Into the Dark

Scott Hamilton

Paul Janman has added a short film to his review of Brett Graham's recent exhibition Doorway to Night.

The film opens with a shot of the exterior of Gow Langsford's Onehunga gallery, where Graham has created a tower modelled on the ones that guard Pāremoremo, the maximum security prison built near estuarine mud on Auckland's North Shore. 

Paul's camera takes us inside the gallery, and shows us an anonymous visitor quietly removing his or her shoes, and thereby obeying the ancient distinction between tapu and noa. Graham's exhibition has turned the gallery temporarily into a sort of marae. And the centrepiece of the exhibition is a raupo whare that once served as a meeting place for Maori in Onehunga. The whare was raised by King Pōtatau, whose followers lived in a string of kāinga in Māngere, just across the Manukau harbour from Onehunga.

With its thick-walled blockhouse and its militia and the trading vessels tied up at its wharf, Onehunga was a border town in the early 1860s. After British and colonial troops crossed the border in 1863, invading the Waikato Kingdom Pōtatau established down the Great South Road, the kāinga across the water were emptied, looted, and burned, and the raupō whare suffered the same fate.

For two decades Brett Graham has been rescuing the wars and confiscations of nineteenth century New Zealand from what EPT Thompson called 'the enormous condescension of posterity'. He has shown that these events are not dates in a history book, but wounds that still infect New Zealand society today.

In 2009 I wrote about Graham's extraordinary exhibition Campaign Rooms, which was simultaneously a response to the 'terror raids' in the Ureweras and a journey into nineteenth century history and an alternate history of the twentieth century. Just as Tame Iti had engaged in symbolic warfare by shooting New Zealand flags and carrying guns through Tūhoe forests, so Graham disturbed sensibilities by sculpting a series of 'Māorified' weapons: a Stealth bomber with koru, for example.

In subsequent exhibitions Graham has ranged freely through time and space, returning regularly to the wars of the 1860s. In 2014, for example, he produced austere, god's eye view impressions of the series of redoubts colonial forces built as they invaded the Waikato, and at the same time a carving on beechwood that reached deep into the Polynesian past, recalling the first vaka that landed in Aotearoa.

The raupō whare he reconstructed in Onehunga is one of a series of works that recreate the structures of the nineteenth century at an unprecedented scale. Before Janman's camera ventures inside the whare, he offers us a fragment of poetry:

Ki te iwi

Kua ngaro

Ki te po uriuri

Ki te po tangotango

Ki te po oti atu

I te tatau o te po

To those 

who are lost

To darkest night

To deepest night

To ultimate night

Through the doorway

                                   To night...

How should we read these words, which are uncredited? We might take them as a tribute to the victims of the wars and ethnic cleansing of the 1860s—to the refugees from Auckland that colonial official John Gorst described filling the Great South Road in the first chaotic days after the invasion of the Waikato. They might memorialise the fighters for King Tāwhiao who fell defending pā in Rangiri or Orākau. The words make me think of lines by the great Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelof. As he considers the uncounted victims of centuries of tyranny and war, Ekelof insists that:

you disappear but

the fact

of your absence

remains

We will remember, the poet seems to be saying, even when we do not remember. But the passage Janman offers may take on a different meaning when it is read through a Polynesian lens. As the philosopher Carl Mika has explained, the colour black and the reality and idea of darkness have distinctive connotations in te ao Māori. They represent not simply dissolution and oblivion, but fertility and new beninnings. For Mika, pō or darkness can be opposed to the merciless light of the mainstream European philosophical tradition. From Plato onwards European philosophers have wanted to eliminate obscurity and illuminate the universe, but in the Polynesian tradition pō is as essential as light. Ralph Hotere's famous installation Black Phoenix, which showed a fire-scarred waka in the process of both disintegration and resurrection, might have been designed to make Mika's point. 

Although Mika talks mainly about the meaning of pō in te ao Māori, thinkers from other Polynesian cultures have given darkness the same significance. The Tongan sculptor Visesio Siasau uses the term 'va va' to describe a 'fertile void' that includes both destruction and creation. In his great novel Flying Fox in a Freedom Tree, Albert Wendt describes a character wandering on the black lava fields of Savai'i. He experiences a strange ecstatsy in this uninhabited zone, feeling free from the constraints of villages and plantations, families and matai. In Shirley Horrocks' documentary The New Oceania Wendt himself takes a walk on the lava fields, and explains that they represent both the end and the beginnings of life.

Janman's camera enters the whare and explores it with a slowness that feels gentle. We are shown the contrast between the dark of the whare and the antiseptic white of the gallery's walls. The whare seems to absorb light, like a black hole. I wanted to stay there forever.

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