Sounds Aotearoa provides local musicians with a fantastic opportunity to develop professionally and make key contacts that may be able to assist to progress their career. It combines three streams to promote Kiwi music and to help build capability in the music industry:
1. New Zealand Music Showcases
In the evenings New Zealand artists perform as part of the showcase programme. These bands will be seen by members of our international buyer and visitor programme.  Tickets for the showcases will also be available to the general public.

2. New Zealand Music Expo
The ‘pulse’ of the Expo that will house exhibition booths where attendee’s can source information from government departments, private organisations and others involved in the business of music.

3. Industry Development Conference
During the day, the ‘think tank’ for Sounds Aotearoa; the conference programme will provide attendee’s with the opportunity to build knowledge, networks and capability through the keynote presentations, forums, panels and workshops.  Some of the activities will be presented by our international guests.

Artistic Director of Sounds, Emere Wano says that the few artists who have made it to international expos such as Hinewehi Mohi have found the experience “hard work and very expensive”.

Ed Giesen from An Emerald City states that “this personal connection gained from having a conversation with someone is worth a 100 emails and that Sounds Aotearoa will provide the opportunity for event directors, venue managers and festival directors to see Emerald City perform and then to engage in dialogue”.

Once again New Plymouth is paving the way for a fantastic event that is really at the heart of promoting our music and supporting our musicians. It’s a big project to take on and demonstrates the real innovation and “get up and go” in the artistic community there, that these two excellent organisations are collborating to provide something for the whole country in a small, but perfectly-formed region.

Sponsorship opportunties

Sounds Aotearoa is looking for both organisations and individual patrons to sponsor a local musician to attend the market. The cost of sponsoring one local musician to attend is $250+gst. This covers the registration fee that provides access to all elements of the event, the conference, expo, evening showcases and a 3-day ticket to WOMAD.

Registration

Full registration costs NZ$450.00 +gst  and includes entry to all showcases, expo and conference sessions, PLUS a three day ticket to WOMAD.

On the surface, plywood doesn’t seem the most fascinating of materials, yet there is something so sensuous about the Curvesse chair (1944; pictured above) that those who encounter it for the first time cannot help but be fascinated. Designed by Garth Chester, the Curvesse is amongst the most iconic works of 20th-century New Zealand furniture. However Chester was not alone in the exploration of plywood as material suitable for creating experimental furniture. It is those themes – a distinct material and a culture of innovation – that Ply-ability sets out to explore.

The exhibition looks at a selection of Garth Chester’s works from the 1940s and 50s including the Curvesse and other major works of his early career. At the same time it doesn’t shy away from the complexities of later works that were shaped directly by contact with the works of American designer Charles Eames. From there, Ply-ability traces the use of plywood in New Zealand furniture through the following decades. The exhibition features works by other leading designers including the chair Michael Payne designed for Expo 70 in Osaka, Japan; the cabinets designed by influential furniture designer Humphrey Ikin; and the lighting designs of David Trubridge.

Not all of the designers included in Ply-Ability are well known, or indeed professionals. One large plywood lounger remains anonymous – something somebody’s dad whipped up in the workshop having fallen under plywood’s spell. Nor are all works completely developed as commercial products. Robbie Greig of the design collective, Candywhistle, is represented by a stool that he fully admits is still in development. It’s works like Greig’s and his contemporaries that curator Lucy Hammonds hopes suggest new directions in the use of plywood by New Zealand designers.

New Zealand really got going with the manufacture of plywood in the 1930s at about the same time modernism arrived as the driving force in design. However today the connection between material and philosophy is less obvious, with a sense – according to Hammonds – that the odds are beginning to stack up against the material. Modernism was driven by a struggle to express new values, with plywood among the materials that articulated that vision. Now, in the 21st century, society faces new challenges requiring equally radical design ideas; it remains to be seen whether plywood will have an ongoing role in shaping the way we create and look at New Zealand furniture.

