History, heritage, and colonialism

Historical consciousness, Britishness, and cultural identity in New Zealand, 1870–1940

Kynan Gentry

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780719089213
• eBook ISBN: 9781784991937
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

History, heritage, and colonialism explores the politics of history-making and interest in preserving the material remnants of the past in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century colonial society, looking at both indigenous pasts and those of European origin.Focusing on New Zealand, but also covering the Australian and Canadian experiences, it explores how different groups and political interests have sought to harness historical narrative in support of competing visions of identity and memory. Considering this within the frames of the local and national as well as of empire, the book offers a valuable critique of the study of colonial identity-making and cultures of colonisation.This book offers important insights for societies negotiating the legacy of a colonial past in a global present, and will be of particular value to all those concerned with museum, heritage, and tourism studies, as well as imperial history.

CHAPTER ONE

Entangled objects: tourism and the exhibition of Maori material culture

In late 1862 the former lay preacher William Jenkins secured financial and moral support for a travelling exhibition of Maori chiefs to England. Within months he had signed up thirteen Maori volunteers from six different tribes to participate in the venture. As curator of the exhibition, Jenkins chose his living ‘objects’ carefully, with all but two of the Maori wearing facial moko. During the passage to England, Jenkins developed his exhibition from an ethnographic text – probably Charles Davis’s Maori Mementos.¹ Clad in their native costumes, the Maori were to present themselves as Davis’s text dictated. Having spent quite some time among Maori working as a native interpreter, Jenkins was well aware that many of these practices had been discarded by the Christianised Maori that made up his troupe. One of the party, Te Wharepapa, later complained in a letter that ‘Jenkins wished us all to practice those wrong things. I never did it in my own country nor did Paratene [his son] since he was baptised. The soldiers came looking on and Jenkins often came and said practice all these things, for you do not seem perfect in these Maori ways.’ According to another Maori who complained about having to wear native attire, Jenkins told him ‘You must wear the mats, people like it’.² In his role as curator, Jenkins had framed Maori as exotic ‘noble savages’ who were sure to excite the attention of English audiences, who judging by comments published in newspapers endorsed his presentation. The popularity of Jenkins’s notion of Maori social identity lay in its conforming to pervading scientific, social and political paradigms of the era that supported the concept of unilinear evolution, and ultimately colonial authority.

This intersection between ethnographic exhibition and colonisation is the key theme of this chapter. While considering Maori material culture more broadly, it focuses on the place of Maori historical and cultural sites, and immovable material culture, within tourism, exhibition, and museum practice. It explores what governed how and why such sites and structures were deemed significant by Pakeha; how they were displayed and interpreted; how this fitted into the broader pattern of colonisation, and how – much like Jenkins’s efforts to curate Maori performance – the preservation of the sites and material culture was itself defined by western cultural and political paradigms.

1 William Jenkins (in profile at the back) and the group of Maori he took to England in 1863, as depicted at the time in the Illustrated London News

Exhibiting Maori

By the time the systematic colonisation of New Zealand began in 1840, Maori material culture had been collected and exhibited for more than fifty years. On his first voyage to New Zealand in 1769, for example, James Cook had been instructed to ‘cultivate a Friendship and Alliance with [the natives], making them presents of such Trifles as they may value, and inviting them to Traffick’.³ From the early nineteenth century Maori also travelled to England, beginning with the young Ngapuhi warrior Moehanga, who in 1805 travelled on the whaler Ferret to gain an audience with George III. Others travelled to Asia, America, and Europe as merchants and sailors aboard European vessels, such as the Ngati Toa chief Te Pehi Kupe, who in 1824 went to England aboard the Urania in his quest for arms. Te Pehi was received well, creating a stir with his full-face moko. When the Urania’s captain – Richard Reynolds – was approached by showmen proposing to exhibit the tattooed Maori for money, Reynolds declined, the two men having become firm friends after Te Pehi had saved Reynolds from drowning on the voyage out.⁴ Such was the English intrigue, however, that at least one showman was convinced to bring Maori to England as a commercial venture. Although that speculation failed when his troupe fell ill during the tour, a western passion for ethnographic exhibition of Maori was ignited. Such interactions were crucial to the early western formulation of notions of Maori social identity.

Modelled on the Great Exhibition of 1851, the 1865 Exhibition in Dunedin was the first international exhibition held in New Zealand. It was intended to symbolise progressive colonisation and express the ambitions of the young colony. The inclusion of a Maori section reflected several things, the most important being the desire for demonstrations of imperial prowess. As the Great Exhibition begat the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Dunedin Exhibition stimulated public interest in museums in New Zealand, and by 1875 at least ten public museums were in operation.⁵ The most important of these was the Colonial Museum in Wellington, whose first director, the Scottish geologist and naturalist Dr James Hector, was the most prominent scientist in government employ and one of the commissioners of the Dunedin exhibition. In addition to Hector’s own collection, the new museum brought together the collections of a number of shorter-lived bodies, including the Wellington Philosophical Institute and the New Zealand Society.⁶ With the colony a mere twenty-five years old, under Hector’s directorship the museum’s principal focus would be the advancement of colonisation through exploration and classification of the colony’s natural resources – a somewhat typical phase in the development of most colonial museums.⁷ Surviving evidence accordingly suggests that the early museum contained few Maori objects, and that the few it did have were exhibited with geology, flora and fauna, placing them in the broadly based ‘New Zealand collection’ housed in the main hall. When, from the later 1870s, Maori objects were viewed as ethnological materials, no distinction was made between New Zealand and foreign objects.⁸

