Cultural Appreciation or Inventing Identity? H.D. Skinner and the Otago Museum.

Cultural Appreciation or Inventing Identity?

H.D. Skinner and the Otago Museum.

Fig.1: Otago Museum, Great King Street Entrance, 1955. [Annual Report for the Years 1954 and 1955, MS-0996-007/025, Hocken Collections,

ARC-0124].

Melissa Wells

This dissertation, prepared under the supervision of Associate Professor Alex

Trapeznik, is submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of

Otago for the degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honours in History,

October 2014.

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University of Otago Library 20111031

Melissa Wells

Wells

Melissa Wells

Melissa

Melissa Wells

1991

Melissa Wells

BA (Hons)

Melissa Wells

Cultural Appreciation or Inventing Identity? H.D. Skinner and the Otago Museum

Melissa Wells

History

Melissa Wells

[email protected]

Melissa Wells

29/09/14

Table of Contents:

Abstract 1

List of Figures 2

Acknowledgements 3

Introduction 4

Chapter One – What is a Museum? The History of Museums and the 10

Otago Museum in a broader international context

Chapter Two – ‘The Founding Father’ of New Zealand Anthropology: 30

H.D. Skinner’s years at the Otago Museum

Chapter Three – Inventing Identity? Through Indigenous Collections 44

Epilogue – H.D. Skinner’s Legacy 54

Conclusion 58

Appendix 61

Bibliography 71

Abstract:

The Otago Museum has grown enormously, particularly in collection size,

since it was first established in 1868. Much of the expansion in its collection can be

attributed to one man, Henry Devenish Skinner, and especially the importance he

attached to the collection and display of Māori and Polynesian artefacts. This thesis

investigates the long history of museums internationally, the more recent appearance

of museums in New Zealand society, the life of H.D. Skinner, and the issues relating

to exhibiting indigenous artefacts and how this leads to the invention of identities. It

contributes to the understanding of three important topics. Firstly, where the Otago

Museum fits into a national and international context. Secondly, why H.D. Skinner

was a pioneer in the world of museums and anthropological research, which includes

an appreciation of him as one of the greatest museum directors the Otago Museum

has ever had. Thirdly, how indigenous culture has been displayed, with an

investigation of the perceptions and tensions from both Māori and Pākehā on the use

of indigenous artefacts to generate stories within museums. The importance of this

research is as a case study. It is a snapshot in time of the way in which the regional

and cultural history was exhibited and how museums created and still do create our

identity, as a people and as a place.

1

List of Figures:

Fig. 1. Otago Museum, Great King Street Front, 1955 Title page

Fig. 2. Otago Museum Management Committee, 1948 61

Fig. 3. Three Nephrite Adzes, 1949 62

Fig. 4. ‘Waka Huia’ (feather-box), 1957-58 63

Fig. 5. Class Group 1: Structure of a Wharenui, 1957-58 64

Fig. 6. Class Group 2: Using a Māori chord drill, 1957-58 65

Fig. 7. Ground floor of old block, looking south, 1956 66

Fig. 8. Culture Areas of New Zealand 67

Fig. 9. Three Mere Pounamu, 1956 68

Fig. 10. ‘Tira’, Mere Pounamu, 1951 69

Fig. 11. Otago Museum, sketch of future extensions, 1956 70

2

Acknowledgements:

I would first like to say thank you to my honours supervisor, Associate

Professor Alex Trapeznik, for your guidance with my research and writing, and also

your caring nature, particularly for those emails questioning whether I was still alive

or not, which notified me that it was time to resurface for air and some further

advice.

A big thank you goes out to my parents, particularly my father, Graeme, for

his great knowledge of the English language, and for giving up his time to help me

edit this piece of work.

To my fellow 400-level classmates, thank you for being such a great team,

and in particular thank you to Susan for your unwavering support, insight,

understanding and those interesting study sessions.

Thank you to my friends who believed, encouraged and supported me,

especially when my own confidence faltered.

I am much obliged to the Hocken Collections staff who were very patient and

helpful in my research process, and I am particularly grateful to Chris and Ian for

accessing H.D. Skinner’s records which I have heard were located on the top shelf!

Lastly, thank you to the extended University of Otago History department

staff and postgraduate students, especially to Rosi Crane for your helpful research

directions when I got stuck, to Dr Angela Wanhalla for your open door and your

belief in me, and Peter Cadogan for your technical help.

3

Introduction:

Depending on our chosen learning environment and career, much of the

theoretical based learning is taught in a classroom based domain. Learning in this

setting is founded on the written and spoken word, with experiences being initiated

through symbols and signs, along with the expectation of achieving. In contrast,

museums open up a whole new environment for education. In comparison to schools,

museums are voluntarily educational, they cater for all ages, and people can stay as

long as they like. Museums offer an informal context in which the public can freely

discover and explore, as well as enabling the conveyance of natural, social,

historical, cultural and scientific information. This thesis contributes one view on

how museum exhibits can be used to invent identity through the use of indigenous

artefacts and how the representation of indigenous culture has been portrayed in the

museum setting. It will also focus, as a case study, on Henry Devenish Skinner’s

involvement with the Otago Museum, his collection practices and policies, and his

interest in Māori and Polynesian items.

In its most basic definitive form, a museum is a building in which objects of

historical, scientific, artistic, or cultural interest are stored and exhibited. Each

museum offers a selection of artwork and exhibits and usually presents them with a

specific perspective. Like any establishment, it has a vision and a mission within

society, and certain areas of focus. Today, the Otago Museum acknowledges that it

has a “particular responsibility for the natural, cultural, and scientific heritage of the

Otago region.”1 This responsibility that the Otago Museum now holds has come out

of its lengthy history and the variety of directors and curators who have administered

and contributed their own mark to the museum’s collection, displays, and

methodology during its lifetime.

The Otago Museum was established in 1868, originally situated south of the

Octagon in the area now called the Exchange. The founding collection was a

significant range of rocks and minerals donated by James Hector, who arrived in

1861 as Otago’s Provincial Geologist. The first official curator of the museum was

Frederick Hutton, who was given the priority of finding a larger purpose-built

building to house the growing collections. In 1874 the Museum Council secured the

4

1 “Board Practice Manual,” Otago Museum Trust Board, 25 August 2005, accessed 1 July 2014, http://www.puketeraki.co.nz/site/puketeraki/Boar%20Practice%20Manual%20(2).pdf., 1.

museum’s current site on Great King Street, and in 1877 it was opened to the public.

Over the years since 1868, the Otago Museum has had eight directors. The first three,

Frederick Hutton, Thomas Jeffery Parker and Professor William Benham were all

particularly interested in natural history. Hutton was a geologist, Parker a biologist

and Benham a zoologist. The first New Zealand born leader at the Museum was

appointed in 1937; this was Henry Devenish Skinner, a Cambridge University

graduate, an anthropologist, an ethnologist, and the first director to see the possibility

in collecting and showing cultural items as well as the natural. He set up the

Association of Friends of the Otago Museum and while he was there, the museum

committee and the Art Galleries and Museum Association of New Zealand

(AGMANZ) were established. Skinner has left a strong legacy behind, with family

members still following on similar paths to his. Succeeding Skinner’s long

directorship at the museum, another period of biological sciences hit the museum

with the appointment of another New Zealand born director, Raymond Forster, with

his speciality being in the classification of arachnids. Before coming to the Otago

Museum he had experience in working at the National Museum of Wellington and

the Canterbury Museum. From 1957 to 1987, spiders ran the fort, until Richard

Cassels, another Cambridge graduate, took up the reigns. Cassels made it his priority

to turn to the public, focusing on how the museum could best serve the people of and

visitors to Dunedin. In 1995, Shimrath Paul, a businessman, took on the leadership of

the museum. Paul focused even more on the visitor’s experience and redeveloped the

museum, adding in the popular tropical forest butterfly attraction. The most recent

director, Ian Griffin, was appointed in May 2013. With a PhD in Astronomy and vast

experience of leadership within science institutes behind him, Griffin brought a huge

range of skills and fresh views to the museum.

There is much literature already published on aspects of this thesis, but none

focusing on H.D. Skinner as an educator and commentator on indigenous artefacts,

his interaction with the Otago Museum, the public of Dunedin and the surrounding

region. There are articles with strong opinions of H.D. Skinner, such as Fiona

Cameron who offers a disapproving view of Skinner in her 2014 article in the journal

Anthropology and History, while Moira White provided a rounded background on

Skinner in her article on Polynesian racial history in The Journal of Pacific History

5

in 2012.2 3 Using these, plus some primary resources, enabled a well-balanced

perspective of H.D. Skinner to be presented in this dissertation.

The leading secondary resources used included books, book chapters, journal

articles and other publications by significant authors such as Paul Tapsell, Conal

McCarthy, Gary Edson, David Dean, Chris Gosden, and H.D. Skinner himself,

among others, all of whom have been either directly or concomitantly involved in

museum studies. They also had various and helpful views on museums, their change

over time, and their use of indigenous material. Paul Tapsell offers numerous works

on the use and display of indigenous artefacts and cultures in the museum setting.

His points of view are crucial due to his own Māori heritage and identity plus his

experience in the museum sector. Conal McCarthy’s article “Before ‘Te Māori’: a

revolution deconstructed”, and his book Exhibiting Māori: A History of Colonial

Cultures on Display, presents information on how views of Māori culture and

artefacts have changed over time, in particular at Te Papa Tongarewa. Gary Edson’s

edited book Museum Ethics, provides a succinct set of chapters on the ethical

workings within museum spaces, and discusses the issues that have arisen

surrounding indigenous artefacts including rights, politics and repatriation. David

Dean, in his work Museum Exhibition: Theory and Practice, proffers an integrated

approach from the theoretical values of a museum to the practical workings. He

covers a broad scope, including topics of collection care, exhibition design, and

administration. Chris Gosden, along with Frances Larson in their book, Knowing

Things: Exploring the Collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum 1884-1945, offers an

observation into the Pitt Rivers Museum and its foundation. It also examines current

thoughts on the essential nature of connections, especially those fostered and held

between artefacts and people.

