Artist Richard Lewer’s new exhibition, What they didn’t teach me at school, means he’s had to dredge up memories of his time at Hamilton Boys’ High during the 1980s. “God, it was terrible,” he groans. “I got the cane on my first day because I pushed this boy through a puddle. The headmaster, Tony Steel, who was an ex-All Black, was watching. He said, ‘Come with me, Lewer.’ You couldn’t imagine it nowadays, could you, getting belted?”
One of his report cards noted: “Lewer continually falls off his chair in class.” But he was just a gormless teenager having a laugh, tilting back on his chair.
“I don’t think I was a troublemaker,” says Lewer, on the phone from Melbourne, where he has lived for nearly 30 years. “I tried to fit in. I liked sports and I played rugby and table tennis but I knew I didn’t fit into certain classes or structures.”
That meant Lewer and any other boys on the fringes wound up corralled in the lowest-level form each year. “It was for the naughty kids. It was such a low-standard form that we didn’t learn anything.”
But with an aptitude for drawing, he developed a gift for art. “It was never nurtured by anyone. It was escapism, to be honest. It was totally to get well within myself” – a remark he expands on in a later conversation.
“My education was the art room. I went through to the seventh form and I stayed in the art room for that whole year. And then I applied for Elam [the University of Auckland School of Fine Arts].”
Lewer was one of the first students from Hamilton Boys’ to be accepted into Elam, and he went on to a master’s degree at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne. The 53-year-old lives in the inner-Melbourne suburb of Northcote with his wife, Kerryn Wilson, a civil engineer.
He is warmly regarded on both sides of the Tasman as an empathetic chronicler of extremities of human behaviour, with a sharp focus on crime, religion and sport. His wry humour is never far away, especially when he turns his eye on himself (for instance, in his 2020-21 autobiographical series, Richard’s Disasters, A True Story).
He’s also attuned to “ordinary” people. Sydney Modern, an adjunct of the Art Gallery of New South Wales which opened in 2022, commissioned him to document its A$344 million construction. His response was to “shine a light” on the workers: paintings of the builders, glaziers, electricians and cleaners.
“It was amazing because they came to the opening and it was a big deal,” he says. “I’ve never done such a happy work; it was a joyful sort of thing to do.”
Lewer’s style can’t be easily pinned down, ranging from colour-filled paintings to audio-video works to deceptively naive drawings and text. Sometimes, he shifts from working on canvas and paper to challenging surfaces such as metals, recycled venetian blinds, Formica tables, pool tables and materials from renovated police stations.
Home truths
A familiar touchstone weaves through all this flow of texture and tone. Lewer always circles back to his early life in Hamilton and the family home in Lewis St, which, as a child, he thought was “Lewers St”.
What they didn’t teach me at school, which opens at the New Zealand Portrait Gallery Te Pūkenga Whakaata in Wellington on February 22, takes him home again, this time to correct a giant gap he has only recently discovered in his “terrible” education: the history of the 1863-64 Waikato War.
He is not alone. New Zealand’s colonial history has never been taught consistently in schools until recently. As late as 2014, then prime minister John Key claimed New Zealand had been “settled peacefully”.
That’s not true. The Waikato War, one chapter of the broader New Zealand Wars, was a brutish one-sided conflict engineered by British crown representatives to crush the Kiingitanga self-governance movement and confiscate vast swathes of Māori land, estimated at about half a million hectares, an area that is now the heartland of Waikato’s dairy industry.
When the Labour government in 2019 announced that our colonial history would be added to the curriculum from 2022, historian Vincent O’Malley wrote in the Guardian: “It felt like a momentous decision, given abundant evidence that most students left school having little or no exposure to the history of their own country.”
“I had an assistant called Luke [Stretten, a sculptor], who is Māori and has been living over here for some time,” says Lewer. “During the Covid period, we got into lots of discussions about New Zealand and how it is now and how it was then. I told him I had learnt nothing at school and didn’t really know what had gone on. To my embarrassment and shame, I had no idea. Luke was saying, you should learn this.”
Lewer started by reading books, including O’Malley’s The New Zealand Wars Ngā Pakanga o Aotearoa, and listening to the RNZ podcast New Zealand Wars, and decided he wanted to interpret the history. But he wasn’t sure how to proceed. When he visited Hamilton seeking advice from some prominent iwi he knew in the art world, he was rebuffed because he was Pākehā.
“I approached a few people and they said, ‘You’re not allowed to do this, this is not your story, leave this alone’ – even stronger words than that.
“That went on for a good six months. I didn’t want to offend people but at the same time, I knew my job was to be an artist and my way of learning about things is through painting and drawing, so I thought, ‘I am going to carry on.’
“Every time I asked what is the right way to do this, I felt I was muzzled to some degree. It wasn’t until I met Tom Roa [Tainui leader, Waikato University professor and Waitangi Tribunal member] that people became more relaxed about what I was doing, but only some people.
“I was told Tom was a ferocious man. I was so nervous … but as soon as I met him, he put me at ease. He had all the time in the world for my questions and he made me so comfortable about wanting to do this story.”
