This exhibition is now closed
Kā Honoka
18 December 2015 –
28 August 2016

Charles Meryon NOUVELLE- ZÉLANDE Greniers indigènes et habitations à AKAROA (Presqu’île de Banks) 1845 1860. Etching. Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū 1972
Cross-cultural encounter in the Pacific shows whaling as central to the local story.
This selection of works explores early cross-cultural encounter in the Pacific and nineteenth-century European presence and ambition, with whaling as a central part of the local story. Spanning a period of some 180 years, this exhibition links such diverse locations as Paris, Sydney, Niue, Tonga, the Bay of Islands and Banks Peninsula, and brings the past powerfully into the present.
Curator:
Ken Hall
Exhibition number: 987
Collection works in this exhibition (17)
Night time, Amuri Bluff

Tony Fomison
Cascade
Peter Robinson
Coiffures diverses des habitans de Tonga Tabou, lle des Amis

Louis Auguste de Sainson
Nouvelle-Zélande

Louis Auguste de Sainson
Nouvelle-Zélande

Louis Auguste de Sainson
Nouvelle-Zélande - coffre en bois sculpté [Plate 59]

Louis Auguste de Sainson
Nouvelle Zélande. Pirogue de la baie Tolaga. Pl. 60

Pierre Langlumé, François-Edmond Pâris, Jean-Antoine Laurent
Nouvelle Zélande. Pirogue de L'Anse de l'Astrolabe. (Baie Tasman.), Pirogue du Canal de l'Astrolabe. Pl. 35

François-Edmond Pâris, Pierre Langlumé, Jean-Antoine Laurent, Joseph Tastu
Sydney from the North Shore

Conrad Martens
Captain Ahab, peg-legged hunter of the white whale

Tony Fomison
Nouvelle-Zélande, Presqu’île de Banks. Etat de la petite colonie Française d’Akaroa. Vers 1845 - Voyage du Rhin.

Charles Meryon
Le Ministère de la Marine

Charles Meryon
On Another Man’s Land

John Pule
Portrait of a Life-cast, possibly of ‘Taha-tahala’ [possibly Takatahara], Aotearoa New Zealand
Fiona Pardington
Portrait of a life-cast of ‘Pouka-lem’, Aotearoa New Zealand
Fiona Pardington
Nouvelle Zélande, Greniers indigènes et Habitations à Akaroa (Presqu’île de Banks, 1845

Charles Meryon
Nouvelle Zélande, Presqu’île de Banks, 1845. Pointe dite des Charbonniers, à Akaroa, Pêche à la Seine

Charles Meryon
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Notes

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Herman Melville's Moby Dick, first published on 14 November 1851, is a whale of a book...
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Happy Birthday Akaroa Museum
Big Congratulations to Akaroa Museum on their 50th anniversary which they are celebrating this weekend.
Artist Profile

Doris Lusk: An Inventive Eye
In the strange, stunned afterlife that ticked slowly by in the first few years following Christchurch’s February 2011 earthquake, a curious note of recognition sounded through the shock and loss. As a massive programme of demolitions relentlessly hollowed out the city, many buildings were incompletely removed and lingered on for months as melancholy remains – stumps abandoned in a forlorn urban forest. Hideous, sculptural, beautiful; they bore compelling resemblance to a body of paintings created in the city more than three decades earlier.
Article

A Tale of Two Chiefs
If you have recently visited He Taonga Rangatira: Noble Treasures at the Gallery you will have been struck by Fiona Pardington's two large photographic portraits of lifelike busts of Ngāi tahu tipuna (ancestors).
Collection

Charles Meryon Le Ministère de la Marine
Charles Meryon’s fantastical Parisian scene presents the French Admiralty building with a flying horde being delivered from the far ends of the globe. The crowd below is thrown into disarray as Roman charioteers, whales and whaleboats, a waka with sails, an anchor, serpents, cowboys and horses with fishtails prepare for landing.
Meryon’s impaired mental state in this period is the usual explanation given for this extraordinary etching. At the same time, it may be viewed as an image laden with personal symbolism as the confounding facts, fantasies and errors of the past make their perplexing return.
Meryon spent three years in Akaroa from 1843–46 as a young naval cadet, protecting the fledgling French settlement. Although this particular colonising plan did not succeed, the streetlamps of Paris were fed a regular supply of whale oil from Banks Peninsula in this period. For Meryon these were formative years and regularly revisited in his imagination. (Kā Honoka, 18 December 2015 – 28 August 2016)
Collection

