loading . . . In the early days of learning about art and figuring out my own style, one name kept coming up, a person whose work I saw everywhere and noticed: Colin McCahon.
I’d actually met Colin back in the 1970s. If I was up in Auckland with the others from Ngā Tamatoa and we wanted to have a drink, we’d go to the Kiwi Tavern. That’s where Colin drank. I only knew him as a bit of a haurangi fulla, a bit of a drunk, who sometimes used to sell his paintings for a crate of beer. At the time, I didn’t really appreciate how influential he was as an artist, and I had no idea that he would come to have a significant impact on me during a certain period of my life.
Jump forward to 1997. I’d driven to Waikaremoana, like I had many, many times before. Waikaremoana is our lake, he ātaahua tērā, tucked in the embrace of Te Urewera. You don’t just get there by accident or on the way to somewhere else. You are led there on a twisting backcountry road, tight corners, a trail of gravel and clouds of dust. If you’ve gone to Waikaremoana, you are there to appreciate the whenua, the ngahere, the roto. So there I was.
I was in the Āniwaniwa Visitor Centre, which was then a Department of Conservation-run place on the edge of the lake; sightseers, trampers, and hunters would stop by to find information or check in before they headed into the wilderness.
On the exhibition wall in the large reception area was a painting I’d seen before — an artwork that referenced Tūhoe identity and the maunga, Maungapōhatu, as well as Te Kooti and Rua Kēnana. Dark, rich, earthy colours, with a rākau in the middle, pushing up and out, with the words ‘tane’ and ‘atua’ on the base of the trunk in case you missed the message.
On this day, something about the piece struck me, something I hadn’t really taken in before, but something that, since I’d been teaching myself about mahi toi, was now so obvious: _Oh, that’s a Colin McCahon painting._
It was called the _Urewera Mural_ and it was actually three panels, each one 1.8 metres wide and 2.1 metres tall. It was commissioned in 1974 by what was then called the Urewera National Parks Board, specifically for the visitor centre. The brief was to depict ‘the relationship of Tūhoe with the land’ and to unravel ‘the mystery of man in Te Urewera’ — whatever that meant. They did get John Rangihau — Tūhoe kaumātua, the fulla sent along to kura to tell us about the Māori trades apprenticeship scheme — to go and talk to McCahon to help with his thinking.
As I stood in front of it in 1997, I got this funny feeling in my puku.
A thought came into my head: _I want this painting to disappear. I want it to vanish._ My whakaaro was that I could use the painting to make a statement: the Crown stole our land, whenua whānako, so maybe if they lose this painting, they will feel a tiny fraction of what it’s like to lose something precious.
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I wanted them to think: _This is how it feels to have a taonga tuku iho taken from me_. Make them understand. From there, a plan started formulating.
There are things I want to say, and there are things I don’t want to say, like some of the names of people who were involved. But it’s time for me to share some of my kōrero. Because what unfolded was huge, and stressful, and meaningful, and took some twists I had never expected. And what was most important was the kaupapa.
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As I drove back to Ruatoki, planning away, there were aspects I wasn’t sure about, and aspects I definitely was sure about: no one was to get hurt, and no harming the artwork. Get in, get the painting, get out. That’s it. Just make it disappear. No violence. I went and spoke to a few fullas who I thought might be able to help, about three of them, never letting on that I was talking to anyone else. Discreet.
“There’s a painting down at Waikaremoana; work out a plan to get it,” I told each of them. I said I’d pay them back with money or a car or something; that part of the plan wasn’t clear, but it was never about money.
It was never about anything other than the whenua. It wasn’t a criminal act — it was a political one.
As I waited to hear back about these fullas’ plans, another guy came to me. He was someone I had come to know very well and was close to me.
He wanted to do it. I didn’t want him to do it. But he really, really wanted to do it. He begged me and begged me. I was against it for one reason in particular: if he got caught, the cops would suspect straight away that I was involved and they’d come after me. Since we were close, it would not be a giant leap for the cops to make.
In the end, I relented and agreed he could do it. It was the one big mistake I made. Because that thing I’d feared? Yeah, it happened.
