Gottfried Lindauer, Tomika Te Mutu, chief of the Ngāi Te Rangi tribe, Bay of Plenty, 1880, Oil on canvas (photograph via National Library of Australia, Canberra, Rex Nan Kivell Collection)Tā Moko is an exploration of Māori tattooing, an appropriate subject for the NGA given the geographical proximity and historical connections between Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, and given that twenty per cent of the world’s Māori are residents of this country. It is also appropriate in celebrating the strengths of the consolidated national collection – both the NGA’s masterpiece historic carvings Te Rauparaha and Raharuhi Rukupo and the superb New Zealand holdings of the National Library’s Rex Nan Kivell collection. Exhibition curator Crispin Howarth effectively traces this unique cultural tradition through paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, and artefacts from European first contact to the present day, along the way situating the practice in relation to Aotearoa’s complex frontier and bicultural histories.

At the time of contact, Māori were a sophisticatedly verbal but non-literate people, and their image-making was constrained by strict religious, socio-political, and material conventions. Traditional moko are far from aesthetic-cosmetic; each part of the face, each particular curve and whorl denotes some aspect of the wearer’s lineage and authority, life history and achievements. Such is their specificity that tribal rangatira (chieftains) would sign documents (including the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi) with a flat, graphic rendering of their personal facial tattoo. However, beyond the skin, the marae, and the canoe, there was no indigenous tradition of face-making. Accordingly, much of what we know of the traditional practices of tā moko comes through the accounts and illustrations of pākehā (British Europeans), beginning with Sydney Parkinson and William Hodges, the artists of James Cook’s first and second voyages.

Capital and Christianity followed the tracks of the early explorers, and European and American commercial interests (mostly whalers) and missionaries (mostly Wesleyans) sailed into contact and conflict with the people of the Pacific in the early decades of the nineteenth century. In this period, not only did pākehā-Māori like John Rutherford and Barnet Burns have themselves tattooed, but British artists like Augustus Earle and John Sylvester recorded the blue-curlicued faces of their native sitters with strict precision. The European fascination with Polynesian tattooing even led to a brisk trade in toi moko, the preserved heads of tribal chiefs, these artefacts most commonly being exchanged for weapons. Indeed, such were the imperial anxieties generated by the inter-tribal Musket Wars of the 1820s that Governor Ralph Darling of New South Wales was forced to act against the trans-Tasman arms trade by prohibiting the importation of toi moko into Sydney.

By mid-century, the Māori community, keen to adapt and modernise, had begun to adopt European dress and manners and to eschew traditional body marking. There was a brief revival of traditional culture in the 1860s and 1870s under the aegis of the Māori King movement and the influence of the prophet Te Kooti, but the association of moko with these rebellions eventually led to its banning under the terms of the Tohunga Suppression Act of 1907. By last century, the image of facial moko had come to signify the Māori past, and the elder portraits of Charles Goldie and Gottfried Lindauer from the early 1900s are suffused by a nostalgic, even sentimental tone.

Nevertheless, while abandoned for much of the twentieth century (other than by members of Māori criminal gangs), the practice has undergone a significant popular revival since the 1970s, coinciding not only with a more assertive Māori cultural nationalism, but with the developing global-millennial fashion for inking.

Which brings us back to the present exhibition.

George Wesley Bishop, Māori rangatira (possible Te Iriaha), 1860s, Carte de visite (photograph via Michael Graham-Stewart collection, Auckland)

At one level, Tā Moko simply seems to parse the new conventions of twenty-first-century museum display: in its vari-coloured walls – one side a deep green-blue, the end wall a Regency-Victorian red, and the other side a jasperware cobalt; in the way in which the traditional ‘150 cm. centre’ single-line hang has been replaced by pictures climbing in decorative patterns up the walls and out of range of close examination; and in the liberal proliferation of text. However, closer attention reveals these devices not as the reflex tics of curatorial fashion, but as conditioned by and appropriate to the objects and ideas at hand.

The wall colours can be read as denoting respectively the sea of Polynesian history and myth, the ochre-red of the land, and the blue of the sky (or indeed of moko pigmentation). The staggered up-and-down array of nineteenth-century photographs recalls the layout of nineteenth-century carte-de-visite albums, while any potential problems of distance and focus are overcome by the fact that these large images are tight blow-ups from astonishingly crisp historic originals – all of which are, in any event, on display in nearby vitrines. The metre-wide band of text that runs ceiling to floor down one wall is more than a decorative, semiotic supergraphic; it is in fact a glossary of relevant Māori words, immensely useful when reading the exhibition labels. Not incidentally, those labels (printed in both English and Māori) emphasise the sitter – whose lineage, authority, and achievements are written in their moko – rather than the artist. Even the extensive public program activity, including (as the NGA’s Katie Russell put it at the opening) ‘artists coming to do moko live on human beings in the gallery’ is not gratuitous, but deeply serious, as authoritative as it is informative.

Te Pēhi Kupe (Ngāti Toa) 1825, watercolour, National Library of Australia, Canberra, Rex Nan Kivell Collection

That Māori culture is alive and kicking (or rather haka-stomping) was patently apparent at the exhibition opening, with its flax-cape-and-moko-wearing dignitaries, but also in the participation of Queanbeyan-based children’s culture club Tumanako. What was also made clear at the launch, held almost exactly one week after the Christchurch massacre, is that the formerly strict cultural demarcations of the imperial past are softening. A Ngunnawal-Ngambri Welcome to Country and a smoking ceremony accompanied by a yidaki drone segued smoothly into a Māori conch trumpet call and urgent monotonal chanting, as guests at the opening processed upstairs to the Orde Poynton Gallery. And beyond the conventions of mutual respect nowadays commonly offered between First Nations peoples, there was a broader humanity in evidence. After New Zealand High Commissioner Annette King led a minute’s silence in honour of Aotearoa’s Muslim dead, there followed a recitation by the entire audience of ‘The Christchurch Response’, with its rich, repeated refrain: ‘They are us.’

Which is probably as good a vision statement for the contemporary, global art museum as any.

Māori markings: Tā moko is on display at the National Gallery of Australia from 21 March to 25 August 2019.