Original subtitles

This is Lake Taupo.

It is the largest in New Zealand.

Its calm, glistening waters are one of the North Island's

great natural features.

But hidden away on its northern shore, reachable only by boat,

is an unexpected creation.

A carving, 14 metres high, chiselled into the cliff.

This is a portrait of a man called Ngatoroirangi,

a crucial figure in the story of this region.

He was a Polynesian priest and navigator who, about 800 years ago,

brought his people thousands of miles across the Pacific Ocean,

to settle here in Aotearoa, otherwise known as New Zealand.

His face is adorned with symbolic patterns denoting his high status,

his wisdom and insight.

His connection to the gods.

He looks like he has been here for centuries

but he was created just 40 years ago

by one of his descendants, a Maori sculptor called

Matahi Brightwell.

It is a monumental expression of Maori culture

and proof of its continuing vitality.

In the second half of the 18th century,

James Cook voyaged across the Pacific

on a mission to explore one of the last uncharted parts of the globe.

He set foot in places that few Europeans had seen before.

And made contact with entire societies

long hidden from the rest of the world.

It was the beginning of a remarkable encounter

between Oceania and the West.

Between indigenous people and those who went on to colonise them.

In this series, I am exploring the momentous impact of that encounter.

The extraordinary art that arose from it,

how indigenous culture was disrupted,

Western art was reinvigorated,

and the global imagination irrevocably changed.

It is a story I am not telling alone.

In these programmes,

indigenous people from all over Oceania have their say.

Reflecting on the often fraught legacy of encounter.

New Zealand means nothing to me.

It is a name that explorers gave to our land.

It means nothing.

This episode tells the story of the Maori.

Their first clashes with Europeans,

the collaborations and exchange that followed.

How many Maori resisted colonisation and went on to stage

an audacious cultural revival

that has made its mark on many aspects of modern life.

It is usually believed that the people and cultures of Oceania

were all but destroyed by contact with Europeans,

through war, disease and religion.

But the Maori weren't passive victims of these encounters.

They were a powerful and versatile society.

So they adapted.

They fought back and, today,

Maori culture is not only an integral part of modern New Zealand,

it is also famous around the world.

New Zealand, or Aotearoa, its indigenous name,

was the last major landmass on earth to be settled by humans.

About 1,000 years ago,

a group of Polynesian mariners

arrived here from the islands around Tahiti.

This great migration still resonates with today's Maori.

Europeans were voyaging 500 years ago but, in the context of time,

it is a fraction of time compared to the 7,000 years

that Polynesians have been voyaging, discovering, and settling.

They settled all of the Polynesian triangle from Hawaii to Rapa Nui,

Easter Island, down here to Aotearoa, to New Zealand.

A Waka houra is a vessel

that our ancestors built many thousands of years ago,

and this particular vessel is modelled of those same vessels.

Our genealogy goes back to the islands.

It goes back to Tahiti, it goes back to Tonga, to Samoa,

talking thousands of years ago.

Those ancestors all connect us.

We have Kupe, who was a very observant, adventurous person.

He was up in the islands and he could see, each year,

the migrating birds come through.

So, one year, he decided follow them.

And the birds eventually led him to Aotearoa.

It was his wife that named Aotearoa.

When they were coming close she saw this long white cloud

and that is what the name means.

The Land of the Long White Cloud.

Many consider New Zealand to be one of the world's beautiful countries.

A land of mountains and volcanoes, glaciers and waterfalls, forests,

fjords, and pristine beaches.

A land so improbably spectacular

that Hollywood films its fantasies here.

And the Maori story of its creation was no less spectacular.

One day, an audacious demigod called Maui made a fish hook

from his grandmother's jawbone.

He threw the hook over the side of his canoe.

The hook plunged to bottom of the ocean and, very soon,

he felt a nibble.

Maui hauled an absolutely huge fish out of the water

but, before he could stop them,

his greedy brothers cut up the fish

and it became the jagged outline of New Zealand's North Island.

The Maori soon colonised both islands.

They thrived in these fertile lands, cultivating sweet potatoes,

hunting game, and forming sophisticated trading networks.

The Maori lived in isolation for a staggering 800 years,

and so developed a culture unlike any other in Polynesia,

with its own dialects and myths.

But their particular genius was for sculpture.