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The painting was taken on June 5, 1997, about four in the morning, which was good because no one was around to get hurt. So far, so good.
But the guy who had insisted on doing it, with the help of a couple of others, he was pretty quickly on the police suspect list. There had been a roadblock set up in Ruatāhuna, and he was seen there. Though he wasn’t arrested at the time, the cops were soon on his back. After about a week, he and another guy got charged.
Just as I’d predicted, when the cops started sniffing around him, they started sniffing around me, too. They had nothing to directly link me to what had happened, but they kept the pressure up. Or tried to, anyway.
The cop in charge was Detective Inspector Graham Bell; he was pretty famous, had a bit of a media profile. People called him Ding Dong Bell. The cops started coming at me with all sorts. They got a warrant to search my house for the painting, but everyone in Ruatoki knew they were coming before they arrived.
When they showed up, there was no sign of the painting of course, but it turned out they were looking for ropes, too. _Eh? Ropes?_ Then they told me I was under arrest.
“Oh, yeah, what for?”
“Kidnapping.”
“Kidnapping? What the fuck? Who am I supposed to have kidnapped?”
They’d been digging through everything, going through my whole life, trying to find something against me to put the pressure on. They found something they thought would work.
At the time, I had an unwritten arrangement with one of the local cops — there were some things that it was difficult for him to deal with under the law, and which would be better if they were dealt with our way, by us. There had been problems with burglaries and home invasions and one young fulla had raided the kōhanga reo. We dealt with him our way. That was what Ding Dong Bell was homing in on. The cops charged me for it and tried to hang it over me, use it to get information about the painting. But in the end, most of the charges went away and it came to nothing much.
In the meantime, they’d kept me locked up in the police cells in Tauranga and tried a few more tactics to find out about the painting. One night, well after midnight, a cop came and banged on the cell: “Tāme, get up! Your paramount chief is here to see you.”
“Paramount chief?” I said. “I don’t have one. What are you talking about?”
I went out, and there was Sir John Turei, my uncle, and Hema Tēmara, a kuia from Te Papa Museum. The police must have asked them to come and talk to me. The first thing the old fulla said to me was, “Kei hea te peita a Colin McCahon?” Where’s the McCahon? “E aua, i mauherehere kē ia i a au mō te patu tangata.” Don’t know, I’m here for allegedly beating someone up.
That was about as far as the conversation went. Did the cops get what they wanted, some kind of confession? _Ehē_.
Another time, at the Whakatāne Police Station, Ding Dong came in and said to me that his grandfather was one of the cops who arrested Rua Kēnana during the wrongful and harmful armed police raid in 1916, when — not for the first time and not for the last time — a Tūhoe community was traumatised by the actions of the state. Two people were killed. Some of our tīpuna were there. What the fuck was this guy up to? Was he trying to rattle me, provoke me? It didn’t work.
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Eventually, I was granted bail and was back at home. Out of the blue one day, I got a call from Merata Mita, the filmmaker. She started saying she had something to pass on. I told her: “Stop, I can’t talk on my phone, I’ll come and see you.” I figured my phone was being bugged. We hung up and I made arrangements to meet her in Auckland, to find out the message she wanted to pass on, which was: “Ralph Hōtere wants to see you.”
I assumed it would be about the painting, since Ralph was an artist. When I caught up with Ralph, sure enough, it was about the McCahon. But he was just passing on a message himself. “There’s a lady who wants to talk to you about the painting. Her name is Jenny Gibbs.”
Jenny Gibbs said, ‘Somebody told me that if anybody knows where the painting is, it will be Tāme Iti…’
So, that’s how the fulla who’d done the job and I ended up standing on the front doorstep of a mansion on Paritai Drive, a road of multi-million dollar homes overlooking the Waitematā. Jenny, who had been married to Alan Gibbs, was a well- known patron of the arts. Alan made a lot of money during the economic reforms of the 1980s, including the privatisation of Telecom, and they were both very supportive of the arts community.
