Kōrero: Arts and the nation

This photograph of poet and writer Arthur Adams (left) and composer Alfred Hill was taken around 1893. At that time they were working together on a comic opera, The whipping boy. Later the two collaborated on two musicals with Māori themes – Hinemoa in 1895 and Tapu, which was first performed in 1903. Hill drew on Māori waiata. Adams wrote an epic poem about Te Rauparaha in his collection Maoriland and other verses and subsequently published a novel, Tussock land, in which the female heroine, Aroha, is presented sympathetically as the daughter of 'a race of brown Ulysses'. For neither Hill nor Adams did the 'Maoriland' cultural mythology last – they both eventually moved to Sydney to live.