Burt in bronze – giving speed longevity
The Burt Munro statue has become beloved. The artist should be remembered, writes Michael Fallow.
You can sometimes hear children give a yelp when they see it. A little stowaway, hanging on for dear life. It’s a mouse that the late Otatara artist Roddy McMillan secreted into his nowfamous bronze statue of Burt Munro outside Queen’s Park.
The sculpture shows Munro riding his magnificently modified old Indian bike, his face contorted by wind resistance.
Look closely and you’ll see the mouse is having a hard time of it too.
A different and renowned sculptor, Anthony Stones, who once exhibited at the nearby Southland Museum and Art Gallery, explained why none of the famous figures he’d portrayed in his own work – writers, poets, artists, explorers – were smiling. He couldn’t capture a big open smile, he said. Maybe a thoughtful, even amused sort of contemplation could be communicated, but some moments were just too fleeting.
Something about them defied the permanence of a statue.
To his great credit, McMillan’s sculpture does capture something that was oh-so-swift in passing.
He portrays the old motorcyclist with his head up, copping the full force of the wind. That’s not how you set records. Streamlining is important. You keep your head down.
But this was the instant Munro saved his own life, sticking his head above the cowling as he corrected a dangerous fishtailing at more than 320kmh at the Bonneville salt flat in the United States.
And, literal types please note, there’s no indication of any mouse coming along for the ride at the time. Put that one down to artistic whimsy.
McMillan first made his name carving wood. He began in the mid1980s, starting with furniture for antique shops.
Then, during his OE in Britain, he’d worked restoring picture frames in London and as a plumber in the Isle of Arran.
Back to Invercargill he came in 1992, determined to make his living carving and sculpting.
While he’d managed to make ends meet, the artist’s life could be a bit of a struggle.
‘‘Sometimes it’s a pretty bleak existence,’’ he once told The Southland Times. ‘‘You just put up with it.’’
For all its charms, wood was itself a challenging medium. And not only, as he once joked, because he was ‘‘losing too many fingers’’.
He found himself carrying ideas around for years, waiting for the right piece of wood to be found.
‘‘Everything you do with wood is just amazing luck . . . you just sort of see the right shape.’’
In his wood-work years he’d sculpted a recreation of a shelving unit from Munro’s shed that held blown gaskets and other pieces of machinery that were piled up and collecting dust. He gave it the same name Munro had bestowed on the originals: Offerings to the God of Speed.
Each individual piece carved from oak in a trial-and-error fashion. They made for a piece won the ‘‘most interesting use of a medium’’ award at the Provincial Pride Art Awards held by the Southland Art Gallery in 2007.
As his work transitioned towards bronze, so did his references to Munro as a subject.
A series of bronze trophies moulded and cast from original Munro bike parts for the 2007 and 2008 Burt Munro Challenge races.
McMillan was already finding some sculptures were taking more than a month to make. But when you love your work, that just made it all the sweeter.
And it was a multifaceted challenge combining ‘‘about four different trades’’.
First, a model is created out of clay, hen a mould taken, finally the bronze is
‘‘And the city, particularly its children, deserve it too. Because where there’s a statue, there’s a story. A story worth telling, in this case.’’ Southland Times editorial in 2011
cast. It’s not quick work. A small piece could quite easily take four weeks.
(The Munro statue, you may have noticed, is not a small piece. It’s 7 per cent bigger than life-sized.)
So anyway, Roddy McMillan was well placed to spearhead the push for Invercargill to have a Munro statue in advance of the 2010 Munro Challenge. He had both the artistic reputation, and the credentials of a true enthusiast of the Munro legend.
‘‘I was in his shed with my father when I was a kid.’’
So young at the time that, in truth, he couldn’t really remember Munro. But as he grew, the more he looked into the man’s achievements, the more amazed he was.
Backed by the Southland Motorcycle Club he sought funding to create a bronze of Munro in his bike. It helped that Burt’s family and, Invercargill MP Eric Roy, and Neville Hayes of E Hayes and Co (longtime supporters of Munro’s efforts and Munro bike owners) all gave the idea their benediction.
At the time, the Burt Munro Challenge was still in its infancy and the success of Roger Donaldson’s film The World’s Fastest Indian was still vivid in the community’s mind.
In October 2010 the Invercargill City Council weighed in with its okay.
The ILT Foundation, Southland Community Trust and a bunch of other businesses and benefactors chipped in to fund the sculpture itself and the city’s ratepayers would pay for the landscaping work.
Although the sculpture was said to be a $200,000 project, that figure is unlikely to reflect the true scale of the project. Undertakings such as this tend to have a significant labour-of-love component.
And such was the scale that this became one of those times when a man needs a foundry.
When it came time for the casting, McMillan turned to a Seaview outfit, Heavy Metal, for this work. And particularly welcome this job was was, coming at a time when manufacturing jobs were in the doldrums and large scale ‘‘creative’’ projects held particular appeal.
The foundry was already no stranger to such, notably the lid on the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior in Wellington, Paul Dibble sculptures in Hyde Park, London, which marked New Zealanders’ contribution to the world wars, and Weta’s tripod camera critter in Wellington’s Courtney Place.
The statue was unveiled in November 2011. Pretty much an instant hit.
The Southland Times editorialised that Munro deserved it.
‘‘And the city, particularly its children, deserve it too. Because where there’s a statue, there’s a story. A story worth telling, in this case.
‘‘What’s more, if it turns out that children naughtily climb all over it . . .we get the feeling Burt wouldn’t have minded.’’
Roddy McMillan died in 2015, in his mid-50s, His death notice invited donations to the Southland Motorcycle Club (Burt Munro Challenge).
And that status of his statue is unassailable. Not far away, inside Queen’s Park, generations of children have intrepidly climbed, or been parentally plonked atop, the children’s playground lions and eagle. Maybe the seals if their grip was strong enough.
The Munro statue has in recent years come roaring up to assume the same embraceable status. Just as often, though, the childlike enthusiasts look an awful lot like adults.