Vault, no. 41, 2023.
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Photographer Tia Ranginui (Ngāti Hine Oneone) was raised in Koriniti, up the Whanganui River, in Aotearoa New Zealand. As a child, her grandfather and uncle told her about patupaiarehe, the original inhabitants of Aotearoa according to some Māori traditions. They had pale skin and red or fair hair, lived a nocturnal life in the mountains and forests, and were veiled in swirling mists. They were occasionally heard singing and playing flutes, but seldom seen. They were said to bewitch people—especially young women—to lure them away. Redhead and fair-haired Māori offspring were sometimes said to be the result of coupling with them. 

A less-known term for patupaiarehe is pākehakeha or pākepakeha, which may be the source of the word Pākehā, which is used to distinguish the Europeans who arrived later. It has been suggested that, in 1642, when Ngāti Tūmatakōkiri clashed with the first European explorers, they may have seen them as patupaiarehe.

But who or what were patupaiarehe? They are referred to as the ‘first people’, but also as ‘fairies’. Were they natural or supernatural, actual or imagined, real or mythic? In recent times, some have taken the stories literally, as evidence that white people arrived in Aotearoa before Polynesians, hence undermining Māori claims to indigeneity. They include the white supremacists Kerry Bolton, who compiled the book Legends of the Patupaiarehe: New Zealand’s White Fey Folk (2004), and Martin Doutré, who runs the website Ancient Celtic New Zealand. In 2015, a two-part television documentary, New Zealand: Skeletons in the Cupboard, also promoted this view, but was quickly denounced. Following complaints, TVNZ pulled it from their on-demand site, though it’s still on YouTube. Such thinking resonates with earlier theories, like Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl’s hypothesis that Polynesia was settled by white people from South America.

Ranginui believes in patupaiarehe, but dismisses the conspiracy theorists as ‘full of shit’ for ‘exploiting our stories, against us’. Since 2020, she has been making photographs playing on patupaiarehe and their curious status. Her series Tua o Tāwauwau / Away with the Fairies consists of twelve images thus far. In them, patupaiarehe are played by two ‘red-headed cool kids’—apathetic-looking slackers she recruited locally: a boy, Noah; a girl, Jett. In her images, it’s as if these patupaiarehe have come down from the mountains and out of the forests to hang out in her neighbourhood—suburban Gonville and Castlecliff. They are out in daylight, hiding in plain sight. They still conjure the mist, but now it’s supplied by smoke machines and vapes.

Tipua (2020) is a key image in the series. Jett walks along a low brick boundary wall, in front of a red-brick house. She wears a red-and-black maxi dress—a bit hippie. She’s not wearing shoes, just socks. There’s a puff of smoke, but it’s hard to know if she’s inhaling or exhaling it. The tiny cloud is perfectly framed between her mouth and the house’s white guttering and white downpipe in an uncanny, decisive moment. This small miracle is down to the alignment of house, subject, and photographer—it’s specific to Ranginui’s viewpoint, her witnessing. The Māori title means, as a noun, ‘goblin, foreigner, demon, object of fear, strange being, superhero’, and, as an adjective, ‘strange, supernatural, abnormal, terrifying’. 

Ranginui’s work is a kind of magic realism, scrambling the documentary and the theatrical, the suburban and the supernatural. It often turns on mundane documentary-level details, like a suggestive moth already tattooed on Noah’s leg and the amusing inscriptions on his boxers (the model’s own). The work offers Lynchian twists, where the familiar and benign turns uncanny. Taniwha (2020) finds Jett and Noah sitting back to back in a dinghy in the artist’s backyard, their long hair hiding their faces, like female demons in Japanese horror movies. They could just be playing, goofing off. They could be conjoined twins, demented doppelgangers, or a pushmi-pullyu. They’re draped in the artist’s kimono, which happens to be embroidered with a Chinese dragon. The title is Māori for those monstrous creatures who haunt and guard waterways. 

While some of Ranginui’s titles are in Māori, many refer to Norse myth—a prod at Heyerdahl perhaps. Sleepthorn (2020)—which shows Noah asleep in the dinghy—is named after a Viking symbol used to dispatch people to the land of nod. This prompts us to think of the vessel as a longship. Niflheim (2020)—which finds him sunbathing on the grass, veiled in mist—is the name of the dark, misty realm of the dead ruled by the goddess Hel (as played by Cate Blanchett in Taika Waititi’s Thor: Ragnarok). Heimdall (2022)—which shows Noah again, bare-chested, viewed from below, posed heroically against the sky—takes its name from ‘the whitest of the gods’, who kept watch for invaders and the onset of Ragnarok from his dwelling Himinbjörg, where the burning rainbow bridge, the Bifrost, meets the sky. Similarly, Billow—which sees Jett emerging from water—refers to the Billow wave maidens, who were Ægir’s daughters and Heimdall’s mothers. 

Three images, made in 2021, operate like a subchapter, addressing those tales of patupaiarehe abducting Māori girls. One shows Noah on the prowl in a white Ford Mustang GT convertible. Its title, Sleipnir, cross-references the car with Odin’s legendary eight-legged white horse. Without a Paddle shows a Māori girl in the car, suggesting she’s been shanghaied, though she seems rather unfazed. In Stolen, we peek through the windscreen on the couple—presumably now with the roof up—shrouded in mist, dope smoke perhaps.

Ranginui’s photos may be lucid visually, but they tell us little about patupaiarehe, instead playing on their obscurity. The titles of other works in the series refer to obscuring mists and optical distortions. Pūrerehu (2020) shows Jett on a far-off bank, emitting a puff, her hair obscuring her face. The Māori title can mean misty, dim, and distant, cloud or moth. Røyk (2022)—where Noah lies on a tennis court and also emits a puff—is Norweigan for smoke. The title of an earlier shot of him—Sun Dog (2020)—refers to an optical illusion caused by the refraction of sunlight off ice crystals. 

As much as the series has expanded, Ranginui never really gets to the bottom of the mystery: who are patupaiarehe and what do they want? In fact, we need her series title to frame the work as being about patupaiarehe. Without it, we wouldn’t know we were looking at fairies, rather than just local kids up to their tricks. Ranginui’s images are offered up like documents of alien sightings, which we might choose to accept or reject. The project turns on the leverage her titles exert on her images, offering multiple and alternative frames of reference. But is this direction or misdirection? Is Ranginui suggesting a wormhole between Māori and Norse archetypes or pointing to the absurdity of imagining one? Is she posing a question for the curious or setting a trap for the gullible? (Interestingly, she does herself claim a drop of Norse blood.)

As a Pākehā, I am alert to the ways we have framed Māori as our other, projecting our issues and fantasies—positive and negative—over them. But here, Ranginui addresses the way Māori have framed patupaiarehe as their own other. By using local white kids as stand-ins for the enigmatic fairies, Ranginui teases us with the possibility that she herself might be mistaken, conflating Pākehā and patupaiarehe in her own fanciful conspiracy theory. Is she away with the fairies, or just toying with us?

[IMAGE: Tia Ranginui Billow 2022]