John Pule On Another Man’s Land
John Pule examines the complex experience of leaving one’s homeland and arriving in another – a reflection on his own migration from Niue to Aotearoa New Zealand. Using the grid-like composition of hiapo, he has developed a symbolic language of spears, migratory birds, sea creatures and geometric patterning that speaks to personal and shared histories of cross-cultural exchange. Here, he also reproduces an eighteenth-century drawing by Raiatean navigator Tupaia, depicting Captain Cook’s botanist Joseph Banks trading with a rakatira from Uawa. It’s an image that complicates our understanding of the dynamics involved in this encounter, and asks us to consider our own place in Aotearoa.
hiapo ~ barkcloth from Niue
rakatira ~ person of high rank, chief, leader
He Kapuka Oneone – A Handful of Soil (from August 2024)
Collection
Fiona Pardington Portrait of a Life-cast, possibly of ‘Taha-tahala’ [possibly Takatahara], Aotearoa New Zealand
Across her career, Fiona Pardington has a history of working with found objects. This portrait acts to reclaim an image believed to be of her ancestor, Takatahara from Te Pātaka o Rākaihautū / Banks Peninsula. The subject was introduced to the plaster-cast technique of naturalist and phrenologist Pierre Marie Alexandre Dumoutier at Ōtakou during one of his visits to Aotearoa in the early 1800s. Often mistaken for death masks, life-casts were in fact made with the subject’s participation. Takatahara was known as a robust toa (warrior) who fought in, and lived well past, the battle with Te Rauparaha at Ōnawe pā (fortified village).
(Te Wheke, 2020)
Collection

Charles Meryon Nouvelle Zélande, Greniers indigènes et Habitations à Akaroa (Presqu’île de Banks, 1845
Described as the father of modern etching, French naval officer Charles Meryon was one of the most important artists to work in Waitaha / Canterbury during the colonial era. He served on the Rhin, stationed at Akaroa between 1843 and 1846, to look out for the French settlement there. Meryon made numerous pencil studies at Akaroa which he later used as the basis for this series of etchings completed back in Paris during the 1860s. He planned to publish these and other images of the Pacific in an album, which unfortunately he never completed. The story of the French attempt to settle Te Waipounamu / the South Island is a fascinating chapter in New Zealand’s history. A French whaling captain, Jean Langlois, purchased 30,000 acres from Kāi Tahu on Horomaka / Banks Peninsula in 1838 and returned to France to get government support to establish a French colony at Akaroa. It was from here that he hoped the French would be able to expand throughout the rest of the South Island. A company was formed and sixty- three French and German settlers set sail on the Comte de Paris. They arrived at Akaroa in August 1840 only to find a Union Jack flying at Takapūneke / Green’s Point signalling that British sovereignty had already been claimed. Today, Akaroa continues to retain something of a French flavour.
(Pickaxes and shovels, 17 February – 5 August 2018)
Collection

Charles Meryon Nouvelle Zélande, Presqu’île de Banks, 1845. Pointe dite des Charbonniers, à Akaroa, Pêche à la Seine
Described as the father of modern etching, French naval officer Charles Meryon was one of the most important artists to work in Waitaha / Canterbury during the colonial era. He served on the Rhin, stationed at Akaroa between 1843 and 1846, to look out for the French settlement there. Meryon made numerous pencil studies at Akaroa which he later used as the basis for this series of etchings completed back in Paris during the 1860s. He planned to publish these and other images of the Pacific in an album, which unfortunately he never completed. The story of the French attempt to settle Te Waipounamu / the South Island is a fascinating chapter in New Zealand’s history. A French whaling captain, Jean Langlois, purchased 30,000 acres from Kāi Tahu on Horomaka / Banks Peninsula in 1838 and returned to France to get government support to establish a French colony at Akaroa. It was from here that he hoped the French would be able to expand throughout the rest of the South Island. A company was formed and sixty- three French and German settlers set sail on the Comte de Paris. They arrived at Akaroa in August 1840 only to find a Union Jack flying at Takapūneke / Green’s Point signalling that British sovereignty had already been claimed. Today, Akaroa continues to retain something of a French flavour.
(Pickaxes and shovels, 17 February – 5 August 2018)