At the same time, however, the early Colonial Museum’s most prized possession was Te Hau ki Turanga (the breath, or vitality, of Turanga). Renowned for the beauty of its carvings, and representing a high point (if not a final flowering) of the great carving tradition of Turanganui-a-Kiwa, Te Hau ki Turanga had been built in the 1840s by the Rongowhakaata chief and master carver Raharuhi Rukupo as a memorial to his elder brother.⁹ When James Richmond was sent to the East Coast in 1867 to implement land confiscations following the siege of Waerenda-a-hiki, it seems he was equally determined to secure the house for the Colonial Museum, no doubt aware of its reputation. The taking of the whare had been strongly protested against by the Rongowhakaata people, who later petitioned for its return as it was a ‘great taonga’, but, as Richmond noted at the time, ‘the House could have been, strictly speaking, forfeited on the basis that the owners were rebels, but a generous amount of money had been paid’, adding that the motive for the acquisition was to preserve the house from decay.¹⁰ When the whare was eventually re-erected in Wellington, it was as an intimate space for the display of other Maori objects, with Maori flags draped from the ceiling and carvings placed casually against the poupou.¹¹ It also served for at least a decade as the meeting place for the newly reformed Wellington Philosophical Society, and was periodically ‘dressed up’ as an exotic refreshments room for talks and meetings in the museum.¹² Similar liberties were taken by the Canterbury Museum in the displaying of its carved house Hau-te-Ananui-o-Tangaroa (the sacred great cave of Tangaroa). Acquired by the museum from the Ngati Porou chief Henare Potae in 1873, it arrived the following year, together with its designer Hone Taahu, and the East Coast carver Tamati Ngakaho, who were to complete and erect the building.¹³ In its reconstruction a number of changes were pursued by the museum’s director Julius von Haast – mostly driven by cost-saving and the desire to protect the building from the elements. The laying of a concrete foundation was followed by the construction of a European-style framework, to which the Maori work was fastened. With the focus being on the house’s interior, and the argument that the intention was to use it as a storehouse for Maori artefacts, the raupo and toe-toe exterior was replaced by corrugated iron.¹⁴ The naturalist Thomas Potts and the missionary James Stack both made their views on such liberties known – Potts concluding that ‘such a departure from the original building will only be accomplished at the costly price of losing a valuable and most interesting ethnological study, illustrating the old habits, manners and customs of so many of our fellow subjects’.¹⁵ Yet as Paul Walker concludes in his research on the house, with Maori seen as a coherent and singular ‘other’, the particulars were not so important, with the building simply designated ‘the Maori House’ as opposed to ‘the Ngati Porou house’.¹⁶

Such displays of Maori material culture became increasingly common in the wake of the New Zealand Wars when there was a rapid expansion in the transfer of ‘trophies’ from Maori custody to the museums. As McCarthy suggests, their exhibition implied the possession of a people apparently doomed to extinction.¹⁷ Displayed as ‘specimens’ or ‘works of art’, such arrangements gave little sense of the original function of objects or their meaning to Maori. At the 1872 Colonial Exhibition in Christchurch, for example, many of the carvings on display had been ‘borrowed’ from Te Hau ki Turanga, but were displayed in a way that divorced them from the context of the house.

For Isaac Featherston, then Agent-General in London, the Vienna Universal Exhibition the following year was an opportunity to advertise New Zealand as an exotic destination alongside the more traditional exhibition of the country’s wares and the promotion of immigration.¹⁸ Maori and Maori material culture were part of this ‘decorative exotica’ – displayed among potted flax, stuffed birds, scenic views of the country, and a moa from the Canterbury Museum. This form of display was extended at the 1879 Sydney International Exhibition with the introduction of an ethnological exhibition, apparently at Hector’s suggestion. The court was designed around the Ngati Awa house Mataatua (The Face of God), the government having earlier approached Ngati Awa with the plan to ‘show to the world the work which the Maori people were doing in the erection of carved dwellings’.¹⁹ The building of Mataatua in the early 1870s had been intended to cement alliances between Ngati Awa and Urawera and to heal divisions created during the war with the government a few years before. After its completion in 1874, it had hosted a number of large political gatherings, receiving visits from tribes belonging to the King Movement and others aligned with ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Front Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Glossary of Maori terms
• Map of New Zealand
• Introduction
• 1 Entangled objects: tourism and the exhibition of Maori material culture
• 2 Throwing stones at Napoleon: Pakeha identity and the preservation and neglect of Maori material culture
• 3 The art of forgetting: history, myth, and the New Zealand Wars
• 4 History from below, or, When did parochialism become a dirty word?
• 5 In pursuit of a national past: ‘New Zealand is putting her historical house in order’
• 6 New Zealand in context: history and heritage in late nineteenth-century Canada and Australia
• Conclusion
• Select bibliography
• Index