Reproduced courtesy of the University of St Andrews
This year at StAnza we collaborated with MUSA (the Museum of the University of St Andrews) on an installation featuring artefacts from Commonwealth countries held by the museum and poems about them commissioned by StAnza specially for the festival. The poems and images of artefacts in ‘A Common Wealth of Artefacts’ were projected in the Byre foyers during the festival and at the same time MUSA posted them on their blog. We are pleased now to be re-posting these articles on the StAnza Blog, and here is the second of them featuring a poem by Kiri Piahana-Wong, who is a New Zealander of Māori (Ngāti Ranginui), Chinese and English ancestry. She is a poet, editor and publisher whose first poetry collection, Night Swimming (Anahera Press), was published in 2013.
Today’s object is a type of stone club called a patu onewa used by New Zealand Māori in hand-to hand combat.
Patu Onewa
Inter-tribal warfare was common in New Zealand in the early 19th century, but before Europeans arrived, Maori did not use projectile weapons, such as bows and arrows. Instead, patu were used, with a thrusting motion to attack the enemy’s upper body, or to finish off an enemy with a downward blow to the head.
Patu onewa were usually made from a hard volcanic rock such as basalt, through a painstaking process of hammering, grinding and polishing until they were perfectly finished, resulting in a beautiful but deadly object. You can see here that the club handle has been perforated to accommodate a wrist strap for the warrior.
Our example dates from the 19th century and was donated to the University by the Reverend John Thomson around that…
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