H.D. Skinner’s numerous papers provide an educated view from the past, one

that was quite new and forward thinking for the people of New Zealand, but similar

in theory and practice to other areas of the world at the time. There are two honours

theses which have been of use: one from 2008 on the early history of the Otago

6

2 Fiona Ruth Cameron, “From “Dead Things” to Immutable, Combinable Mobiles: H.D. Skinner, the Otago Museum and University and the Governance of Māori Populations,” History and Anthropology 25, no.2 (2014).

3 Moira White, "Notes and Documents: Dixon, Skinner and Te Rangi Hiroa – Scholarly Discussion of Polynesian Racial History, 1920-49,” The Journal of Pacific History 47, no. 3 (2012).

Museum by Megan Wells who was interested in its origins and development from

1868 to 1879;4 and one from 2001 by Susannah Risk, on the early history of the

Otago Settler’s Association and Museum from 1898 to 1928.5 Both of these works

focus on a time period that is earlier than that of this thesis, but each gives an idea of

the past and what led to the epoch of H.D. Skinner and his time at the Otago

Museum.

Primary sources will be used in the form of letters, manuscripts, and

newspaper clippings, while also incorporating contemporary views on his

mannerisms and collection practices from the perspectives of people who are for and

against his methods. Research involved delving into the records held at the Hocken

Collections and books at the University of Otago Libraries and storage areas. The

Hocken Collections has a vast compendium of resources, and one never really knows

what gems one may find there. Interviewing three people with insight into museums,

museum studies and directors: Ian Griffin, Paul Tapsell and Rosi Crane, offered

contemporary views on the past, present and future of museums studies as a whole,

thoughts on H.D. Skinner’s character and practices, and the use of indigenous

artefacts in museums. All interviewees held vastly different thoughts on Skinner,

particularly Ian Griffin and Paul Tapsell, which are discussed in chapters two and

three.

For the most part, the resources for chapter one were made up of secondary

sources. Chapter two, chapter three and the epilogue, consists mainly of primary

references sourced from the Hocken Collections, including the Henry Devenish

Skinner papers, the Charles Brasch collection, and the Angus Ross papers, plus some

secondary resources and contemporary views on the creation of identities through

collection artefacts.

Before researching into the field of inquiry for the third chapter, a search was

made for records of exhibitions H.D. Skinner held during his time as director in the

hope that those exhibitions would show how collections tell the story of a people and

a place. However, this was to be one dead end in the research, as there are no

complete records on exhibitions from Skinner’s time, other than the Annual Reports,

7

4 Megan Wells, “The Otago Museum, 1868-1879: origins and early development” (Hons. diss., University of Otago, 2008).

5 Susannah Risk, “Capturing the Past: an early history of the Otago Early Settlers’ Museum and Association, 1898-1928” (Hons. diss., University of Otago, 2001).

which are somewhat patchy in what information they hold. A few newspaper

clippings to be found in David Teviotdale’s clipping books in the Hocken Collections

also provided a little information. There is a lot of information that has either not

been documented or has been lost over the years. Although one would expect to find

a document, file or note containing a summary or listing of all the exhibitions held at

the Otago Museum while H.D. Skinner worked and directed there, none could be

found. It seems that no such note or document exists, apart from the snippets of

information regarding yearly accessions in the Museum’s annual reports. There are a

number of wonderful ‘clipping books’ several of which were very useful as they not

only contained newspaper articles covering a wide range of subjects but also some

pertaining to the happenings of the Otago Museum and Skinner. A lot of information

was uncovered from these. Manuscripts, notebooks, and random bits of paper from

various people, including Skinner, were also helpful.

The layout of this thesis is in three chapters, with an ensuing epilogue, and a

conclusion. Chapter one will outline the questions, what is a museum? And how have

museums changed over time? It will include an overview of the history of museums,

plus a brief history of museums in New Zealand. It will incorporate changes in

collection management, architecture, and public interactions. The chapter will also

provide descriptions of the differences between particular types of establishments,

whilst focusing on the Otago Museum as an example in both a national and an

international context.

Chapter two will focus on H.D. Skinner, particularly on the portion of his life

which he spent working at the Otago Museum, concentrating on what he brought to

the museum that was new. It will address Skinner’s ways of collecting artefacts and

his personal traits of public interactions. Primary sources will be used in the form of

letters, manuscripts, and newspaper clippings, while also incorporating contemporary

views on his mannerisms and collection practices. Included are some sources that are

or were, supporters of his methods and some who considered them inappropriate.

Chapter three will examine the concept of inventing identity, one which

seems to still be in motion. It will focus on indigenous Māori collections and

exhibits, studying how they are and have been used in inventing identity. It will also

look at how, at least in the context of the Otago Museum, the absence of certain

information about the artefacts displayed can tell us more than the facts that are

8

given. Views from both sides of the argument over museums’ collecting of

indigenous artefacts will be offered, that is, the views of the indigenous Māori, and

the western colonisers. Due to the lack of resources, rather than paying attention to

all that was displayed, emphasis will be given to what was missing, but concluding

with an accurate representation of the exhibition of indigenous artefacts.

The epilogue will look briefly at the period between H.D. Skinner’s

retirement from the Otago Museum and his departure from this life, and what he

accomplished in his last twenty years. It also covers how he is remembered today,

and the legacy that he left behind.

Due to the limited time span available to complete this project and restricted

funds for travel, the resources that may have been found and used, had these

constraints not been in place, would have been different and possibly given this

thesis more depth and breadth.

This thesis is a case study focusing on the anthropological pioneer Henry

Devenish Skinner and the Otago Museum in a broader national and international

context. It is a study of a snapshot in time of the way in which the regional and

cultural history was exhibited and how museums created and still do create our

identity, as a people and as a place.

9

Chapter One:

What is a Museum? The History of Museums and the Otago Museum in a

broader international context

What is a museum? This is a difficult question, as it is a complex

establishment, one that is difficult to properly define. A museum is an interconnected

structure of intricate ideas, cultures, societies, the environment, and people.

Analysing this question further and describing other important terms in relation to

museums, will be useful and lead on into the history of the museum as an institution.

After this, the focus will narrow in on the history of museums in New Zealand,

paying particular attention to the Otago Museum. Two other focal points that will be

covered will be ‘material culture’ and ‘museum and the market.’

Museum Definitions

The fundamental dictionary denotation describes museums as buildings in

which objects of historical, scientific, artistic, or cultural interest are stored and

exhibited. Though museums have also been associated with the ideals of vestiges,

souvenirs and relics.1 Taking the definition of a museum one step further, the

International Council of Museums (ICOM) states the following:

A museum is a non-profit, permanent institution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment.2

The distinction is necessary, in that the first definition is what the general public

comprehends, and the second is what the museum truly is by the understanding of

those in the museum sector. There are other meanings though, according to G. Ellis

Burcaw, there are a total of thirteen different interpretations of what a museum is.3

These range from one line sentences, to ones needing further clarification breaking

10

1 Gary Edson, “Ethics as a code,” in Museum Ethics, ed. Gary Edson (London: Routledge, 1997), 107.

2 “Definition of a Museum,” International Council Of Museums (ICOM), accessed 27 July 2014, http://archives.icom.museum/definition.html.

3 G. Ellis Burcaw, Introduction to Museum Work, 2nd ed. (Nashville, Tenn.: American Association for State and Local History, 1983), 18-19.

key words down, and some which are whole paragraphs. The word ‘museum’ itself is

Latin and comes from the Greek word mouseion meaning ‘seat of the muses’, which

is based on the word mousa meaning ‘muse’, though it has had an assortment of

meanings over the centuries.

Some other important words and phrases that need to be distinguished are

museology, museography, material culture and different sorts of museum

establishments. Museology is the theoretical study of the museum field, which

includes the background of museums, from their curation such as organisation,

conservation, arrangement, management, role in society, systems of research, to their

development through time. Museography on the other hand, is the practical side of

the study, the practical techniques which relate to museology.4 Asking what ‘Material

culture’ is, like that of the museum, comes with many different clarifications. A

typical dictionary definition is that it is an aggregate of the physical objects created

by a culture, which include items such as tools, buildings, and other artefacts created

by members of a society. It refers to the physical items, resources and spaces that

human beings use to define their own culture.

There are many types of museums. Natural history, cultural history, social

history, science centres, art galleries, just to broadly name a few. There are those on a

large scale, such as national museums, and then those on a more local scale, such as

provincial museums. Even some small towns have their own little local museum.

What usually defines a type of museum is the types of items each museum chooses

to collect and exhibit. A science centre is different from a history museum in that it

largely deals with hands-on learning opportunities and its exhibitions and

presentations are made up of “the physical and biological sciences and associated

technology.”5 According to Edward Alexander, an American historian and museum

administrator, there are five different types of museums: the art museum, the natural

history museum, the museum of science and technology, the history museum, and

botanical gardens and zoos.6 Art Museums are often broken down into three parts.

