Though this painting is not dated, Tony Fomison’s own serial number #139 groups it with work made in 1976 and first exhibited at Barry Lett Gallery, Auckland, then owned by Rodney Kirk Smith. The large Polynesian head looming against a sombre ocean and dimly lit horizon was a theme in several of Fomison’s paintings of this period, when he was living in Gunson Street, Ponsonby, and remembering the South Island of his childhood. Fomison met Colin McCahon after moving from Christchurch to Auckland in 1973, and the simple horizon lines, muted lighting and dark palette resemble similar effects in paintings by McCahon from the early 1970s, such as A Piece of Muriwai Canvas (1973) or Walk. Beach Walk (1973). However, the allegorical head, which is also a personified headland, is very much Fomison’s own invention, though it may have some relation to the abstract geological forms in McCahon’s Necessary Protection landscapes from this time. Early versions of this head appeared as dark charcoal drawings on paper in the early 1960s, for example Takaumu, named after a significant Ngãti Tahu kaumatua. The heads painted at Gunson Street around 1976, however, were not named but had allegorical titles such as Ah South Island, Your Music Remembers Me (#125), Let Each Decide, Yes Let Each Decide (#119), and The Handing-On (#128) (sold Webb’s, April 2007). In the latter, and in the untitled #135, the meanings of this head and of its relationship to the early Takaumu drawing are spelled out. A small, youthful head is held protectively in the outstretched palm, like a rocky cave, of the large figure in The Handing-On; in #135, a small figure crouches like a supplicant or acolyte before the large head recessed in the cave-like form of a headland. Though these heads may not literally refer to the person of Takaumu, they do seem to represent ancestral wisdom embodied in the land. And clearly, this wisdom is being passed on to a younger person – perhaps to Fomison himself. A probable location for these wise heads is revealed in a small circular painting mounted in a breadboard surround, Lake Waiwera in the Eeling Time (#149), 1977, in which the familiar head is painted against a background of eeling channels. During his high-school years in Christchurch, Fomison had developed a relationship with the place and with Ngãti Tahu whãnui of Lake Waiwera and Birdlings Flat. This is where he began to educate his interest in taha Mãori and the identity politics that would compel him, in February 1990, to join the protests at Waitangi. While there, he suffered from ill health and died, aged 51 years. IAN WEDDE