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Te Rā the sail. Image: British Museum Oc,NZ.147
Te Rā the sail. Image: British Museum Oc,NZ.147

ĀteaAugust 31, 2019

Te Rā the sail, last of its kind

Te Rā the sail. Image: British Museum Oc,NZ.147
Te Rā the sail. Image: British Museum Oc,NZ.147

A team of University of Otago researchers and weavers will unlock the secrets of one of te ao Māori’s most precious taonga for the first time in more than 200 years.

The late Hec Busby was in his 50s when the Hawai’ian ocean voyaging waka Hokule’a landed at Waitangi in 1985. By that point, most mātauranga Māori about waka building and ocean voyaging had been lost. A bridge builder by trade, Busby went on to visit museums around the country to learn as much as he could about single and double hulled waka, eventually building 26 over his lifetime, including the waka hourua Te Aurere and Ngahiraka Mai Tawhiti, which have sailed all across the Pacific.

The one thing he didn’t get to study on his journey through the country’s museum archives was a traditionally crafted sail. That’s because there is only one remaining example of a customary Māori sail remaining in the world. Her name is Te Rā and she has been a guest of the British Museum for more than 200 years.

Te Rā the sail is the only remaining customary Māori sail in the world and is thought to have been in the British Museum for over 200 years. Image: British Museum Oc,NZ.147

At nearly four and a half meters long, Te Rā is made of 13 woven panels, or papa, joined together and a tail, or pennant. The top edge and tail are fringed with clusters of coloured feathers. She’s thought to have been collected by James Cook between 1769 and 1771, but this has never been verified.

In January this year, a team of researchers from the University of Otago on a Marsden Fund grant, set off to meet her and try to unlock some of her secrets. The grant for ‘Whakaarahia anō te rā kaihau! Raise up again the billowing sail! Revitalising cultural knowledge through analysis of Te Rā, the Māori sail’ is for three years, but one of the leads on the project, Dr Catherine Smith, says it’s likely to be an obsession “for the rest of our lives.”

L-R: Donna Campbell, Ranui Ngarimu (back) and Catherine Smith. Photo: Otago University

The team is made up of Smith, a textile researcher and conservator of cultural materials, weaving experts Ranui Ngarimu (Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Mūtunga) and Dr Donna Campbell (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Ruanui), and feather identification expert Hokimate Harwood (Ngāpuhi). Together they travelled to London to meet Te Rā – the storage facility where she is kept is about 40 minutes from the British Museum itself. They were given only three days to analyse the sail up close. 

Although researchers including Elsdon Best and Te Rangi Hīroa have sketched her and speculated about her provenance over the years, no one has ever identified the materials or what kind of vessel she might have been attached to. Even by the turn of the 20th century, very little was known about Te Rā. The Whakaarahia anō te rā kaihau! team are the first researchers to take samples, which they brought back to New Zealand to try and identify the plant materials and feathers (and understand their function), and learn about the techniques used to weave her.

A meeting of mātauranga and methodology, the project includes technologies such as polarised light microscopy, DNA testing and cutting-edge imaging and modelling technologies, combined with the ancient knowledge and epistemologies held by experts on weaving. The multi-disciplinary approach aims to create new scientific and cultural understandings that the group hopes will strengthen knowledge around traditional sailing and weaving, and our understanding of the settling of Aotearoa.

Sketches from ‘Maori Canoe-Sail in the British Museum’ by Te Rangi Hīroa, The Journal of the Polynesian Society, Volume 40 1931

Back in 2014, Campbell had travelled to London to see Te Rā with weaving artist Aroha Mitchell, Haki Tuaupiki, a sailor and navigator of traditional waka, and astronomy scholar Rangi Matamua. There’s a touching part in Campbell’s thesis that describes their first encounter.

Excerpt from ‘Ngā kura a Hineteiwaiwa: The Embodiment of Mana Wahine in Māori Fibre Arts’ PhD Thesis by Dr Donna Campbell (University of Waikato)

“It was very emotional,” she tells me over the phone. “We walked into the room and could just feel the story, all of those other taonga calling out ‘we’re here, we’re here!’ I could feel all of the history and mauri of these many taonga from many places and times. It was really powerful.”

“At that point we didn’t really have a plan, we just took a zillion photographs and dreamt about being able to reproduce this taonga. Dreams about bringing her home and letting lots of weavers know how to do it.”

Not long after, Smith and Ngarimu met Te Rā on a trip to the British Museum to look at a rare kakahu Māori (cloak). A casual request to museum staff to see Te Rā while they were there was granted, to their surprise, but there wasn’t enough space for the pair to unfurl the sail and see her properly. So once home, Smith and Ngarimu dreamed up their plan to apply for funding to study Te Rā. Campbell was a natural fit and had worked with Smith at the Otago museum. With the addition of a feather expert, their dream team was complete and in 2017, it was announced that they had won a Marsden Fund grant.

