The Problem of the Meeting House

Hotunui, built in 1878 as a wedding gift for Wēpiha’s sister, Mereana, who was marrying
a Ngāti Maru leader. The house now stands in the Auckland War Memorial Museum. [Source: Te Ara]

Everyone knows what the modern marae looks like -- the marae form itself is as old as the culture the Polynesians brought here:

By the time Abel Tasman’s crew dragged their waka onto the shores of New Zealand, the ‘classical’ forms and arrangement of Maori architecture were in evidence: a Polynesian-derived marae around which was gathered chiefly and family residences.

The marae is the hub, the space around which the places are organised. The problem is with the meeting house. The meeting house (wharenui) is the focus of the modern marae. But while the marae form itself dates back to the Polynesian years, the meeting house itself is modern.  Like many things Maori, it is a development that integrates cultures.

The focus of the pre-European marae was not the wharenui. The focus of the pre-European marae was the chief’s house, around which conversation and ritual would happen.

The term Whare Nui simply means “big house.” Whare Rununga literally means “meeting house.” Whare Whakairo means “carved house” – a house transformed by ornament. “Whakairo is quality, the difference between crudity and elegance, animal and human, nature as opposed to culture.” [1] Legend has it that the form and ornamentation of the great wharenui was stolen from the sea god Tangaroa by his grandson Ruatepupuke. [2] Aggravated by Ruatepupuke’s son Hui-te-ana-nui fishing with a “magic hook” withoutfirst paying respect to the sea god, Tangaroa dragged him down to the bottom of the sea. Whereupon Ruatepupuke set out to rescue his son, discovering down in the sea’s depth an underwater village – the houses covered in carvings that spoke and sang to each other. Rescuing his son and some of the carvings, he brought them back to the land. If we listen carefully, the carvings still retain their ability to speak to us …

The Whare Whakairo is said to symbolically represent both the Maori cosmology, the carved pou (posts) separating the earth mother and sky father (Rangi and Papa), and a tribe’s ancestors – the parts of the whare whakairo itself representing a particular ancestor.

The porch, marae atea, provides an important space in every New Zealand home: covered outdoor space. In a village setting, the marae atea fronts onto the marae itself, the open space at the centre of the village – like the Greek or Roman forum -- becoming the stage set for conversation, performance and debate.

The ornamentation is highly accomplished, transcending its East Polynesian roots, the carving becoming even more detailed as European contact delivered steel tools.

The wonder of this is that for all the talk of its long history, the classic whare whakairo itself is so young.

Although the carved meeting-house is now popularly considered the focal-point for any Maori settlement, there is little evidence for the pre-European existence of the meeting-house as it is now known. [3]  

The meeting-house as we know it today is a recent development combining elements of chief’s house, temporary guest-house and church. In earlier times, the marae (ceremonial area) was in front of the house of the chief, a dwelling house which was slightly larger than the ordinary and often decorated with carving. [4]

This arrangement can be seen in photographs of the Maori king’s house at Ngaruawahia in the 1860s:

It was Christianity, which arrived in 1814, that would have the greatest influence on Maori buildings, its teaching, gospel and [neo]Gothic architecture leading to the construction of Maori churches – such as those at Waikanae, Otaki and Manutake – and more significantly, the East Coast meeting house, at Turanga [Gisborne] in the early 1840s by the Rongowhakaata tribe signified the amalgamation of the mana and function of the chief’s house, with the rich decorations of the pataka [elevated food store], and the scale of a small church. [5]

Look at the dates that the first major meeting houses were erected: Te Hau-ki-Tūranga, early 1840s; Taiporohenui, 1854; Maatatua, 1875; Hotonui, 1878; 

It's said that one reason medieval cathedral building took off in Europe was that it was a post-millenarian celebration -- a superstitious population having survived the magic date of 1000AD could now shake off a few of the shackles and celebrate. Perhaps the same could be said of the major meeting houses, many of whom all appear soon after the major land wars. Not so much a symbol of the late-century "decline" so often spoken about but a sign instead of resilience. The relative youth of the concept was in fact a sign of the culture's continuing vigour.

Yet the idea that the meeting-house had a long rather than a recent history “survived in popular architectural history long after it had been abandoned by academic discussion… The story seems to have more force than its denial.”[6]

The important part of this story is what it reveals: Maori embracing the new (steel tools, English building, missionary teaching) displaying thereby a cultural capacity for very rapid change. While popular history insisted instead on seeing Maori culture as something preserved in amber, and on the decline.

So the real “problem of the meeting house” is not the age of these buildings, but that this popular misconception seems to be part of denying this capacity for change, for which there is abundant evidence throughout their long migratory history. Here was a culture that arrived here only recently and was still maturing; having grown out of societies in which for thousands of years change was their only constant: societies eagerly seeking new horizons – quite literally, out there on the oceans! And right from their arrival in c. 1250, as East Polynesians, they began transforming themselves again, -- both themselves and their culture – adapting first to the new more temperate land, then to the death of the moa, to slowly and ingeniously becoming New Zealanders – and then right on to their embrace, when Europeans first visited, of new foods, new tools, new ideas and new trading opportunities. Their house forms themselves reflected a “strong continuity” over this time, but “detail changed over the centuries and from region to region,” while their settlements here exhibited “a bewildering variety of size and shape.”[7]

This was not the Egyptians who were virtually stagnant for 5,000 years, nor the Australian Aboriginal for 60,000. This was a culture eager to explore and try out new things, one used to change and ever-ready to embrace it.

However, until very recently, most scholarship on classic Maori culture assumed an unchanging, standardised ‘traditional’ cultural configuration that had persisted for hundreds of years before European contact, only disintegrating during the nineteenth century under the colonial European impact. [8]

In this patronising view,

many items and cultural practices now recognised as originating in the nineteenth century were projected back into the past and employed as a spurious reconstruction of pre-European traditional Maori culture. A prime example has been those accounts that accepted the fully carved meeting house as part of the pre-European cultural repertoire.

The real problem here is the ongoing denial of Maori cultural capacity for change.

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[1]Hirini Mead, quoted in ‘Ten Questions With Damian Skinner,’ https://www.tepapa.govt.nz/about/te-papa-press/our-authors/damian-skinner-biography-and-interview#questions(accessed 17 December 2019)

[2]‘Legendary Origins of Carving,’ Te Ara, https://teara.govt.nz/en/whakairo-maori-carving/page-1(accessed 17 December 2019)

[3]Janet M. Davidson, ‘The Polynesian Foundation,’ in B.R Williams and W.H. Oliver, The Oxford History of New Zealand (1981), p. 15

[4]David Simmons, Whakairo; Maori Tribal Art(1987), p. 39

[5]Deirdre Brown, Maori Architecture (20xx), p. 47

[6]Paul Litterick, The Lost Bungalow and Other Stories, PhD thesis (2016), p. 48

[7]Janet M. Davidson, ‘The Polynesian Foundation,’ in B.R Williams and W.H. Oliver, The Oxford History of New Zealand (1981), p. 15

[8]Roger Neich, Painted Histories: Early Maori Figurative Painting (1993), p. 89

* * Pic from NZ History