THE ORIGIN OF MAORI CARVING by SIR APIRANA NGATA PART 2 This essay was written about the time of the building of the Waltara Meeting House (1936). In the first instalment which appeared in Issue 22, Sir Apirana assumed two basic styles of Maori carving, one of them typical of the Arawa and East Coast tribes, and the other typical of Northland and Taranaki. He set out to prove that these two styles have a common ancestor and believed that the Ngati Awa, living between Whakatane and Opotiki in the 14th-15th century, made carvings which were later copied by Maori artists all over the country. Maori tradition reveals that the pre-European Northern and Western carving had a ngati Awa origin and that the Arawa carving style can be traced to Ngati Awa. East Coast carving is also shown, in an interesting ancient chant, to come from the Bay of Plenty. However, great differences existed between the style borrowed by the Northern and Western tribes around 1500, and the known Ngati Awa style of the 18th century, which influenced the Eastern carvers.

All Maori Carving is of Ngati-Awa origin We now come to the earlier Ngati-Awa work which we say was distributed over the North Hauraki and Taranaki. In Percy Smith's story of the Peopling of the North (printed as a supplement to Vol, VI of the Journal of Polynesian Society) the period of the Ngati Awa occupation of the North was shown to have occurred in the 15th and 16th centuries, when the Ngati Awa were forced southwards to Tauranga and Taranaki. The northern traditions speak of a Ngati-Kahu section, which occupied the Mangonui district, and connects it with Ngati-Kahungunu. There appears to be a conflict between these and the East Coast traditions which bring Tamatea and his sons from overseas in Takitimu. The latter agree, however, that Kahungunu—the Kahungunu who established himself in the Gisborne-Mahia area—at one time resided near Tauranga where he quarrelled with Whaene and whence he migrated to the East Coast. If traditions conflict or are obscure the extant evidence of Ngati Awa culture is eloquent enough, Carving found in river silt near Opotiki. (Photo from Phillipps, Maori Carving Illustrated)