Fine arts, which are things of beauty, applied or useful arts where the art items have a

11

4 G. Ellis Burcaw, Introduction to Museum Work, 21.


6 Edward P. Alexander, Museums in Motion: An Introduction to the History and Functions of Museums (Walnut Creek, California: AltaMira Press, 1996), 17-116.

function, and folk or indigenous art.7 The golden age for art museums was the

nineteenth century. France, England, and Germany were all quick to develop art

museums, however the idea of an art museum in the United States, where artworks

were regarded “more as historical documents than works of art,” was slow to be

adopted.8

Depending on one’s point of view and age, museums have either changed

incredibly or not a lot. In saying this, one must look both at the surface and

underneath the ‘museum’ banner. Each group of people have different

understandings of what a museum is and what they, as public institutions, bring to

society. One museum that incorporates some of, if not all, these categories is the

Otago Museum. The current director, Ian Griffin, considers the museum to be

something of an ‘omni-museum,’ one that incorporates our past as a whole.9

Although it is a provincial museum, the Otago Museum offers a diverse range of

objects, over two million of them, and these days is interested in more than just

archaeological material, as it has been in the past. Griffin believes that the museum

would not be where it is now, had it not been for the previous innovative directors

and curators.10

Scrutiny of the various definitions of museums shows that they are often

regarded as having three main functions, all of equal importance. Museums are

focused on being educational and research based organisations, they emphasise their

commitment to preserving and conserving their collections, and they are greatly

valued for their connection with past characters and events.11

A History of Museums:

Museums have been around for an extremely long time. The first museums

that were fundamentally like the ones around today, were founded in Alexandria,

Athens and Rome, with the first being the Museum of Alexandria constructed in 290

12


8 Edward P. Alexander, Museums in Motion, 30.

9 Ian Griffin, interview by the author, Dunedin, New Zealand, 18 June 2014.

10 Ian Griffin, interview.

11 Alma S. Wittlin, Museums: In Search of a Usable Future (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1970), 1.

B.C. by Ptolemy Soter. The centre was devoted to the muses as a centre for learning,

which resulted in the modern-day name ‘museum’.12 In classical times, the museum

was a building dedicated to the nine goddesses, known as the Muses. These

goddesses observed “the welfare of the epic, music, love poetry, oratory, history,

tragedy, comedy, the dance, and astronomy.”13 This first museum was supported by

the state and was used as an establishment for study in higher education, such as a

university is today. Some artefacts that were housed there included animal

components such as skins and elephant trunks, statues of great thinkers, and

instruments used in medical and astronomical studies.14

The temples of the Greeks and Romans, from around the third century

onwards, housed many items of value that were offerings to their Gods, such as

paintings, sculptures, valuable metal objects made out of bronze, silver and gold.15

These collections have been named as ‘Economic Hoard Collections,’ which were

primarily for subsistence and often the bounty from wars being won. Although this is

the case, Alma Wittlin, a distinguished historical museologist stated that the

functions of the collections within Greek temples were numerous. They indicated the

power behind joint purchasing, they promoted beauty, and the statues and other

godly oblations embodied their memories, national customs and ideas.16 The

difference between the Greeks and the Romans seems to have been through the

manner of collection. Where the Greeks collected through independent offerings,

Romans acquired theirs through war booty.

Following the Greeks and Romans, there was a period where museums as

they are currently understood vanished for many hundreds of years. It was not until

the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe that some form of them returned,

this time in private collections. They were a leisurely pastime, and according to G.

Ellis Burcaw, a well educated American museum director and professor of

anthropology, private collections brought to life two new words in the domain of

13


13 Edward P. Alexander and Mary Alexander, Museums in Motion: An Introduction to the History and Functions of Museums, 2nd ed. (Plymouth, U.K.: AltaMira Press, 2008), 3.

14 Edward P. Alexander and Mary Alexander, Museums in Motion, 2nd ed. 3-4.

15 Edward P. Alexander and Mary Alexander, Museums in Motion, 2nd ed. 7.

16 Alma S. Wittlin, Museums: In Search of a Usable Future, 4-5.

museums, which were “cabinets” or “Wunderkammers” as the Germans called

them.17 A cabinet, or Wunderkammer, “was usually a square-shaped room filled with

stuffed animals, botanical rarities, small works of art such as medallions or statuettes,

artefacts and curios.”18 For these collections there was considerable emphasis on the

merit of entertainment, as the artefacts would offer social prestige to their collectors.

In the late seventeenth century, there was a gradual trend towards museums

becoming public entities, with the first university museum, in Basel, Switzerland,

opening in 1671.19 Though this movement did not really take off until the later

eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Alma Wittlin saw the process of private

collections becoming part of or developing into public museums as societies’

acceptance of expanding human rights. This new public institution, called the

‘museum’, offered people with little or no literacy skills the chance to learn. The

museum demonstrated and encouraged a more educated way of life. According to

Alma Wittlin, it was the French Revolution of 1788-89 that led to the first public

museums in France, which in turn precipitated the move towards them in other

European countries. The most noteworthy museum in France would be the Louvre

museum in Paris, with its core collection from Francis I’s own palace at

Fontainebleau.20 It was Jean-Baptiste Colbert, who served as a politician and

Minister of Finances under the rule of King Louis XIV of France, who hoped to

redirect the king’s attention away from his private ‘pleasure house’ and towards the

training of contemporary artists through supplying them with fine artworks. While

the French royal collection was under the counsel of Colbert, the selection of exhibits

grew immensely.21

The British Museum in London, was the first public museum in the United

Kingdom, however, in comparison to a lot of other European countries the United

Kingdom had few royal collections that could be used to form the basis of a public

museum. It was Sir Hans Sloane, a successful Irish physician and avid collector, who

bequeathed his collection to his nation, which upon his death in 1753, amounted to

14




20 Alma S. Wittlin, Museums: In Search of a Usable Future, 81.


over 71,000 objects most of which were natural history artefacts, and these formed

the basis of the British Museum.22 Although Sloane’s wish was for the museum to be

for the enjoyment of the people, it was far from accessible for people from all walks

of life, and for quite some time children under the age of ten were not allowed to

visit.23 The first public museum in the United States of America was inspired by the

formation of the British Museum and was established in Charleston, South Carolina

in 1773, with its mission to preserve the natural and cultural history of Charleston

and the surrounding low-country. Although it was founded in the eighteenth century,

it was not until 1824 that it opened to the public.24

Following the first wave of public museums in the western world, came the

move towards museum specialisation, which became necessary due to the

overextension of museum staff and congestion in the museum spaces. Specialisation

differed from museum to museum, where some had a limitation on size and others

had a limitation on subject material. It was this latter constraint which became the

determiner of museum titles, such as Natural History Museum, Science and/or

Technology Museum or History Museum.25 Natural history museums are museums

that focus on the world of nature and have their exhibits showing topics such as

animals, flora and fauna, and their corresponding fossils, geology, and the climate.

The first public natural history museum was established at Oxford University in

1683, named the Ashmolean Museum after Elias Ashmole, a collector, amateur

scientist, and lawyer. Ashmole donated his collection to Oxford, but stipulated that

his collection must be housed separately in a custom-built museum.26 Museums of

science and technology are interested in artefacts like machinery, musical

instruments, items of warfare such as guns, swords and armor, artefacts of horology,

and “instruments devoted to mathematics, medicine, astronomy, chemistry, and

physics.”27 According to G. Ellis Burcaw, history museums in Canada and the United

15

22 “Sir Hans Sloane,” The British Museum, accessed 11 September 2014, http://www.britishmuseum.org/about_us/the_museums_story/sir_hans_sloane.aspx.


24 “About the Charleston Museum,” The Charleston Museum, accessed 12 September 2014, http://www.charlestonmuseum.org/about.


26 Edward P. Alexander, Museums in Motion, 42-43.


States were, and still are, mostly concerned with the history of each museum’s local

region.28 Though this is the case, Alma Wittlin positions national museums under the

same banner of history museums, therefore spreading the scope out to include whole

nations, cultures, and people. Before the First World War, countries in Europe were

building collections of treasures and symbols to show their past greatness as

independent kingdoms, or to display their attempts at political independence. Alma

Wittlin gives the example of the Austrian empire, where Hungary, Bohemia and

Rumania, fought for autonomy. Each of these regions started their own museum

collections in order to remind their citizens of their bygone legacy. By contrast, in

Germany nationalism led the way in museums, rather than regional museums

dominating.29

A Brief History of Museums in New Zealand with focus on the Otago Museum:

Although the ‘boom’ years, especially for local history museums, were

between the 1960s and 70s, the history of museums in New Zealand date back to the

1850s with the earliest museum, which is now known as the Auckland War Memorial

Museum, forming and beginning its collections in 1852. The basis of the collection

was at first intended to exhibit and conserve the arts, tools, and artefacts of New

Zealand indigenous people, Māori, but soon the collection was expanded to include

in particular the fauna and flora of the new country, as well as demonstrating and

reflecting the pākehā settlers’ own cultures.30 Next came the Colonial Museum,

opening in Wellington in 1865, which was started by Sir James Hector. The

museum’s name changed several times, in 1907 to the Dominion Museum, in 1972 to

the National Museum, and in 1992 to the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa

Tongarewa, as it is known today, though it was not till 1998 that the museum opened

as Te Papa.31 Following on from Wellington, came the establishment of the Otago

Museum in 1868. The first curator of the museum was Frederick Wollaston Hutton,

who had the unique significance of being closely affiliated with the establishment of

16


29 Alma S. Wittlin, Museums: In Search of a Usable Future, 122-123.

30 “About our collection,” Auckland Museum, accessed 11 September 2014, http://www.aucklandmuseum.com/collections-and-library/collections/about-our-collections.

31 “Our History,” Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, accessed 10 September 2014, http://www.tepapa.govt.nz/AboutUs/history/Pages/default.aspx.

not only the museum in Otago, but also the ones in Wellington and Christchurch.32

The last of the major cities’ museums to emerge was the Canterbury Museum in

1870, which was first directed by Sir Julius von Haast. It was known, and still is

today, for its natural and human history collections.33

The Otago Museum has seen eight directors and curators with varying

backgrounds, throughout its one hundred and forty-six years. The first three,

Frederick Hutton, Thomas Jeffery Parker and Professor William Benham were all

particularly interested in natural history. Hutton was a geologist, Parker a biologist

and Benham a scientist. The first New Zealand born leader at the Museum was

appointed in 1937. This was Henry Devenish Skinner, an anthropologist and an

ethnologist, and the first director to see the possibility in showing indigenous cultural

items as well as the natural.

