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.

In Europe cave drawings have been found that are up to 50,000 years old. In India, cave carvings have been dated at 120,000 years, meaning they have survived more than half the lifespan of the human species so far.

New Zealand rock art is much more recent, because people came here only about 750 or 800 years ago. But it is still the earliest art we have.

Our sole fully trained rock art conservator, Nick Tupara, who works as Maori liaison officer for the Gisborne District Council, says our art is of huge significance. "Our art is very specific to New Zealand, and quite outstanding as an example of that art form internationally."

Some museums do recognise it. Auckland Museum's Maori gallery displays four blocks of rock art chopped out of a limestone outcrop in the South Island's Waitaki valley in 1917 by a visiting American, J.L. Elmore.

But the national museum, Te Papa, ignores Maori rock art completely - an oversight that Auckland researchers Pam and Peter Russell say is "scandalous".

Te Papa's director of art and visual culture, Jonathan Mane-Wheoki, plans to refer to the influence of rock art on postwar New Zealand artists in an exhibition on "nationalism" in art this year. But Te Papa does not collect rock artworks.

"If you come at them from a Maori perspective - and I am Maori, so I can speak from that perspective - you would tend to think they should be left to the elements just to quietly fade away," he says.

Peter and Pam Russell have a different view. They told the NZ Archaeological Association's 50th anniversary conference in December that "the art is the heritage of all New Zealanders and conserving it is something to be shared by everyone".

They have surveyed rock art sites in both main islands and the Chathams and were horrified by what they found.

A rock shelter with 40 canoe carvings in the Kaingaroa Forest near Murupara, which the Russells say is "the most spectacular North Island site", is being covered up by mosses, lichens and ferns. It is fenced off and an old muddy sign explains the carvings, but they are unmarked from the road.

Local iwi Ngati Manawa believes the Government should act because the forest sits on Crown land which is subject to a Treaty of Waitangi claim.

"We had a hearing last August and currently we are in negotiation with the Crown," says iwi chairman Bill Bird. "In the meantime there is no excuse in terms of it deteriorating any more than it should."

On the Waikato River, a 1981 Canterbury Museum study concluded ancient drawings were drowned by the Arapuni and Waipapa hydro dams in the 1950s, although the Russells believe one of these sites may still be hidden in steep bush below the Arapuni dam. A cave with 54 canoe shapes just below the Aratiatia dam collapsed about 15 years ago. Fletcher believes the forces created by opening and shutting the dam gates hastened the collapse.

Fletcher has found other art that is protected by isolation, such as a 2.5m-long canoe carved into rock in forest near Tokoroa, and several paintings of eel-like figures on a farm near Taupo.

Tupara has seen a similarly isolated rock outcrop displaying "a flotilla of canoes" on a farm out from Otorohanga, and a famous red painting of a canoe containing people and said to have been painted by Te Rauparaha on a visit to Lake Okataina. It is in unmarked bush well above the lake and accessible only by boat.

Another set of canoes that was buried by ash in the 1886 eruption of Mt Tarawera has been protected by a grille and shelter near the wharf at the western side of Lake Tarawera.

But out on the North Island's west coast it is a different story. Examples at Manu Bay, near Raglan, and from nearby Waingaro, have been lost to time.

The situation is better in the South Island, where Ngai Tahu is developing partnerships with the private landowners, mostly farmers, whose land contains 95 per cent of the drawings.

Ngai Tahu itself owns two publicly accessible sites that are well-marked and caged for protection.

The iwi aims to get rock art sites fenced off from animals, record the locations and images of the art, and develop public displays and education material. But it has to pick its priorities.

"We are a small charitable trust. We are not adequately resourced to manage 500 sites," says Symon.

The most numerous rock drawings are around Pleasant Pt in South Canterbury, where the local information centre provides phone numbers of farms with art sites. A tourist circuit is being developed from nearby Timaru, where Ngai Tahu plan a rock art visitor centre.

Tupara says the rock art can be treated and preserved with good site management practices and scientific intervention to slow down and even stop decay.

The Chatham Islands offer another potential answer - to keep the ancient art alive in new artworks. A team of first-time local Chathams carvers led by Massey University carver Mana Cracknell has created an unconventional five-sided meeting house called Kopinga ("kopi trees"), with modern carvings inspired by the islands' tree etchings and rock carvings.

One of the carvers, trucking contractor Pete Launauze, says: "We are going to put them on the beams [of Kopinga], not only for us, but for the people who come after us."