Race to save the dying art of tree etching

First-time carver Pete Launauze follows in his ancestors' traditions by carving a work for the new Kopinga meeting house. Picture / Richard Robinson

Many generations after they were etched into the sides of trees, the faces created by unknown Moriori artists on the Chatham Islands still seem to speak to us.

The faces, full bodies and other designs on living trees cannot be more than a century or two old.

Many may have been carved after 1835, when 900 Atiawa people from Wellington invaded the Chathams, killed about 300 of the Moriori and enslaved the rest - around 1500 to 2000 people.

In the quiet forests where only the roar of the sea breaks the silence, it is easy to imagine those sad survivors etching their designs on to the kopi (karaka) trees, perhaps to pass on their memories to their children.

The practice was widespread. In the late 1950s and 1960s, Auckland Museum ethnologist David Simmons recorded 1400 tree etchings throughout Chatham and Pitt Islands.

Just 40 years later, almost all of them have gone - most simply lost as the trees have died. The latest survey, in 1998, found just 185 etchings on 147 trees.

Their fate symbolises our neglect of our pre-European art. Throughout the country, there are examples of neglect and destruction. Sea erosion, over-hanging trees and vandalism have taken their toll.

It's a fair bet most New Zealanders are barely aware that many of the first inhabitants of this country were artists.

The Moriori and the mainland Maori did not, of course, have paper or modern chemical paints.

But they used the trees and rocks they found around them, and either etched or carved them with stone tools or drew on them with dry paint made from animal or bird fat, vegetable gum, iron oxide or charcoal.

By the mid-1990s, 330 rock art sites had been recorded in the South Island. In the past eight years Ngai Tahu investigators have found another 220 in a project which ends this year.

In the North Island, only about 30 sites were recorded in a 1981 study. Taupo archaeological consultant Perry Fletcher has since found "many, many shelters with pigment marks" in the central part of the island, although many are "just basically dots and dashes".

In other countries, these earliest markings of our species are celebrated.

"It's massive. There are very few places that don't contain rock art," says Amanda Symon, a Pakeha archaeologist who is the curator of the Ngai Tahu Rock Art Trust.