From the 15th century,

the Maori began constructing large permanent households

often adorned with elaborate carvings.

This tradition has since evolved into the wharenui, or meeting house.

The communal space at the heart of every tribe.

These intricate buildings are testament to Maori creativity

and a powerful statement of their identity.

The structure is a symbolic representation

of an ancestor's body.

The rafters, which are likened to the ribs of the ancestor,

are adorned with painted patterns that symbolise life itself,

flowing through lines of descent.

The wall panels, made from lattices of dried flower stalks,

vibrate with geometrical designs.

But the most striking features of the meeting house

are its carved figures.

This sculpture, right in the middle of the meeting house,

is a portrait of Rahuri.

Now, Rahuri was a very important ancestor

to this part of northern New Zealand.

Indeed, he was said to rule over

all of the people of northern New Zealand.

And if we look at these remarkable tattoos across his face,

we can get a really good idea of what kind of a person Rahuri was.

These lovely spirals on both of his cheeks,

these tell us that he was a cultivator,

he was involved in horticulture.

The elaborate patterns down here around his mouth,

they tell us that he was an excellent orator.

He was a great speaker.

Which was a very important skill if you were a tribal leader.

And up here, the patterns on his forehead tell us

that he had three sisters to the left

and three brothers to the right.

And then, exploding out of this extraordinary crown of his,

we have his descendants. His sons.

We know they are his sons because they all have penises

and they move in six generations up from the past,

all the way up towards the present.

All around the meeting house are wall panels called poupou

that depict ancestral history and myth.

They have contorted bodies,

grimacing faces, and lolling tongues.

Their eyes, made from haliotis shells, flash in the darkness.

This figure represents Mount Taranaki,

the most famous and sacred mountain in New Zealand.

And this is the goddess of the shoreline, Hinemoana.

Just as the sea provides food and sustenance,

so she grasps her breasts

with which she nourishes the people of New Zealand.

The meeting house is a microcosm of the Maori universe.

It contains myth and religion, family and history,

past and present.

But it's also a total work of art.

A testament to this society's exuberant imagination

and extraordinary skill.

But in the 18th century,

the society's well ordered universe would be fatally disrupted.

On Monday 9th October 1769,

a group of Maori living on the east coast of the North Island

spotted something alarming.

Unusual people, in unusual clothes, were marching across their land.

The Maori did what they always did when they were threatened.

They gathered their strongest men and performed a haka,

a terrifying war dance.

The invaders had never seen anything like it before so they anxiously

retreated, but later they returned.

There was an exchange of words, some trade, and, eventually,

a confused confrontation that ended with one Maori being killed.

The invaders were not finished.

Later in the day, they launched another unprovoked attack.

Seven Maori, most of them boys,

were innocently paddling a canoe in these waters

when the unusual men arrived in their own boats

and tried to kidnap them.

The boys, naturally, resisted.

They threw everything they had -

stones, even their own paddles, at their assailants.

And that is when the invaders loaded weapons

that looked like exploding spears,

shot four of them dead, and took the other three hostage.

The invaders were, of course,

a group of British Marines under the command of James Cook.

Cook, along with the crew of his ship, the Endeavour,

had spent nine months crossing the Pacific,

stopping at Tahiti before finally reaching

what is known today as New Zealand.

And, in doing so, they became the first known Europeans

to set foot on these islands.

Cook's primary mission was to explore and map these new lands.

He had with him a team of scientists and artists,

led by the botanist Joseph Banks.

But, despite ostensibly peaceful intentions,

violence often erupted in the uncertain moments of first contact.

It must be said that Cook did feel guilty

about the unnecessary deaths he had caused.

He was not a violent man by nature.

This incident was a sign of things to come.

The Maori were not going to roll over or run away.

They were going to fight back

and there would be a great deal of violence to come.

Cook named this area Poverty Bay

and descendants of the first Maori killed that day

are still living here.

His name was Te Maro and his death is still mourned by his tribe.

MAORI CHANTING

250 years ago, my people, my people here, our people, our hapu here,

we've sat and we've watched this for 250 years.

We have always felt that the actions of those visitors

was poorly judged and that the life of our ancestor was wasted.

My name is Charlotte Gibson.

My hapu is Ngati Oneone and this is my marae.