When we got there, there were a couple of other people there, too, including the lawyer Christopher Harder. He was looking to be a negotiator middle man, but that wasn’t something we were keen on. Still, he ended up becoming my lawyer on the kidnapping charge and did a good job.
Jenny told me she had a big collection of McCahon paintings, and then she said: ‘Somebody told me that if anybody knows where the painting is, it will be Tāme Iti.’
“Oh yeah, okay,” I said, straight- faced. I wasn’t going to let on I knew anything. Once more, I was playing a role; I was on a stage.
Taking the painting had never been about the artwork itself. It was about us, Ngāi Tūhoe. Our loss. The theft of our land, our whenua whānako — all that countryside that had been pointed out to me as a boy, stretching beyond the confiscation line. Here was my chance to bring that kaupapa to the fore. To reveal the true cause without revealing what I knew.
Jenny made a cup of tea, and we went downstairs to another part of the house. She showed me some of her art collection, and then we sat down to talk. We spoke for three and a half hours.
I didn’t speak about the McCahon. I spoke about the actions of the Crown, about the raupatu, about the confiscation of land, in Tūhoe, Waikato, and Taranaki.
Between us, I began to feel things change. There was a vibration. The wairua was different. I could sense it. Then she spoke. She said that she’d heard my kōrero about Tūhoe, that she understood. ‘If you find the Colin McCahon,’ she said, ‘all the better.’ I was a bit surprised — her thinking had switched from the painting to the cause.
The importance of the painting was shifting into the background; the importance of the kaupapa behind this action was moving forward.
To me, the thought, the kaupapa, was more important than the action itself. What was the symbolism of the McCahon, what was its significance in this context? It was so we could lay out and expose our narratives, our reality. She understood.
Jenny asked me what we needed. I said we’d need to go and talk to people, and that maybe we’d need a helicopter. That wouldn’t be a problem, she indicated. And so the discussions continued, finding a way, manoeuvring to discover the best way to make this whole exercise about the 60,000 acres of stolen land, not the 12 square metres of art.
At the same time, the police were watching me closely. Ka pai — I knew they would be. I was constantly on alert. They targeted us in several ways, including recruiting informants. As usual, the police would put pressure on the vulnerable people, those who were a bit pōhara, poor.
Everything I did, I knew I was being watched. It took its toll on me. I put on weight, I became overly suspicious of people. But I had to hold tight, wait for the moment. Just like in a performance. Sometimes you need to wait. Timing is everything.
Eventually, after 15 months, the time arrived. The painting had moved. It was in Auckland. We had a codename for it, ‘Whāriki’, a mat. I liked the idea of a kuia Pākehā handing it back. No need for the helicopter in the end; we came up with a new plan.
We arranged for Jenny to hop in her car, a $300,000 Mercedes Benz, and cover her eyes. We drove her to a secret location. Put the ‘Whāriki’ in the back of the car, and then we disappeared. She took it to the Auckland Art Gallery.
It was a relief, in the end, that we no longer had it. It had been heavy. It was time for the ‘Whāriki’ to come out of the mist, ki Te Ao Mārama. It had done its job.
We had provoked a conversation, even in the international art world. We had made people think about value — this painting, which was valued at $2 million, was considered to be worth the investment of all those police hours, all that mahi of the state trying to hunt it down, trying to hunt us down. What about the value of the land that had been stolen from us? What efforts were being put into righting _that_?
We had undertaken a strategy to draw those questions out, to provoke that thinking — within the system and within ourselves. Even within Tūhoe. What are the actions? What are the things we can do and should do? What are we trying to achieve? Those are things we should always be thinking about, whether it be organising a march or making a submission: have a defined target; have an execution plan.
For me, the McCahon painting activation was hardcore, sure. The logistics and the strategy were stressful. But it worked. People talked about what mattered to us.
In 2015, the _Urewera Mural_ was put on display at Te Kura Whare in Tāneatua, the base for Te Uru Taumata, Ngai Tūhoe.
**A mildly abbreviated chapter taken with kind permission from the newly published memoir _Mana_ by Tāme Iti (Allen & Unwin, $50), available in bookstores nationwide.**
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