Thursday 19 March 2026
Year 11 Art Field Trip
Last week our two Year 11 Art classes were fortunate to spend the day exploring the maunga of Ōtāhuhu and Māngere with our former colleague, now artist, Dr Derek Ventling. Dr Ventling shared the landscape techniques that we had all been fortunate to study as a department when, in 2023, he shared his Margaret Myers Fellowship with the Art Department, inviting Australian landscape painter Debbie McKinnon to work with us for a week in Leigh and its environs.
Our theme for the year is the Ōtāhuhu portage, a unique geographical and cultural feature that constitutes the narrowest traversal of the North Island between the Manukau and distant Waitematā harbours. We use the portage as a metaphor for our students’ genealogical and cultural journeys, celebrating the diversity of our immigration stories.
We began the day by climbing Māngere maunga, drawing the expansive views to the west and east, before heading across the isthmus to the Ōtāhuhu maunga. We also visited the Anglican cemetery in Ōtāhuhu, which lies at the inner reaches of the Ōtāhuhu Creek and Tamaki River, which denote the passage to the Waitematā. New Zealand’s first recipient of the Victoria Cross, John Thornton Down (died 1866, aged 24 years), and important early figures in our local history, such as the missionary James Hamlin, after whom Hamlin’s Hill is named.
Returning to the classroom in the afternoon, the classes worked on large scale paintings, where they explored the loose, expressive and gestural handling of paint under Dr Ventling’s expert direction, to round off an exceptionally busy and successful day.