He was a gardener and whilst, on the face of things,

that might seem that he had a very ordinary role,

when in fact, in those times,

being a gardener was a position of very high standing

amongst the people.

THEY SING

You google Cook,

your screen is slathered with all sorts of references to Cook.

If you google Te Maro, you might get two.

And the only reference to him is that he was the guy who got shot.

There's never been an apology for that.

And, to some of us, we don't think it's right

that we ask for the apology.

It's actually for the person who needs to apologise

to figure that out.

Certainly, we were, and still are, very much impacted on

by the death of Te Maro.

We hold a significant amount of anxiety around the actions

of the Endeavour crew and the leadership, or lack of leadership,

shown by Cook on that day and the days that followed.

His death, his loss, was not an insignificant moment

in the lives and the history of our people.

After these tragic first encounters,

Cook and his crew sailed up the coast of the North Island and their

relationship with the Maori improved.

On the 12th of October 1769,

just a few days after first contact had been made,

another group of Maori met the British.

They paddled up to the Endeavour in seven war canoes.

And, very soon, they began to trade.

The British were carrying some beautiful Polynesian textiles

and the Maori were so desperate to get hold of them

that they even offered the British their own paddles.

and this is one of those very paddles.

It's therefore one of the very first objects to ever pass from Maori to

European hands.

Enough to send a shiver down the spine.

It was a functional object, of course,

but it was also an object of great spiritual importance

and aesthetic complexity.

If you look at the paddle's blade

here you will see the faded remains of a pattern.

Now, that is known as kowhaiwhai.

Kowhaiwhai was applied to many Maori artefacts,

though each design was virtually unique.

It might look abstract but it's actually filled with references

and symbolic significance.

So this curving line here evokes

the flowing water as it passes by

the side of the canoe.

These designs over here,

these are based on the shape and the movement of a hammerhead shark

as it barges its way through the ocean.

And, on the other side,

these designs are based on a native squid and its ink cloud.

But perhaps we shouldn't be too literal, because these designs -

and indeed this entire object - is designed to capture

a sense of speed and power and energy.

Either way, it is stunning

and it astonished and delighted every European who set eyes on it.

Indeed, when Joseph Banks examined a pattern just like this,

he famously said that it was like nothing but itself.

As Cook and his crew circumnavigated

the two great islands of New Zealand,

trading continued with occasional outbreaks of violence.

These early exchanges were immortalised in this drawing

by the Endeavour's Polynesian navigator, Tupaia.

It shows a British man,

who many believe is Joseph Banks himself,

and a top-knotted Maori warrior

trading a piece of white cloth for a bright red crayfish.

Their hands reach out to each other, their eyes wide open with wonder.

This is art as first contact.

On the whole, the British wanted fish and vegetables for the crew

and wood and flax for ship repairs.

The Maori, in return, demanded textiles, beads, weapons

and, above all, anything made from metal.

Like most Polynesian societies,

Maori culture had a Stone Age technology.

Metal was almost unheard of.

And so something as basic as this - a simple metal nail,

which was virtually worthless on its own back in Europe -

was in huge demand here in New Zealand.

But the Maori were canny traders.

They placed a high value on their own products

and were often reluctant to give them up.

This led to one of the most fascinating objects

of the entire Cook era -

a genuine cultural fusion between Oceania and the West.

Now this pretty little thing,

which is carved really rather beautifully

from a jade-like green stone,

is called a patu.

Though it looks like an ornamental shoehorn,

it actually served a rather more violent function.

It was a weapon.

And you could use it in a number of different ways.

You could either hold it like this and beat someone around the head

with it, or you could hold it a little bit more like this

and jab it into their ribcage or jawbone.

Either way, it was a highly effective,

highly portable tool for hand-to-hand combat

and pretty much any Maori warrior worth his salt

was in possession of one.

Anyway, when Joseph Banks came to New Zealand,

he became fascinated with these objects.

So fascinated that, when he returned to Britain in the early 1770s,

he decided to make some of his own.

And so he went to a foundry in Fleet Street

and had 40 patus cast in brass.

He then went down the road to the Strand, where he had a man engrave

the finishing details. So you can see here "Joseph Banks Esquire".

The date, 1772, which was the year it was made and, in the middle,

Joseph Banks's coat of arms,

which, I must say, is a little bit premature,

because Banks didn't actually

gain an official coat of arms until ten years later.

