Our history told in landscapes

By ANDREW CLIFFORD

Although Bob Kerr considers his painting practice to be a foil to his day job as a children's book illustrator, illustrating is a tendency he finds hard to resist as he brings periods of New Zealand's history to life, often drawing from archival texts.

The Wellington-based Kerr's specialty is painting landscapes and for any New Zealander working in that genre, it can be difficult to manoeuvre around the spectre of Colin McCahon's legacy.

Although Kerr has wrestled with that influence in his earlier work, there are still similarities.

One distinction that Kerr agrees on is that McCahon was particularly interested in mythologising a spiritual landscape while Kerr is more interested in the political histories of landscape.

"I call it the contested areas of the landscape," Kerr says. "In a way, Don Brash has raised that with his Orewa speech again. I don't agree with Don Brash but I think it is good to have this debate."

Kerr's present exhibition The Rua Expedition, which has been touring the North Island, revisits accounts of the controversial arrest of Rua Kenana that took place in Urewera in 1916, which happens to be at the centre of Waitangi Tribunal hearings.

Equally uncanny is the resemblances to present world events.

"I was painting these pictures last year as Bush was preparing for war in Iraq and the echoes were extraordinary," remarks Kerr.

"There were rumours of weapons of mass destruction; Rua was rumoured to have machine guns and an army of hundreds, and there were even Arab terrorist connections.

"This is the newspaper's 1916 report: 'Rua is pretty well supplied with rifles and ammunition obtained by Assyrian hawkers who have smuggled them into the Urewera under their fancy goods'."

The unnecessary massacre that resulted led to a large army of 72 well-armed policemen descending on the defenceless community of Maungapohatu.

Sixty-five-year-old John Cullen, the police commissioner responsible for the raid, was about to retire and led the expedition personally.

"The more I read about Cullen, the more I thought this was an interesting guy. The devil has the best lines," laughs Kerr. "What I find remarkable about it, visually, is that Cullen drove half of the way there in a nice white Cadillac, which contrasted nicely with Rua Kenana's white horse.

"Cullen was a really good propagandist for himself. He took along a [Weekly News] photographer [Arthur Brecken] and [NZ Herald chief reporter] John Birch. So there was always visual material about that rather shameful expedition.

"The big simple idea I had was, 'Gosh, since we know these 72 policemen, since we know their names and we have photographs of many of them, why don't I visualise this event in our history by painting their portraits and just putting their names on them?"'

Kerr doesn't see himself as revising the original accounts of the expedition but simply presenting the facts in today's context for people to draw their own conclusions.

His diligence was validated by the warm response he received from descendants of Kenana and the policemen.

"[The exhibition] opened in Whakatane and I was a bit nervous because this is the closest public gallery to where the events happened. And there were descendants of Rua at the opening. They were extraordinarily generous."

Academics have also shown approval: "I was really chuffed that Dr Judith Binney bought one of the paintings, because it was her book Mihaia that alerted me to all of this."

This isn't the first endorsement Kerr has had from a historian. He was also commissioned to produce the painting that appears on the cover of the late Michael King's Penguin History of New Zealand.

"I was lucky enough to have done two book tours with him," explains Kerr, who is also a writer.

"He was such enormous fun. He was going to write an essay for me for the Rua Expeditions' show catalogue just before he got sick, so he had to pull out.

"We had a lot of dialogue about that cover and I had a number of goes. I was trying to get a landscape that showed humans in the landscape, and that's suggested by that little wisp of smoke and that sort of path into the landscape.

"Is it the DOC track last Sunday? Is it the first people stepping ashore? Is it somebody stepping ashore from the Endeavour? Or maybe it's all three? I wanted something that could be all those possibilities."

Kerr also has an exhibition of new work about to open in Auckland, which he sees as light relief to the Rua Expedition show.

"It's sort of light and airy and fun, as opposed to the rather heavy topic of Cullen's expedition into the Urewera.

"It's been such fun to do. So we've got pictures of landscapes that attracted me over summer - the Whanganui River, Bethells Beach, caravans at Kaikoura.

"I do seem to like that coastal strip. I love those wind-bent manuka near the coast."

Although he is celebrating New Zealand's playground, one suspects deeper issues are still at play.

"These are light and sunny paintings, to some degree," he states, slyly alluding to the fact that he's also enjoying another contested landscape.

Exhibition

* Who: Bob Kerr

* Where: McPherson Gallery, Broker House, Level 2, 14 Vulcan Lane

* When: Opens Tuesday. Runs until May 22

* Also: The Rua Expedition, Waikato Museum of Art & History until May 30