Lewer also had a productive meeting in Wellington with O’Malley, who has since seen PDF images of Lewer’s works. O’Malley believes he was right to persist despite being warned off.
“When I met Richard, before he had started on the works, he was clear he wasn’t trying to tell anyone else’s story,” he emails. “The whole point was to explore his experience as a Pākehā who grew up in Waikato but learnt nothing about the Waikato War during his school years. That sounds kind of incredible but it is a very typical story.
“I think it is essential that we reflect on these silences and omissions in terms of how we engage with our history – especially Pākehā. So what Richard is doing is really important in terms of that process of learning to front up to our history.”
Joanna Kidman (Ngāti Maniapoto, Ngāti Raukawa), who is a professor of Māori education at Victoria University Te Herenga Waka and is married to O’Malley, has also seen the art works. She has tūpuna who were killed in 1864 at Ōrākau, one of many disturbing episodes of the war.
“I think Richard’s art is amazing and provocative (in a good way) and it breaks many silences,” she says. “It’s critically important that Pākehā engage with these histories. That can feel uncomfortable for some but in general, young people in schools find it empowering to learn about what happened.
“Waikato Māori have carried memories of the invasion for generations and we’ll continue to pass them on when we gather at tribal or whānau occasions. But we also need Pākehā to explore the history and how it directly affects New Zealand society today.”
Painting the skies red
The art work in What they didn’t teach me at school unfolds in stages. The first group features 12 large, figurative acrylic paintings on unprimed canvas tracking the north-to-south passage of fighting along the Waikato River and the Great South Rd, built to carry the troops.
King Tāwhiao appears at the beginning, first as a powerful, imposing silhouette, then diminished at the end as he lays down his patu before retreat.
The darkening skies fill with red as the troops advance through Rangiriri Pā, Lake Kopuera, Rangiaowhia and Ōrākau, the scene of Rewi’s last stand, from which fleeing Māori were hunted down.
These works are followed by eight smaller ink portraits of key figures, including General Duncan Cameron, who led the soldiers throughout the war.
A large New Zealand flag has a message of reconciliation written across it, and the show winds up with white acrylic images painted on blackboards, including one with text saying, “Lewer continually falls off his chair in class,” and a portrait of his family as blank white smudges.
Lewer’s immersion in this history has helped him discover its links with his own life.
“The Great South Rd was created as a corridor for the troops to move along and invade,” he says. “I keep going back to my own personal thing of driving back and forth from Hamilton to Auckland, and the amount of times I have stopped at the pub at Rangiriri [where a decisive battle was fought]. I had no idea.”
He adds: “This has probably been the hardest body of work I have ever made but I am super glad I’ve been able to make it and I feel really good about showing it. The outcome, though, isn’t until the work goes on the wall and then there is a whole lot of other public discussion. In the meantime, it is a huge part of my history I had no idea about and you can never take it away.”
Scars from childhood
Exploring this history has forced Lewer to confront some difficult personal issues. As already mentioned, he said he’d got into art at school to “get well within myself”.
An image from the Richard’s Disasters series offers a clue: a motif frequently repeated in his work is the family home in Lewis St, a house with dark windows and a forbidding aura.
“There are connections and patterns which follow my work; it all intertwines,” he says. “With my family, it’s a hard one. My sister and I have talked about it; it was quite a traumatic upbringing but this is not the right place to air that.
“I air it in my art and I feel that people pick up on it. I feel it’s therapeutic. If I didn’t make art I don’t know where I’d be. Mum and Dad probably tried their best … My sister and I talk about it a lot and there are scars from our family childhood. It was not a happy, healthy environment at all.”
Lewer describes his father, an IRD tax inspector, as a man who was “extremely straight, the rules applied, and as life has gone on, I realised that’s how he fitted into things”.
With both parents dying recently, he has been looking through 18 albums of their photos his sister sent over from New Zealand. “It’s quite sad when I look at these photos of Mum and Dad,” he says. “I feel a great deal of sadness, not because they have gone but because of the way they lived their lives.”
Another work, Richard’s Medical Disasters, reveals some other scars. It’s a huge diagram of his medical history, including chronic pancreatitis, a serious illness he’s been living with since 2011.
Medical Disasters debuted at the Art Gallery of NSW last year as part of the Sulman Prize finalists’ exhibition before its sale – much to his shock – to a farming couple in South Australia.
“People I know saw people looking at it in the gallery chuckling, saying, ‘He thinks he’s got it bad!’” he says with a laugh.
“And now it’s in a private collection. One of my dealers said she had a client who wanted to buy it. I thought, ‘Really? What a weirdo.’ I met them a couple of weeks ago. They said they walk past me every day and they go, ‘Ooh, my knee’s a bit dicky.’
“We all do it. Everyone comes back to their own ailments.”
What They Didn’t Teach Me At School: The Waikato War, by Richard Lewer, NZ Portrait Gallery Te Pūkenga Whakaata, Wellington, February 22-May 12.
