Doris Lusk

Doris Lusk began spending time in Horomaka Banks Peninsula in the 1940s, while visiting friends who lived at the small settlement of Duvauchelle, near Takamatua, with her family. They rented an old farmhouse for weekends and holidays, and Lusk’s paintings soon revealed the influence of that distinctive landscape, with its rumpled hills and huge, bleached tree trunks left lying in bare paddocks. Here, her eye was drawn to an old ngaio tree, with its arching branches and rough, furrowed trunk. Ngaio leaves contain a toxin that made them useful to Māori as a natural insect repellent. The tree also held a close association with the moon: in Māori pūrākau a woman named Rona was said to have angered the moon deity, Marama, by cursing. As he wrenched her up into the night sky, she grabbed hold of a ngaio tree. Their joint images can be found in the moon’s cratered surface.

pūrākau ~ myths, ancient legends, stories

(He Kapuka Oneone – A Handful of Soil, 2025)