Description

Across the motu there are places that remind those who stop
there of the bloody battles between Māori iwi and the Crown
known as the New Zealand Wars. Many don’t know where
these places are, most don’t stop. In 2021 Palmerston North
poet and artist John Tāne Christeller decided to visit the sites
and record what he saw, and from his observations created a
series of wood-block prints and short poems in English and
te reo Māori. Collected together in
Shared Histories
they tell
the stories of ordinary places where battles were fought and
men, women and children died; places we drive past every
day, often without knowledge or reflection. Christeller hopes
his work will open up a conversation about the battle sites,
what they meant to New Zealanders then and now, and
perhaps help towards correcting an imbalance in how we
remember those who fought there: Pākehā and Māori