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Artist’s Statement
Northland Maori Churches
Laurence Aberhart 2007

I grew up in the 1950s and 60s in Nelson, a town at the top end of the South Island of New Zealand, a town isolated enough to be measured against Australian terms of the word. It took a long day to get anywhere significant. The earliest escape possible for a boy from a working class family not able to afford university was Teachers Training College where you received further education but you were also, in those days at least, paid for it.

I graduated after three years and had in an unconnected way, become transfixed by photography. A Training College graduate was normally returned to their home area. My choice was as far from Nelson as possible, Auckland district, with a further choice perhaps as to where.  I asked either to be sent into the heart of the city or as far away from it as possible and was given a position in Paihia, Bay of Islands, Northland, very co-incidently about three kilometres in a direct line across the water from where I have been living for the past 25 years.

I lasted out my one and only year of teaching in 1970. I had been posted to an area where I knew absolutely nothing about most of the local people. By which I mean I grew up in the South Island, where we did have ‘Maoris’; the Kotuas lived over the corner and Charlie Hippolyte would beat me up at school, but apart from that, from a South Islander’s perspective, they were all but invisible. On the other hand, Northland, where I was living seemed to be a near reverse of that.

Over that year and the next one I traveled out and about as much as I could and was most taken by one aspect of the landscape. Northland was the first point of European contact and settlement in New Zealand with the most extensive impact being made by the missionaries. In other areas of the country that had strong Maori populations Maori culture held and adjusted to the impact and change of the European/Missionary whereas in Northland, the capitulation to the over-culture was the greatest. That over-culture was, apart from the musket, most profoundly delivered by the Church[es] and as a consequence, the landscape near areas of Maori settlement was most readable by the number of churches visible.

In other areas of the country when you are obviously in or near ‘Maori land’, the most observable feature of that landscape is often the marae where the Meeting House or whare-nui is centred. The Meeting House is usually a proud building featuring fine carving and weaving [teko-teko] directly surviving from the nineteenth century or as an example of the newer ‘Maori Renaissance’ which has occurred over the past twenty years or so. The Maori churches of Northland on the other hand are, in the main, neglected. Seen as un-important? The neglect seems delivered mostly by the poverty and depopulation of such rural areas, by the drive in the 1950-60s to get Maori into the cities and into work, and also I think, because somehow these building aren’t quite legitimate. They are neither fully of one culture nor the other. They represent the somehow illegitimate product of two cultures meeting together for the first time and the later, increasingly, discredited influence of that form of Missionary Christianity.

I traveled through Northland, saw these churches and was most touched by them, by their humble plainness, by the quietness, the stillness their plain and near-emptied interiors evoked. And I knew that they had to be photographed – Recorded. I also knew that one didn’t want to over-meddle with them. That my ‘technique’ or then lack of it, meant that it wasn’t for me to do, that I couldn’t re-present that plain humbleness with the intensity that it deserved. I could also see that these little buildings wouldn’t be here for much longer either; their plain construction, their neglect and the warm wet Northland climate was pretty much a guarantee of that.

Things happen and I found myself back in The South Island [not Nelson] for the next ten years and over all that time, as photography suddenly became a visible, viable, art medium, I thought of those little wooden buildings, knowing full well how fragile they were when I had seen them that decade before and wondered, worried that they were still standing. And why hadn’t I seen any of ‘that’ in the photographs I was seeing from all those, almost entirely, North Island based photographers?

In 1982 I was awarded an Arts Council grant. I knew what I had to do. Northland. Those churches. Before it was too late. Greta and I went and did it. Well, I did it as well as I, in my best un-informed way could. As thoroughly as I could.

 In 1982 another thing was happening. There was a widespread economic depression and for the first time in a decade or two, unemployment. Unemployment hits harder in areas such as Northland which already would have been one of several ‘Maori’ areas in which unemployment was a fact of life for there is no employment to be had and what there is at such times, goes away. With a new Labour Government set to deal with such issues, schemes were devised to reduce the not-in-work statistics with which almost anyone with a good idea could organise numbers of the out of work into channeled projects – P.E.P.schemes.  In Northland, and elsewhere, one of the simplest ways to implement one of these schemes was to come up with an idea, the easiest of which being to tidy up community buildings – such as halls, marae and, churches.  What we found was that often we were very literally a day or two away from one of these schemes being implemented, that the paint and brushes were being prepared and the people were just about to give the poor old church a good coat of paint, inside and out.

So, back to The South Island with a backlog of hundreds of negatives to process and prints to be made. One year later, almost by accident, we were living in Russell, Bay of Islands, Northland. A new darkroom was built and the business of turning latency into reality continued. By the time I had enough work finished to exhibit, something else had happened. The ‘Maori Renaissance’ which for the past few years had been nascent finally emerged in a graspable form. Maori was ‘in’, especially in the art gallery/museum context and what became very apparent, the message being delivered in no uncertain terms by those on the move up through the new order, was that Pakeha [Europeans] should stay away. Fair enough. It did make what I had been doing, even though I knew that what I was dealing with was neither conceived as, nor could be seen in any shape or form as an economic proposition, effectively untouchable. Further work, even to the matter of making of prints, was, especially economically, pointless.

Over the next two decades I watched and noted. Still no one did anything with, or about, those churches. I noted also that my first fears were coming to pass; the beautiful church at Pukepoto was blown down, the Catholic Mission Church at Waitaruke was pulled down; I’d pass another church, once visible on a hillside but now …. Where? What? And so on.

That un-touchability had also meant that even though I had every best intention, only the smaller proportion of the churches, in particular, were ever realised as prints. Twenty years I’m beginning to understand, is a long time. Over that time, my circumstances have meant that much of that earlier work, because of the lack of interest, was put away. The same conditions that determine a shorter life for wooden buildings in Northland, warmth and moisture, had their impact and much gelatin was transformed into mould and, with a certain amount of grief and heartbreak, was thrown away. Equally, my negatives from the 70s are now starting to give off strong odours and crinkle. Time is running out and what has not been printed may never be.

I’m becoming a complete-ist. The first project has been to print in its entirety, the Maori Churches of Northland. I have been motivated by the fact that 20 plus years after it was last available, I have located a nineteenth century formulated printing paper which is sympathetic to this subject, particularly in terms of it’s elongated tonal range. In the nineteenth century the quality of photographic material was often far superior to those of today [well, actually, now that we are in the digital age, that’s yesterday].

I have also returned to the subject slowly and have been noticing again some of those churches that for whatever reason were not photographed in the 1980s. Someone has to do it.

Laurence Aberhart 2007