Colin McCahon - The Titirangi Years

View from the girls' bunk room, open to the bush, 1950s. Photo Gerhardt Rosenberg

McCahon was born in August 1919 in Timaru, the son of a commercial traveller and grandson of William Ferrier the photographer and landscape painter. He grew up in Dunedin and Oamaru and attended Otago Boy’s High School and then Dunedin School of Art. 

In 1942 he married Anne Hamblett, daughter of Archdeacon W.A. Hamblett.  Anne was a promising young artist who had been awarded with scholarships and prizes during her time at Dunedin Art School.  In 1943 the couple moved to Nelson. They subsequently lived in Dunedin and Christchurch.  By 1949 Anne and Colin had a family of four children, William, Catherine, Victoria and Matthew. They were desperately poor and Anne began working as an illustrator to supplement the family income.

In 1953 Colin McCahon met Eric Westbrook, director of the Auckland City Art Gallery.  McCahon gained the impression that there was a job available for him at the gallery.  On the strength of this he moved to Auckland in May 1953.  It transpired that the only job available for McCahon was a cleaner at the gallery, a position he readily accepted.   McCahon bought the house at 67 Otitori Bay Road and the family moved to their new home in Titirangi.The house was small and primitive.  Money was tight and for the first month the McCahons lived ‘almost entirely on a diet of potatoes, parsley, and bags of rock-cakes given by a kind and ancient aunt.

Their new house bore little resemblance to the home they left behind in Barbour Street, Christchurch.  McCahon would later describe the Barbour Street property as: ‘A place almost without night and day as the super floodlights of the [neighbouring] railway goods-yards kept us in perpetual light.’

The Titirangi home was located in bush, far from the city lights.  It was a basic bach. The minute kitchen doubled as the entry lobby. A small lean-to area to the north of the kitchen was the laundry, bathroom and dining area.  To the other side of the kitchen was a living room with an alcoved porch off it beside the fireplace. The house was on town supply water and had electricity. Toilet facilities consisted of a bucket (a casko can) in a corner under the house for the women and open-air facilities for the males of the family.  The children in this early period slept in the lean-to area of the living room; Colin & Anne slept in the tiny porch.

McCahon’s work progressed during his time at Titirangi.  He was delighted by the unique quality of his new surroundings.  He wrote:

‘The November light for that first year was a miracle. . . After the south, the drenching rain and brilliant sun, that shattered clouds after thunder and the rainbows that looped over the city and harbour through the Auckland light . . .’

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