So why did he do it?

Well, he hoped to bring these beautiful brass patus

back to New Zealand on a second voyage

and then to either offer them as gifts to influential people,

or to trade them for other objects.

And he was hoping that the idea of

having a familiar object in an improved material - metal -

would prove irresistible to the Maori.

Now, what I find so interesting about this object is it is

a hybrid object.

It's a product of an encounter

between two opposite sides of the world -

between Maori traditions and European manufacture.

The British were clearly fascinated

by this unusual and isolated society.

That fascination was perhaps best expressed in drawings and paintings

made by one of the Endeavour's young artists.

Sydney Parkinson was probably only 23 years old

when he came on board the Endeavour

and he was not an adventurous type.

He was a small, frail,

pale-skinned Quaker from Edinburgh,

who barely had the ability to grow stubble.

Now, he'd been employed as a botanical artist, but,

when the expedition's figure painter,

a man called Alexander Buchan, died of epilepsy

before he even made it to New Zealand,

Parkinson was tasked with painting people, too.

With his workload doubled, Parkinson sketched,

drew and painted at a ferocious pace.

He depicted New Zealand's jagged coastline,

its plants, birds and fish

and the Maori's fantastical war canoes.

But one thing captured his imagination more than any other.

Tattooing was a common practice across the Pacific,

but the Maori alone applied them to their faces

and called the designs moko.

Parkinson had never seen anything like it before and reproduced

these elaborate spiralling shapes with exquisite attention to detail.

This is a portrait of a Maori chief's son.

His face is adorned with stripes,

crosshatchings and kowhaiwhai curls.

It is art of the highest quality -

a tradition that continues to this day.

New Zealand means nothing to me. It's a...

It's a name that a Dutch explorer

by the name of Abel Tasman gave to our whenua - our land.

And it means nothing.

our traditional moko is to remind people,

remind the world, that the Maori culture -

our culture, our language,

our traditions, our art,

er, our songs, our dances -

is alive and well.

Because there was a misbelief that Maori people were dying,

a dying race,

a dying language, dying art forms,

and that's not true.

In the 1990s, a group of us called Mana Motuhake o Tuhoe

decided to revive ta moko

to let the world know that our culture, our stories,

is alive and well.

The design on my face comes from the tribe I come from - Tuhoe.

So these patterns are specific to Tuhoe.

A Tuhoe person would recognise the patterns and go, "Oh, yeah,

"he's one of my relatives."

So we have proverbs in our culture.

We call them whakatuaki - words of wisdom.

And each design has a meaning to it.

It's not just a picture.

It has a genealogy,

it's a long...long lineage.

And so we wear our stories,

we wear our culture.

The head is the most sacred part of the body,

so to choose to wear ta moko from where I am,

it's... It's deep.

It's deep. The whole world is looking at you.

We're about revival,

maintaining mana.

Our mana is honour - honouring the ancestors,

honouring the present and honouring the future,

so that our culture survives.

In the decades following Cook's arrival in New Zealand,

European visitors were few and far between.

There was no rush to start a British colony on these islands,

in part because the Maori had developed a fearsome reputation.

In December, 1809,

a group of British mariners were out looking for some timber

when they were ambushed by Maori warriors.

The Maori, who were seeking revenge for an earlier insult,

beat the men to death, dismembered them and ate them.

They then put on their victims' clothes,

snuck onto their ship and murdered almost everyone on board.

New Zealand was dubbed the Cannibal Isles

and Europeans were warned off coming here.

Yet, by the early 19th century,

European traders and whalers began to arrive with increasing frequency.

And one Maori chief offered them a particularly warm welcome.

His name was Hongi Hika.

Hongi Hika was a valuable interface between these two clashing cultures.

He encouraged Europeans to settle in New Zealand

and he protected them while they were here.

But he also travelled to Britain in 1820,

where he met King George IV

and helped compile the very first Maori-English dictionary.

But this apparent generosity of spirit was by no means altruistic.

Hongi Hika befriended Europeans

because he wanted something from them.

He desired something that would bring him immense power,

but would also wreak immense damage.

GUNSHOT

This is a double-barrelled muzzle-loading percussion shotgun.

It was made in the mid-19th century

by an English gunsmith called William Morter

and it's made from walnut and steel.

