MAORI SCULPTURAL GROUP

Dominion, Volume 32, Issue 232, 29 June 1939, Page 8

MAORI SCULPTURAL GROUP

Now Being Modelled

NATIVE DISCOVERY OF NEW ZEALAND

The exhibition sculptor, Mr. W. Trethewey, has started work on what he hopes will be the most notable of the allegorical groups to adorn the exterior of the main buildings. This Is the Maori group, depicting the discovery of New Zealand by Kupe and his companions in adventure, nearly 1000 years ago. From a tiny model in clay, he and his assistants are copying the figures, heroically moulded and picturesquely grouped, on a more than life-sized scale. The figures of sculptor and girl assistants are dwarfed by the immobile eight-foot giants of their creation.

Mr. Trethewey is experiencing some difficulty in obtaining typical examples of Maori physique and physiognomy to act as models for these figures. He is anxious to portray accurately the faces and dress of the first Polynesian comers—no easy task over a lapse of 10 centuries when modern experts are still unable to say whether the explorers wore grass kilts or tapa lavalavas, whether the spirals of tatooing were as in after years, and whether many of their tools and implements were brought with them from the islands or were evolved to meet the new conditions of Maoriland.

According to' native tradition, 30 generations ago two chiefs of the Society Islands, Kupe and Ngahue, explored the New Zealand coast. They came all the way from Hawaiki in wooden catamarans, hollowed from tree-trunks with crude stone adzes, tied together with plaited fibre, and propelled by the winds of God. Kupe’s wife, Hine-te-Aparangi, is said to have named New Zealand Ao-tea-roa, the long white cloud. Kupe called at Port Nicholson, camped at Worser Bay, gave Somes and Ward islands their Maori names, pulled up his canoe at Island Bay, leaving tracks in the rocks still pointed out by Maori fishermen, called at Plimmerton, and left there his stone anchor (now in the Dominion Museum), caught a great octopus in Cook Strait and hauled it ashore at Whekenui Bay, Tory Channel, passed through the Sounds and explored the West Coast. He took back to Hawaiki greenstone from Arahura and moa bones, and a tale of adventure still remembered by the Maoris more than 900 years afterward, and confirmed by legends extant in other parts of Polynesia.

Jt is Kupe’s discovery of New Zealand that Mr. Trethewey is. commemorating. In his group the chief stands gazing at the land to which his wife points, while at their feet crouches a bearded tohunga, the wise man without whom no Polynesian navigator entrusted himself on the high seas.