Detail of Te Rā’s edge and feather clusters. Photo: Adam Rowley © Te Rā Project, University of Otago

In preparation for the trip, Campbell and Ngarimu ran a weaving wānanga at Arahura Marae in Hokitika where they carried out visual analysis and tried to reverse engineer the weaving technique based on photos of the sail. The pair took the weaving samples they had made in New Zealand to London to compare. 

Although the whenu (strips of harakeke) they used were about 10 times wider than those of Te Rā, the main weave turned out to be correct, although that’s not all there is to weaving, says Campbell. “It’s not just the technique, it’s the rhythm of the weave. Trying to do it all in one action.”

Most fascinating to both weavers was the reinforced joining used to bind the 13 panels together, which was woven over a series of layers. Campbell says it’s a construction method rarely seen today called hiki or hono.

“The hiki on Te Rā is a triple join… The tripling over of the weave would have made a very strong seam to hold the textile together. It’s not used today. I was excited to go back and work that out, because you have to look underneath to understand what’s happening.”

Most extraordinary of all, she says, is how they managed to get the zig zag pattern, which she’s referring to as puareare “for now”, to continue through the reinforced join.

“How the openings, the pattern that comes down, how that could continue through a joining and not be interrupted, that’s kind of genius. Absolute genius.”

Detail of the puareare weave passing through the reenforced hiki join uninterrupted. Photo: Donna Campbell

Campbell says as of now it’s a technique they still haven’t figured out how to replicate, and that she’ll continue to try and figure it out on her own, with Ranui and with the help of other weavers.

Probably the most delicate process was the sample taking. One is not allowed to simply snip off a corner, the sample has to be undetectable and cause the least possible intervention in the materials. Harwood looked at the feathers adorning the top of the sail and the streamer along the side. She studied the feather down at the base, as well as the colour, the size, shape and any patterning. The down identifies the species of bird, and the physical characteristics will indicate where on the bird the feather came from.

Like so many other decorative artforms in traditional Māori society, it’s thought the feathers had a dual purpose, one of them being to show wind direction. Specific species would have been used as well as specific types of feathers on the bird.

While examining the sail for suitable sites to take a sample, Smith also identified a number of places the sail had been repaired by other museum conservators with tissue. In a video made for their blog while the group was in London, the researchers challenged one assumption fairly early on, that the sail is made from harakeke (flax).

“To me it feels like ti kouka,” says Ngarimu in the video. “The way it feels and the way it moves.”

Ngarimu, Smith and Campbell examine Te Rā. Photo: Adam Rowley © Te Rā Project, University of Otago

Once they got their samples back to New Zealand, Smith says they used a reference collection of plant materials and polarised light microscopy (PLM) to match a number of the features. “Comparing the known with the unknown…” says Smith. “We’re 99.95% it’s from New Zealand and luckily we have a broad reference collection. The same will happen with Hokimate and the feathers.”

When I ask Smith what the samples revealed about the materials, harakeke or ti kouka, she tells me that they have an answer… and she can’t tell me what it is.

“We’re going to announce the material at the national weavers’ hui in October,” she teases. “We can’t tell anyone else before then because they’re our most important constituents!”

The journey of ‘Whakaarahia anō te rā kaihau! Raise up again the billowing sail!’ has been painstakingly documented in the form of blogs and videos. They’re endlessly fascinating, not least of all because five years on from first dreaming up their project, the teams’ enthusiasm for unlocking the secrets of Te Rā is unwavering.

“Every single time you look at an artefact like Te Rā, every time you talk about it, there’s something else there. We’ll probably be doing this project for another 10 years. This is just a mechanism to start it.”

This content was created in paid partnership with University of Otago. Learn more about our partnerships here.

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Nash Karaitiana’s designs. Image: Supplied
Nash Karaitiana’s designs. Image: Supplied

ĀteaAugust 31, 2019

Meet Unco designer Nash Karaitiana: the man bringing bootleg to Fashion Week

Nash Karaitiana’s designs. Image: Supplied
Nash Karaitiana’s designs. Image: Supplied

Award-winning designer Nash Karaitiana just had his first show at NZFW. Alice Webb-Liddall caught up with him about his unique brand Unco, and his journey to Fashion Week.

The Miromoda show at New Zealand Fashion Week is a must-see each year. Avante garde shares a catwalk with baggy streetwear, simple designs walking alongside wearable artworks as over 10 designers show their collections in a half-hour catwalk show.