Not only have the exhibitions changed both in what is displayed and in the

way it is displayed, but also the architecture of the museum has been redesigned and

restyled. For museums today, it is seen as important to keep their heritage, but also to

keep up with contemporary views on building design such as shape, form, layout and

composition. In 1874 the Otago Museum was under construction at its new site in

Great King Street with architect David Ross, as its designer. Constructed in a

classical Greek style with double Doric columns which in contrast to the Ionic and

Corinthian types, are simple and heavy in stature with no additional embossing such

as scrolls or acanthus leaves.34 Although Ross chose a simplistic style, it is still a

structure of wonder. Both exteriorly and interiorly the museum is almost an exhibit in

itself. According to Fleming, museum architects tend to think that the building is

more significant than what it holds.35 The Otago Museum has changed location once

and in its new position, it has grown considerably in size, with new wings being

added when the money was available and more room required. In 1937, there was

interest in expanding the museum by erecting a Biology Block, so that the Otago

17

32 A.H. McLintock, “Museums” in An Encyclopedia of New Zealand, vol. 2 (Wellington, N.Z.: R.E. Owen, Government Printer, 1966), 602.

33 “Our History,” Canterbury Museum, accessed 11 September 2014, http://www.canterburymuseum.com/about-us/our-history.

34 “Greek Temple Architecture,” Ancient Greece, accessed 26 June 2014, http://www.ancientgreece.com/s/Art/.

35 D. Fleming, “Positioning the Museum for Social Inclusion,” in Museums, Society, Inequality ed. R. Sandell (London: Routledge, 2002), 213.

University’s Zoology department could move out of the museum building, and also

constructing an auditorium. As well as expanding the building space, there was

interest in increasing the number of museum staff employed in the future, though the

explanation at the time for this not occurring when they wanted it to was that it

would only come to fruition when local bodies of Dunedin recognised the

“increasing contribution to education made by the museum.”36 Even though the

Otago Museum ultimately had to grow in size, (see figure 11), curators also had to be

creative with the space given, with an emphasis on being spatially aware, and it

continues to be this way with all museums. Creative not just in the parts that the

public view, but also in the stacks.

As the Otago Museum grew in its collections more space was needed and in

1910 the first wing was added, called the Hocken Wing, named after Thomas

Moreland Hocken. This space went on to house the basis of what is now the Hocken

Library Collection. In 1930, the building had another wing added, this one was

named after the particularly resourceful benefactor Willi Fels. Today this wing holds

the People of the World and the Tāngata Whenua Galleries. Another wing was added

in 1963 called the Centennial wing which now houses the Pacific Cultures and

Nature galleries. The latest additions to the museum happened in the 1990s and

2000s with the addition of the new Atrium, the gallery that presently holds Southern

Land, Southern People and the Tropical Butterfly Forest. The current building in its

entirety was classed as a Category 1 Historic Place by the Historic Places Trust at the

end of 2011.37

Material Culture, Exhibition and Display:

Museum exhibits, over the course of history, have changed dramatically,

especially in the way items are displayed, presented and the ambience that surrounds

them. Although there are museums that seem to be stuck completely in the past, there

is in most museums a drive to be always moving forward. It had been believed in the

past that objects spoke for themselves, and at times this is still regarded as true.

However, today, museums generally interpret and communicate the displays before

18

36 Otago Museum, Otago Museum: Annual Report for the Year 1937 (Dunedin, N.Z.: Crown Print Limited, 1937), 8-9.

37 “Otago Museum,” Heritage New Zealand, accessed 13 September 2014, http://www.heritage.org.nz/the-list/details/2203.

the opening of an exhibition to the public, giving form to the exhibits. Without

interpretation and communication, all that is left is presentation, which is often

referred to as ‘open storage’.38 In the past, the Otago Museum used this simple

display layout leaving any interpretation to the viewer’s imagination. See figure 7,

where cabinets filled with sets of different items filled the room: on the left are types

of butterflies; at the bottom right is a geographical mountain and glacier landscape;

on the far right are some Pacific Island items; and with the large Fin whale hanging

from above. There are only a few labels with the displays, meaning that

interpretation of the items was left to the public’s discretion. For a close up of how

particular items were displayed, see figures 3 and 4. Today placards are next to

nearly every object, usually describing the antiquarian paradigm behind the exhibits

or even culturally informing its viewers of the history of who used certain items and

what they would have done with them.

Collection arrangement often depended on museum type. In most

archaeological or ethnographic museums, collections and exhibits are displayed

according to cultural or geographical areas, such as the Otago Museum which has its

permanent display of the ‘Southern Land, Southern People’, which illustrates the

character of the region of southern New Zealand; and ‘Pacific Cultures’ which

displays exhibits all connected to the Pacific area and ways of life. Tim Flannery,

director of the Museum of South Australia, has been criticised for being a director

who prefers the old-style museum over the contemporary. Flannery presents his

exhibitions in an array of serial rankings of objects which is called a thematic

approach. The Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, also presents their collections according

to type. Jewellery, musical instruments, weapons, masks, tools, textiles are each put

in their own sections, rather than showing exhibits in the form of dioramas and

objects displayed in relation to their individual contexts of culture, society or

geography. The Otago Museum also has aspects of showing their collections this

way, with their exhibit of weaponry, but this is at a lower level of organisation. As a

whole it is not presented in this way. In general, today’s museums have come to a

point where the thoughts of the audience’s experiences are very important. Although

museums show items and offer understandings of the past, they must also keep up

with the latest innovations particularly with regard to digitisation, displays, and

19

38 David Dean, Museum Exhibition: Theory and Practice, (London: Routledge, 1994), 5.

visitor experience. How each museum shows their material to the public also

depends on the key values which they employ in their practices with objects. As

Witcomb explains, these values and practices characterise and categorise museums

as being either “elitist or popular, hierarchical or democratic, old and musty or new

and exciting, irrelevant or relevant to contemporary concerns.”39 Viewing the Otago

Museum through the primary sources left over from its history, and the collection of

contemporary views of its history, it is possible to see several transitions which link

into Witcomb’s ideas. Through the evolution of museums in general, there are few

museums today, if any, which only cater for the ruling elite.

Myrian Santos believes that to fully understand museum practices and the

history of them, is to consider two sorts of situations: “The recall of previously

experienced events and the reverence for inanimate things.”40 For the most part

national museums are not interested in exhibiting life stories of individual people

through objects, however some smaller museums are. Gathering material culture that

can stimulate memories of the past, such as everyday items from previous decades of

life, also songs and recordings of past sounds, and oral interviews. Within this

experience of prompting deep-set emotions at the sight of specific objects, museums

are able to be the connection between the past and the present.41 However, one

object, or collection of objects, may have intense meaning to one person and signify

absolutely nothing to another. As Gaynor Kavanagh suggests in his book Dream

Spaces: Memory and the Museum, to produce meaning, an emotional connection and

or a reaction to an object, things such as age, ethnicity, gender, profession, home

country, city or town, are all incredibly important.42

There is also the idea that traditionalist museums “kill” objects with their

static ideas and unwillingness to change. The lack of voice given to objects and the

belief that they will speak for themselves tends to be the force behind this thought.

Museums are now more commonly proactive, with the educational mission

20

39 Andrew Whitcomb, introduction to Re-imagining the Museum: Beyond the Mausoleum, ed. Andrea Whitcomb (London: Routledge, 2003), 1-2.

40 Myrian Sepúlveda dos Santos, “Museums and Memory: The Enchanted Modernity,” Journal for Cultural Research 7, no. 1 (2003): 32.

41 Myrian Sepúlveda dos Santos, “Museums and Memory,” 37.

42 Gaynor Kavanagh, Dream Spaces: Memory and the Museum (Strand, London: Leicester University Press, 2000).

becoming the primary focus of most exhibitions. In contrast to public education

systems, museums are open to all ages and intellectual abilities, and they are

considered institutions of the state, or country, that are as much for social leisure as

academic enlightenment.43 All exhibits should be explained in such a way that an

intelligent twelve year old would be able to understand its contents or what it is

wishing to portray.44

Most museums tend to have a storyline which some exhibits or sometimes all

of their collections follow in some way. The storyline provides a substructure to the

educational substance of an exhibition and attends to the design and production

provided by it. The storyline usually comprises of the collection objects, the titles,

sub-titles and text to go with the objects, a brief outline of the exhibition and an all-

inclusive researched narrative document.45 In 1889-90 when Thomas Jeffery Parker

was the curator of the Otago Museum, there was a big international exhibition where

in the space provided he painted a black line on the floor. This was to guide the

visitors around his collection, “so that if you were to follow the line and read all the

labels, by the end of it, if you had the patience, you would have a very good idea of

what the current thinking was on evolution.”46 In a way he was paying homage to the

way Victorians thought about things, as a progression, going from the smallest living

creature and working their way up through the amphibians, fish and reptiles, then the

mammals, and ending by looking at apes.47 Another thing that museums do is have

distinctive views or mottos on the past, the present, and the future. These often

represent the outlook each museum has, both on the collections they collect and

display and how they interact within the public sphere. An example of the Otago

Museum’s past but futuristic attitude is as follows:

From the chaos and conflict of today's society the Museum must build the collections that will tell us tomorrow who we are and how we got there. After all, that's what museums are all about.48

21

43 David Dean, Museum Exhibition: Theory and Practice (London: Routledge, 1994), 5-7.

44 Rosi Crane, interview by the author, Dunedin, New Zealand, 16 June 2014.

45 David Dean, Theory and Practice, 103.

46 Rosi Crane, interview.

47 Rosi Crane, interview.

48 Otago Museum pamphlet, undated, Henry Devenish Skinner papers, MS-1218/009, Hocken Collections, University of Otago, Dunedin.

