Napier veteran campaigner Pat Magill vows there will be another mural

Veteran social justice campaigner Pat Magill and artist Jan Marie Cook, the hands that created the hands that sew together the quiltwork of the mural. Photo / Paul Taylor

A mural painted on a wall backing on to the police cell block 18 years ago in the hope of breaking down the need for the jailhouse is itself coming down, by demolition.

But while it was a sad moment as artist Jan Marie Cook and veteran social justice battler Pat Magill looked at the partly weather-worn artwork for possibly the last time, there was an appreciation that it could not be saved.

Cook, who led the project when the mural went up in 2002 said: "Things change."

Magill, who turns 94 next week, will keep on with the mission to "Build communities, not prisons", as one inscription on the mural says, and vows a new mural will go up, somewhere.

"Who knows," said Cook, when asked if she would be involved again, although history suggests that if Magill is involved she could well go a second round.

"It was part of Pat's initiative for the community," she said. She'd done some artwork for him when needed, and found the enthusiasm of the campaigner, his commitment to Napier and to the Pilot City Trust through which the calls for social change have often been pushed difficult to resist.

In a way which will be familiar to the way people have taken to Magill's purpose of the years, she said: "I only did it because Pat asked."

Magill had also enlisted the schools of Napier, to get pupils to do their own art impressions of Napier and its issues.

Cook, who had up to about three years earlier been a tutor at the EIT, enlisted EIT students "Nathan, Bernard and Shaun" to help in about a month of bringing new colour and meaning to an otherwise staid, grey wall of concrete blocks.

"It was like a quilt, with the hands at the end sewing it together," she said. "It was like a response to what was represented by the holding cells behind it."

Magill said: "The reason I asked the police was to bring back a relationship between the community and the police."

The mural carried messages from the children and the artists, such as "Bullying must be stopped", "Without a sense of caring there can be no community", and "can we forget the prejudice formed by society".

Now on a mission to have Napier dedicated as a "Child Friendly City", he said: "We were going to do it up, but then we were told the wall was coming down. We will do another one."