Towards Whangarei Heads is painted from the vantage point of the Poor Knights Islands, a group of islands some 50 kilometres to the north-east of Whangarei, a protected nature reserve and popular deep-sea diving location.The islands themselves have a long and bloody history for the Maori tribes who have resided there. The Poor Knights group or Aorangi was home to around 300 to 400 Maori and was a popular seasonal bird-hunting ground. In the early 1820s, a massacre took place after a rival tribe was refused landing rights and an opportunity to stock up on food supplies. Never ones to forget a slight, the tribe of Hikutu launched a surprise night-time attack whilst the majority of the island warriors were warring in the Hauraki Gulf with Hone Heke. A two-day blood bath ensued, with many leaping to their deaths off the cliffs and any remaining survivors enslaved. When the chief Tatau returned, his five-year-old son, who had remained hidden on the island, told him what had occurred. Tatau performed last rites over the victims, and declared the island strictly tapu, leaving for good. There has been no continuous occupation of the islands since. Over time, the Poor Knights have been the subject of an intensive pest-eradication programme, mainly of the islanders’ pigs, which were left to run wild, and have become part of the Hauraki Gulf Maritime Park. The island group was declared a nature reserve in 1977 and ultimately enlarged to include a marine reserve extending some 800 metres beyond its shores. It is widely regarded as one of New Zealand’s most important offshore reserves and access is available only to scientific expeditions. All the more remarkable it is, then, that Stanley Palmer gained access to the islands through the local tribes and was permitted to visit and to photograph the surrounding landscape. A lifetime commitment to conservation, and especially that of our offshore islands and our coastline, has been an ongoing concern in Palmer’s works. The metaphor of man as an island has been widely used in New Zealand literature and art. Palmer himself is interested in the inherent fragility of our environment, the lack of control it affords us and what happens at the edges over which we have no control: of the ocean and the sky and the land. Emma Fox