Although this motto is not particularly individualistic, it is nevertheless quite all-

encompassing, it offers a structured view into how museums try to present society

systematically for the future generations.

It was from the 1940s-50s onwards that the process of decolonisation and

increased self-government in New Zealand and other settler nations such as

Australia, Canada and North America, saw developments in museums and museum

anthropological ethics. Christina Kreps offers a well-defined view on what

decolonisation means for Western museums. She says that it is an ongoing

progression of recognising both historical and colonial incidents in which

acquisitions were collected. It is disclosing long-founded Eurocentric ideals and

prejudices within the concepts, practices, and discourses within Western museums,

and it is also the activity of “transforming museums through sustained critical

analysis and concrete actions.”49

Ethically speaking, moral codes for museums are rather new entities. The first

of its kind was published by the American Association of Museums in 1925, called

the Code of Ethics for Museum Workers. The year of 1972 that saw the International

Council of Museums (ICOM) come together to discuss and argue that “museums

should become an integral part of societies around them.” But it took another

fourteen years for ICOM to develop and release the Code of Professional Ethics, in

1986, a code which museums around the world now live by.50 The nations of the

world which followed suit, but also wrote their own codes before ICOM’s

professional code, were New Zealand in 1977, Canada and Israel in 1979, Australia

in 1982, and the United Kingdom in 1983.51 The impetus of a code of ethics is to

increase the level of professional practice. This can be attained, within the museum

profession, by continuing and supporting the professional standing of the museum in

the community, and by reinforcing the duties and leadership of museums in society.52

22

49 Christina Kreps, “Changing the rules of the road: Post-colonialism and the new ethics of museum anthropology,” in The Routledge Companion to Museum Ethics: Redefining Ethics for the Twenty-First-Century Museum, ed. Janet Marstine (London: Routledge, 2011), 72.

50 Awareswar Galla, “Indigenous peoples, museums, and ethics,” in Museum Ethics ed. Gary Edson (London: Routledge, 1997), 143.

51 Gary Edson, “Ethics,” in Museum Ethics ed. Gary Edson (London: Routledge, 1997), 13-14.

52 Gary Edson, “Ethics,” 6.

In terms of ethics pertaining to indigenous peoples and their cultural items

being held in western museums, the first law of this kind was set up in 1989 and was

the National Museum of the American Indian Act (NMAIA). This piece of legislation

was the first federal law that attended to the repatriation of Native American human

remains and funerary objects. It was later amended in 1996 to include the restitution

of objects of both sacred and cultural value to Native American tribes.53 In New

Zealand the closest thing to the NMAIA that exists is at the Auckland Museum, with

the Auckland War Memorial Museum Amendment Act being set up in 1996, under

which the ‘Taumata ā Iwi’ was established.54 The Taumata a Iwi is a Māori

Committee made up of members from the Ngāti Whātua, Ngāti Pāoa and Tainui

tribes. The purpose of this committee is to give them the right to advise on all matters

of Māori protocol, it gives a partnership between two cultural entities, they get to

monitor the care of their taonga in the museum and to encourage repatriation, they

get to safeguard mana whenua and tapu items, and offer redress for past

misunderstandings.55 Paul Tapsell, a lecturer in Māori Studies at the University of

Otago has a background in three important spheres relating to this research topic: he

is an indigenous Māori community member; an academically trained museum

professional in museology; and a former museum office executive.56 Tying these

three experiences together, he offers a unique understanding of the Māori knowledge

system and the cross-cultural understandings within museum contexts. Within these

contexts he gives the perspective that museums may be seen as having changed their

ethical practices, but only on the surface. Underneath, things are still the same.57

Following this, one more museum ideal that should addressed, in questioning

what is a museum, is the history behind its collection practices. The differences being

that in the past, much collecting was done for private collections rather than for

23

53 Smithsonian Institution, Annual Report of the Repatriation Activities of the Smithsonian Institution (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 2012), 1.

54 Paul Tapsell, personal correspondence by the author, 4 August 2014.

55 “Taumata-ā-iwi,” Auckland Museum, accessed 7 August 2014, http://www.aucklandmuseum.com/about-us/corporate-information/taumata-a-iwi/governance-principles.

56 Paul Tapsell, ““Aroha mai: Whose museum?” The Rise of Indigenous Ethics Within Museum Contexts: A Māori-tribal Perspectives,” in The Routledge Companion to Museum Ethics: Redefining Ethics for the Twenty-First-Century Museum, ed. Janet Marstine (London: Routledge, 2011), 85.

57 Paul Tapsell, interview by the author, Dunedin, New Zealand, 19 June 2014. Tapsell will offer more insight in the third chapter on inventing identity and indigenous collections.

public entities such as museums. The change, according to Stephen Weil is in the

way of viewing the collection which leads onto how objects are collected. The

questions the collectors of private collections ask themselves are entirely different

from those who work in a museum. The private buyer asks himself whether the

object in question is “truly remarkable and intrinsically desirable.” Always has, and

always will. The museum collector however, considers how the object will be useful

to the institutional mission.58 In the past though, there was a certain fever amongst all

collectors in trying to get the best collection, effectively swapping out bits of their

collections in return for other objects, in order to gain some sort of god-like stance

against others in their field. This is not how things are done now, but private and

institutional collectors were the entrepreneurs of their time.

Museums and the Market:

Can, and do, museums really make a difference in society? Well, considering

this question, it is helpful to remember the three E’s: Entertainment, education and

experience. Today, museums are a great source of relaxed, unofficial education and/

or self-directed learning. Although a few old feathers may feel ruffled at the word

‘entertainment’, museums have and do provide just this. For the most part, those who

attend a museum are doing so as an enjoyable leisure-time venture.59 As early as the

1900s, it had become apparent that museums could offer more than just a learning

experience, and the museum building craze of the nineteenth century was in part a

response to the demand for “rational entertainment” by those who had increasing

leisure hours to fill, such as the rise of the middle classes.60 In 1907, the famed

anthropologist Franz Boaz said that the “value of the museum as a resort for popular

entertainment must not be underrated”, that healthy and thought-provoking leisure

time surroundings should be given every opportunity to develop and anything that

“counteracts the influence of the saloon and of the race-track is of great social

24

58 Stephen E. Weil, Making Museums Matter (Cooperstown, New York: Smithsonian Institution, 2002), 148.

59 Stephen E. Weil, Making Museums Matter, 64.

60 Jim Bennett, “Museums and the History of Science: Practitioner’s Postscript,” Isis 96, no. 4 (2005): 606.

importance.”61 While the museum at its core wishes to educate and enlighten those

willing to explore its corridors and galleries, many visitors are searching for and

expecting to find the ‘wow-factor’, to be impressed and to admire something

outlandish, examples of which most museums provide in order to have a standing

within society and to attract more visitors. A particular example of this is the moa set

up at the Otago Museum.

Museums are considered good and worthwhile as a visitor destination when

they can offer strong collections in a range of cultures, topics, artists, taxidermic

animals, fossils or whatever the museum may specialise in. However, the items that

were often chosen to be the impressive central feature of a museum exhibit or

collection were frequently from other countries and/or cultures. Each item must

come with its own paper trail history of where it was from, who donated it and

consent of purchase. For example, the Otago Museum holds an Egyptian mummy

from 1894, donated by Bendix Hallenstein, a well-known merchant, statesman and

manufacturer in Dunedin, New Zealand. It was first questioned where he got it from,

and whether it was through legal means. In this case there was proof given that

Hallenstein’s transaction was valid and that he had purchased the mummy from a

German consular agent M. Tudor, in Luxor, Egypt.62 The Egyptian mummy also

provided the Otago Museum with an item that produced that ‘wow’ factor.

Everything to do with the running of museums and museology in general is

concerned with the human race, so understanding the nature of human learning and

reminiscence is a vital tool in deciding what material to exhibit and how to exhibit

it.63 People think of museums as places filled with objects, but often, in reality they

are places of ideas. Expanding on this, once something is in existence or has been

created, it is certain that people in general will have thoughts, feelings and ideas

about these items. However, depending on their background, their past learning

experiences, and their own philosophies on life, each person can have different ideas

on the items, and this is how we as human beings interact. In the context of a

museum, displaying objects, as museums are expected to do, can create dissension.

25

62 Bendix Hallenstein to the Otago Museum, 14 February 1894, Otago Museum records, MS-2785/001, Hocken Collections, University of Otago, Dunedin.

63 David Dean, Theory and Practice, 19.

As William Boyd explains, sometimes “the simple display of an object can be

controversial. When exhibits go beyond the “wonder” of the object standing alone

and are designed to inform and stimulate visitor learning, they consciously invite

controversy.”64 Museums are also seen as sources of recollection and reflection. The

objects and stories contained in them are not just capricious creations but are social

reconstructions containing components of past events.

For most museums and art galleries, it is necessary to be both lenders and

borrowers. As well as short-term and long-term collections, there are touring

exhibitions, where the collection may come from one country and tour through all

the main museums of the another. A museum loan collection is of value because:

Loans of objects, artworks, and taonga are an essential part of the business of cultural heritage organisations. For lenders, loans help increase access to their collections. For borrowers, loans enhance the experience their organisation offers visitors.65

The first international touring exhibition occurred in the 1930s between Portugal and

Italy, as a result of their colonial ambitions which led to an international art

exhibition, featuring the national pieces from both countries.66 Touring, or travelling,

exhibitions can be incredibly expensive, which is why the museums and galleries

that join in on the displaying of the items, contribute to the overall cost of the tour.

