Here: Kupe to Cook
Australian National Maritime Museum, Sydney, Australia
22 June - 29 November 2020
Pātaka Art + Museum
11 August - 24 November 2019
Kupe’s anchor stone Maungaroa in Here: Kupe to Cook presented at Pātaka Art+Museum in 2019.
Presented at the National Maritime Museum in Sydney, Australia in 2020, following the 2019 launch at Pātaka Art+Museum in Aotearoa New Zealand, Here: Kupe to Cook challenges a number of discovery narratives that sit are the heart of European New Zealand and Australia identity.
As the title suggests, Here: Kupe to Cook is an exhibition that looks at the arrival of people here in Aotearoa, beginning with the great Oceanic navigator Kupe who came to these shores over 1000 years ago, leaving his anchor stone (Maungaroa) here in Porirua to claim and name the land after himself and his family. Stories about Cook and his crew are featured in the exhibition, but neither Kupe nor Cook are the main protagonists.
This is an exhibition that looks at the mistakes, the misconceptions and the malign effects of our various arrivals here in Aotearoa. The exhibition begins by unpacking some of the greatest misconceptions in the mythology of our nation’s discovery. Cook did not discover Aotearoa, but nor is the popularisation of Kupe as discovering Aotearoa entirely correct. While Kupe is credited by numerous iwi as the person who first navigated a course from Hawaiki to Aotearoa, it is the legendary historical figure Maui who Māori most readily associate with the discovery of this land, pulling it up out of the sea from beyond the horizon.
That’s where Greg Semu’s The Arrival comes in, a striking and challenging artwork that confronts these complex histories. The Arrival is a photographic restaging of Louis Steele and Charles Goldie’s infamous 1899 painting, The Arrival of the Maoris in New Zealand. Created in the style of Theodore Géricault’s 1819 painting The Raft of the Medusa, Steele and Goldie sought to celebrate the tenacity of the human spirit with their dramatised recreation of the arrival of the first settlers in Aotearoa.
Greg Semu, Arrival, 2019. From The Raft of the Tagata Pasifika (People of the Pacific) series, 2014-2019.
It is easy to see how Kupe’s journey and the idea of ‘discovery’ would have been an exciting narrative to popularise among early Pākehā settlers, who themselves possessed an identity-narrative based on discovery and migration to new lands. Today however the painting is emblematic of refuted 19th-century views, with its inaccurate depiction of the vessel and the travellers as forlorn, unprepared, and lost at sea.
Greg Semu is not the only artist asking big questions. Christine Hellyar questions Cook and Joseph Banks’ supposedly unwitting transmission of European illnesses during their travels in the Pacific, while Michel Tuffery’s paintings and documentary film collaboration with Lala Rolls investigates the role of Tahitian navigator Tupaia in the first contacts between Māori and the crew of the Endeavour. The documentary includes the tragic deaths of Te Mārō and Te Rākau during the very first engagement in Tūranga.
Below is a full copy of the exhibition catalogue of the major works from the exhibition with more information about the artists and their artworks in the exhibition.
