Seminar February 2024

Hauraki Plains Project

A chance remark during an art development course led me back to a place I thought I knew: my childhood home, the Hauraki Plains. What began as a casual reflection quickly deepened into something far more unsettling and compelling — a recognition that I knew very little about the history of this place before my great-grandfather was balloted land at Ngātea in 1910, during the first wave of European settlement.

I learned that the Hauraki Plains were once a vast and rich floodplain — wetlands, kahikatea forests, and winding rivers — an environment now almost unrecognisable beneath a checkerboard of dairy farms. My initial reaction was one of shock, then shame. How had I grown up here, yet remained unaware of the histories beneath my feet?

At the same time, I encountered the story of Ngāti Paoa through a friend researching his iwi's history. Ngāti Paoa are one of the many iwi of the Hauraki region. This intersection of personal memory and indigenous history opened something in me — a desire not just to learn more, but to explore these layers through my art.

Over the past two to three years, my practice has centred on re-imagining and re-representing the Hauraki Plains — not as they are now, but as they once were, and might still be, in memory, in story, in imagination. I’m not seeking easy answers. This is a process of response, reckoning, and respect. I want to keep pushing myself, to think beyond the familiar and delve into parts of this land’s story I haven’t yet considered.

This journey is informed by my Pākehā identity. I believe that acknowledging this perspective — honestly and openly — can be part of the wider movement towards understanding and reconciliation. I hope my work contributes, however humbly, to a broader and deeper story of place, people, and time.