Recent Hawke’s Bay Museum & Art Gallery exhibitions (like Felix Kelly: A Kiwi at Brideshead and Claire Plug: Look South) have toured to other centres. Ply-ability on the other hand will not be touring, a decision museum director Douglas Lloyd Jenkins is happy with:

“Napier gave Garth Chester his first large commission – the Nicholson chapel chair – so I figure we get to lure visitors here to see just how that particular investment has paid off.”

Back in October, Seb Chan (Head of Digital, Social & Emerging Technologies at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum) gave a talk in which he outlined a simple list of ‘five rules’ for building museum content. We thought it was so good, that we would revisit it here on Lively.

Museum content, not limited to objects, should be:

1. Discoverable – it is where I am and where I look for it. This means putting content where visitors expect to find it which online means good SEO, folksonomies and smart keywords, and onsite in the galleries it means great exhibition design.

2. Meaningful – I can understand it. Plain English contextual notes and label text, scaffolded where needed and definitely with an appropriate cascade.

3. Responsive – to my interests, moods, location. Content should ideally be able to be personalised with tailored recommendations. Mood responsive? Take a look at the Brooklyn’s handheld project.

4. Useable/Shareable – I can pass it on and share. All content should be released under a license that allows at least non-commercial sharing. Museums are entirely in the social objects business – let’s actually encourage sociality.

5. Available in all three locations – online, onsite and offsite. That means on the the museum’s website, on other websites, in the galleries if it is popular, and if it has a relationship to the outside world it should also be discoverable there as well. The later relies on geo-locations marked in the world either physically or virtually.

Nothing too remarkable here for regular readers or people in the field but sometimes lists are useful. You’ve probably noticed that each of these rules revolve around the notion of visitor-centrism.

Mike Ellis makes a great point in the comments on Seb’s original blog post:

“…You could probably strike the word “museum” from the title. All content should be these things, right?”

Lynda Kelly, being ever-sensible about these sorts of things, looks at the practical side for content producers:

“Write once, publish broadly, across a wide range of mediums.”

There is good discussion around this concept on Museum 3.0.

If you wish to contribute to the discussion around these five rules, please do so over at the original post.

Botanist and writer Maggy Wassilieff takes a wander through the New Zealand Gardens Trust and their Gardens of significance scheme. Maggy is a retired botanist who attempts to garden in the path of Cook Strait gales.

Summer may have finally arrived and I’m impatient for my wind-blasted garden to transform itself into a fabulous horticultural show-piece. But who am I fooling? For in truth, my slack habits preclude me from ever having a show garden. However, I can indulge my garden desires vicariously by visiting open gardens.

With around 1000 gardens in New Zealand open to the public for part or all of the year, I’m spoiled for choice for seeing what our hard-working, master gardeners have been up to.

I can narrow down this choice by just viewing the nation’s most significant gardens. These are open gardens, public and privately-owned, that are considered by the New Zealand Gardens Trust to be the best in the country.

New Zealand Gardens Trust

The New Zealand Gardens Trust is a group of horticulturalists committed to promoting the finest open gardens in New Zealand. They visit and evaluate gardens. The best are featured on their informative website.

If satisfied that a garden has merit, the trustees decide whether it is a garden of significance or a registered garden.

Gardens of Significance

These are the finest gardens, and there are three classes:

A garden of international significance must reach the peak of presentation and plantsmanship and maintain this level year-round.  To date, only 4 gardens qualify: Ayrlies, Te Kainga Marire, Richmond and Lanarch Castle gardens. These, the NZ Gardens Trust consider, are the must-see gardens.

There are 36 gardens of national significance. Included in this grouping are our large city botanic gardens and  Wellington’s native plant garden – Otari-Wilton’s Bush.  Although they exhibit high standards of design, planting and maintenance, they may lack impact at certain times.

There are 58 gardens of significance. These are at their best during spring and summer months.

The 62 registered gardens are in a differnt class, they do not achieve such an all-round standard of design, planting and maintenance as the gardens of significance. Nevertheless, they are quality gardens and are considered worthy of visiting.

