A 12-metre piece on Te Matapihi ki te Ao Nui’s southern façade brings J.C. Sturm’s poem Brown Optimism into public view, pairing powerful critique from a Māori world view with etched makomako imagery to confront passersby with themes of loss, identity, and resilience.

On the southern façade of Te Matapihi ki te Ao Nui, near the Victoria Street tomokanga, a large rawa stretches across the external wall. Tihei have reproduced Brown Optimism, a poem by J.C. Sturm that gives sharp voice to the complexities of Māori experience. Mounted outdoors, the poem challenges the Wellington wind as boldly as it challenges those walking beneath it.

J.C. Sturm also known as Te Kare Papuni and Jacquie Baxter was the first Māori to graduate with a Master of Arts in New Zealand, in 1951. She worked within the city library, establishing the original Māori reference collection now housed on the building’s second floor. Her poetry is known for its intimacy, compassion and honesty. In Brown Optimism she grieves the erosion of Māori identity and voices anger at the colonial impositions that shaped her life.

Behind her words, Tihei etched the makomako (wineberry; Aristotelia serrata) tree. The jagged edges of its leaves resemble the teeth of the mako shark, giving the tree its name. As a backdrop, it deepens the work’s meaning: the poem has its own bite.

J.C. Sturm writes of the “trampling of the dark leaves of the Polynesian tree.” Here, the makomako imagery connects to her lament for the family tree, genealogy disrupted and diminished through colonisation.

Positioned in such a prominent place, this rawa reminds us how J.C. Sturm’s challenge to society persists through every fierce Wellington gust. The poem cuts through wind and urban bustle, confronting those who pass by with her internal struggle standing openly on the wall of the city’s heart.

Sturm - also known as Te Kare Papuni and Jacquie Baxter- first joined the library when it operated from what is now the City Gallery building, later working in Te Matapihi ki te Ao Nui. As one of Aotearoa’s earliest Māori librarians, she became Wellington’s principal New Zealand Room librarian in 1972.

A leading Māori short-story writer and poet, she holds an important place in New Zealand literature. Her collected works, edited by Paul Millar with Ruth Buchanan, will be published by Steele Roberts in 2026.

Sturm was twenty when her poem Brown Optimism appeared in Critic in 1947, inspired by her first visit to whānau in Te Urewera and the Bay of Plenty the year prior. Born in 1927 and raised in the Pākehā world from age four, she reconnected with her Māori family as a teenager, a pivotal experience that shaped her writing.