Poet Bill Manhire, whom Hotere had met in Dunedin, was living in London in the early 1970s. Manhire would send postcards with the word PINE typed repeatedly on them, and a line of poetry.

Although Manhire was thinking of pine plantations which he found rather scary, in response Hotere made a series of works on paper in which he plays on other meaning of the word pine, which is to lament the loss of someone or something. Pairing the black ink-outlined word PINE with a line of text from Manhire's poem with a patch of bruise-coloured brushy watercolour marks, Hotere numbered these 1972 works one to fourteen, like the Stations of the Cross.

Two years later, in 1974, Hotere used the historic royal Columbian handpress in the Otakou Press room at the University of Otago Library to make a series of woodblock prints with ink annotations. Made by Thomas Long of Edinburgh about 1860, this press had been brought to Dunedin in the mid-1860s by Henry Wise and was used to print street directories. Hotere combines serif and sans serif fonts for the column of PINE, making it appear like a tree trunk. He has run each piece of paper through the press several times to get overprinting effects, which also make the word PINE appear like a sound poem, echoing across the lightly toned green paper.