For most of the designers, the models provide the perfect blank canvas to show off their creations, colours, patterns, and beautiful silhouettes, but one collection sticks out at the 2019 Miromoda show. Nash Karaitiana’s models all strut down the catwalk, striking a hands above head, hip-popped pose at the end of the runway. And that’s how the Napier-based designer wants his fashion to be seen.

“It’s like $2 shop bootleg wrestling tees,” says Karaitiana (Ngāti Kahungunu, Rangitāne, Ngāti Ruru) of his designs, “it’s ironic. What’s that word? Gimmicky. I love a gimmick.”

The 23-year-old won the annual Miromoda Supreme Award for his fashion line under brand name Unco. It’s a somewhat ironic take on fashion: zip-off cargo pant-shorts with removable dome pockets, denim bomber jackets made from old jeans and loud tees with retro lettering and acid-trip fluoro imagery.

The Miromoda competition was held in June, with 12 Māori designers showcasing their work from avante-garde to streetwear to elegant evening wear. Karaitiana entered after seeing his uncle’s work showcased the year before, but says he never thought he would take out the competition.

“It was pretty surprising. There were heaps of people with really well-designed clothes and I just rocked in with tee shirts and hoodies.”

He’s unable to name just one source of inspiration for his collection, instead picking up different elements from all over the world.

“I’ve travelled to Japan twice and that influenced my style a lot. The skate culture, because I grew up skating so that stems from America, I guess. I’m really into like Berlin and London. I’ve been watching quite a few people from there, and anime, so much of my design comes from anime.”

Fashion week is a big change from the usual for Karaitiana. Usually his fashion is more of a side-hustle, around his day job as a support worker. His start in fashion was designing shirts for himself and his friends, and the idea of creating for himself is one he still sticks to.

“I started making clothes for myself, and from there I started making bootleg t-shirts for people and after that I started to make my own clothes… my style is ironic, cozy boy. I make it for me but I make the styles so everyone can fit them.

Nash Karaitiana on tour with his wife Jessey and their daughter (image: supplied)

Karaitiana’s bright, garish designs stand out among the simple, delicate lines of many of the other collections in the Miromoda show. His uncle, designer Te Orihau Karaitiana has entered the show for the past two years with his brand, MATU. It’s a much more simple design aesthetic with elegant lines and natural, muted colours, especially when placed beside Karaitiana’s own.

“He dyes his fabric with onion skins and things like that. He did fashion at the polytechnic down in Napier and entered Miromoda last year. I would really like to do a collab with him, I’ll design fabrics and he can do the garments. His silhouettes are so nice and loose.”

And Karaitiana is no stranger to collaboration in his design work. He recently designed a range of t-shirts and shirts for Australasian designer brand Salasai, owned by his aunty, Kirsha Whitcher. 

“She followed me on instagram and saw that I was doing the bootleg tees. I got a couple made for my cousins and after that she hit me up and asked me to do it for the brand. She kind of gave me a little theme and then free rein after that, which was really great for my design confidence.”

His team is relatively small, consisting mainly of himself, wife Jessey Karaitiana, and friend Sean Courtney, the owner of a secondhand and vintage goods business. 

Karaitiana’s parents also own a store in Napier where he stocks his garments. Other than that he’s got an online store, but says most of his sales are made through his instagram page. 

“I kind of just post on instagram and every time I post I get about two orders. Since winning Miromoda I’ve probably had around 20 or 30.”

He also does bespoke orders, catering from wacky concert merch to hoodies in tribute to people’s dead pets, all advertised on his instagram.

As laid-back as he seems, Karaitiana’s garish designs were a very calculated move. He saw the era of 90s comeback fashion nearing its end, noticing it was time for a 2000s revival, and he didn’t waste time waiting for someone else to do it.

“All the questionable fashion choices are coming around.  I saw the 90s was kind of running out and I hopped on it straight away. Everyone’s gonna be rocking the Skechers soon. I reckon skinny jeans again and then the 90s again, after that. Then it’ll go back to the skinny jeans and baggy tee-shirts and then hi-tops.”

He’s also well aware of the consumer shift towards ethical fashion choices, all his clothing is made from organic cotton, denim and canvas, and is created in Bali.

“Everyone is going more ethical. All my stuff is made out of organic cottons. We have these board shorts that are going to come in and they’re made out of recycled plastic bottles. The buttons on the shirts used to be coconut shells but they kept breaking so now they’re recycled plastic shaped like coconut shells.”

Karaitiana hopes his Fashion Week collection will lead more stockists to his brand. His goal is to be stocked worldwide, anywhere he can travel. For now, living in Napier with Jessey and their daughter, the young designer seems content with his trajectory.

“I know some of my stuff is a bit out there, but the people who buy it are really into it. I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing – collabs and designing – in my spare time and see where it takes me.”

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