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Museum Director as an accepted museum convention. This replaced the tradition of using kokowai to
colour and decorate.
The pou were also painted red to visually stimulate and acknowledge the tapu of the colour red. The
Ngapuhi tradition of applying and saturating one‟s body, clothing, homes, palisades, pataka, bones,
weaponry and funerary with red clay kokowai is also recognized. The narratives of kokowai are found
in the Maori creation histories and whakapapa from the separation of Ranginui and Papatuanuku to the
shedding of their blood. The blood of Ranginui can be seen as the red glow in the sky and the blood of
Papatuanuku which flowed into the earth became the kokowai from which the first human being was
created. This relationship with Ranginui and Papatuanuku is the reason kokowai is tapu. The
intention of the pou is to awaken and arouse the spiritual relationship between the living and the dead,
by naming Ngati Hau land blocks and tupuna.
The use of text on the pou is an acknowledgement to the history, identity, narration and naming of
each block of land and tupuna. “Text was a powerful colonial tool that transformed many changes” to
the Maori way of living (Byrnes, 2001). The names of each land block and tupuna are stencilled and
painted in white paint on each pou. Visually the installation also references traditional and
geographical markers of mountains, trees, pa sites, burial grounds and rivers. When the application of
white paint on several of the pou started to run into the deeply grooved surface of the jarrah wood,
spray paint experiments were trialled successfully. However the decision to spray paint was
discouraged because several younger whanau members are taggers in and around Whangarei with
recognized signature tags.
Setting times to meet with people to discuss the work, rallying whanau support to install the Pou,
collecting images and maintaining an impetus has been time consuming and at times really
disheartening. It had been envisaged that the installation would take up to three weeks to complete but
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