It was originally designed to shoot the birds and other animals

on English farms, but then it was sailed all around the world,

where it was sold to a Maori warrior,

who no doubt considered it to be a significant step up from a patu.

And we can see how important this weapon was

to the person who acquired it, if we look here.

Because this stock has been adorned

with typically wonderful Maori carvings.

Right down here are these extraordinary wave-like forms

that remind me of the kowhaiwhai patterns

on rafters in meeting houses.

And, in the middle, this very, very detailed,

diamond-shaped pattern that's been divided up in very complex segments.

And right up here on the grip is an extremely fine piece of carving

that looks like snakeskin

and was clearly designed to help its user grab hold of this weapon

in the wet forests of New Zealand.

Now, I must admit, I'm not much of a gun person,

and it does feel strange holding in my hands what was probably once

a murder weapon used to kill other Maori warriors,

or indeed even other Europeans.

But it is, nevertheless, a fascinating example

of hybrid culture,

of Maori culture and European culture coming together

in a beautiful, but, admittedly, explosive way.

Hongi Hika used guns to conquer rival tribes

and they acquired guns to fight back.

An unprecedented arms race followed that killed 40,000 Maori

and left many communities shattered.

While guns undermined the fabric of Maori society,

a new religion challenged traditional beliefs.

The first Christian missionaries in New Zealand

struggled to convert the Maori.

In the first 15 years, they didn't save a single soul,

but they eventually established a foothold in the country.

This is Christ Church, in Russell - the oldest church in New Zealand.

Missionaries bought the land from Maori chiefs in 1834

and a certain Charles Darwin was among the donors

that funded this simple clapboard chapel.

Services began in January 1836,

conducted in both English and Maori.

WOMAN PRAYS IN OWN LANGUAGE

When the Maori embraced Christianity,

the missionaries naively thought

they would abandon their old beliefs completely.

But the Maori didn't see it as a choice between one thing

and the other. They simply took the Christian ideas they liked

and incorporated them into their own cultural traditions.

This cross-pollination had some startling artistic consequences.

This, believe it or not, is the Madonna and child.

The Virgin Mary and the infant Christ as, well,

I've certainly never seen before.

In some ways, of course, it's deeply familiar.

This artist, whom we know nothing about,

but was working probably in the 19th century,

had clearly seen lots of Catholic images of Mary

cradling her very special child

and had simply decided to recreate their pose.

But it's the treatment of the figures that's so different.

Christ has the broad, angular features of the Maori,

with these almond-shaped eyes made from Haliotis shells.

And the Virgin, well, for one thing, she's naked -

something you don't often see in European art.

She is also standing on a severed head

and her face is covered in moko.

Her face is covered in Maori tattoos.

Now, when the Christian missionaries first saw this sculpture,

they must have thought it was deeply disrespectful.

What could be more inappropriate than a tattooed Virgin Mary?

And yet, those tattoos were the Maori way of understanding Mary

and Christianity on their own terms.

In Maori society, the first-born daughter of a high-status family

was treated as a kind of Princess and deemed too sacred, too taboo,

for any man to touch.

And these women were identified by the full facial moko -

a tattoo that was traditionally reserved only for men.

So this is perhaps this artist's way of telling his viewers that Mary,

as a pure, special person,

who is deserving of their respect

and indeed worthy of their adoration.

As more and more white settlers arrived in New Zealand

through the 19th century, the Maori tried to fight back.

But against the might of the British Empire,

the odds were stacked against them.

The last Maori surrendered in 1872.

By the beginning of the 20th century,

the Maori population had dwindled to 40,000.

They now accounted for just one in 15 New Zealanders.

For many, the Maori were a dying race, soon to become extinct.

And at least one artist sought to memorialise them.

Charles Goldie was born in Auckland in 1870.

In his early 20s, he travelled to study painting in Paris.

On his return, he applied French techniques to local subjects.

He spent years in the company of elderly chiefs,

became fluent in the language

and painted a series of elegiac portraits.

This is a portrait of a Maori chief

called Te Aho-o-te-Rangi Wharepu.

He was in his mid-90s when this painting was made,

so his life spanned much of New Zealand's colonial history.

He had once been a brilliant, indeed ferocious, warrior.

He was also an expert in Maori folklore

and, by all accounts, a distinguished canoe builder to boot.

