Bob Kerr – paintings :

Whakatane Art Gallery 17 November – 17 December, 2003
Rotorua Museum of Art and History 12 December - 15 February 2004
Idiom Studio Wellington 20 February - 15 March 2004
Waikato Museum of Art and History 20 March - 30 May 2004.

This exhibition is the most recent step in Bob Kerr’s ongoing project to paint the contested New Zealand landscape, the sites of uncomfortable moments in our post-colonial history. As in earlier exhibitions, these paintings draw on incidents, writings and photographic images from New Zealand’s post-colonial history to uncover the tensions which still lie beneath the surface of many apparently tranquil vistas.

In this case the landscape is the Urewera, especially the route towards Maungapohatu, the heart of Tuhoe territory, taken by a large party of police in 1916. This fatal expedition was a misguided and unnecessary conflict between two utterly different societies, one heavily armed, the other nearly defenceless. The resulting tragedy is no longer widely remembered outside the Urewera but remains vivid to the people of Maungapohatu and their descendants.

The Maungapohatu community, deep inside the roadless Urewera, was led by the prophetic leader Rua Kenana. By 1916 his unconventional beliefs and refusal to accept the lowly status granted by Pakeha society had become intolerable to the government and its supporters. Rua’s threatening reputation had been fostered by increasingly wild rumours in the press that he was "pretty well supplied with rifles and ammunition." Some even talked of a machine gun, and of hundreds of armed followers.

Bob Kerr's new paintings include one large work comprising 72 small panels, showing each of the police officers who marched into the Urewera in April 1916 to arrest Rua. This work is titled "Those who are not for carbine duty must bring their batons, handcuffs, revolver and ammunition". These words were among the instructions issued to those police selected from around the North Island to take part in the raid by the then Police Commissioner, John Cullen. Cullen organised the 19i6 raid and led it personally, although he was then 65 years old and due for retirement later that year. A portrait of Cullen also appears in the exhibition.

Other works use the words of NZ Herald chief reporter John Birch, who was invited to join the expedition along with Weekly News photographer Arthur Breckon. Birch noted that the police, as they sweated on foot up the rutted trail to Maungapohatu, had their minds not only on their immediate objective but also on its possible outcome. "… what valuable land there is tied up, and in Maori hands, in this Urewera country… there are open spaces large enough to build towns upon."

Two men, including Rua's son, died at Maungapohatu the day Cullen's party arrived at the community, and several more, including four policemen, were injured. Rua himself and three other men were arrested. The cost of the resulting court cases almost destroyed the community.

Many of the paintings in this exhibition are derived from the photographs taken during the raid by Arthur Breckon, and published soon afterwards in the Weekly News and other NZ papers to glorify the expedition. In its entirety, the exhibition amounts to a Pakeha re-evaluation of the 1916 incident, seen with a modern-day and more bicultural eye.