaways and free street art workshops. From 6pm, it moves to Astrolabe with a New Zealand made Street Art documentary showcasing the many talented Street Arts of New Zealand, plus games, art competitions and giveaways.
Over the four days until Sunday, the public can wander through the alleys to watch the artists and spend time in the gallery that Street Prints Mauao have opened.
There’s quite a vibe happening already, so I started checking out some of the previous work from these artists so we have an idea of what to expect.
Simon Ormerod going by the moniker ‘Cracked Ink’, originally hails from the north of England and now from the north of Auckland, and is known for his humorous characters, expressing huge personality across the walls.
Mica Still grew up in a small coastal town in Oregon, USA where the art scene was dominated politely by fishing boats and seaside watercolours. Very different from her vivid colourful works that give an optical punch.
Erika Pearce finds inspiration in the natural beauty of New Zealand, the sun and the ocean. Her artwork is unique mix of a large range of styles, from tattoo aesthetic to hyperrealism to full-scale murals.
Charles and Janine Williams, winners of the 2015 Ono’u Graffiti Festival in Tahiti, and creators of the controversial splashback in Jamie and Hayden’s Block NZ kitchen, will be painting here at the Mount in their distinctive bold style.
Two of my favourite artists coming this week are Dside and Andrew J Steel, who as ‘BMD’ went to Hawaii this year to paint one of the Hawaiian Airline service vehicles, reflecting the new route from New Zealand to Honolulu. Dside and Andrew will be painting as solo artists for our street art festival.
Every community has people who have great ideas to make their community healthier, more connected and a great place to live and work in. What’s your great idea?
Some ways to come up with good ideas:
1. Listen to the people around you. What challenges are they facing? How can their daily lives be helped? What ideas can you think of?
2. Read a lot. Read internet articles, newspapers, magazines, books. Explore what’s possible, what other people do and whether that would work in our own community.
3. Find inspiration. From others, from life itself, from friends. Ignite that engine and energy that gets your mind going.
4. Keep a list. You can use Google docs, keep a notebook to write them down, or jot them down like I do, in my phone notebook.
5. Reflect. Look at your life – What are you doing? Where are you going? Who are you? What are you all about? What’s important? What are you trying to achieve? What are you doing that works and doesn’t work? Ask yourself these types of questions, think about what it is you do every day and why. This kind of examination can produce dozens of new ideas.
6. Question everything. Ask yourself ‘why?’ Develop an enquiring scientific mind that examines facts. When you find yourself thinking or following traditional ideas that everyone assumes are right, question them. Ask yourself if it’s really true, and if so, why? Why does everyone think this? Is it possible there are other ways of doing things?
7. Change things up. Drive home a different way. Get out of familiar territory, break out of your niche, look at new things, new websites, new books. This can open up new ideas.
8. Brainstorm with others. Get together with 1 or 2 other people and bounce ideas off each other.
If you’ve been to Bondi Beach and seen the impressive Sculpture by the Sea public art fest each year, then you start to think it’s only a matter of time before the stretch between Mount Maunganui to Omanu and beyond to Papamoa could start to become an outdoor gallery of public art.
Launched in Perth on Australia’s Indian Ocean coastal in 2005 by David Handley, Sculpture by the Sea has a captivating vast backdrop of long horizons and sunsets and has become a powerful majestic sculpture-packed coastal walk.
Koichi Ishino, wind blowing, Sculpture by the Sea, Bondi 2015. Photo Gareth Carr
Barbara Licha, listen time passes, Sculpture by the Sea, Bondi 2015. Photo Clyde Yee
Deirdre Mair, mirage, Sculpture by the Sea, Bondi 2015. Photo Clyde Yee
I totally get it when David writes “I have always loved large community arts events like ‘Opera in the Park’ and ‘Symphony Under the Stars’, especially the way total strangers sit next to each other listening to music while enjoying a picnic dinner.” This sense of community happens too when we have Night Owl Theatre at Mount Drury, or sit and watch Jamie Harkins create his 3D Sand Art drawings, or on the evenings when people wander along the Pilot Bay boardwalk to bring their dinner and listen to my piano playing while watching the sun set. We pause in these moments and experience something powerful, participating and immersing ourselves in a human expression of art which has in turn immersed itself into the natural beauty around it. The next day the tide has come in and washed the sand art away, or the sun has set, taking those moments into yesterday, not to be experienced just the same again. Or the piano has been wheeled home. We don’t need to ask what it was for, or what does it mean. It just is. We were in the moment where it happened, the stars sang, and we knew who we were. People ask me ‘why are you playing piano on the boardwalk?’ I say ‘why are you smiling?’ They grin and say ‘because you’re playing piano’, to which I reply ‘that’s why’.
The piano in Pilot Bay, Jamie Harkins 3D Sand Art, Night Owl Cinema
There are few opportunities to enjoy cultural activities that are free. Recently I was asked by various members and representatives of our Tauranga community whether I thought the council should accept Gareth Morgan’s offer to pay for a 9.9m high million-dollar sculpture, made by New Zealand artist Phil Price, to be located on the corner of Pacific Ave and Marine Parade. I happened to meet Gareth at the dairy so asked him what he thought about talking to mobile video camera so we could present that to the Mount community to hear from him direct what his proposal was about. He was willing so we had a chat about it.
