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Bestiary of Cryptids & Legendary CreaturesMarakihau is a Māori sea-being with a curling body and hollow tongue, represented in carvings, paintings and ancestral accounts.
On a carved wall slab, a fish approaches a cup-shaped opening. It is the end of the marakihau’s tongue. [9]
Read the manuscriptA marakihau is a Māori sea-being figure whose human upper body gives way to a curling aquatic form. A long, hollow tongue often reaches from its mouth. [4]
Paekupu, the Māori curriculum dictionary, places the word among the arts and describes the figure as painted or carved on the posts of a wharenui, a meeting house. It brings a presence from the realm of Tangaroa, associated with the sea, into the space where people gather. [1]
Te Papa museum associates the form especially with Mataatua and the Bay of Plenty. Its collection includes a small pendant made from the pale inanga variety of pounamu, or greenstone. Its account links the wooden figure with fish, waka (canoes) and their travellers. [3]
Paekupu also credits an example to Cliff Whiting, identifying kauri as its material. The dictionary’s examples invite students to explain the figure’s parts and ask what an elder says about its meaning. One sample sentence compares the marakihau’s tail to a whale’s. [1]
On 19 and 20 November 1938, museum researcher William John Phillipps examined Te Tokanga-nui-a-noho at Te Kuiti with help from P. H. Jones, George Turner and tribal elders. He described a house built by Te Kooti’s followers and given to Ngāti Maniapoto leaders in gratitude for their hospitality. East Coast carvers and local assistants had worked on it. The house also became a part-time home of Tāwhiao, the Māori King. By the time of his visit it had been dismantled four times and moved twice. Photographs helped him follow what repairs had changed. [5]
His Figure 4 shows two marakihau on the porch wall. Each holds its tubular tongue in one hand; below the humanlike upper body, the carved form turns into a fishlike tail. Patterned panels and rafters surround the pair. The photograph records their place within a building shaped by its makers and renewed by its keepers. [5]
The pendant catalogued by Te Papa as ME002984 is only 55 millimetres high and 41 millimetres long. Its compact, pierced green form differs sharply from an upright house post. The museum records an unnamed maker and a production range of 1750–1850; Alexander Turnbull gave it to the collection in 1913. The title Manaia (pendant) and the overview’s identification of a marakihau form both belong to the same record. [3]
In his earlier illustrated study Māori Art, Augustus Hamilton describes a carved wall slab with a tongue ending in a cup. A fish approaches the opening. The tube makes an otherwise strange arrangement legible as an action: the creature is drawing its prey inward. Hamilton also names examples at Ruatāhuna and Te Kuiti. His description can be followed from mouth to tube to fish, but the book does not name the person who supplied that explanation. [9]
Hamilton connects the small fish in the carving with a much greater danger. A marakihau can draw down a canoe through the same funnel. The scale changes: what happens to a fish can happen to people travelling together over the sea. A vessel that carries and protects its occupants becomes something the creature can take whole. Hamilton gives the power without a named voyage or a sequence of escape; the carved action carries the threat. [9]
Te Papa’s account distinguishes swallowing fish, overturning waka and swallowing people. Its occasionally horned figure is therefore no passive ornament. Mouth and tongue explain how the danger reaches out from the represented body. [3]
An epa, or house post, discovered at Waitara in Taranaki in 1919 offers another way to meet the figure. Te Ahukaramū Charles Royal identifies the marakihau at its top in a Te Ara caption. A sea taniwha is one reading. An ancestor is another: the bulbous head, three fingers and serpentine body are connected there with an account of amphibious human origins. The post is held by Puke Ariki under the reference A77.330. [2]
The public caption leaves both interpretations beside the same object. Neither the discovery date nor the catalogue number identifies a single ancestor, and Royal does not supply one. [2]
Sculptor Brett Graham explains the work of carving as a sequence of removal. The chosen timber already contains the material from which the head, limbs and body will emerge; they are not pieces attached afterwards. The carver first roughs out the shape with an adze, then sits beside it with a mallet and chisel to cut the detail. In a large house project, several people may work under a master carver. A curling body has to be made within those material limits. [6]
Graham also explains that timber represents Tāne, the forest deity, while the pāua shell used for eyes comes from the sea, the source of carving knowledge. Once wood becomes a carved post, it takes on properties of the chief or other figure represented. The materials bring forest, water and human relationships into the same work. The marakihau’s passage from sea-being to house figure belongs within that larger account of making. [6]
In 1966, carving specialist Jock Malcolm McEwen proposed a sequence of changes in the form. Earlier examples, he wrote, had triangular scales along the abdomen and head. Around 1880 the body scales disappeared and head scales became horns; by 1890 some figures had neither. His sequence ends around 1900 with the fish tail surviving as other distinctive features fall away. At Wairaka, Whakatāne, he identifies a merger with European mermaid imagery, including coiled hair and breasts. [4]
McEwen also follows Gilbert Archey’s suggestion that the curled lower form developed from a human figure with one extended, curving leg. That is an argument about carving, not a recovered biography of a creature. It offers a different explanation from a maker simply combining half a person with half a fish. His proposed stages describe a historical interpretation of change, rather than a timetable established for every work. [4]
A named ancestral relationship appears in Te Whare Takatāpui, a contemporary resource by Elizabeth Kerekere, Tīwhanawhana Trust and the Celebrating Trans Lives project. Its marakihau represents Kerekere’s ancestor Hine Te Ariki, who became such a being after death. Kerekere places her within an explanation of wairua, the spiritual dimension that continues beyond a person’s lifetime. The figure belongs to a family relationship as well as to a recognizable artistic form. [11]
