7 November, 2025

Art for a career, art for a cause

Tony McNeight has given the gift of drawing to thousands. He spoke to Rob Drent about his passion for art, his landmark giant poppy and the Anzacs

Peace Poppy… Tony McNeight with his artwork at a Depot Anzac Day event

The walk up the stairs of the Devonport RSA to his sketching classes provides something of a link between Tony McNeight’s passions for art and our fallen soldiers.
“Every morning when I go there I salute the boys and recite Flanders Fields,” says McNeight, an RSA committee member, describing climbing the stairwell hung with the names and photographs of Devonport men who lost their lives in foreign lands.
McNeight grew up in Devonport, moving to the suburb with his family aged 4 in the late 1950s and settling at Cheltenham Beach.
His dad Bill was a prominent sportsman. A West Coaster, he played rugby for the South Island against the touring British Lions in 1930 but “got the pip” with rugby when he wasn’t selected for the All Blacks, says Tony, and switched to league. He played for the Kiwis against Great Britain in 1936 and captained the New Zealand team to Australia in 1938. War spelt the end of his playing career, but as he served with the armed forces in the Pacific, Lieutenant McNeight played with the likes of the late All Black Fred Allen in a combined services rugby team in Fiji.

As a boy, Tony remembers attempting to follow in his father’s footsteps, going to rugby league musters at the North Shore Albions in Bayswater. But the sport wasn’t for him and he turned to football, playing for North Shore for many years, from midgets to senior reserves.
“I grew up on the beach – it was a great childhood,” he says. At least for his early years, until his father died suddenly in 1965 at 59. Tony was 10. He and his mum Gwyn moved to a new build in Ariho Terrace, in what was then a new subdivision in Devonport.
McNeight can’t pinpoint where his love of art came from. “I don’t believe it’s in people’s DNA, but I used to love lying on the floor as a kid drawing.”
He went to Vauxhall Primary and Takapuna Grammar, learning that he was better the arts than some other subjects. “I scored 5 per cent in School C Maths.” He fared better at history, with 76 per cent.
“I’ve always loved the connection between art and history. From palaeolithic times when men were painting in caves … the history of colour and the relationship between colour, art history and civilisation, I’ve always found fascinating.”
McNeight left school after fifth form for a creative design course at Auckland Technical Institute. “It was old-school,” he recalls: commercial typography, designing logos. He entered the advertising industry aged 20. Before computers, design was hands-on. Rothmans was an early client, and the work was exacting. For a cigarette packet design, McNeight had to letter 6-point type with a paintbrush. He worked for agencies including Colenso and then departed for London between 1981 and ’83.
“I was there for the World Cup in Spain in 1982 and got to watch some old mates from North Shore [Adrian Elrick and Duncan Cole] playing [for New Zealand].”
He returned from London married and had daughter Samantha. Design work was pouring in from the corporates leading up to the 1987 sharemarket crash. In 1986 he set up McNeight Designs, a company which went for 12 years. But a series of buyouts and restructures “left me on gardening leave”. So he left for Western Australia, settling in Bunbury, where he began tree bark paintings. They were large works, with an example hanging today in the Devonport Deli.
After a couple of years he found he was missing New Zealand and returned in 2012, again working in design.

The Giant Poppy — a 2015 installation in Auckland Domain — happened almost by accident.
Thanks to his father’s wartime service, McNeight had an affinity for Anzac Day and the men who went to war for their country, and he would always attend an Anzac Day service. In 2014 he was marking the occasion at the cenotaph at Auckland Museum, and saw the many people laying poppies and “thought what a shame there was no acknowledgement of it”.
For some reason he gazed towards the field across from the museum, and “I had this epiphany of a great big poppy on the field there”.
The thought transformed into an idea, to a concept and then to a reality, a poppy comprising 59,000 discs symbolising the New Zealanders killed or wounded in WW1. Each disc was signed with a personal message by people who had a family member killed or wounded in wars, and they were placed in the shape of a giant poppy the size of a football field. The project raised $60,000 for the RSA.
Tapping contacts at NZ Steel, an old advertising client, the steel was supplied and then cut into discs by a small firm in Waihi. The biggest obstacle was getting through the various council departments for permission, but a meeting of around 10 stakeholders at the proposed site swung the balance. Sponsors came on board and McNeight had a team of five people working on the project.
“When you get something in motion and going forward, all sorts of things come into your world to make it happen.”

The art of croquet… McNeight at the North Shore Croquet Club 120th anniversary celebrations last Sunday

An almost magical moment happened when the poppy was being laid out at Auckland Domain. Around 2000 black discs formed the poppy’s “heart”.
Wind flipped one of the black discs over. “It was the one on which I had written a message to my father, William John McNeight,” McNeight recalled last week, still incredulous.
As part of the Giant Poppy event, McNeight also got to meet a “personal hero” – Victoria Cross winner Willy Apiata, who became something of an ambassador for the poppy. “It was a pleasure and an honour to have him there.”
On the last day of the nine-day exhibition of the Giant Poppy, the mayor of Arras in France happened to be in New Zealand.
He returned to France and contacted McNeight about setting up a similar but smaller poppy in the town in 2018 to commemorate the end of the war. McNeight crowdfunded to pay for airfares and took 5000 of the discs to France.
Devonport sculptor Helen Pollock was also part of the French poppy, with a centrepiece at the exhibition.
On the installation’s last day, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and French President Francois Hollande placed their own signed poppies to complete the work.
After the two giant poppies, McNeight “just walked away … I went sailing around Greece for 10 days and took stock.”
He bought a sketchbook at the airport, and “I started sketching and thought I would quite like to teach this”.
He knew Erin Hill, who was living in Australia and had launched a drawing business. He launched Erin Hill in New Zealand in 2016 and has run classes since. More than 3000 people have attended his classes in Devonport, elsewhere in Auckland and the rest of New Zealand, and overseas.
Sketching trips to foreign countries have proven popular: he’s off to Hong Kong in two weeks. Other trips have included Sri Lanka and Tasmania. Groups are a maximum of 10 and trips are usually for 10 days. In New Zealand, his tours have included the deep south of the South Island and Akaroa, the Kāpiti coast and Motueka.

McNeight, who had moved back to Devonport in 2015, wasn’t quite done with poppies, though, and created a Giant Peace Poppy of 500 discs at the Depot for an Anzac Day exhibition in 2019. He’s also painted a poppy mural on a wall at the Devonport RSA.
McNeight says his poppy creations have “reached their natural conclusion”, for now at least.
But he puts one on the lonesome soldier outside Devonport Library each year around Anzac Day.
His recent work, If Trees Could Speak, is a series of drawings that are his heartfelt response to the battle by Honour the Maunga to save 345 exotic trees on Ōwairaka Mt Albert. After strolling around the maunga, taking photographs and sketching, he was struck by the sense that the destruction of nature really needed to stop.
On being in Devonport teaching art classes and living with wife Gayle, McNeight says he is “living his best life”.
But he will probably scale back his sketching classes over the next year or two. Turning 70 this year, McNeight and Gayle plan to travel more. Some of his favourite places are Niue and the island of Hydra in Greece. “It’s got no cars – only donkeys.”
But he reckons he’ll always return to Devonport, as “we’ve got everything you need here”. Even recreationally: in the last few years he’s taken up the genteel but competitive sport of croquet at the historic North Shore Croquet Club.