February 19, 2024
From Māori All Black to bishop, artist’s extraordinary life
A man with extraordinary gifts that he shared with the motu.
That’s the way MP Shane Jones sees his uncle Bishop Muru Walters from Te Aupouri and Te Rarawa, who died last Thursday aged 89.
A member of the Ihaka whanau, the Anglican church was always going to be part of his destiny, but he was also a superb athlete who probably would have gone to the top if not for the Rugby Union’s policy of not taking Maori on All Black tours to South Africa.
Walters also made an early impact as an artist, one of the group of Maori modernists that came primarily out of the north under the wing of visionary art educator Gordon Tovey.
Mr Jones says it’s the passing of a generation.
“Because he embodied a generation that moved in the north out of what would have been a subsistence lifestyle into the professions and indeed spent a lot of tme in the South island, Dunedin. He was a lecturer at the teachers’ college down there dedicated in his later years his life to the mission of the church,” he says.
A service for Bishop Muru Walters will be held at 3 this afternoon at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Khyber Pass in Auckland.