Trust John McColl Te Wharematangi Baxter to choose to die on Good Friday.
There was, in that decision, customary thought, compassion and wicked wit.
A respected painter, writer, thinker and carer of both his parents’ remarkable literary legacies, John Baxter (Taranaki, Te Whakatōhea) passed away after a long battle with cancer on April 4 2026, aged 73.
Electing euthanasia, there was dignity and care in the way John brought whanau and friends around him in the weeks before his passing. Settling his affairs.
His daughter Jessica, grandchildren, and wider family and friends were often with him as he shared his life with us in this time – in the care of the Vincentian Home and Mary Potter Hospice. We were blessed with the openness in this time – the spirit, wisdom and no-nonsense good humour.
John was also a beloved part of the community of Paekākāriki on the Kāpiti coast. Paekākāriki may be an excellent place to have community, but it’s also a good place to keep one’s own company. To find richness in solitude, or enjoy getting a little lost.
Having long battled ill health, John enjoyed his own space but his friendships ran very deep. They also went a long way back: connecting us to Aotearoa artists, writers and thinkers of the past, surrounded as he was by them since a child.
We first met, some 30 years ago, bathed in sunshine on the beach at the bottom of Paekākariki’s Ocean Road. John was and will always be a legendary talker, an orator, and he was also quite the drinker back then. I was still in my 20s ready to talk poetry, art and history, and party in equal measure. Raging with words, song and art over tumblers of cask wine into the night.
At that point, John lived just up the road from me at the Haismans, and introduced me to another friend around the corner, his mother Jacquie Baxter. Best known today as the poet JC Sturm, she was then in the midst of an enormously productive period of writing and publishing later in life at the beach. This was in retirement after 27 years as a librarian at Wellington City Library, running the New Zealand Room. Steadfast and incisive, many considered her quietly the library’s heart.
An early remarkable student poem of Jacquie’s recently discovered in her papers now adorns as giant artwork the outside of the reopened museum Te Matapihi Te Ao Nui. John and whanau got to be there for its dawn blessing late last year. John was to pass away shortly after the library opened in late March.
Jacquie’s influence as a poet has been rising now for some time, an inspiration to young Māori wahine artists, but when I first met John, the enormous stature and complex legend of his father James K Baxter (who died in 1972) still remained a quiet burden. It was no wonder that beyond a few small poetry collection publications on the Kāpiti Coast, John kept his excellent poetry for friends.
Paekākāriki had long been a place of solace for the whole whanau. That’s John and his then wife Karen’s place on Wellington Road in the beautiful illustration he did in 1983 on the cover of JC Sturm’s collection of stories, The House of the Talking Cat.
John’s sister Hillary, niece Stephanie Te Kare Baxter and partner Ian McDonald and their whanau, and Karen Baxter with Jessica were all to make Paekākāriki home, a safe place. Grandchildren Hemi, Dre, and Hoani visited. Today, great nephew Jack McDonald remains in the village and with partner Kelsey Lee now has two young children of his own, Te Kare and, born in February, Te Aronui. Jack’s sister Mereana has also recently had a pēpē, visiting John just before his death. The family grows.
Back in the ‘90s I joined a bit of a set of artists living in baches and sleepouts. It was cheaper then. Our favourite local hangout was not to be the pub (as good as it was) but painter Gary Freemantle’s One Eye Gallery upstairs in the Holtom’s Building, with Gary putting on a string of inventive contemporary art exhibitions and hosting literary events. He teased surprising projects out of some brilliant artists – from Don Driver collages to Joanna Margaret Paul drawings. It was always as well a place for writers for reading and launching work, Jacquie among them. A rough and ready, yet warm performance space.
Beginning at the end of 1997, many of us showed or played there, putting experimental tendencies to productive use. Yet the biggest and most brilliant of projects were of John Baxter’s paintings, which gained considerable national attention. John had his first solo exhibitions here from 1998 (there were to be others at Neut Gallery in Newtown and at Pataka, Porirua) with Gary commenting in a story on Paekākāriki.nz that One Eye’s “main reason for being” was to give John’s talent as an artist a space to work towards.
John brought his enormous knowledge of our history, art, Māoritanga and Te Ao Māori spiritual practice into paintings that act as signs or tohu – expression through symbology – marrying his Māori and Pākehā worlds, and traditional lesser known Māori practices with the contemporary landscape.
They are works to be read carefully, yet dance in the abstract with the care of artists John treasured – from modernists like Paul Klee to the ancient Egyptians and folk art. Painters of icons and symbols beyond the Reinaissance.
Featured with an intensity that belies their static state are manaia creatures who serve as messengers or kaitiaki, guardians. It is a quiet reassertion of the artist or poet’s role as visionary.
This reminded me of a private interview I did with John back in 1998 that’s never been published.
“I think,” he told me then, “there’s an awareness on both sides [of my whanau] of a certain mystical quality. My mother Jacquie’s Whakatohea and Taranaki sides were both connected with people who were seers, who were priests and who were rangatira.
“On my Scottish side, my father’s side, James K, well I mean he’s one of the few poets in this country I think who was from a bardic tradition… he got up in front of 100s of people and recited them, sang them almost.
“My grandfather’s first language was Gaelic, he came from the Western Highlands, and people used to bring their horses and he’d whisper in their ear and the horse would tell him what was wrong with them. He was very much into second sight and could take pain away just by putting his hands on people.”
John couldn’t recall a time in his life when he didn’t draw. As a child he recalls drawing while his parents both wrote in different parts of the family home.
“Both my parents were poets, but I am a painter,” he recently told me. “Their words were magical, but they produced images in my mind which sometimes became pictures on a page or canvas.”
John’s work was to be on the cover of his father’s poetry in the ‘70s and his mother’s poetry books during the ‘80s and ‘90s (the latter published by Steele Roberts). Both John and Jacquie were to feature in the major exhibition Parihaka: the Art of Passive Resistance at City Gallery Wellington and Dunedin Public Art Gallery in 2001.
That whakapapa to Te Whiti and Tohu at Parihaka was treasured by John as spiritual guide, but he also had power on his father’s side. His grandparents were Archibald Baxter, the famous conscientious objector and writer, and Millicent Macmillan Brown, with Archie a dedicated Pacifist, publicly committed to anti-militarism, and later nuclear disarmament. Clearly strong and independently minded, like her grandson John, Milicent was the daughter of Helen Connon, an early woman graduate of Canterbury College, and John Macmillan Brown, one of its founding professors. Her memoirs were published by Reed in 1981.
All this whakapapa makes sense when you spend time with John – the remarkable knowledge and independent spirit of these generations and beyond, distilled and held in him, mixed – full to the brim.
In 2023 John learnt that cancer might see him with a matter of months rather than years to live. I recorded interviews for RNZ and for Wellington City Council, and a show curated by Gary Freemantle of John’s work was held at Mahara Gallery in 2024 – Rua Pōtae. Yet, as has often been the case with John, he continued on far beyond everyone else’s expectations.
To take a line from WB Yeats, I think a fire burnt in John’s head. Brilliant, sometimes almost too intense. But it was one he learnt to deal with by living a quiet almost monastic life, surrounded by the richness of books, history, music and art, and the love in the surround of friends and family. He guarded his parents literary legacies with great care as taonga, relying on a landline rather than a computer to the end.
He was intense to be close to. That’s my feeling. He knew this, and he loved you just the same.
