The fight to protect hidden Māori rock art

There are two tricks to seeing Māori rock art. The first is to let your eyes slowly adjust to the black and red markings on the limestone and allow the images to float out of the rock like a mirage: the coiled tails of taniwha (revered water spirits), the outspread wings of the now-extinct giant eagle, figures holding weapons and tools, sea creatures and waka (canoes).

The second trick is knowing the art exists in the first place. There are more than 750 Māori rock art sites now recorded in New Zealand’s Te Waipounamu/South Island, but many New Zealanders are unaware they exist.

The Māori practice of painting on rock is thought to date back about 800 years, to when the first people arrived in Aotearoa, and continued until European explorers began sailing around the island.

“You can see birds like the moa, or the pouākai – the giant eagle – that have been extinct for 500 years or more drawn into the rock,” said Amanda Symon, an archaeologist and trustee at Ngāi Tahu Māori Rock Art Trust, which was set up to help Māori regional councils manage the sites.

About 95% of sites are on private farmland, which may partly account for why the drawings have not garnered much public attention.

The deliberate repression of Māori culture after colonisation and a lack of understanding about the importance of the art form are probably to blame for the lax approach to preservation.

But the drawings are now being brought back into the light, and are undergoing huge preservation and restoration efforts, thanks to a collaboration between iwi (tribes), scientists, artists and enthusiasts.

Ōpihi – nicknamed Taniwha Gully – lies in South Canterbury, two hours south of Christchurch, and is the most impressive rock art site in the country.

There, a network of 14 limestone caves and overhangs is tucked into 10 hectares of rolling regenerating farmland. One houses one of the more striking pieces – an incredibly rare image of a pregnant taniwha.

“It just took my breath away,” said Francine Spencer, an artist and rock art tour guide, of the first time she saw the work.

The site has “a lot of mauri – spiritual feeling”, added Rachel Solomon of Te Ana Māori Rock Art Centre, a community organisation that acts as guardians over the rock art on behalf of Ngāi Tahu, the South Island’s largest iwi.

Much of the art’s meaning has been lost, but Solomon and Spencer agree that they probably go beyond the purely decorative and that in some cases, the land and the art are in conversation with one another.

Ōpihi, designated a nationally significant Māori ancestral site in 2017, is becoming the showpiece for the type of protection and restoration that can be achieved when mātauranga Māori – Māori expertise and knowledge – intersects with western science.

An ecological restoration project, spearheaded by the trust and the crown institute Manaaki Whenua Landcare Research, is attempting to reverse more than 100 years of detrimental farming practices to return the site to its original state.

For Solomon, “these are the original art galleries of New Zealand. They need protecting.”