A matter of taste

I realise my taste in gardens often differs from that of the experts. I remember dragging my family off to one celebrated garden in the middle of the North Island and being singularly underwhelmed by it. I’ve been bored by some significant gardens, finding their predictable planting schemes a real turn-off. I don’t like formal box-hedged gardens, as I’m reminded of the cat urine odour that seeped from grandma’s box hedges when damp. Others can’t get their heads around the eclectic nature of some gardens.

The beauty of the New Zealand Gardens Trust scheme is that theoretically personal taste does not enter into the assessment process. Gardens of different styles are judged on horticultural merit alone, using the following criteria: design; plants and plantings; maintenance; construction; and overall  impression.

But is garden assessment really an objective exercise? Are these the only criteria that could be assessed? The scheme is not without its controversy.

Some gardeners have questioned the Trust’s decisions. Abbie Jury of Tikorangi Gardens, a founding garden member of the Trust, provided some cogent criticisms of the current scheme.

“Garden assessment so far has often been adversarial and lacking accountability”, she wrote in her May 2009 gardening column.

Further, she’s cast doubt on the wisdom of the Trust awarding international status to gardens when no impartial overseas assessors were involved.

Sustainable gardens?

I’m uneasy in gardens where weeds, bugs, and fungal blights are absent, for I suspect the gardens’ pest-free condition has been achieved by means of potent sprays.   Like most home-gardeners I want to garden in an environmentally-friendly way, without resorting to weekly spray regimes. And I’m conservative with water in the garden during dry months. Do the significant and registered gardens employ sustainable practices? I’d like to know. As much as I enjoy visiting fine gardens, I want to be assured that the gardens’ overall effect has not been achieved at the expense of the environment.

———-

New Zealand Gardens Trust

Interactive website of gardens endorsed by the Royal New Zealand Institute of Horticulture (RNZIH), containing a national database of significant and registered gardens.

Assessing gardens for the New Zealand Gardens Trust

An assessor’s view of the New Zealand Gardens Trust scheme. Article published in 2004 in the New Zealand Garden Journal. (Note: PDF)

The Settled Landscape: Trees and gardens – Te Ara

Learn more about New Zealand’s forestry and gardens from Te Ara – the encyclopedia of New Zealand.

We’ve spent a bit of time lately talking about wine – we got Toasted in Martinborough and had Adventures in Terroir along the Classic New Zealand Wine Trail. But it is a subject of which we are particularly fond. And given the plethora of grape-effused events happening over the next couple of days, it’s time to be thinking about such delightful things again.

Pinot Noir 2010 hits the capital for the next couple of days. As I’m not there, I’ll have to console myself with a friends and family tasting of my top five favourite NZ pinots – Martinborough Vineyard, Dog Point, Ata Rangi, Milltons and Rabbit Ranch. It may take me a number of nights to do this and several weeks of hard work to fund it. But so worth it.

Saturday sees a great selection of staggeringly good events with the Nelson Aromatics Symposium (Yum!), Taranaki Wine and Food Festival and the Waiheke Wine and Food Festival.  This is the opening volley of indulgence events for February with The Marlborough Wine Festival following suit on the 13th, Nelson’s Brightwater Wine and Food Festival on the 21st and the Waikato Times Food and Wine Festival on the 27th.

For those more interested in liquids from the grain, watch out for the Liquorland NZ Beer Festival in Auckland on the 13 Feb and Wellington 6 March.

More gourmet delights are available at the Maketu Rotary Kaimoana Festival. Also check out what the NZ Cheese School is up to with a tasty platter of cheese-making courses this year. Get in early if you want to get some practice in for CheeseFest ‘10 in March.

Be ready to impress! Te Ara has some excellent background reading to help the conversation flow freely. There are expansive articles on Wine and Viticulture and information on Hops.

Have a happy and safe Waitangi Day tomorrow folks!

by Cheryl Bernstein

The first time we visited Christchurch Art Gallery some three years ago, I remember my son stopping dead at the foot of the huge flight of white marble stairs which leads to the upper galleries. He swallowed.

“It’s a mountain, Mum, isn’t it,” he said in a small voice. “A mountain of stairs.”

