Fiordland’s far reaches are not well-known for their hospitality, but for the crew of the HMS Resolution, arriving among the network of coves, fjords and islands on 26 March 1773, the steep, scattered coastline seemed a veritable refuge compared to the sub-antarctic waters in which they had spent the past three months. “So apt is mankind,” wrote a naturalist travelling with the party, George Forster, “after a long absence from land, to be prejudiced in favour of the wildest shore, that we looked upon the country at that time as one of the most beautiful which nature, unassisted by art, could produce.”
It didn’t take the Europeans long to put art to work on Tamatea, or Dusky Sound, as the site was named by the Resolution’s captain, James Cook. William Hodges, the voyage’s dedicated draughtsperson, produced several sketches and paintings of the landscape over the course of the forty-six days the ship was anchored, artworks now considered among the earliest instances of a New Zealand-European art history. Echoing the feeling of the voyage’s written accounts, which detailed (and delighted in) the sound’s abundance of freshwater, fish and game, Hodges casts the place as a paradise, calm-watered and fringed by dense greenery, almost always steeped in the soft light of a setting sun—scenes in which the region’s infamously unpredictable weather and storm clouds of sandflies are notably absent.
These early European encounters set the stage in several ways for Pure Salt’s Tamatea Project, an environmental initiative that envisions Tamatea Dusky Sound as a diverse and thriving ecosystem, and as the site for Aotearoa’s first ‘bio bank’. Records from the Resolution’s trip to Tamatea offer a glimpse of what this might look (or sound) like—a space where the bush hums with birdsong and the sea is flush with aquatic life—but they also tell of how we arrived at a situation where such spaces require concerted effort to create and maintain. In his diaries, Cook writes of releasing five geese into a cove and planting various seeds, and of the ship’s cat gorging daily on the unsuspecting, ground-bound native birdlife. While these early disruptions to the ecosystem still reverberate today, the Tamatea Project is committed to restoring its earlier abundance through an extensive regime of pest management and the reintroduction of missing species.
One way in which the project is carrying on earlier legacies in the region is through its belief in the intersection of art and science. TamateaArt is an arm of the project inviting artists to visit Dusky Sound to create artworks with the aim of raising awareness for the isolated ecosystem and raising funds for the project’s core restoration work.
To date, eleven artists have participated in the programme. Several, like Hodges, work in the tradition of landscape painting, while others lend a different view to the region’s art history. The Kaihaukai Art Collective (formed by the duo Ron Bull and Simon Kaan), for instance, created a presentation at Te Papa in response to the exhibition Tamatea: Legacies of Encounter, which included a painting by Hodges, Waterfall in Dusky Bay with Maori canoe (1776). Their installation recounted the history of Tamatea Dusky Sound through a four-course menu, spanning a time prior to human contact with the region, the first encounters between Māori and Europeans, Cook’s first interventions into the ecosystem, to its current state of imbalance due to large numbers of invasive species like deer.
Others consider how art can be a tool for science communication. Tim Li’s graphite drawings turn a naturalist’s perceptive eye to the physiognomy of fish species. Jo Ogier has created a detailed nautical map of the species that marine reserves help to protect. Ginney Deavoll’s ‘Dusky Dollar’ series consists of three unique banknotes painted with local wildlife, including kiwi, turutu, poroporo, kina, humpback whales, great white sharks and little blue penguins. “I’ve always thought that when people experience it for themselves, and have that feeling of awe, they will care and help to ensure its protection for generations to come,” she says.
Each of Deavoll’s ‘Dusky Dollars’ can be purchased as a direct investment in the future ‘bio bank’. Like all the works created and sold through the initiative, they help to raise funds for conservation tools, supporting the monitoring of more than 4000 traps across 30,000 hectares of land, as well as innovative technologies for biodiversity management.
The project’s vision is ambitious and ongoing, and new artists are invited to apply to have their own encounter with Tamatea from aboard the project’s boat—aptly named the Flightless, suggesting goals perhaps humbler than those of the Resolution before it, and above all a commitment to the hard groundwork of conservation.
Introducing the Artist Advice Bureau