Charles Goldie painted and photographed Te Aho many times

in the early 1900s, paying him a small fee

for each time he modelled in the studio.

And here, he has shown the great man in great detail.

He is wearing this korowai cloak

in which each tassel and each shadow of each tassel

is individually painted.

He has got to this extraordinarily elaborate full facial moko,

or tattoo.

And, on his right arm, he has the name of his second wife

who had been killed in a battle in the 1860s.

But this isn't simply a portrait of him.

Goldie saw it as a portrait of the entire Maori people

and a metaphor for their decline.

It is filled with symbols of downfall.

Here sitting in front of what looks like a dilapidated meeting house.

He is holding a walking stick.

He looks weak and dejected.

And then there is of course the title -

The Calm Close of Valour's Various Day.

This is a picture about the end of a day,

the end of a life and the end of an era.

And you know, looking at it now, I can't help thinking about

Sydney Parkinson's pictures of Maori that he had made

not even 150 years earlier.

Because where Parkinson had seen a young, powerful,

swaggering society - a society that seemed almost invincible -

Goldie depicts a people who have already been defeated

and have little life left in them.

And yet, as Charles Goldie mourned the passing of the Maori,

an indigenous renaissance was already bubbling into existence.

At the end of the 19th century,

New Zealand's now famous tourist industry was just getting started.

Well-heeled visitors flocked to the geothermal landscapes around Rotorua

Many Maori made their living from such demand.

Adults became tour guides and dancers

and children performed hakas in the streets for a penny.

Tourism also unwittingly created one of New Zealand's finest artists.

Tene Waitere had been born in 1853.

His mother was a slave, taken by Hongi Hika.

He learned to carve as a boy and, in the 1890s,

he got a job in Rotorua at the aptly named Geyser Hotel.

Tene Waitere carved buildings in Maori design.

He also made souvenirs, like pipes and walking sticks,

for tourists and collectors.

But he was by no means a purveyor of tourist tat.

His work combined the traditional and the modern,

the Maori and the Western, with exquisite success.

Tene Waitere's most famous work is the Ta Moko panel.

This is one of the masterpieces of New Zealand art

and, in my view, it's also one of the masterpieces

of 19th-century sculpture.

It was carved at exactly the same time

as Rodin was making his celebrated sculptures back in Paris.

But I'll be honest with you.

I would take this over those any day of the week.

Amazingly, it originally functioned

as a kind of three-dimensional information leaflet.

It was commissioned to illustrate different Maori tattoo patterns

for a book that was published in the 1890s.

And you will see here that Tene Waitere has presented us

with three human faces. Two men with full facial moko

and, down here, one woman with a moko kauae.

And yet, it is so much more than illustration.

I find it really quite difficult to put my finger on what makes

this sculpture so profound and so gripping.

Obviously, it's beautifully carved,

and Tene is showing us that he can

do the traditional, stylised Maori patterns,

but he can also do modern, Western style, naturalistic faces.

And these faces aren't simply naturalistic.

They contain a kind of psychological reality and complexity to them.

It's difficult to know what's going through these men's minds,

but down here in particular, this face is absolutely exhilarating.

The closed eyes create all these questions in the audience's mind.

And there is this wonderful counterpoint

that races across this sculpture -

a counterpoint between the men and the woman,

between the frontal faces and the oblique face.

And, above all, between these wide-open eyes

and these closed eyes down here.

To look at this sculpture

is to almost feel like you're being hypnotised.

Tene Waitere was perhaps the most important Maori carver

of his generation and no-one knows more about him

than his great-great-grandson, Jim Schuster.

So, Jim, what is this space?

It's our family home.

We, er, use it as a...

Well, really it's really a museum of the family history in here.

These are tokotoko.

These are the sort of things that he carved for the

English gentry who came, these sort of canes.

And what's this inside there?

That's a paua shell.

See, that's a little figure.

That's his nose, that's his mouth.

And that's the eyes on it,

so that they... These are like little kaitiaki,

they look out for you. So they can see that way. Ha.

See out to the side. You will see this one here's looking forward.

So...

I mean, when I was growing up here,

we'd find, in the tool shed, all the shovel handles -

right at the top end of the shovel handle

was a carved little kaitiaki on the end of it.

He was just...