It’s a notion artist Joanna Langford has picked up on in Up from the Plainlands (2009), an installation she’s made for the landing at the top of the stairs. It’s in the strategic position formerly occupied by Michael Parekowhai’s My Sister My Self (2006) – a sleek black fibreglass seal balancing a Duchampian stool and bicycle wheel on its nose – which a couple of years ago replaced the old faithful bronze Ex Tenebris Lux (c.1935) by academic British artist Ernest Gillick.

Changing of the guard

The switch of works from Gillick to Parekowhai was a clear signal of an intellectual shift at the gallery. It announced a different approach to art history that has become even more apparent in the two major exhibitions that have recently opened. Both exhibitions have pulled off the difficult-to-achieve task of striking both critical success and a broader appeal to family audiences.

It’s also the territory Langford operates in with Up from the Plainlands. At once whimsical and visually imposing, Langford’s tiny fantastical world of sushi grass and endless bamboo-skewer stairways disappearing within a dramatic aerial billow of plastic bag clouds, is the perfect punctuation point between the two shows – Blue Planet and Brought to Light.

‘Blue Planet’, to the left, is the third in the Gallery’s series of colour-themed exhibitions for children. To the right is the major new collection hang, ‘Brought to Light’. The refit exchanges the previous rabbit-warren of dark red rooms for a light, airy boulevard from which spacious galleries open. It also swaps a canonical view of art history for a more lively approach involving, as Senior Curator Justin Paton notes, ‘conversations’ between historical and contemporary works. Langford’s Up from the Plainlands sets the requisite tone for engagement of the audience’s imagination. After considering the work for a couple of minutes, my son smiled with happy recognition and whispered: “You know, it looks a lot like the stairs up to Jade Palace in Kung Fu Panda.”

Distracted to distraction

We had planned a quick trot through the collection show before visiting ‘Blue Planet’, but it proved impossible. There were too many works in the collection that engaged my six-year-old son’s attention.

We spent quite some time with Steve Carr’s carved ‘bearskin rug’, A Shot in the Dark (Bear Rug) (2008), near George Duncan Leslie’s famous In the Wizard’s Garden (c.1904) in the colonial galleries. (“Is it made out of stone? A big stone bear. It looks quite mean. It has a fierce face.”) Then there was Rob McLeod’s eye-popping Two Tongues (2002) (“Ha ha ha! It’s an alien having a fight with another alien”) and a mysterious dark etching by Jason Greig. (“Is it Count Dracula? Excellent.”) We looked at Bill Culbert’s magisterial Pacific Flotsam (2007), a gigantic floor installation of fluorescent tubes and plastic bottles which takes up an entire gallery.

“What d’you think?” I asked.

“I love it,” said my son. “We have the same lights in Room 6.”

‘Blue Planet’ – when we finally arrived – was full of people. This is something I’ve noticed with the two previous children’s exhibitions we’ve seen, likewise curated by the gallery’s Ken Hall: they’re always extremely popular with general visitors, not just families. This time paintings, sculpture, video, prints and ceramics are included and there are some very significant works which are worth visiting even without children in tow. These include Colin McCahon’s extraordinary but little-known blue word painting The curtain of Solomon (1962) [panels 2 and 4] from the Hocken Library and Max Gimblett’s divinely simple Cerulean Blue—To Len Lye (1981) from the Chartwell Collection.

My son was particularly taken with Rohan Weallans’s Blue Brain (2005) paint sculpture and Peter Madden’s Small World View (2009), a large vitrine full of what looks like artefacts from a miniature alien civilisation, commissioned for the show.

“Why do you like it?”

“Well, there are painted flies, and skulls. There’s dead stuff, though it might not be dead really. And if you look there, you can see an alien’s actual eyeballs.”

(With the previous exhibition season featuring a show by Ronnie van Hout, I’d imagine that there are many primary school-age children in Christchurch who now believe that aliens play a quintessential part in contemporary art.)

