Unsettling the New Zealand flag
Thomasin Sleigh visits an exhibition which reveals a very personal take on the Waikato War.
In 2015, Otorohanga College students presented a petition to Parliament that asked for a national day of remembrance of the New Zealand Wars/Ngā Pakanga o Aotearoa. I remember powerful scenes: rangatahi outside Aotearoa’s stony seat of power asking to acknowledge the violence of our country’s past and, importantly, to embed this acknowledgement in our collective calendar.
Students Leah Bell and Waimarama Anderson started the petition after they visited battle sites at Ōrākau and Rangiaowhia with their school and were shocked to learn of the horrific events that happened there in the 19th century.
Equally shocking to Bell and Anderson was the fact that they did not know this history, so close to their homes, and that these battles, which were key events in the wider Waikato War, weren’t compulsory learning in schools.
The first Te Pūtake o te Riri, He Rā Maumahara national day of commemoration of the New Zealand Wars was hosted by the iwi of Te Tai Tokerau in 2018 and, from 2023, teaching Aotearoa’s history has been part of the core curriculum.
These are very recent, structural shifts in the way our country learns about and remembers its past. But implementing these changes is not simple and the next decades will be important – for Māori and tauiwi alike.
Our history is riven with the inequities and violence of colonisation, systemic racism and patriarchy, and the lens that is placed on the past can bring different people and events into focus. Many thorny questions persist: Who has the authority to speak about specific moments in history? And what forms should this information take?
Pākehā artist Richard Lewer has lived in Australia for many years, but he grew up in Waikato. Like Bell and Anderson, he was not taught about the battles at Ōrākau or
Rangiaowhia and he calls this out in the title of his exhibition at the New Zealand Portrait Gallery Te Pūkenga Whakaata, What they didn’t teach me at school.
Lewer acknowledges his personal responsibility in the introductory text, where he writes, “I grew up in Hamilton, in the Waikato, but I had no idea about its history, no idea. I knew absolutely nothing, and it’s embarrassing, it’s shameful”.
In this show we walk with Lewer through his learning about the Waikato War. The subjective autobiography of the exhibition is underscored by the wall text, which is written in colloquial first person, from Lewer’s point of view, rather than the neutral omniscience of standard gallery labels.
The works in the show also feature Lewer’s first-person voice. The gallery is dominated by a huge New Zealand flag overlaid with the words, “To have a future I must reconcile with my past”. I was struck by the use of the word ‘reconcile’ in this physically massive statement; its definition is to settle or resolve, or to make consistent.
This aspiration seems at odds with the evolving, unstable nature of modern historiography, where new methodologies regularly disrupt widely accepted histories; it suggests Lewer expects his learning will reach an endpoint, a static moment of clear understanding.
Across from the flag hangs a series of large paintings of key events and people in the Waikato War. Western landscape painting has long been used as a propaganda tool for imperialist expansion. In fact, Governor George Grey is shown in Lewer’s series standing alongside a painted landscape, reference perhaps to the relationship between this medium and British colonial avarice.
Lewer’s series are a personal expression of his learning, as Pākehā, and, importantly, of the limits of his knowledge. The accompanying written commentary is filled with statements like, “It seems to me that …”, “From what I’ve read …”, and “From what I understand …”. The people in these paintings are similarly blurry and equivocal and often merge with their environment.
These works are explicit, though, about the horror of the battles that unfolded across Waikato, which are referenced in red crackling fields of paint and spiky, almost electrical horizons – they speak of danger and of dread. In The Crossing of the Mangatāwhiri (2024), the neat army tents lining a hilltop look like brittle teeth; the greedy maw of British colonial expansion.
The introductory wall label of What they didn’t teach me at school and its website listing finish with the line, “The views expressed in this exhibition are the personal views of the artist and are not necessarily the views of the gallery and its board and sponsors.” Surely this is the case for all exhibitions, but Lewer’s art has been publicly distanced by its host institution.
It’s easy, I guess, to gather around the New Zealand flag when the Black Ferns win, but harder to do so when it’s overlaid with Lewer’s words of guilt and anxiety.
Hopefully He Rā Maumahara will trigger many questions, like Lewer’s, in the future, and be a civic project less for nation building, and more for nation questioning.
What they didn’t teach me at school: Richard Lewer – the Waikato Wars. The New Zealand Portrait Gallery Te Pūkenga Whakaata, until May 12.