Voyage of discovery — young Maori to follow ancestral route

Press, 14 November 1981, Page 15

Voyage of discovery — young Maori to follow ancestral route

By

DAVID PATERSON,

, on behalf

of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs

In a remote village in Tahiti, far from the tourist traps of Papeete and the glare of publicity, a young New Zealander is nearing the end of a three-year struggle to make one of the last great voyages of the twentieth century. Matahi WhakatakaBrightwell, against seemingly impossible odds, has felled, hand-carved, and hollowed two giant New Zealand totara trees from the Whirinaki forest and shaped them into twin, 70-foot hulls so that early next year he can retrace the voyages of 1000 years ago that led to the eventual settlement of Aotearoa.

The voyage is seen by leading academics in the subject as being as culturally

significant as the “drift” journey of the Kon-Tiki from Peru to the Tuamotu groups. It will follow the ancient sea lanes from Raiatea, the traditional home of the New Zealand Maori, to the Cook Islands, and then south to the Kermadecs. Ultimately, the landfall will be New Zealand. It will take between 30 and 40 days — perhaps longer. As closely as possible, the voyage will follow the conditions which faced the early Polynesian navigators.

The two hulls, which were shipped to Tahiti earlier this year, will be linked, rather like a catamaran, by great beams held together with natural fibres, strong enough to withstand the great pressure of storm conditions, flexible enough to allow each hull to find its own level in the changing surfaces of the seas.

Between the hulls the crew of about 14 will live in a small thatched hut. For food

they will have the traditional foods of Polynesia: taro, green bananas wrapped in the leaves of the pandanus tree to preserve the fruit. Water will be stored in bam-

boo pipes and coconut shells. They will have a store of dried fish and kumara, and as a fresh supplement to the daily diet, long hours will be spent, fishing using handwoven fibre lines with bone hooks and feather lures.

For navigation, the sailing master will follow the rising sun, study the swells and movements of the waves, the flights of the sea birds, and the changing winds. At’ night the reflection of the known stars will be captured in the still water of a half coconut shell.

Each stage of the journey will follow the sailing directions which in New Zealand, Tahiti, and Cook Islands have been kept alive in chants and myths handed down through genealogies that go back a thousand and more years. For the New Zealand Maoris in particular, the voyage will have a religious mysticism; it will be a reaffirmation of the tales of tohungas and story-tellers about an age when their

ancestors lived in legendary Hawaiki Nui (probably the island of Raiatea) by the warm shores of Pacific lagoons. For Matahi Whakataka, part-Maori, part-English, part-Scot, it will be the chance to bring together one of the most racially and socially divergent groups that has probably ever worked on a single project in New Zealand. To his family and people, he will become, in a sense, their ancestor, a heavy responsibility for a young man in his late 20s. Matahi was brought up in Masterton, living, as he put it, the life of the normal working class teen-ager. Though his Maori genealogy is impressive and is based oh the tribes of the East Coast, the Waikato, and Northland (in a distant way he was related to Inia te Wiata, the great New Zealand singer, and to Dr Gregory, the current member of Parliament for Northern Maori, and the writer, Witi Ihimaera) he knew little of his Maori or ancestral background until his middle-teens. It was then that his grandmother took a hand in his education. And a very ordinary, rugby-playing, car-mad young Maori rapidly found himself on a marae near Bulls, not far from Levin, where for the next eight years he studied under the last great traditional carvers, the lore and myths of his people and the richly intricate and complex art of traditional carving. He studied, too, what little was known of the science and myth of the sailing canoe though the art died out in New Zealand about the time of Cook’s first visit. Deeply immersed in the mythology of the Maori at a time of the land marches and the reawakening of the pride of being-, a Maori, Matahi Whakataka joined the “tent

embassy" in Parliament grounds to plead the case for Maori lands. His elders, however, ordered him back to his studies and he complied. Not many teen-agers would take easily to such strict discipline but he accepted the reasons and the motivation behind such actions. The master carver in a sense holds the history and the lore of his people. By the time the tutors decided that Matahi had learnt the basics of his craft — not only wood carving but the making of jewellery and ornaments and the study of the mythology of his tribe — Matahi moved out into the materialistic world of New Zealand society.

The effect was traumatic. “I left the marae a Maori carver, a Maori person, but away from my people I learnt that there were other cultures and other bloods in me. Sure, living in a State rental housing area in Masterton you are not very

conscious of having Celtic past, Anglo-Saxon emotions — or lack of them.

“But when you have been studying one side of your past, the other must also become evident. It came as a bit of a shock. Here I was being as Maori as you could be at my age, and suddenly finding that there were other cultures, in my blood.’tIn some, the conflict. of dual culture has led to cases of clinically defined schizophrenia. In his case it led to the beginning of life as a talented controversial artist. While the consciousness of the Maori as an equal partner in a predominantly white dominated society was growing rapidly during the late 19705, Matahi was travelling the country developing his own unique expression of art. Any piece of wood, rock, or cliff became a challenge to his tools and his creative skills. Around the western bays of Lake Taupo, a great smooth cliff wall rising from the water became the material for a giant carving of a face, 50 feet high, 40 feet wide. In the design there was certainly the inheritance of the Maori culture, but equally there were traces of the Celt.

