Mate Koaro; by Eno Artist, 2013

This painting was part of the All Fresco Live Painting weekend in May 2013. Because of weather problems (the planned weekend was very wet), what was to be a single and very public event finally reached full fruition some months later. I have previously posted a number of the other paintings, and it was not until this evening that I figured out the best way to photograph this one.

On his blog the artist wrote this about his homage to the extinct native trout of Lake Rotoaira.

"Mate Koaro" is a homage to the extinct native trout of Lake Rotoaira. In the 1960’s the NZ Government revised the Public Works Act allowing them to illegally confiscate land from the Indigenous Ngati-Tuwharetoa Maori people of NZ. There was was great protest at the time as the dam and power station that the government proposed to install in the lake Rotoaira area would totally annihilate the eco-system (in particular the only known Koaro fish species in the world) and destroy the existing infrastructure of the Maori people for future generations. I’ve painted the large scale silhouette of the Koaro to bring it’s spirit back to the land and shed light to it’s powerful story about how this small, (now extinct) native trout created the backbone of the infrastructure of the Ngati Tuwharetoa people of which I’m a descendant, for countless generations.   

I also looked up a bit of information about this and well recall the protests related to such a massive project to alter the way in which the water flowed. I found this in Wikipedia:

Lake Rotoaira is a small lake (area of 13 km²) to the south of Lake Taupo. It is located in a graben between Mount Tongariro to the south and the smaller volcanic peak of Pihanga to the northwest. It originally drained into the Tongariro River.
The Tongariro Power Scheme utilised Rotoaira (by damming its outflow) as a storage lake for the Tokaanu Hydropower Station. Extensive engineering works were carried out including the diversion of a number of other streams (including the headwaters of the Whanganui River) via the Otamangakau Hydro Lake and construction of a tunnel through Pihanga to the Tokaanu Hydropower Station.