Nine and a half posts on Rarotonga, and the ancestors begin to stand

In the Tupapa district of Rarotonga, master carver Michael Matchitt and a team from Tātai Hononga spent weeks shaping timber into pou — ancestor posts — for a meeting house called Aotearoa Marae. When they left, nine and a half of the twelve stood finished. Each one carries a tupuna who once sailed south and never came back.

The pou are for the Aotearoa Marae in Tupapa, and the name is not decorative. Each post represents a tupuna who made the voyage from the Cook Islands to Aotearoa in the canoes — the journey that oral tradition places at Avana Harbour in Ngatangiia, on the island's eastern side, where a stone monument names seven vaka including Takitumu, Tainui and Te Arawa. What the carvers are doing in Tupapa is the return leg, several hundred years late.

Matchitt led the exchange with his partner and support coordinator Miraka Davies, working alongside local community carvers. It was organised with the Aotearoa Society of the Cook Islands. The two carving traditions do not share materials: carvers in Aotearoa reach for tōtara and kauri, while Rarotonga works in tamanu, miro and ironwood, the timbers that grow within sight of the workshop.

Even the word marae shifts between the islands. In the Cook Islands it means an open stone platform — Arai-te-Tonga, the best-known pre-Christian marae on Rarotonga, sits in this same district, its upright pillar the place where the Makea Karika ariki title was conferred. In Aotearoa it means the whole complex built around a meeting house. It is the second kind that is rising in Tupapa.

Those two numbers explain much of why the carving matters. Far more people of Cook Islands descent live in New Zealand, mostly in Auckland, than on the islands themselves — a consequence of free association, under which the Cook Islands governs itself while Cook Islanders hold New Zealand citizenship and travel on New Zealand passports. There is no separate Cook Islands passport. The migration in the monument at Avana Harbour never really stopped.

New Zealand High Commissioner Catherine Graham described the project as an expression of the connections between the two countries, and of "the richness of our Pacific whakapapa". The phrase does real work here. Much of the older carving of these islands is gone — the slab-and-figure staff gods of Rarotonga, the fisherman's god figures, surrendered or destroyed after the missionaries arrived in the 1820s. What survives sits in the British Museum and other overseas collections, not in the islands that made it.

Two and a half posts remain unfinished. The carvers went home.