New Zealand-born artist, Marian Maguire, creates lithographic series that combine the colonial history of New Zealand with imagery from Greek vase painting. She brings together the rich print and photographic iconography of Europe’s encounter with New Zealand with the classical imagery of Ancient Greece to comment on the timeless and yet culturally nuanced nature of empire and conflict.

The addition of black vase iconography serves to emphasise the loaded history that Europeans brought with them to the Pacific to meet an equally ancient Maori culture. The weaving of mythic classical heroes like Odysseus and Heracles into narratives of European exploration highlights the changing nature of received histories. Just as classical myths changed through oral traditions, perceptions of the Pacific changed in Europe as different accounts and images were brought back.

In her series The Labours of Herakles, Maguire sets the classical tale of Herakles (Hercules) in New Zealand, combining his labours with colonial encounters and struggles between Maori and the British. Introduced and concluded by decorated classical urns, the twelve prints show Herakles as both coloniser and colonised, struggling to make sense of his life and labours. In every print Maguire quotes directly from prints and photographs produced as a result of British exploration and settlement in the Pacific. Many of these are in the NMM collections.

This ninth lithograph in the series continues Herakles's attempt to cultivate and farm the land in European style. Here he takes to dairy farming and ushers his cow across the landscape towards the right, his efforts related to his classical tenth labour to obtain the cattle of Geryon. Their black-vase figures are taken directly from a vase by the Lysippides Painter in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, in which Herakles drives a bull to slaughter. Here he farms at the foot of Mount Taranaki [Egmont], set in the landscape of Charles Heaphy's 1840 watercolour of the scene held in the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington. This is a more verdant landscape than the one seen through Herakles's window in plate IX, yet, the foreground vegetation still shows signs of change and depletion from Heaphy's original. British foxgloves have appeared to the left, destined to become unloved weeds in New Zealand.