Interact

An interactive component has featured in each of the previous two children’s exhibitions at the gallery. On this occasion, Madden’s wall of drawers and cabinets filled are with hundreds of tiny blue objects set up visual challenges based on the I-Spy picture riddle books, while a 3-D cardboard snowflake can be assembled in the gallery or at home. (It should be noted that the model snowflake proved beyond me, but I am particularly hopeless at following instructions.) Although my favourite interactive work remains Steve Carr’s silly personalized hand sculptures with stick-on eyes from ‘White on White’ (the previous show in the series), the blue productions are a lot of fun. Perhaps these are more suitable for 7 years plus: there’s not a great deal this time for tiny children.

The gallery has produced an activity book to accompany ‘Blue Planet’: it includes instructions for making a water bomb, a space to paint a glitter painting like Reuben Paterson’s, and a treasure hunt around the gallery. There’s a generosity to this approach and an empathetic understanding of the needs of junior visitors to art galleries that establishes a friendly relationship with family audiences. It’s all too easy to strike the wrong note in devising programmes for children around contemporary art appreciation. In my opinion Christchurch Art Gallery gets it absolutely right, neither patronising the young visitor nor trivialising the concerns of the work and the artist. And nor, I might add, do the children’s activities appear to get in the way of childless visitors, as I can remember the well-intentioned but ultimately horrible fake animal fur stools under the paintings at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery doing some years ago.

The child in all of us

The children’s shows are now an established component of Christchurch Art Gallery’s exhibition programme and are refreshed annually. What I admire, though, about the most recent projects is that families are not simply ghettoised into the children’s gallery. That sense of fun, wonder and imaginative engagement with art is apparent throughout the gallery, communicated in the high-energy approach evident in the curation of exhibitions as well as their interpretation.

“I like the way,” said my son as we left, “that it’s not just for kids or for adults, but it’s a mixture of the two. Do you think they’ll have that alien in pyjamas sculpture back again next time?”

———-

Christchurch Art Gallery

Housing one of the largest art collections in New Zealand, Christchurch Art Gallery offers a regularly-changing dynamic programme of collection-based, national and international touring exhibitions and events.

Giveaway terms and conditions.

Backroads: Charting a Poet’s Life is a beautifully produced volume, in which iconic Kiwi poet Sam Hunt writes of his inspiration, performing, touring, the creative process, drying up, publishing, small towns, Minstrel his beloved dog, and his poetic influences.

Also included are personal insights into, and amusing anecdotes of, Alistair and Meg Campbell, Denis Glover, A.R.D. Fairburn, Robin Hyde and Hone Tuwhare.

Te Ara Tapu: Sacred Journeys presents more than 150 of the most prized treasures from the extensive collection of historically important and stunning taonga Maori entrusted to the care of the Whanganui Regional Museum.

Lavishly illustrated with stunning full-colour photographs of the treasures as well as historical images, this book is a memorable and beautiful record of the region and its people. A bonus CD contains a record of all 4,500 taonga Maori held by the Museum.

Edith Collier: Her life and work 1885-1964 covers Edith Collier’s contribution to New Zealand art as an innovator, modernist and expatriate painter.

Her achievements placed her in a most distinguished group, but have been eclipsed by the very company she kept – such as Frances Hodgkins and Margaret Preston. This book by Joanne Drayton – sets the record straight.

The Crescent Moon : The Asian Face of Islam in New Zealand opens new doors into the lives of the largest group of Muslims in New Zealand and in the world as a whole: those of Asian descent. Photographer Ans Westra and writer Adrienne Jansen take a trip through the country, catching up with a diverse group of people in their everyday lives. They talk with disarming honesty about the media, about 9/11, about identity, about their faith – but mostly they just talk about who they are and their life in New Zealand today.

]]> http://mch.govt.nz/blog/2010/02/03/new-zealand-books-giveaway/feed/ 0 http://mch.govt.nz/blog/2010/01/29/artss-3/ http://mch.govt.nz/blog/2010/01/29/artss-3/#comments Fri, 29 Jan 2010 01:35:31 +0000 Anna http://www.nzlive.com/blog/?p=753 An occasional, randomised look at highlights from the RSS feeds.