"Oh, that's a piece of wood, I'll carve something in that."

He carved smoking pipes,

rifle butts.

Anything of wood, he had to carve.

He was probably the most prolific carver of his time.

And it was how he fed his family.

It was how he earned his living.

So, Jim, these are his chisels.

What is this implement?

This is... This is what we call a patu file.

Patu file is...

Patu means to hit, file is a chisel.

This one here is made of whalebone. Whalebone?

And I'd say it's from...

The heaviest bone in a whale is from the jawbone.

And so when Tene was carving, for such a small implement,

it just needed a light tap.

You don't have to...

Because it's such a dense material? Yeah.

This up there, is that of Tene himself?

That's the young Tene. He was a good-looking man, wasn't he?

Even in his old age, he still had that moustache. Hmm.

That is how we sort of see him

in a lot of the photographs on the book shelf.

But I like the fact that he is here, pride of place, looking,

looking out over so many of the things that he has created.

This is his house, his palace, his, er...

..his Buckingham Palace.

At a time when so much traditional culture was under threat,

Tene Waitere's extraordinary career was an inspiration to many.

And today, Maori sculptors all over New Zealand

are keeping the old methods alive.

I can trace my heritage back to the canoe builders 800 years ago.

It's my role, as a tribal artist,

is to teach or re-educate Maori of the origin,

and that's what the purpose of my art is.

This piece is off my war canoe my son and I built.

It's traditional.

I am honouring my teacher,

who taught me the style.

So that style is only done with a straight-edged chisel

and with the hands.

The effigy of my teacher is seated on a kotuku, the white heron,

and that signifies the white heron bringing the basket of knowledge

to man with Tane on his back.

So I've put my teacher bringing the basket of knowledge to me,

and that's a traditional concept.

I use only Maori wood, totara,

and that's the only wood I will use.

I take trees between 800 and 600 years old.

And, because of their quality,

has its own natural resin that preserves the wood,

and that's a rare wood.

I am bound by tradition to use a straight-edged chisel

sharpened the Maori way

and I have depict each shape according to the form.

We are not born out of institutions,

we don't go through the school system.

It's a Maori concept on retaining our knowledge.

So I have to represent the genealogical history of my race

in my artwork and that's what I've been trained for.

The Maori cultural revival continued to grow throughout the 20th century

and proved so compelling that white New Zealanders, known as Pakeha,

were also inspired by indigenous motifs.

And some started to use them.

In the 1950s, artist Gordon Walters

was in search of a style that was both contemporary

and traditional, international and unmistakably New Zealand.

His solution was to combine geometric abstraction

with old Maori designs

in a series of eye-stretching canvases.

This is one of Gordon Walters' largest paintings.

Now, like any good artist, Walters was a perfectionist

and he went to extraordinary lengths to create it.

He produced innumerable sketches and collages

to arrive at this composition.

He then transferred a full-scale drawing onto the canvas

and painted it in a mixture of acrylic and PVA paint.

And it's thought he used as many as five coats of paint

to produce this clean, hard effect.

And, I must say, the precision of the paintmanship here

is really quite breathtaking.

Even if you lean in really, really close,

it's almost impossible to believe

that this painting has been handmade.

It is built from the most fundamental pictorial forms -

circles and lines, dots and dashes.

And it's all about rhythm -

between black and white, horizontal and vertical,

between positive and negative.

And that rhythm makes it thrilling to look at.

It vibrates on the retina.

I've only been here a few minutes

and I'm already beginning to feel giddy.

At first sight, this might look like an impeccable piece

of geometrical Western-style abstraction.

But it was also inspired by Maori design.

These line circle forms here

originate in an indigenous decorative motif called the koru,

which is based on the shape of an unfurling fern frond.

So this is perhaps Gordon Walters' attempt to make a form of modern art

that is nevertheless rooted in the culture of New Zealand.

Walters' paintings proved controversial.

A number of Maori critics condemned him for cultural appropriation.

They argued that he had colonised the koru

just as white settlers had colonised their land.

And yet Walters' koru patterns spread.

They appeared on the front of journals and books and, in 1981,

they became the logo of the New Zealand Film Commission.

A logo that's still being used today.

Walters' art was part of a broader diffusion of Maori culture

across all aspects of New Zealand society,

with traditional motifs appearing on stamps, banknotes,

buildings and even New Zealand's most fashionable beverage -

the flat white.