This makes them a lot more cost efficient. These exhibitions offer collaborations

between institutions where one museum may hold half a collection pertaining to a

particular topic, and another museum the other half. They provide new notions and

breathing room for institutions that have space for exhibitions but a deficiency in

permanent collections. The Otago Museum was quick to be a part of the circulating

loan collections. 1937 saw several loan collections come through. The first series

was a collection of New Caledonian ethnographic material, mostly containing items

made from nephrite. Nephrite being a hard, pale green or white mineral which is one

of the forms of jade, made up of a silicate of calcium and magnesium. It was

organised and financed by the New Zealand Advisory Committee of the Carnegie

26

64 William L. Boyd, “Museums as Centres of Controversy,” Daedalus 128, no. 3 (1999): 185.

65 “Managing Loans,” He Rauemi Resource Guide 23, 2nd ed., Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, accessed 13 August 2014, http://www.tepapa.govt.nz/SiteCollectionDocuments/NationalServices/Resources/ResourceGuides/ManagingLoansHeRauemiResourceGuide.pdf, 2.

66 Rebecca Amsellem, “Museum & Mobility: Case Study on International Touring Exhibitions,” 2013, accessed 1 July 2014, http://interartive.org/2014/05/museum-mobility-amsellem/.

Corporation. The museum designed cards to relate the material from New Caledonia

to the Māori items made from nephrite, in particular nephrite adzes, maces and beads

and to describe differences between them.67 The next loan collection was an

exhibition of Chinese Art called Chinese Art including many Examples from Famous

Collections, Exhibited in New Zealand, 1937, this one was organised and funded by

Captain George Humphreys-Davies. Humphreys-Davies was known for his broad

and encompassing knowledge on Eastern Art, and he was appointed honorary curator

of the Oriental Collections at the Auckland War Museum in 1937.68 According to the

Otago Museum, loan collections were already giving good results in the “direction of

making the New Zealand museum movement […] conscious of its own existence”

and the influence of the loan scheme strengthened relations between the museums of

New Zealand.69

According to Gary Edson, the director of a museum training program at Texas

Tech University and the executive director of the university museum there, many

people, not individually specified by Edson, have queried the significance of

museums and have anticipated an end to their functionality. Following this there has

been a growing interest in the commercialisation of museums which tends to polarise

opinion, with some people strongly for and others equally strongly opposed to the

idea. Some see it as the most viable option for the survival of museums,

recommending a more business-like attitude.70 This view can be seen in the history

of the Otago Museum. The director previous to the current one was Shimrath Paul,

who was the one who installed the science centre ‘Discovery World’ and the Tropical

Forest Butterfly Experience in 1990 and 2007 respectively. Although these ideas

have brought a more modern and popular spin to museums, some feel that this

commercialisation may be inconsistent with the museum’s traditional roles of

preservation, research and the interpretation of natural and cultural heritage

27

67 Otago Museum: Annual Report for the Year 1937, 7.

68 David Bell, “Ukiyo-e in New Zealand,” New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 10, no.1 (2008): 35.


70 Gary Edson, “Ethics as a code,” 107.

material.71 As the world continually changes and is altered by an assortment of

activities, international scrutiny is focused in on both the scientific and cultural

heritage of the world community. As this happens, in agreement with Gary Edson,

“museums can serve a primary role in stimulating a new sociological awareness by

encouraging more coherent thinking and a broader vision of humankind and the

environment.”72

However, commercialisation may not be the answer. For instance the 9/11

Museum Memorial in New York City, is a type of museum which makes a pay-as-

you-enter fee for viewing the exhibits. Although it is free for those with special

consideration, such as those who lost someone in the attacks, the general admission

fee for an adult is US$24. An array of opinions have been given on the seemingly

profit-oriented exhibition from “beautiful” and “I think they did a good job,” to

“ridiculous” (concerning the entry fee), “too cold and steel-like inside,” “my only

concern is the $24. The museum should not be making money. Any money made

should go to the families.” Many could not ignore the commercialisation, from the

hefty admission fee to the gift shop selling coffee-mug souvenirs.73 Even though this

is the case, people not only come to museums with the desire to educate themselves

but some come with a longing, a yearning for the past. Museums try to encompass

this wistfulness and sentimentality, and sometimes they show collections and

exhibits that may be upsetting for some people, some cultures, and some whole

countries. However, according to David Lowenthal, Professor of Geography at the

University College London with a background in history, political science, landscape

architecture and environmental psychology, “Nostalgia is today the universal

catchword for looking back,” and museums are using this concept to attract the

public’s attention, some museums even profiting from this reminiscence, all the more

28

71 Jonathan Sweet, “Museum Architecture and visitor experience,” in Museum Marketing: Competing in the Global Marketplace, ed. Ruth Rentschler and Anne-Marie Hede (Burlington, M.A.: Elsevier Ltd, 2007), 226.

72 Gary Edson, “Ethics as a code,” 107.

73 Maria Alvarez, “9/11 Museum visitors critical of entry fee, commercialization,” am New York, 21 May 2014, accessed 9 August 2014, http://www.amny.com/news/9-11-museum-visitors-critical-of-entry-fee-commercialization-1.8125107.

so now with the incorporation of everyday items of the past into museum

collections.74

It seems there is something about our nature as humans that makes us want to

collect things, whether by serendipity or intention. Photographs, newspaper

clippings, shoes, stamps, books, fossils. If something exists, almost certainly

someone will collect it. For each item that to a certain person is a precious treasure,

there will be others who consider it worthless and of no interest at all. What

museums have the task of doing is objectively determining the merit of a collection,

in respect to the future and whether the public of the future will find the items worthy

and of value in understanding the past.75 To conclude this chapter as it began, what is

a museum? It is a network. A network of meaningful, educational, cultural and

socially viable objects and histories that bring people together as a community, as a

country, and as a people.

29

74 David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 4.

75 Gary Edson, “Ethics and the museum community,” in Museum Ethics ed. Gary Edson (London: Routledge, 1997), 95.

Chapter Two:

‘The Founding Father’ of New Zealand Anthropology: H.D. Skinner’s years at

the Otago Museum

‘Curator’ was the name given to the head of the museum before the term

‘director’ was used, and curator is precisely what H.D. Skinner became in the year of

1937. Although this was the year that Skinner officially took over the leadership of

the Otago Museum, his interest and work there started long before this time. To

many Henry Devenish Skinner was known as Harry or as HD, never really as Henry.

He was born in New Plymouth in 1886 to Margaret Bracken, née Devenish, and

William Henry Skinner. It could be said that Skinner’s interest in Māori culture,

objects and anthropology in general came from his father, who was an ardent

collector of Māori artefacts. A surveyor by trade, Skinner’s father worked for the

Crown Lands Department. He was also a founding member of the Polynesian

Society and wrote extensively on colonial history and Māori ethnology. As a boy, HD

would join his father in his avid search for Māori curios on Taranaki beaches.

Apart from his early familial education into other cultures and their artefacts,

Skinner was also interested in the military which saw him enroll in the Cadet Corps

first in New Plymouth and later in Nelson, aged eleven and sixteen respectively, and

later still enlisting in both World Wars. At first, Skinner studied law for three years at

Victoria College, but his interest in it as a profession was never really sparked.

Although law was not to be Skinner’s life vocation, he made at least one important

acquaintance, Eva Louisa Gibbs, who would later become Skinner’s wife. According

to Atholl Anderson, a well known New Zealander, anthropologist and historian, the

Gibbs family decision to move to Dunedin, may also have been the reason Skinner

chose to go to Dunedin to study a Bachelor of Arts at the University of Otago.1 As

Anthropology was not offered, and would continue to be a non-existent area of study

and research until HD Skinner himself was appointed as a lecturer in 1918, Zoology

became his favoured topic, along with studying Classics. He graduated two years

30

1 Atholl Anderson, “Henry Devenish Skinner,” in The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography 1921-1940 vol.4, (Auckland, N.Z.: Auckland University Press, 1998), 479.

later, in 1912.2 At the end of this year he was subsequently asked to take interim

charge of the museum during the absence of the Head Curator, Professor William

Benham, when he returned to England temporarily.3

After this time Skinner enlisted in World War I and fought at Gallipoli where

he was twice wounded, with a both a leg and head injury. His strength of mind,

character and enthusiasm could be said to have shown through in his act of bravery

here, where he volunteered to take a message back to base, injured as he was, even

though this necessitated crossing a very active battleground. In late 1915 he was

discharged from the army with distinguished war service. Eva Gibbs joined him in

England in 1916, and they were united in matrimony that December. Before heading

back home, Skinner commenced anthropological studies under Alfred Cort Haddon,

who was the world’s specialist in oceanic ethnology at the time, at Cambridge

University.4 Skinner’s research was concerned with the evolution of Māori art.

Following his graduation, Skinner and his wife moved back to New Zealand,

where they took up residence in Dunedin subsequent to being appointed the Assistant

Curator of the Otago Museum and the Head of the Ethnology Department at the

University of Otago, in December 1918. At this time there was trouble with staffing,

so Skinner also took on the additional responsibilities of Hocken Librarian and as a

lecturer in the Anthropological department on top of his curatorial duties.5 It is

important to note that Skinner was the first lecturer of Anthropology in the whole of

Australasia. During this time Skinner published a monograph called The Morioris of

Chatham Islands in 1923. His wife Eva drew most of the pictures for it, and through

his research, Skinner was able to discard the ‘Maruiwi’ explanation of Moriori and

Māori origins.6 This explanation released both the study of archaeology and

31

2 Dmitri Anson, “Henry Devenish Skinner (1186-1978),” in Southern People: A Dictionary of Otago Southland Biography, ed. Jane Thomson (Dunedin, N.Z.: Longacre Press, Dunedin City Council, 1998), 459.

3 H.D. Skinner, Notes of Address at Conversazione (Association of Friends of the Museum: Some Historical Notes), 30 November 1952, Henry Devenish Skinner papers, MS-1218/010, Hocken Collections, University of Otago, Dunedin, 3.

