The Journey Home
Eight years ago I returned home to New Zealand, after spending 47 years in Australia. Finding my birth family, Pākehā / Māori (Ngāpuhi) has had a profound impact on my life. We all have the desire to be known and to find where we belong. My journey in finding my way home to New Zealand is not just a tale about discovering family and place of origin, but it is about the discovery of self.
When I found my family and understood where I came from, I felt I was given a treasure box, full of history, culture, and knowledge yet to be explored. Here are some of the paintings from this beautiful collection.
Here I Am — A Story of Identity
Here I Am acrylic on linen, 61 x 61cm
Identity is a complicated thing. It reaches into the deepest questions we carry:
Why am I here?
Where did I come from?
Who am I?
In 1901, when Prince Albert, Duke of York visited New Zealand, a Māori woman removed a feather from her hair — a tail feather of the huia bird — and placed it in his hatband. It was a gesture of honour.
A symbol of status, respect, and cultural significance.
But when he returned to London, that symbol became fashion. What had once held deep meaning was reduced to ornament, and the demand that followed contributed to the extinction of the huia.
It is a sobering thought — how easily the desire for acceptance can cost something precious.
For me, the huia feather came to represent something deeply personal. It spoke of absence.
Of erasure. Of a life that felt, in some ways, unseen.
My birth mother never told her family that I existed. My father died without ever knowing about me.
I was a secret.
Was it the weight of social expectation? The stigma of an unmarried pregnancy?
Or was it because I was a mixed-race child?
I may never fully know. But I felt the impact of that silence.
And from that place, my painting Here I Am was born —
a defiant declaration:
I exist. My life matters.
It was immediate, almost instinctive. A reaction to the pain of being hidden. A refusal to remain unseen.
But a year later, when I exhibited the painting again, something had shifted.
I had shifted.
I stood in front of the same work, but I no longer saw rejection.
I saw meaning. I saw strength.
In Māori culture, the huia feather was not a symbol of loss — it was a mark of honour, given to those of high standing. And in that moment, I understood something profound:
I did not have to live under the weight of someone else’s story about me.
I could choose what I believed.
Instead of seeing the feather as a symbol of abandonment, I could receive it as a gift — a recognition of my own worth. I could honour myself.
And that changed everything.
Because when we truly know who we are, we begin to live differently.
We stand with greater strength. We move with deeper courage.
We embrace life — not in spite of our story, but because of it.
Before the Waka Arrived
When I met my brother Brownie, he spoke our whakapapa.
A lineage of ancestors
reaching back beyond memory — to a time before the first waka arrived.
He spoke not only of people, but of creation, of the spiritual realm, of the beginning of all things.
And as I listened,
something within me settled.
A place I didn’t know was still aching was finally at rest.
I felt belonging.
Deep, undeniable belonging.
And in that moment, something long held — a quiet, lifelong sense of abandonment —
began to heal.
At the base of the painting, the koru unfolds.
A symbol of new life. Of renewal. Of beginnings.
An invitation to keep moving forward.
To grow. To become.
To come home to yourself.
Before The Waka Arrived mixed media on linen, 61 x 61cm
Coming Home
Coming home — finding my family, and my place in New Zealand — is a story of reconciliation that could only have been made possible by grace.
I am a meeting place of two cultures.
For a long time, I felt lost between them.
But now, I feel like one of the huia bird returned —
not lost, but restored.
Not extinct, but reawakened.
I am on a path of discovering identity, of understanding the inheritance that has always been mine —
the knowledge, the history, the living thread of my Māori heritage.
And as I learn, I am strengthened.
Not only as a person, but as an artist.
Wairua — Spirit of Aotearoa
I lived in Australia from the age of two. When my parents separated,
my dad returned to New Zealand.
Every few years, I would come back. Those summers shaped something deep within me.
Down at the bach with my cousins — searching for pipies in the sand, catching fish, sneaking smokes behind the shed.
Wild. Free. Unforgettable.
New Zealand settled into me in a different way.
Not just as a place, but as a feeling.
For me, Aotearoa is the colour of paua shell.
Deep turquoise. Shifting greens. Iridescent blue and violet.
Light moving across the surface, never still, always alive.
These colours became memory. And memory became meaning.
This painting, Wairua is the essence or spirit of Aotearoa.
Held in colour, held in memory,
held within me.
Inheritance I acrylic on linen, 61 × 61cm
Coming Home acrylic on linen, 152 x 76cm
Wairua acrylic on linen, 152 x 76cm
Inheritance 1 & II
Coming home has given me permission to be fully myself.
Passionate. Loud. Colourful. Alive.
These paintings are an expression of that freedom.
Not just expressions — they are declarations.
Of presence. Of identity. Of becoming.
The colour red moves through me deeply.
It speaks of life. Of energy. Of something ancient and powerful
I am only beginning to understand.
As I allow myself the freedom to be who I am, my paintings become something more.
An inheritance.
Not only of where I have come from, but of all I am still discovering.
A living expression of everything I am —
and everything I am yet to know.
Inheritance II acrylic on linen, 61 × 61cm