Kerekere draws a contemporary meaning from that ancestry: she understands trans, non-binary, gender-fluid and intersex people as present-day embodiments of tipua, beings capable of changing gender and form. In her framework, the ancestral meeting house becomes a place of belonging for takatāpui, Māori people with diverse genders and sexualities. This is her stated interpretation and purpose. The marakihau helps affirm a connection with those who came before, rather than merely illustrating a marvellous body. [11]
Lisa Reihana’s Digital Marae: Marakihau gives the sea-being kelp-like dreadlocks and a bull’s horn held like a large smoking cup. The artist names the flying hair on a Soul II Soul album cover as an influence. Her photograph brings that popular image into conversation with carved ancestral figures. In the Govett-Brewster collection, the colour print on aluminium stands two metres high. Its material and scale let a photograph take the place of an imposing bodily presence. [10]
Reihana describes her images as photographic carvings. Her marakihau belongs to Digital Marae, a project begun in 1995 that reimagines ancestral figures for a contemporary meeting place. She also explains taniwha as guardians who can be frightening as well as protective, associated with particular places and their dangers. Kelp, hair, horn and the established curled form become choices made by a living artist, whose account names both the older relationship and the modern visual borrowing. [10]
Painter John Walsh remembers finding two worn sketchbooks in a suitcase at Tolaga Bay’s rubbish dump. Their drawings belonged to a Second World War soldier. He could already draw, but those pages gave him his first sense of encountering accomplished art. Page Galleries’ 2023 exhibition account recalls this childhood discovery beside his later pursuit of figures emerging from paint. [7]
Walsh describes a less planned arrival. An eye appears in the paint; he develops its expression, then follows the character and what it is doing. The exhibition account places marakihau among the beings in his landscapes. It also records his distress at the damage intensive pine forestry has done to Uawa Tolaga Bay, where he grew up fishing, surfing and exploring. His painted environments carry affection and loss as well as fantastic inhabitants. [7]
Art historian Shona Kallestrup follows a very different journey into Queen Marie of Romania’s garden huts. At Sinaia, beside Pelișor Palace, non-Māori craftsmen adapted marakihau for decorative panels. Kallestrup proposes photographs of the Te Kuiti porch as one possible source. She does not establish the exact copying route. The huts omit the wall that separates a meeting house’s porch from its interior, losing a significant architectural distinction. [8]
Other inventions make the distance still clearer. The Sinaia hut had benches carved into cat and bear faces; the Cotroceni hut included an animal skull beneath a carved bird. These were European garden retreats, not Māori meeting houses. The sea-being’s image had travelled, but its hosts supplied a different purpose. Kallestrup leaves the source photographs uncertain while identifying a visible result: a figure associated with houses and ancestry had become part of a princess’s exotic setting. [8]
Hamilton’s illustrated book appeared in parts between 1896 and 1901. Its brief description accompanies Plate XXIII, figure 3, rather than a separate account of a voyage or encounter. [9]
He Kupenga Hao i te Reo · Paekupu / He Kupenga Hao i te Reo · Māori and English
Ngā Toi entry, explanation and Cliff Whiting example credit
Checked 2026-10-11
Te Ahukaramū Charles Royal · Te Ara Encyclopedia of New Zealand · 2009-03-02 · English
Marakihau-style carving, Puke Ariki A77.330
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Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa · Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa · English
ME002984; production range 1750–1850; overview
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Jock Malcolm McEwen · Te Ara reproduction of An Encyclopaedia of New Zealand · 1966 · A. H. McLintock encyclopedia, online historical reproduction · English
Elements of Carving, The Marakihau; co-creator credit
Te Ara preserves this 1966 interpretation without correction or updating.
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William John Phillipps · Papers Past / Art in New Zealand · 1938-12-01 · English
Article beginning p82; Figure4 on p84; https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/ARTNZ19381201.2.32
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Artwork
Select a folio to enlarge it. Its caption describes the account, landscape or artistic choices behind the image.
Manuscript checked 2026-10-13. Artistic interpretations © Scott Schubr / Luminary Oddities.
Return to the Bestiary ↑Brett Graham · Te Ara Encyclopedia of New Zealand · 2017-06-08 · English
Page 2, Symbolism of carving materials and techniques
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Page Galleries, incorporating John Walsh statements · Page Galleries · 2023 · English
Exhibition overview, 29 June–22 July 2023; painting process and marakihau paragraph
The gallery text presents Walsh’s statements from his conversation with Graeme Douglas.
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Shona Kallestrup · Art New Zealand · English
Issue 114 web reproduction; marakihau panels and interpretation of appropriated houses
The proposed source images for the Romanian carvings remain possibilities in Kallestrup’s account.
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Augustus Hamilton · New Zealand Institute; Fergusson & Mitchell, Dunedin · Issued in parts, 1896–1901 · English
Plate XXIII, figure 3, complete accompanying description of the carved wall slab
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Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, incorporating Lisa Reihana’s statement · Govett-Brewster Art Gallery / Len Lye Centre · English
Accession 2008/3; complete Details, About and artist statement
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Elizabeth Kerekere, Tīwhanawhana Trust, Celebrating Trans Lives project · Takatāpui: A Resource Hub · English and Māori
Byline; introductory definition/framework; complete Wairua explanation and Hine Te Ariki paragraph
Checked 2026-10-13