Brett Graham, Doorway to Night, Gow Langsford Onehunga, 18.04.26–16.05.26

Reviewed by Paul Janman

Photo by Paul Janman

RS: Paul Janman is a film maker, photographer, and writer. His Tongan Ark, which celebrates the work and thought of Futa Helu, has been called one of the greatest films to come out of Oceania. This essay draws on his pathbreaking work as a psychogeographer of Tāmaki Makaurau and Aotearoa.

You walk from the nearby Onehunga Mall to Princes Street on a bright autumn afternoon and the gallery has gone black. Not painted black: built black. Brett Graham (Ngāti Korokī Kahukura, Tainui) has filled Gow Langsford's new Onehunga space with a whare roughly 14.5 metres long and four metres high, its three outfacing walls plaited from the leaves of tī kōuka, dense and overlapping like a wet cloak. The first thing the eye registers is light loss. The second is scent: a green, faintly funereal sweetness that, as Ngahuia te Awekotuku notes in her exhibition essay, belongs to the cabbage tree's long association with urupā, with the bones of warriors and leaders, with the boundary between the living and the dead. The third thing is the realisation that you are transported to where Pōtatau Te Wherowhero's whare stood, more or less, in the 1840s: at the foot of Normans Hill Road, a stone's throw from the Manukau foreshore.

That stretch of foreshore had names long before it had streets. Old maps note this immediate location as Uringutu, the hapū whose rohe interleaved here with those of Te Taoū and Ngāoho, the three hapū of Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei. The Mangere-Onehunga complex was a seasonal kainga and cultivation ground for Ngāti Whātua, and a confluence point with Tainui, whose ancestral waka entered the Manukau via the Ōtāhuhu portage from the Waitematā. Pōtatau's 1830s arrival as Lord Protector of Auckland was the layering of a Tainui rangatira's mana over a Ngāti Whātua place, with all the careful diplomacy that overlay required. As Brett observed at his artist talk, Onehunga has always been a place of trade and of comings and goings, of meeting points and shared coasts. The airport you fly into nearby in Māngere is the continuation of an old function.

A note on how this review proceeds. The whakataukī ka mua, ka muri (the past in front happens just as what will happen is behind) is sometimes glossed in English as "walking backwards into the future," which I have always thought misses the point. Ka mua, ka muri is closer to the navigation of a waka, where the helmsman reads the wake to steer the prow. Brett, in conversations and in his work, holds the presence of a takarangi (double spiral, stumble, dizzy three-dimensional turning) as a simultaneous moment of inseparable pasts, presents and futures. In another recent exhibition at the Gow Langsford, the painter Shane Cotton spoke of a sphere within which we rotate towards past, present and future at will. Both images carry a useful corrective to the singular track of time: not a timeline but a volume. The volume does not preclude linearity — the spiral has an outside, a centre and more than one axis that an argument can travel along. In what follows, I will move through the dark of Doorway to Night in a roughly chronological way, but the same images will turn me back around: the cloak of leaves at the door will also be Pōtatau's cloak of protection over Auckland; the darkness you walk into is also the womb-night his name carries; the bars inside the dwelling are also the threshold across which the constrained move into the open. The work is dense in this way and asks to be read with the same intensity.

I should declare an interest. Some months before the opening, Brett picked me up in his black lowrider ute and we drove a slow circuit of the Onehunga back streets and foreshore as part of his research process. The ute itself, carrying its own small darkness through the suburb, felt like an early draft of the whare we were going to find inside the gallery. Halfway around, almost as a tohu (sign, cue, symptom, proof, company), we ran into my friend and neighbour Richard von Sturmer at a bus stop. Richard, for those who don't know him in his other identities, wrote the lyrics to 'There Is No Depression in New Zealand', and his house sits next door to the location of Pōtatau's original raupō whare at the foot of Normans Hill Road. Brett and I carried on up the hill to Jellicoe Park, to the surviving Onehunga blockhouse with its loophole rifle slits still cleanly intact, surrounded by the carefully preserved cottages of the Royal New Zealand Fencible Corps: ageing imperial veterans of campaigns in India, Afghanistan, China, Ireland and Canada, billeted here as Auckland's southern home guard. What that white-painted, weatherboarded civic architecture quietly forgets is that in June 1849 Pōtatau himself agreed with Governor Grey to raise a parallel Waikato militia of seventy-two Ngāti Mahuta families at Māngere, drilled under the same officers, with freehold title to follow seven years' service. The Lord Protector was offering a home guard considerably fitter than the geriatric one. Fourteen years later the arrangement was broken, and not from the Māori side. Brett's dark whare a few hundred metres downhill in the gallery is, among other things, a counterbalance to the visibility of those preserved cottages in Jellicoe Park, and a memorial to the militia that never got the reward for its service.