4 Atholl Anderson, “Henry Devenish Skinner,” 479.

5 Angus Ross, Proposed Minute for Annual Report of Otago Museum on the Retirement of Dr. H.D. Skinner as Director, 1953, Professor Angus Ross papers, MS-2721/012, Hocken Collections, University of Otago, Dunedin, unpaged.

6 H.D. Skinner, The Morioris of the Chatham Islands (Honolulu, Hawaii: Bernice P. Bishop Museum, 1923.

ethnology from relying on established traditionalistic arguments. Skinner’s views

were conflicting with older scholars’ work such as that of Johannes Andersen and

Eldson Best, both of whom did not support Skinner’s ideas.7 It would later be

announced in Skinner’s book Comparatively Speaking, that he believed that Māori

culture was not actually formed in Oceania, rather it had its origins in Cambodia.8

This book is made up of a series of essays, not necessarily indicative of all of

Skinner’s work, rather just a collection of papers that he wished to be brought

together.9 It was published as a tribute to Skinner for his influence on anthropological

studies, in addition to his hard work and prestige during his time as head of the

Otago Museum.

It was in 1937 that he was appointed the (Head) Curator of the Museum, after

many years of developing an astonishing ethnographical collection there. During

Skinner’s years, the title of the “Head Curator” changed to “Director.” As director of

the museum, Skinner was in charge of arranging, securing and displaying exhibits.

According to Angus Ross, a distinguished New Zealand scholar, these exhibits won

much high praise from both British and American officials who visited Dunedin

during Skinner’s reign at the museum.10 During his first year at the Otago Museum,

he published a fully illustrated paper called “Maori Use of the Harpoon” in the

Journal of the Polynesian Society. The year was 1937. Around this time, there was a

lot of ethnological and anthropological information still to be found or investigated.

This led researchers to form sometimes questionable conclusions from incomplete

information. Researchers also concluded their findings by sharing explanations and

answers between other academics and various people interested in analysing similar

interests, as is still done to some extent by academics today. In the case of this paper

on harpoons, Skinner used work done by Elsdon Best to provide backing for his

claim that although there are no references to Māori using harpoons in pre-European

times, there are a number of harpoon points in collections, from which Skinner

implies that the harpoon was in fact used. In particular, there is the existence and use

32


8 J.G., “Pathfinder,” The Auckland Star, 1975, John McIndoe Limited records, MS-3187/127, Hocken Collections, University of Otago, Dunedin.

9 Peter Gathercole, introduction to Comparatively Speaking by H.D. Skinner (Dunedin, N.Z.: University of Otago Press, 1974), 11.

10 Angus Ross, “Retirement of Dr. H.D. Skinner as Director,” 1953.

of harpoon points that differ from those thought to be used in spearing birds. These,

Skinner says are “much stouter than bird-spear points.” They were also stouter than

the ones he had hesitantly classified as flounder-spear points in the Otago Museum.

He also provisionally said that these spear-points could have been used for

harpooning sharks, again using Elsdon Best’s research, even though there is only one

reference of this happening.11

By 1951, after heading the museum for fourteen years and being involved for

over thirty years, Skinner was able to report that, “the museum was richer by more

than 100,000 acquisitions since 1919.”12 Skinner’s influence on the museum, and its

collections, became increasingly evident.

In an address that Skinner gave in 1953, he said that the reason they show

mounted taxidermic animals is so that the museum can demonstrate truths directly to

the eye, not just through words, and that this went for all of the other objects too. The

whole point of a museum being to be able to show visual objects is to obtain a first

hand visual experience of what we could essentially read about in books. At this

time, it appears that for those who were sight impaired who wished to learn, they

could do so by touching, not just the taxidermic animals but also the tools and

weapons, plants, minerals and textiles. Skinner wanted to offer a new way of

learning.

When I went to school this visual side of education wasn’t stressed at all, and I learned about wolves and lions from reading about them and then memorising words from the printed page supplemented with pictures.13

In 1947, while Skinner was director of the Otago Museum the Art Galleries

and Museums Association of New Zealand (AGMANZ) was established. The

reasons behind the establishment of this organisation were to lift the standard of

services given by museums; to urge the spread of knowledge of museum activities

and skills; to raise the social positions, proficiency, and salaries of the staff; and to

organise programs of instruction and conventions on museum matters, some of

33

11 H.D. Skinner, “Maori Use of the Harpoon,” The Journal of the Polynesian Society 46, no. 182 (1937): 63-64.


13 Address by H.D. Skinner, 1953, Henry Devenish Skinner papers, MS-1218/010, Hocken Collections, University of Otago, Dunedin, 1.

which Skinner himself advocated for.14 In the same year, the Otago Museum

Committee was also founded, to assist with the control of the institution. At the time

the museum was under the control of the Council of the University of Otago,

resulting in the museum staff having the feeling that they did not have a voice. The

committee consisted of representatives of various bodies and two co-opted

members.15

Skinner’s collection practices have been called ‘under the table’ deals, not

quite legal or ethical by today’s standards, and with the use of his smooth vocabulary

and sweet words, he was able to encourage the donation of items from family

collections, private collections, and other museums, which may have otherwise

stayed where they were. It is clear that Skinner wished to have the largest, and most

vibrant collection of curios from around the world housed at the Otago Museum,

with particular focus on Māori and Pacific items. Over the length and breadth of

Skinner’s work inside and outside the museum environment, much opinion has been

voiced about his collection practices. According to Ian Griffin, the current Otago

Museum director, Skinner could be likened to a man called Del Boy Trotter, from a

UK television series called Only Fools and Horses, the type of character that, “you

know is dodgy, ducking and weaving, doing deals all over the place.” Even though

Skinner was a lot more refined than Trotter, it was in a sense, exactly what he was

doing.16

The golden age of the museum was also around the time of Skinner’s

directorship, this being seen through Skinner’s letters and his search for the next big

acquisition for the museum. Griffin thinks that this was due to a combination of

Skinner’s willingness to engage with external organisations and to effectively swap

treasures he had already stored in the Otago Museum, for other treasures around the

world. Moa bones being particular useful in this regard. Of course this is not how

museums work today. Skinner lived in a very different era of museology. Griffin

believes that Skinner was a very innovative and entrepreneurial man, especially

when it came to collecting items for the Otago Museum’s collection. He was

34

14 A.H. McLintock, “Museums” in An Encyclopedia of New Zealand, vol. 2 (Wellington, N.Z.: R.E. Owen, Government Printer, 1966), 604.

15 H. Chapman, Registrar to Mr. Charles Brasch, 20 November 1947, Charles Brasch literary and personal papers, MS-0996-003/024, Hocken Collections, University of Otago, Dunedin.


someone who was able to think outside the box. An example of this which Griffin

gave, was the story of Parkin Christian, the mayor of Pitcairn Island, who could not

afford to send his son to college. In order to do so, Christian was willing to

effectively sell bits of the Bounty off to the museums in New Zealand. This Bounty

is the actual HMS Bounty which was mutineered in 1789, the Christian family

having possession of remnants of the ship. Parkin Christian wrote to every museum

director in the country, and only Skinner realised the value of having a part of the

HMS Bounty in his collection. All other directors declined. Skinner was thinking,

with his visionary attitude, about the future, the future of the collection, thinking

about what may be relevant in the time ahead.17

According to Fiona Cameron, Skinner’s examination of Māori culture and

material was entirely a conclusion of historical construction, rather than the truth.18

Due to Skinner’s study in Cambridge, the majority of his research used assemblages,

an example of this involved the mapping of different Māori regional culture areas in

New Zealand. A culture area being “a geographical region within the bounds of

which all groups of inhabitants show strong family resemblance.”19 Cameron is of

the opinion that through Skinner’s assemblages of locality collections and culture

traits, he has recreated Māori lifestyles in accordance to social evolutionary

principles, in other words Social Darwinism, which was a large part of the American

Historical School of which Skinner became familiar.20 The paper on “Culture Areas

in New Zealand” as found in Skinner’s book Comparatively Speaking, is based on

the works of Haddon, in 1916, his idea of “cultural regions”, and of Wissler, in 1917,

with his “cultural areas.” This paper, according to Sidney M. Mead, a New Zealand

anthropologist, historian and prominent Māori leader, became the constitution for the

arrangement and administration of objects and collections in the Otago Museum,

35


18 Fiona Ruth Cameron, “From “Dead Things” to Immutable, Combinable Mobiles: H.D. Skinner, the Otago Museum and University and the Governance of Māori Populations,” History and Anthropology 25, no.2 (2014): 212.

19 Henry Devenish Skinner, Comparatively Speaking: Studies in Pacific Material Culture 1921-1972, (Dunedin, N.Z.: University of Otago Press, 1974), 19.

20 Fiona Ruth Cameron, “From “Dead Things”,” 209.

which Skinner completely reorganised with a rare sort of passion, when he took over

from William Benham.21

In 1923, Apirana Ngata established the Māori Ethnological Research Board

and the Māori Purposes Fund Board of which Skinner and his father were members,

along with other anthropological and ethnological figures interested in native culture,

such as Te Rangi Hiroa, otherwise known as Sir Peter Buck. The board aimed to

promote the study of Māori culture, traditions and language and to publish works on

these subjects. Cameron however sees Skinner’s membership of this board as in

opposition to the other members due to his epistemological position.22 Skinner

believed that the Māori past could be most accurately reconstructed by material

culture and through archaeological fieldwork, rather than by considering the input of

living Māori graduates and information passed down through oral histories, as some

other board members were interested in researching and publishing. Te Rangi Hiroa

was of a similar mind to Skinner in this instance, saying that intangible things such

as stories and facts given by word of mouth will have changed over time from their

original oral text, whereas finding a skeleton in its resting place, encircled by burial

items, tells more truth. Material objects are the best sources of evidence when

reconstructing the history of the past.23

In 1926, Skinner founded the Association of Friends of the Otago Museum in

order to forge closer relationships with the wealthy citizens of the surrounding Otago

area. The association at the Otago Museum was the first of its kind in New Zealand,

though in the present day such organisations are much more prevalent. The growth of

the anthropological collections, according to Skinner, was due to several different

factors, but one of the main ones being help from the friends association of the

museum.24 The association helped convey many of Skinner’s, and other staff

members’ enthusiasms and efforts to the general public, and also helped with public

relations.