Peter Kageyama writes in his book For the Love of Cities – “Arts and culture are what make a city fall in love with itself.” It’s not just about having good roading, infrastructure and waste management. If you want to fall in love with a city because of its great sewage treatment facilities good on you. But let’s also accept Gareth’s offer. Let’s create sculpture by the sea. We need to ask ourselves who are our champions in our midst, how do we increase their numbers, and most important, how do we keep them engaged in our city. So let’s also create opportunities to have environmental and public sculpture through the green belts of Bethlehem and the dunes of Papamoa, and then get out there on our bikes, skateboards and feet and enjoy it, fall in love with it, be in it. Our city isn’t just downtown Tauranga, it’s communities in Greerton Village, Bethlehem, Otumoetai, Pyes Pa and from Matua to Papamoa. Let’s create art all over.
Not having experienced many hugs I was a little puzzled and not sure what to do when someone turned up at my house today saying they needed a hug. I wondered what had happened. They were “I texted you to see if I could call in for a hug.” I replied “Oh I was driving, just got home, didn’t see your text.” I reached for my phone to check texts. “Oh there it is. Sorry I didn’t see it. I don’t look at my phone while driving.”
“So, can I have a hug?” Not having ever received many hugs from this person during my life I was “umm sure” and awkwardly opened my arms to give them a hug which I think lasted about 2 seconds. As we broke the hug I asked, puzzled, “are you ok?” I wasn’t used to them hugging. “Yes I’m fine” they said. “I just needed a hug.” “Ok” I said, awkwardly wondering what to do next. “Right, well I’ll be on my way then, see you!” and off they went.
This has only resulted of course in me becoming interested in the science of hugging. A 10-second hug a day can lead to biochemical and physiological reactions in your body that can significantly improve your health. According to one study, this includes:
Political plate tectonics – It’s always interesting and important I think to get to the foundation of how something formed, as it indicates how enduring the structure built on it may be into the future e.g. whether a city is built on a faultline or moving plates.
Likewise for an organisation, church, group of people, or perhaps even a new competitive business breaking out of and away from the old. How was the new thing birthed? From disillusionment, anger, antagonism, joy, hope or fresh purpose?
Can unity be born out of division? In a cause and effect sense, no. Unity is a centripetal or cohesive force, bringing people together. Division is centrifugal and separates people, with barriers to unity formed.
Was the birth of the new thing due to a negative reaction against and away from something, or was it due to a positive step towards something. Is the new building built on moving tectonic plates?
The political lithosphere seems to be breaking up further into major and minor plates that are convergent (destructive, colliding, under pressure, causing quakes), divergent (forming rifts, moving away from each other), or transform (connected, accommodating, neither creating or destroying). Each topped by their own kind of crust.
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“Hence his [Mr Dotcom’s] pact with Mr Harawira. Personally, philosophically, ethnically, materially, they may be poles apart but they have found common cause in antagonism.”
“His reason may be vindictive rather than principled or philosophical, but wealth permits him to use politics for a personal grudge.”
On Friday 2 May, 2014 I was feeling quite sad about something and remembered what my friend Chris Wilton-Jones always encourages “if you feel low go do something for someone else”. I had just seen come up on Facebook a short clip of Pharrell Williams being interviewed by Oprah Winfrey about his song ‘Happy’ being used by cities all over the world to record their own version of people clapping, dancing and being happy. How inspirational it was for thousands of people! Checking online, I saw that no city had recorded their own version, using the yellow opening sequence (Taranaki and Dunedin had versions), and thought ‘we could do this for Tauranga, it’s a happy place!’
I posted onto Facebook before heading off to go play at the Pizza Library and within half an hour had a weekend plan mapped out of locations and times around Tauranga for people to come to and be part of our own video.
It went a little crazy with so many people keen to be part and local newspapers wanting to find out about it. We filmed in Greerton, Bethlehem, Mount, Papamoa, Otumoetai, downtown Tauranga, Yatton Park, Memorial Park and Mitchell Park. We covered the Hercules Morse statue, Creative Tauranga, the Elms, Tauranga Art Gallery, Bayfair, four painted pianos (had to put them in of course!) , Pilot Bay (trying to catch a shot of the port in the background), Mount Mainstreet, Greerton Mainstreet, Downtown Tauranga. Bethlehem Town Centre. We needed to ask permission for the private places – the Elms and Bayfair, plus the police had to be authorised before being able to appear. Anyone under 14 had to have parental approval. There is a pregnant lady, a woman who is on 3x per week dialysis treatment and needs a kidney transplant, a boy with downs syndrome, people from Chile, Germany, and Korea. Filming happened mostly on the Saturday and Sunday, with some more on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. Editing happened Thursday and Friday and the clip went live on Youtube at 12.30pm on Saturday 10th May. It was filmed on a Samsung Galaxy III mobile phone (it has a cracked screen), with downloaded free video editing software off the net (Videopad).