The first move the work makes inside the gallery is a refusal of the familiar grammar of the meeting house. This is not a whare whakairo. There is no kōwhaiwhai, no tukutuku, no carved poupou doing the heavy iconographic lifting. It is, properly speaking, a whare puni in the older idiom: a soft-fibre dwelling of the kind Pōtatau inhabited, here translated from raupō into rau tī kōuka because, as te Awekotuku writes in her notes, the cabbage tree is the plant that watches over death in this country. The blades you stand among in the gallery are the same blades that have stood beside urupā, beside the bones of war leaders, beside the families whose houses these foreshore streets replaced. They have done this watching for centuries and are still doing it now, around you, freshly cut. The walls are plaited blade over blade, into what te Awekotuku calls a supple black cloak of quivering darkness. The roof is layered with the wider, tougher leaves. Crucially, Graham has stripped away the kaho battens and aka aka vines that would normally clip the layers in place: the visible architecture of containment. The leaves are simply allowed to fall. Te Awekotuku’s essay puts it as a denial of the elements: turn away from the safety of taura (rope, cable, cord) and cross the threshold.

The tomokanga is the one place where the work admits another wood. Two upright amo on either side support a heavy horizontal pare cut from wormwood Graham harvested from his late mother Norma's garden. The surface is scored with haehae, the long parallel slashes that mimic the cuts of grief inflicted on living skin, and worked over with iroiro: the carver's worming runnels, named for the maggot whose hunger initiates form. So this is a memento mori in its most literal art-historical sense, a whare mate (house of mourning, sanctuary of grief, place of vigil) for the artist's parents Fred and Norma Graham, and for his mentor Selwyn Murupaenga, all of whom moved through the doorway in recent years. The exhibition essay is, properly, framed around this loss; its title comes from the karakia it opens with, the moonlight lying across the threshold as a barrier to those gone into te pō i oti atu, the ultimate night.

But the work, like the chief whose dwelling it reimagines, will not stay confined to one register. The two halves of the name turn against each other inside one man. Te Wherowhero, his birth name, doubles the word whero (red) into something like deep red, drenched red, red upon red: an interpretation, current in some accounts of his early years, that reads the name as a record of the creative iconography of his birth and then the warfare in which the young leader was constantly bloodied. Pōtatau, the senior name he later carried, is by contrast a name for collective generative darkness: the womb-night of beginnings before the world's separation. He did not move from one to the other so much as hold them in rotation, the warrior's red turning around the peacemaker's dark and the dark turning around the red. All of it references the same man arriving at Onehunga in the 1840s as Lord Protector of Auckland with a steadiness that is the deep subject of Brett's house. The great peacemaker who pledged Auckland's safety as the untouchable “hem of his cloak”, who refused to sign Te Tiriti yet was the second rangatira from outside Te Tai Tokerau to sign He Whakaputanga. The same man who built his Pukekawa (Auckland Domain) cottage at Governor FitzRoy's invitation and held court there with successive governors, was also, by 1860, the figure around whom the Kīngitanga consolidated. Three years after his death, the colonial government he had befriended invaded the Waikato. The Māori militia Pōtatau himself had agreed to raise at Māngere in 1849 was scattered. 1.2 million acres of Waikato land was confiscated. Pōtatau’s house had already been dismantled by the hotelier Robert Forbes and other Māori buildings on the Onehunga foreshore became, within a generation, ramshackle billets for Pākehā evacuees from the emerging hostilities around the outlying settlements between Auckland and Waikato.