For an endearing and cultural end to a week dominated by AC/DC and iPad, NZOnScreen have pulled together a nice little trio of clips. First up, a very rare interview with the reclusive Janet Frame. Then Vincent Ward explores one of Frame’s short stories in a chilling State of Siege. And Frame-biographer Michael King takes us through the life of literary great Frank Sargeson, also a friend of Frame.

Paul Reynolds has introduced us to the Chrystie Hill’s talk Community: its the new content.

In case you haven’t heard…

Kiwi short film The Six Dollar Fifty Man has won the top prize – the Jury Prize in International Short Film-making – at the Sundance International Film Festival in Utah. Another NZ movie has had sell-out audiences buzzing at Sundance – Boy the second feature film by director Taika Waititi is apparently the talk of the event.

The DOCNZ Documentary Film Festival has now been officially rebranded as the Documentary Edge Festival.

Sadly, Auckland’s Cross St Studios close tomorrow – We say goodbye with love.

Have a great weekend out there. And Wellingtonians – remember to cover up in the sun, you haven’t seen much of it lately.

by Ian Wedde

Few experiences compare with walking in an ancient kauri forest. These superb trees reach heights of more than 50 metres with girths of 16 metres and may be thousands of years old.

In mature forests, kauri share sunlight with other large trees such as taraire and rātā, together with a rich under-storey of smaller plants. Their high canopies and clusters of epiphytes are complex ecosystems in their own right. They provide a rich habitat for birds, including the endangered North Island kōkako.

Rare encounters

However, encounters with these wonderful environments are rare – the small surviving remnants are now protected reserves. Almost by definition a visit to a kauri forest is a tourist experience since the small surviving remnants are now protected reserves. Kauri forests once covered 1.2 million hectares in the north of New Zealand. Now only 80,000 hectares survive.

Milled by early settlers for boat-building and by the colony’s growing cities for sawn timber, cleared for farmland, its gum dug but, more damagingly, bled from live trees to make varnish, the kauri was already depleted by the mid-nineteenth century.

Protecting the land

In 1876 a remote remnant of kauri forest, the Waipoua, was bought by the Crown. Over 70 years later, in 1952, this area of 9,105 hectares was declared a protected reserve. It represents 0.7% of original kauri forest. By 1987 all remaining kauri on Crown land were protected, as were most remaining trees on private land.

A visit to one of these places is special indeed, none more so than the Waipoua, home of the giants Tāne Mahuta and the 3,000 year-old Te Matua Ngahere – the father of the forest. In Māori creation stories, it was Tāne the son of Ranginui (the sky father) and Papatūānuku (the earth mother) who prised apart the close embrace of his parents and admitted light to the world, clothing his mother in beautiful garments of forest. Such narratives and the relationships with the natural world that they enshrine are vital aspects of the value of these precious places.

Guardians and ancients

On 23 April 2009, a ‘Family of Ancient Trees’ agreement between New Zealand and Japan was signed in Northland. The agreement linked Waipoua Forest’s giant kauri Tāne Mahuta and Jomon Sugi, an ancient cedar on Yakushima Island, a world heritage site off the south western coast of Japan.

The landmark agreement recognised the environmental significance of these ancient giants and the forests that protect them. It also recognised their importance as destinations for both local and international eco-tourists. Most importantly, the agreement recognised the cultural value of these places to their indigenous guardians and the ways in which such cultural values can enrich the experiences of tourists.

Waipoua’s footprints of giants

Footprints Waipoua is a tourism venture by Māori of the Hokianga region of Northland in association with a number of local organisations: Tai Tokerau Māori and Cultural Tourism Association, Enterprise Northland and the Copthorne Hotel and Resort Hokianga. Footprints is a great example of the benefits of combining local hospitality and cultural knowledge with ecologically-themed tourism.

For local communities and entrepreneurs, the benefits aren’t just economic. Enterprises such as Footprints Waipoua increase goodwill between visitors and locals, forge international relationships, and increase opportunities for the exchange of cultural knowledge. Footprints’ hosted tours promote awareness of the special relationship that exists between indigenous people and local landscapes and environments.