Catching up with James Stanbridge felt refreshingly like stepping into a retro 1950’s science adventure comic book. He’s one of the twelve mostly idiosyncratic artists contributing to Creative Tauranga’s and Lightwave Gallery’s Bleeding Vinyl Covers Group Exhibition.
This musically themed exhibition, timed to coincide with the National Jazz Festival, was co-curated by Ken Wright from Lightwave Gallery and Angela McKenzie from Creative Tauranga. Album cover art, an important part of our musical cultural tapestry, provided an opportunity for artists to reinterpret a favourite LP cover, using a range of medium such as painting, sculpture, illustration, photography, graphic design and printmaking.
James based his two pieces on Led Zeppelin and it’s clear that his Moby Dick is reminiscent of their debut album cover. James was known as ‘the drawing kid’ at school and tells me he “always planned to be an artist or a scientist.” Growing up in Opotiki, he moved to Tauranga for secondary education, then on to study design. He works with pencil and has dabbled with paint but clearly likes, as he says ‘the particular-ness of illustration’. As a detail-focused person the way he draws does reflect that.
This is his first exhibition of his original art, he is tutoring at Bay of Plenty Polytechnic and he will also be part of an upcoming exhibition at Lightwave called ‘Boys Toys’.
The Bleeding Vinyl Covers Group Exhibition will run until 6th May at Creative Tauranga and then reinstalled at Lightwave Gallery at 30 Totara Street.
The other artists exhibiting are Stephanie Brebner, Clive Armstrong, Nick Eggleston, Ashley Grant, Elliot Mason, Anj Keate, Ken Wright, Lesley Robb, Don Overbeay, Angela McKenzie, and Nicol Sanders-O’Shea.
Colleen Waite from Kaitaia opened her exhibition at Lightwave Gallery, Totara Street, Mount Maunganui on Easter Sunday with a stunning display of mixed media abstracts that are both restorative and joyous.
Colleen Waite
Her first solo exhibition in the Bay of Plenty, “A World of Diversity” gives us her window view on life, and a sense that she is responding to what she has experienced with a resilient and assertive smile of hope. In fact she mentions that she discovered her creative ability when using art to work through the sadness of personal loss. Raised by a mother who was a dressmaker, she was immersed in colour and texture from an early age which instilled into her a fascination with design and colour. This permeates, literally, through her work, as she uses laces, fabrics, paper and other media to overlay and build threads of patterns and colour. To me these represent the strands of feelings, thoughts and emotions that weave through our lives as we journey past loss, grief or anguish onto restoring a balance once again.
Colleen jokes that she has AADD (Artist Attention Diversion Disorder). She has worked for many years in the field of Addictions Counselling, and it’s clear, that for her, she carries within an outlook on life that is both colourful and positive. Pablo Picasso wrote “Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.” This is evident in her work.
Overlaying the layers of mixed media, she applies resin which gives a transparency and glow to her work, reminding us that there is always hope for the future. Colleen’s world is diverse and layered, balanced and restored, and she brings this to us in a remarkable way.
A World of Diversity showed from 18-30 April, with an invitation to meet Colleen Waite on Easter Sunday afternoon at the Lightwave Gallery from 12-4pm.
For those like me who doodle 3D visual cubes from a simple square with a pencil on paper while chatting on the phone, what local artists Jamie Harkins and Constanza Tagini Nightingale are doing takes this to a whole new level. Their amazing anamorphic illusions have been quietly etched out on the sandy beach around the side of the Mount opposite Matakana Island delighting passersby. Crevices, staircases into the ground, skateparks, whimsical drawings – their imagination is transforming a sandy cove into stunning works of art. Known as 3DSD (3D Sand drawings), they say their goal is to have fun, to entertain people and to captivate their attention by playing with optical illusion to create 3 dimensional drawings.
Staircase
Constanza and Jamie met about 3 ½ years ago through a mutual friend who knew they were both artists. They formed a group that experimented with light, taking photos at night with long exposure. It was a fun way to enjoy time with people and one night during conversation the idea formed about doing 3D drawings with the sun. Using only a garden rake and a couple of sticks, they usually create one sand drawing per week, sometimes two. Mostly they are out drawing on weekends with friend David Rendu, and have found the spot on the side of the Mount very good to use because of the elevated view and the tide. They start about 2 hours before low tide and continue on into the two hours after low tide, with drawings taking 2-3 hours.
Constanza uses a garden rake to add texture
James directing Constanza, telling her where to place the lines
The human eye can deceive the mind, forcing you to believe in the scope where it does not exist. Jamie and Constanza use the principle of anamorphic, playing with light, shadow and perspective. The eye can trick the mind making you believe there are dimensions that are not really there.
Constanza says “The connection with nature is essential for the creation of our art. The sun, the wind, the moon and the tides make our creations temporary and give us a challenging time for realisation. The use of simple tools is allowing us to create different textures, shades, contrasts and perspectives.”
These ephemeral drawings are respecting the environment, leaving no trace after the following high tide. Photography is the medium to record this moment. The beach and a stick certainly provide infinite possibilities with our imagination making them a reality.
To find out when they will be creating their next 3D sand drawing check out their Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/3DSDart