The flow on the foreshore went both ways, of course, and not symmetrically. Across the road from the gallery, where the Mitre 10 store now stands, the Auckland chief Ihaka Takaanini ran a hostel of his own. Takaanini was a peacemaker in the Pōtatau mould, holding the difficult middle ground between the colonial government and Auckland Māori and gaining mana from the very space between. When Grey's war came south, he refused both flight and the oath of loyalty to the British Queen. The colonial state exploited his renown: he was arrested with twenty-two of his family at Kirikiri, locked in the Ōtāhuhu military barracks, exiled to an island in the Hauraki Gulf where many of his family died. He is buried on Rakino, still visible from the city that turned on him. Grey used him in a misinformation campaign among the settler community as a way of casting suspicion across the southern Auckland Māori population as a whole. So one set of refugees moved into the foreshore, and another set was driven out of it. Doorway to Night is, for me, also a memento to that double displacement and to the betrayal of Pōtatau's costly, decades-long project of just relations between Māori and the Crown.

This second reading is not in tension with the elegy in the gallery essay; it is, I think, the political shadow that elegy casts. And the work itself supports both. Once your eyes recalibrate (and it takes longer than you expect, perhaps three or four minutes), a dim ambient light becomes available inside the dwelling. The roof reveals points of light that read, almost immediately, as wheturangitia: the stars of those who have passed. As Brett mentioned in his accompanying talk, it is Taramainuku who casts his net, Te Kupenga a Taramainuku, each evening to gather the souls of the day's dead and lift them up to the waka (canoe, vessel, spiritual conveyance) that forms part of the Matariki cluster. The lights in the whare’s ceiling are, in this reading, not just memorial pinpricks but the catch of that net. The soundscape, made by Brett's collaborator Daniel Campbell-MacDonald, threads in fragments of Waikato waiata from the 1920s and 1930s, not quite recognisable as songs but more like traces, patterns of energy filtered by the crisscrossed spiral of time. What you hear, even before you can name any of it, is a form of irirangi (the sound of wind across the rafters of an empty house, the murmur of voices from other timeworlds, the eerie register of presence-in-absence).

When the eyes have fully adjusted, you see something else. Inside the dwelling, set away from the walls, are upright poles that read, unmistakably, as bars. The reading is reinforced by a second sculpture installed outside the gallery: a white, weatherboarded form modelled on the high-security surveillance towers at Paremoremo Prison (and rhyming very directly with the blockhouse up the hill in Jellicoe Park). But the bars inside do not divide. You can pass through them easily, moving among the three sections of the house. They contain without dividing. They figure, for me, the line Pōtatau is most often quoted as having spoken: Kotahi te kōhao o te ngira e kuhuna ai te miro mā, te miro pango, te miro whero (there is but one eye of the needle through which the white, the black, and the red threads must pass). One opening, three threads; one house, three rooms; one doorway, into night and through it.

Which is the move the title performs and the building enacts. Doorway to Night is also, by its inversion, a doorway to light: not the light outside the building (Princes Street, the harbour, the gallery's clean white skirts) but the dim adjusted light that becomes available only after you have stood in the dark long enough for your eyes to change. Before historical understanding and redress, we have to pass through some dark realisations. The difficult one that Graham's house holds open, for those of us still circling the foreshore archives looking for the alleged second whare site at the end of Matiere Road, is that the Lord Protector of Auckland was protector of a settler society that, within three years of his death, invaded and confiscated the lands he had pledged it to share. The betrayal does not sit at the end of his life waiting to undo it, and the mana does not sit at the start of his life waiting to be undone. They rotate around each other in the same volume, the same Onehunga, the same dark whare on Princes Street. As I said to Brett at the artist talk, and will say here in print: the betrayal was very great but the mana of Pōtatau was and is greater, and in this house he has brought it forward for all of us to enter and to feel. Tū mai rā, Pōtatau, tū mai rā.

A Home That Is Mine, but Not as I Am

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