MAHITAHI
Audiovisual work in development 2019-2020.
“[...] where rimu rainforest meets the sea. The beach was previously the highway for the first Maori inhabitants in New Zealand. The area is significant for its Maori history. Maui, the great Polynesian explorer, first landed at Mahitahi (Bruce Bay). Hence the local Marae is named Te Tauraka Waka a Maui (the landing place of Maui’s waka).
(also known as) Bruce Bay is named after the PS Bruce, a paddle steamer that travelled the coast bringing the early goldminers and explorers to these shores.”
Mahitahi beach has a striking dualism between the tall rimu rainforest trees standing tall and the crashing waves reaching across towards them.
The stillness on the right and the movement of the left - from left to right a motion, that is halted.
When I first encountered this section of beach, unsurprisingly as a passing Pakeha in this area, I had no idea of its significant Māori history.
The overlapping Māori history and the more recent Pākehā one (as a casual renaming of a significant place to suit its newest visitors), both include vessels carrying different visitors however;
”In 1840, Lieutenant William Hobson, following instructions of the British government, pronounced the southern island of New Zealand to be uninhabited by civilized peoples, which qualified the land to be terra nullius, and therefore fit for the Crown's political occupation.” Being of strong cultural significance of local Māori iwi Makaawhio, the renaming of place by gold-seeking colonisers exemplifies the recurrent white-colonial concept of terra-nullius (‘nobody’s land’). The place was already named and occupied, but was no of interest to the next wave of visitors.
Maui (a ‘second wave’ explorer, the ‘first wave’ being Aotearoa’s inhabitants before Māori, decendents of Lapita) had landed here while exploring the southern oceans ~ 100AD. It is said that the first human occupants of Aotearoa also landed at this same shoreline (Oceanic Migration, Pearce). This same landing place would occurred due to global ocean currents (in this case the Australian Eastern current) that drew vessels to the same points, making this section of shoreline one of the longest inhabited areas of Aotearoa. Maui never claimed to have discovered the South Island and that he claimed no land rights to it.
The beach has a powerful energy present not only in the proof of the cyclic process of the trees and the ocean interacting, wood, earth/sand and water. The cycle is slow, and of many entangled elements and factors. Notably the in between space where the introduced gorse bushes (the yellow flowered, thorned bushes in the photos below) grow up amongst the native flaxes. This work in its process of making considers the movements of water globally, how we once moved upon it, the tides of the sphere that is the earth and all it’s complex systems and influences.
Between is a strip of beach littered with rocks and previously fallen trees that have been taken by the ocean and left back there by the high tide. The pile is added to by other trees washing down from the deeper rainforest via the Mahitahi river whose mouth opens to the sea to the right of frame.
The native bush is right up the ocean shore. My colonial descendent perspective of the eeriness of this beach comes from the contrast in motion and stillness, that “fear of the woods' and the mysterious of the ocean - though somehow instead of fear I feel a respect and a wish to move closer and spend time. These perspectives of place, such as eeriness, mirrors that which initial colonisers might have experienced, leading to their declaration of un-inhabitedness, apparently there’s for the taking, and re-naming, stripping it of its complex history and significance. While researching the history of this significant shoreline, I am wanting to interrogate my language and perspective on such ‘eerrieness’.