The Waikato Wars: What painter Richard Lewer didn’t learn at school

At the New Zealand Portrait Gallery in Pōneke currently hangs an enormous New Zealand flag upon which Melbourne-based Aotearoa artist Richard Lewer has painted the words: “To have a future I must reconcile with MY past.” 

Lewer’s exhibition What they didn’t teach me at school about the Waikato Wars has been his most difficult project, he tells Culture 101’s Mark Amery. 

In 2023 the programme ‘Aotearoa New Zealand’s histories/Te Takanga o Te Wā’ was introduced into schools and kura. History is a curriculum many have criticised as insufficient, not to mention Eurocentric.

Kirikiriroa Hamilton born and raised, Lewer feels going to school in the 1980s he wasn’t so lucky. So - as a painter who has often dealt with real life stories and difficult subjects - he decided to tackle a topic central to where he grew up. 

The Waikato Wars (1863-1865) has been called the largest and most successful of the British military operations in New Zealand. Though the Kiingitangi movement was not eliminated it shifted south, and the Waikato was largely cleared of Māori for European settlement. There was a loss of 1000s of lives.

Lewer feels it’s important for all New Zealanders to acknowledge and digest what happened, starting with himself. 

"And it wasn't until ... one of the assistants I was working with, he's a young Māori sculptor and I was saying 'I just know nothing about it', he said 'why don't you start learning?'. And I thought: [I must] take responsibility!

"In a way it was a quiet time, over Covid, and I just got embedded into learning. So that really lit the fire."

Lewer said he had support from many people on that journey.

For this work, permission to use the national flag had to be granted by the Ministry of Culture and Heritage, which came through only days ago.

"I'm not dishonouring the flag at all", he says. "It's a text that will get people thinking, talking, and I think it's quite a positive statement on the flag."

He hopes the painting will give people pause to read into it what he has said with the piece, and to then consider the wider New Zealand story it is referring to.  

"I want the story to be told."

Lewer has exhibited widely, both here and in Australia. Known for his visual storytelling, his projects tend to focus on the dark side and the psychic residue that remains with us from our past. His work is often informed by the communities and people he meets.

Among his topics have been true crime stories, personal and national disasters (from the Tangiwai to the Wahine), and investigations of both religion and sport. 

Such is his reputation in Australia that he was commissioned to create a giant nine-panel painting for the new Sydney Modern Gallery, which opened December 2022. For this, rather than portray the gallery’s patrons, he portrayed the workers who constructed it. 

In Australia Lewer won the 2020 Paul Guest Prize for drawing, the Blake Prize for Religious Art and the Basil Sellers Art Prize.  

What they didn’t teach me at school is on until 12 May. 

To discover more about the Waikato Wars, Culture 101 recommends the RNZ national documentary series, NZ Wars: Stories of Tainui.