Somewhere near Taihape . . .

IN 1963 a tall, rangy Dutch woman spent five months travelling around the East Cape taking photographs for a series on the lives of children in different places.
After taking pictures at a Ruatoria primary school, the 24-year-old was walking down the road when she met members of a local family who, in true Coastie fashion, invited her in for a cup of tea.
She ended up spending the day taking photos of the eight children and their mother as they went about their day’s business, images that were pub-lished the following year in the Department of Education’s 1964 journal for primary schools, Washday at the Pa.
Through the generosity of the family members Westra, who had lived in New Zealand since 1957, was able to record a series of family portraits with an intimacy today acknowledged as being of rare beauty.
Back then, though, the publication of the journal was met with such hostility that, according to arts commentator Mark Amery, it was considered to have played a part in the beginnings of a new cultural politicisation for Maori.
It was a drama in which the family members did not participate — in an effort to protect their privacy Westra had given them a fictitious name, Wereta, and said that she had photographed them “near Taihape”.
And those were not the only things in the Washday at the Pa journal that did not ring true. The text was entirely made up (mostly by Westra) and there was no pa . . . the family was photographed at their private home.
The criticisms, however, were not about accuracy; they were about the depiction of the family’s living conditions.
Soon to move to a spanking new Maori Affairs house being built in Gisborne, at the time of shooting the “Weretas” lived in an old home in Ruatoria which, though scrupulously clean, was clearly substandard.
The Maori Women’s Welfare League came out swinging, saying that the living conditions portrayed would reinforce Pakeha stereotypes of Maori as poor, rural and “happily primitive”, undermining the efforts of Maori to improve their lot in terms of housing.
As a result, the Department withdrew the nearly 40,000 copies of the journal published — though some can still be found today for collectors with a few hundred dollars to spend.
Westra defended her work — arguing that the photographs provided an accurate portrayal of the living conditions of many Maori at the time — and having retained the copyright for the photographs she privately published a second edition with an additional 22 images.
In any case, she pointed out, housing and other aspects of the lifestyle portrayed were not the main themes of the journal: “The booklet was never meant to portray a typical Maori family,” the Wellington-based artist told The Dominion newspaper (1964). “It is just a story of a happy family living in the country. It shows the warmth of family relationships.”
Perhaps most telling is that members of the family at the centre of the furore appear to have been comfortable with how they were portrayed. When their mother died in the 1980s they contacted Westra to track down an image they could use for her memorial. And in 1998 the artist visited some of them — by now scattered as far afield as Rotorua, Napier, Te Puke and Murupara — to photograph them once again for a new series, Washday at the Pa Revisited.
The family members were “very co-operative” and “quite happy to be seen again”, Westra told art historian Damian Skinner for a story in Art New Zealand magazine (2001). “Interestingly,” she laughed, “every one of them had a line of washing out.”
She says that even all those years later, they couldn’t really understand why the book had created so much controversy.
And, as with the 1963 shoot, she again showed them the prints of the images, asked permission to reproduce them and paid the subjects a sitting fee.
“They were totally the same,” she told Skinner. “They were really tuned in to how I wanted to work and it was a very simple process.”
From very early in her career Westra photographed Maori all over the country because, she told Skinner, they seemed to be “the most interesting thing” about her new home-land.
“Also there was this strong feeling that things were going to change, that here was something historical that needed recording,” she said. “They were moving from the countryside into the cities. There was this sort of falling apart of tribal life at the time and Maori were losing their identity a bit.”
During the 1998 shoot with the “Wereta” family, Westra was interested to see how things had changed, she says in the new Washday at the Pa publication, released to coincide with an
exhibition currently on show at Wellington’s Suite Gallery.
“In many ways things hadn’t,” she says of the three siblings she photo-graphed. “They still had very large families, which was interesting.
“The daughter who was the key figure in the story (named “Mutu” in the original journal), she still had no wallpaper on her walls and said ‘that is what I remember from Mum. I don’t want carpet, I don’t want wallpaper, it’s not important. That’s not the childhood I remember, and I feel comfortable’. It was quite interesting.”
Not everyone was opposed to the Washday at the Pa journal. In his accompanying text in the new publica-tion Amery says longstanding Southern Maori MP Sir Eruera Tirikatene “considered it a depiction of a ‘complete home unit, exhibiting the joyous spirit of togetherness and satisfaction with their life’.”
And today even the Maori Women’s Welfare League has withdrawn its opposition: “The family has had a long and trusting relationship with Ans and, at the end of the day, it’s their story,” said MWWL general manager Jacqui Te Kani. “If they want to agree to the pictures being used, then that’s their prerogative.”
Ans Westra’s career has come a long way since the days when, as an outsider looking in, she used to hitch-hike around the back roads of New Zealand seeking scenes for her social and documentary photographs.
Now aged 75, she is an artist of international repute who was in 1998 named a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for her services to photography, and in 2007 she received an Arts Foundation Icon Award.
The Suite Gallery’s David Alsop, who co-ordinated the new Washday project, says he was inspired to take it on partly by Westra’s status as one of New Zealand’s most celebrated photographers, and partly because of the iconic nature of the images themselves.
As such, he designed the new publication to have a school journal feel: “It has always been a working book rather than a glossy coffee table kind of thing.” And he commissioned Amery to write essays following the Washday story from its beginning through until the present day.
That the original text has been left out is deliberate, he says — the project was never about the fictional story, it was always about the images and the history of the event.
“With the exhibition up in the gallery at the moment, I am practically living and breathing it and what I get is this feeling of happy, healthy children,” he says.
“From an artistic perspective the composition and content of the images are absolutely superb and Ans has printed them in a way that the tonal range is sympathetic to what she has captured.
“But the overall feeling is one of romance. This family was obviously poor but you can’t help feeling that somewhere, in some city school, children were looking at these pictures and thinking how cool it would be to live in the country, to be able to charge around by the river and to be surrounded by all this love.”
■ Ans Westra’s Washday at the Pa exhibition is at Suite Gallery (Wellington) until November 26. Copies of the new Washday at the Pa journal are available from suite.co.nz