Closer to Taupo he began a series of giant sculptures in a park set aside for the purposes; and moved around the country carving statues for universities.

Four years ago, the photographer and writer, Jim Siers, changed Matahi’s life, quite unwittingly, when he attempted the journey from the then Gilbert Islands (today Kiribati) in the voyage of the Taratai I and II from the western to the eastern South Pacific islands.

They were voyages which struck an extraordinary chord with the restless, questioning artist. He met Siers and for months they discussed the possibility of building a double hulled, voyaging canoe that would make the journey from New Zealand to Hawaiki Nui.

Based on the experiences of a Hawaii-Tahiti-Hawaii journey in a double hulled canoe, the Hokule’a which was traditional in design but made of fibreglass, Matahi almost settled on similar modern materials and a reverse journey from New Zealand to the mythical homeland of Hawaiki Nui, probably the island of Raiatea.

In the end his own perception and the persuation of Jim Siers launched Matahi on a traditionally cultural approach. From the elders of his tribe, the Maori Council, and the Conservator of Forests he gained permission to take two totara trees from a section of the Whirinaki forest where the trees are dedicated to perpetuity for the construction of canoes.

With the help of family and friends he felled the trees and persuaded and cajoled a sympathetic log truck owner to transport the two logs to Pahiatua where the elders had given their permission for the use of land for the enterprise.

Why Pahiatua? It is far from the sea, but in Maori it means the resting place of the Gods, symbolically and historically important to the project. There, in an open walled shed, began one of the more extraordinary events to take place in what is normally a 'little quiet country town, not much given to. Maori ceremony or much of a mention in the news. Matahi made use ofthe Government's temporary employment schemes. With a permanent core of about half a dozen carvers, and some friends and relatives, he employed itinerant youngsters who over 18 months helped to carve out the logs, leaving raised portions two or three inches wide every few feet as reinforcing “ribs," each of which has been given a place in the genealogy of the Whakataka-Brightwells. It was hardly all plain sailing. The basic shaping and hollowing took 18 months. Money was a constant problem. There was, at times, friction between those working on the project and the townspeople, for Matahi’s approach was hardly conventional. The transient helpers

were likely to range from young, middle-class pakeha students to “bikie” gangs who worked hard and well but still had a reputation for lawless and sometimes violent activities.

By this stage, Matahi made contact with the Tahitian Tainui Society which had been formed to participate in the Hawaii-Tahiti expedition and to keep alive the art and science of voyaging canoes. While Matahi and his associates were perhaps the last keepers of the art and technology of constructing the traditional hulls, they had little, if any, knowledge of the techniques in rigging, the use of woven sails, and linking the twin hulls to withstand the tremendous pressures to which they will be subjected in the storms of the Pacific. The Tahitians also had the means of transporting the hulls to Papeete. Through the Tainui Society they also had experience in the Polynesian arts of navigating — again an art lost in New Zealand except for the work of Dr David Lewis.

Even so money was a constant problem and Matahi had to. find a steady income while working to complete the hulls ready for shipment to Tahiti.

Through the Maori Affairs

Department and the Education Department, he was given assistance to set up a carving school earlier this year at Maraeroa, in Waitangirua, near Porirua, where he took on a couple of dozen young unemployed Maori and Island youths to train as carvers both in the traditional manner and to help with the canoe, until the two hulls were ready for shipment from Auckland to Papeete. Once there the nerve-rack-ing process of unloading the 70 foot hulls into the water began and, also, for the first time, the vital test of how they would float. Already a number of sceptics had suggested that there would be insufficient freeboard; that a disparity in the weight of the original tree trunks and a possible difference in the specific gravity of the wood, might cause an unmanageable difference of floating characteristics. The sceptics were wrong. The two hulls matched perfectly.

The amount of freeboard was better than anticipated. Under tow from Papeete round the island to the village of Papara, they cut through the water as cleanly as the dolphins which followed.

In a sense the project is still only half completed. Though Matahi is being partly supported by the Tahitian connection, he is very much on his own. He has the twin hulls in trust for the Maori and pakeha people of New Zealand. He has a list almost as long as one of the hulls for a potential crew, including Jim Siers and Captain Rodo Williams, an expert navigator who took part in that successful voyage from Hawaii to Tahiti and back; He also has the backing of the notable Cowan family in Tahiti, including Francis Cowan, who sailed a raft from Tahiti to Chile in the late 19505.

But as Matahi succinctly puts it: "I am living on the smell of an oily rag in one of the most expensive places in the South Pacific.”

Without real financial support he could end up being the lone New Zealander forgotten by his own people in a voyage that could mean so much to the original founders of New Zealand.

Without support, he may not- be able to complete the second stage of the project which he regards as perhaps even more important, though less glamorous than the voyage. That stage is the construction of another twin hulled canoe. This one will remain in New Zealand for the use of the young people of New Zealand to explore the coastline of their own country supported by a trust (yet to be formed) that will maintain the canoe very much along the lines on which the Spirit of Adventure, the yacht donated to the people of New Zealand by the late Sir Wolf Fisher, is operated.

Catamaran style

‘Effect was traumatic’

Friction and problems

School for carvers