Learning with the land

For visitors, the experience goes beyond sight-seeing, offering encounters with the stories, beliefs and practices associated with the forest. On the way to the forest, visitors learn about the arrival of people in the Hokianga and about its importance to the famous Polynesian navigator Kupe.

Once in the forest and in the presence of Tāne Mahuta and Te Matua Ngahere, they learn about the history of the place, its legends, atua (gods), the medicinal uses of plants and the birds, fish and insects that inhabit the forest’s complex ecosystem.

The footprints of these first settlers, of contemporary visitors, and the ecological footprint of the forest itself, come together to enrich the understanding and enjoyment of visitors.

Footprints Waipoua offers a range of special encounters with the Waipoua forest. Including twilight, daytime or marae and forest experiences, all Footprints Waipoua excursions will immerse you in the wonders of the natural world and how it relates to Māori culture. A range of activity and accommodation packages are also available. ]]> http://mch.govt.nz/blog/2010/01/28/footprints-waipoua-%e2%80%93-close-encounters-with-kauri/feed/ 0 http://mch.govt.nz/blog/2010/01/28/northland-journey-on-the-kauri-coast/ http://mch.govt.nz/blog/2010/01/28/northland-journey-on-the-kauri-coast/#comments Wed, 27 Jan 2010 21:25:48 +0000 Matthew http://www.nzlive.com/blog/?p=886 by Ian Wedde

Going to a museum, or to look at a famous view or a landmark building, is never an isolated event. The way to and from the place, the weather, the food and drink you consume, the hospitality you receive, the stories you hear – all these are part of the visit. It’s worthwhile being open to rich, varied and unexpected experiences. What you remember later may not be the exhibition you planned to see, but something that expanded its context: a conversation, a meal, a sense of place.

Apply this principle to an itinerary such as a week-long round trip from Auckland north to Cape Reinga. Hope to be immersed in the histories whose landscapes you are traversing, to buy produce that has stories to tell, to encounter cultures that are new to you.

Go west

There are two options: you can go up the west ‘Kauri Coast’ and come back down via the east – or the other way around. I like going up the west coast because you leave the built-up environment sooner and stay away from it longer. You’ll skirt the Kaipara Harbour, traverse the ‘kūmara flats’ to Dargaville and pass through the magnificent Waipoua Forest. Then it’s on to the Hokianga Harbour and the back road to Ahipara and Ninety Mile Beach, and the northernmost tip of the country at Cape Reinga. Then, and perhaps only then, you may be ready for the bright lights of Paihia and the resort environments of the Bay of Islands on the way home.

The slow west-side route to the kauri coast involves leaving Auckland on Highway 16 through the pleasantly off-the-beaten-track environs of Kumeū.  Round here there’s a rich niche of New Zealand history with links to 19th-century Dalmatian or ‘Dally’ kauri gum-diggers and strong whānau connections with local iwi. And with it there’s wine: here you can buy and sample wine at vineyards established in the 1940s by families of Croatian origin.

Near Helensville, you can take a break in hot mineral springs at Parekai. You join State Highway 1 at Wellsford, only to leave it again, turning west on 12 at Brynderwyn.

Memorials to the kauri

Coming down onto the flats towards Paparoa, you may notice an old, abandoned church in a paddock. It was still there the last time I took this route, back in 2005. It’s built from kauri – timber from the vast forest that once covered 1.2 million hectares of the north of New Zealand. Today only a fraction survives. Much of the timber went into building and the abandoned church is a memorial of sorts as you move into territory that was once covered in forest.

The region has many such unofficial monuments in its fine kauri buildings, as well as organised ones such as the Kauri Bushmens’ Memorial Bush Walk near Paparoa. It’s not a bad preparation for entering intact forest further north at Waipoua and in particular the fabulous Kauri Museum at Matakohe.