It's really rather difficult to go anywhere or do anything

in modern New Zealand without bumping into Maori culture.

There's the koru, of course, which is everywhere.

Case in point.

But there's also the now world famous haka

and the increasingly ubiquitous Maori-style tattoos.

You don't have to be in this country for long to realise

that Maori culture has become

an integral part of national identity here,

for both Maori and non-Maori alike.

And that is surely as it should be.

Since the time of Charles Goldie,

New Zealand's Maori population has increased more than tenfold.

The Maori language is spoken by more people every year

and, over the last three decades,

Maori cultural capital has grown significantly.

In New Zealand, perhaps more than anywhere else in Oceania,

a genuine coexistence of indigenous and settler communities

has become a reality.

And now, at least one artist of Maori descent is re-colonising

European visions of the Pacific

and tackling the mythology of Captain Cook himself.

TRADITIONAL SINGING

This is a masterpiece of contemporary Pacific art.

A monumental meditation on this part of the world's

difficult first encounter with the West.

It is a 26-metre-long video installation by the artist Lisa Reihana,

and it's called In Pursuit Of Venus.

As the screen gradually scrolls from right to left,

actors and dancers stage encounters between Captain Cook's crew

and the indigenous people of Oceania.

There is no dialogue and no narrative -

just a dizzying stream of moments from a decisive period in history.

This is a breathtaking work of art.

It is so full of beauty

and so replete with incident

that it really is quite difficult to know which way to look,

because there is something familiar in every single direction.

There is Cook, there is Banks, there is Tupaia,

there is Parkinson over there trying to paint a picture.

There are Aboriginal Australians,

there are Maori, there are Tahitians.

This entire moment of encounter from 250 years ago

has been reimagined with a vividness

that is state-of-the-art in every way.

There are moments of genuine exchange and collaboration.

We see Sydney Parkinson being tattooed in Tahiti.

But there is violence here, too.

The brutal treatment of indigenous people

and, of course, Cook's own death in Hawaii.

I liken the experience to bearing witness.

I'm not explaining everything that's happening

in these historical events,

but, collectively, it gives you a sense of what is

this kind of precolonial colonising moment.

In Pursuit Of Venus was inspired by seeing a French scenic wallpaper,

which was inspired by the illustrations and stories

of the Western and French explorers,

such as De La Perouse and Captain Cook.

Um, it was kind of a eureka moment, really.

I was searching for some kind of storytelling device

and I was reminded of seeing this particular wallpaper

and decided that I wanted to remake it,

but replacing the images of Pacific Maori people

with real living, breathing people.

And what they are describing initially

are Pacific people going about their business.

And, then, this space is sort of interrupted

by a series of encounters.

And as you're sitting watching and encountering these encounters,

you start to get a picture of what it may have been like, initially,

at this time.

INDISTINCT SHOUTING

What makes this piece so audacious and also so important

is the way it turns the tables,

the way it challenges conventional history.

For too long in the West, we have been told a story

about Captain Cook, how he sailed heroically into the South Seas

and discovered all these islands and people.

But this piece shows us that those places were already discovered,

indeed, inhabited by Polynesians and Aboriginal Australians.

And it also tells us that those discoveries weren't one-way.

This isn't a story of European people discovering

indigenous people. This is a story of encounter.

It's a story of everyone discovering each other.

When Captain Cook began voyaging across the Pacific,

the cultures of Australia, New Zealand and the Polynesian islands

were largely unknown to the rest of the world.

Cook's early encounters set the tone for what would follow.

In Australia, Aboriginal people were displaced and marginalised.

In Tahiti and Hawaii,

indigenous traditions were crushed by Western fantasies.

But, in New Zealand, the Maori clung onto their art forms

which are now famous around the world.

And, today, indigenous culture all over Oceania

is finally enjoying a long overdue revival

and the fragile promise of a brighter future.

Captain Cook's voyages initiated a collision of cultures

all over Oceania.

The encounters that followed them were destructive, without doubt.

But they were also creative,

because when these different societies, once oceans apart,

were thrown together, they produced a kind of artistic alchemy

and that story, one of both conflict and collaboration,

has shaped the global imagination,

and it is a story that is still unfolding to this day.