Time your itinerary right and on the way to Matakohe, you can visit the great fortnightly Paparoa farmers’ market. On Saturday mornings it offers fresh flounder, oysters, smoked mussels, olive oil, goats cheese and more – much of it deriving from the region’s rich social and cultural history. Aspects of this history, especially those that involved the gum-digging ancestors of Croatian wine-makers, are re-encountered at the Kauri Museum.

Treasure or resource?

The impact of the kauri on New Zealand culture has been immense. Venerated and prized by Māori as both tree and material for carving and waka building, it was exploited by early European visitors and settlers as ship timber, especially valuable for masts and spars. Much of the country’s 19th- and early 20th-century building stock was made from it. Its gum, a precious ingredient for making varnish, was dug from around the roots of trees and from swamps and bled from living trees.

Kauri forests were painted by many artists, including Augustus Earle (1793–1838) on his travels around Northland, and the conservation-conscious Charles Blomfield (1848–1926), best known for his paintings of the famous pink and white terraces at Rotorua. It generated a rich tradition of folk art including carved kauri gum. Much finely crafted furniture was made from kauri.

Poets such as William Pember Reeves (1857–1932) lamented ‘The Passing of the Forest’. Gum-diggers were still busy around Aranga, 42 kilometres north west of Dargaville, as late as the 1940s. The tough life they led was described by the Dalmatian poet Ante Kosović (1882–1958) in a lengthy collection of poems in Serbo-Croat, Dalmatinać iz Tudjine (‘From the Dalmatian in exile’).

Leave nothing but footprints

Without doubt, the highlight of any immersive visit to the kauri coast is the Waipoua Forest. From the lookout north of Kaitui you get a panoramic sense of how the country looked before large-scale milling. In the forest, you can park and walk in to the mighty trees, visiting in particular Tāne Mahuta, the lord of the forest and 3,000 year-old Te Matua Ngahere, the father of the forest.

Alternatively, you can pre-book a 40-minute guided walk from the car park with a guide from Footprints Waipoua, a tour organisation that provides cultural experiences of the trees, wildlife and history of the forest. Or you can go on to the Hokianga harbour at Ōmāpere – a great moment as you reach the top of the hill above the magnificent harbour and its huge golden sand dunes to the north. From Ōmāpere or Opononi (home of the legendary Opo the Dolphin) you can return with one of Footprints Waipoua’s more substantial tours, including a four-hour twilight encounter.

Northland stories

In the course of a tour on this coast you’ll hear about the Māori history of the Hokianga, including the significance of the place to the great Polynesian navigator Kupe.  Kupe is believed to have settled in the Hokianga near Pākanae before returning to Hawaiki – hence the claim that the Hokianga was the first place of human settlement in New Zealand.

At Pākanae just east of Opononi is a small Māori settlement outside whose marae is a monument to Kupe. This is referred to in the great masterpiece, Atua Wera, by Northland’s unofficial poet laureate, the late Kendrick Smithyman (1943–95). The unofficial artist laureate of Northland, Eric Lee-Johnson, often painted and photographed Pākanae – including, in 1950, a wonderful watercolour of the Weslyan church there (held at Te Papa Tongarewa: National Museum of New Zealand in Wellington).

The church, with its red roof and spire and plain white kauri weatherboards, dates from the establishment of a Weslyan Missionary Society station there in 1837. It is typical of the many churches, including Catholic ones, that landmark old Māori settlements all around the Hokianga. This story began at an abandoned, weathered church in a paddock east of Paparoa. With the church at Pākanae, we’ve come both full circle and opened another historical vista (that of early missionaries) in a chapter that – like many others set on this coast – centres on that great natural monument, the kauri.

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Destination Northland

The official tourism website for Northland. Featuring essential accommodation, activities, events and travel information.

NZ Places: Northland – Te Ara

Find out about Northland – its landscape, plants and animals, people, history and industry. Visit the significant parts of the region in Northland places.

Northland’s Kauri Forests – A WWF Report

Information and photographs about one of the world’s most impressive tree species. Read about what makes the Kauri so special. From the World Wildlife Fund.

Kauri Museum

Website of the Northland museum with lots of pictures and information about Kauri trees, gum and the early pioneers of New Zealand.