36

21 Sidney M. Mead, review of Comparatively Speaking: Studies in Pacific Material Culture 1921-1972, by Henry Devenish Skinner, The Journal of the Polynesian Society 85, no. 3 (1976): 426.

22 Fiona Ruth Cameron, “From “Dead Things”,” 213.

23 Te Rangi Hiroa, The Coming of the Maori (Wellington, N.Z.: Department of Internal Affairs, 1949), 2.

24 H.D. Skinner, Notes of Address at Conversazione, 4.

At the beginning of Skinner’s leadership in 1937, a collecting box was set up

for donations from the public, in order to help with the running of the museum. It

was started in June, and at the end of the year the money was collected. Three

pounds, fourteen shillings and three pence, was the grand total. Although this was a

relatively small sum, somehow Skinner was able to carefully spend it and supply all

the paint, varnish, paper, and other materials, apart from the timber, for all the

replacements and improvements he thought needed to be done. These included the

repainting and rearranging of cases containing Japanese, Tibetan, and Indian

material, the cleaning and repainting of the cases in the mammalian and other animal

galleries, the main gallery was vanished and painted, and also tickets, diagrams,

maps and cards were replaced. With today’s exchange rate, the total would have

amounted to about one hundred pounds, or two hundred dollars, and Skinner would

have been able to replace the borer-infected wood from the store rooms and cases, far

quicker and with more ease.25 In 1937 the Dunedin City Council increased its

financial support for the museum, when it was “realised that the Museum … [was]

capable of performing functions which … [were] very highly desirable - in fact,

essential - in the life of a modern city.”26

Throughout the length and breadth of Skinner’s directorship there was the

move to be more accommodating of all ages and educational abilities. See figures 5

[class 1] and 6 [class 2]. In the Class Group 1 figure, the teacher gestures to the

structure and koru designs of the wharenui whilst they touch and try using a range of

adzes and other Māori tools. In the Class Group 2 figure, the teacher points and

teaches while his students have a go with a Māori cord drill, otherwise known as a

tuwiri or a porotiti. In 1938, one such drill was found with the puzzled belief that it

was actually a spool for strands of fiber such as flax or wool, but the problem was

elucidated by W. E. Goffe, who was at the time the purchasing officer in the Native

Lands Department.27 In 1938, the Gisborne Times covered the story, describing how

the parts worked together as one, and how to use the drill. The shaft needs to be

37

25 Otago Museum, Otago Museum: Annual Report for the Year 1937 (Dunedin, N.Z.: Crown Print Limited, 1937), 7-8.

26 “Visual Education: The Part of Museums - Tremendous Scope. Address by Mr H.D. Skinner,” Otago Daily Times, December 1937, in ‘Clippings Book volume 1,’ David Teviotdale Papers, MS-3994/002, Hocken Collections, University of Otago, Dunedin.

27 Notes and Queries: “The “Reel” or “Spool” in Maori Material Culture,” The Journal of the Polynesian Society 43, no. 170 (1934): 130.

turned round a few times, which causes the two cords secured to its upper part to be

wound around the shaft. The operator grasps a cord in each hand and pulls them

downward and outward, in a reciprocal motion.28 Another educational scheme, was

the “Museum Arts and Crafts Club for Children.” The objective of said club was to

gain children’s interest in the museum and also to uncover any aptitude which may

lead to a professional career in the museum realm. In other words, sowing the seeds

of interest while they were young.29 It was Skinner who developed the job of

‘educational officer’ and he employed Mr. G. D. Anderson. As Skinner said in the

Annual Report of 1937:

His appointment inaugurates systematic work in a field which is of very great importance to the museum, and one in which important developments will take place in the near future.30

The duties of the educational officer were twofold. Anderson would teach

kindergarten, primary and secondary school children on rotation through the use of

lantern slides, moving films and material from the collections. Anderson was also

expected to circulate various small standardised assortments of items among the

schools of Dunedin City and then later the rest of Otago as well, so that schools

could educate their children in a much more interesting and comprehensive way. The

museum wished to work among the children first and foremost through the sense of

sight, and through touch secondarily.31

As well as having an ever growing interest in educating others about the

world’s different cultures, particularly those in our own backyard, Skinner also

participated in and directed an expanding course of archaeological research “aimed

at recording New Zealand prehistory and preserving for later scientific study Māori

artefacts found during excavations.”32 Skinner himself was not particularly interested

in doing the archaeological excavations and would instead assign or encourage

38

28 “Working the Drill: Mystery Solved - Strange Maori Article,” Gisborne Times, 16 June 1938, in ‘Clippings Book volume 1,’ David Teviotdale Papers, MS-3994/002, Hocken Collections, University of Otago, Dunedin.

29 Otago Museum, “Museum Arts and Crafts Club for Children,” in Museum Management Committee Minutes 1930-50, Otago Museum Records, MS-2786/010, Hocken Collections, University of Otago, Dunedin, unpaged.


31 “Visual Education: The Part of Museums – Tremendous Scope.”

32 Dmitri Anson, “Henry Devenish Skinner (1186-1978),” 459.

others to do it for him, for instance Leslie Lockerbie and David Teviotdale, to whom

Skinner later designated positions at the Otago Museum in 1947 and 1929

respectively.33 Not long after Skinner became director, a German-born collector by

the name of Willi Fels became a major benefactor to the Otago Museum. One of

Skinner’s many qualities was being able to charm people into donating to the

museum. Fels was a valuable resource and friend to Skinner, and together they built

up large collections of Oriental and European fine arts, Māori and Pacific ethnology

and archaeology, and Middle Eastern and Eastern Mediterranean antiquities, from a

near absent base of material.34 Ian Griffin imagines that Skinner would not have been

particularly interested in engaging with the average member of the public, but would

like to think that he was a “great conversationalist over dinner” and a great speaker.

It is evident at least that he was a well versed man, and was able to speak eloquently

whilst giving a lecture of being interviewed. At the time of Skinner, the principal role

of the museum was to support the university as a teaching institution, with the public

being more of an afterthought. Nowadays, museums in general have become much

more publicly centered.35

At the end of Benham’s time and at the beginning of Skinner’s curatorship in

1937, the first series of loan collections which were financed and organised by the

New Zealand Advisory Committee of the Carnegie Corporation started to circulate

the country. Loan exhibits were sent around New Zealand, spending approximately

six weeks at each museum. The original collection that the Otago Museum received

was a series of New Caledonian ethnographic pieces, while the second focussed on

the technique of Māori finger-weaving.36 In November 1937, the public of Dunedin

were able to inspect a loan exhibit focused on a masterful depiction of the art of

Māori tattooing. This particular collection received from the Napier museum, was of

Major-general Horatio Gordon Robley’s drawings of Māori moko.37 The loan

collections scheme resulted in allowing the museums of New Zealand to connect and

39


34 Dmitri Anson, “Henry Devenish Skinner (1186-1978),” 459.



37 “Otago Museum: Latest Acquisitions – Interesting Maori Pieces,” Otago Daily Times, 15 November 1937, in “Clippings Book volume 1,” David Teviotdale Papers, MS-3994/002, Hocken Collections, University of Otago, Dunedin.

participate at a national level and made the museum movement aware of its own

existence. During Skinner’s directorship, he was often hoping for more staff to be

employed at the museum, though it all depended on the annual financial contribution

of local bodies. He considered that an increase in contribution would happen once

the local bodies realised how big an input into local education the museum made.

Skinner believed that this realisation would come about with good publicity of the

museum, so he placed the promoting and advertising side of museum organisation in

the hands of a publicity officer.38 In 1952, the three metropolitan councils and their

museums to the north of the Otago Museum, that is the Canterbury Museum, the

Wellington Museum, then known as the Dominion, and the Auckland Museum, had

all recognised the importance of the local museum and each was supported by rates

and or taxation. Skinner concluded that it was most unfair that there were only two

paid staff at the Otago Museum, whereas there were eight in Christchurch, ten in

Wellington, and thirteen in Auckland.39

Although Skinner was highly educated and qualified in what he was doing at

the Otago Museum, not everyone was pleased with his techniques of presenting

items and identities in the museum, particularly indigenous ones. Skinner’s friend

and acquaintance Te Rangi Hiroa, or Sir Peter Buck as he was better known, disliked

Skinner’s thoughts and ideas of shaping Māori culture, history, and identity by means

of describing material artefacts. These thoughts were expressed quite early on in

Skinner’s time at the Otago Museum, at least before his eventual directorship. “The

bald description of Museum objects leaves me cold, such as Skinner’s delights with

his amulets… [Material culture is] somewhat of a drudgery to describe but remains

dead unless it is woven into the living culture of the people.”40 This was stated in

1929, before the addition of dioramas containing indigenous cultures in museum

exhibits. The topic of inventing identities and the death of identities through material

collections will be further explored in the next chapter.

40


39 H.D. Skinner, Notes of Address at Conversazione, 6.

40 Peter Buck, Letter from Rangihiroa Peter Buck to Tarawhai from Rarotonga, 14 October 1929, MS Papers, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, in Fiona Ruth Cameron, “From “Dead Things” to Immutable, Combinable Mobiles: H.D. Skinner, the Otago Museum and University and the Governance of Māori Populations,” History and Anthropology 25, no. 2 (2014): 209.

Acquisitions to the Otago Museum during Skinner’s reign were largely

Polynesian and Māori items and Skinner recognised early on the importance of

expanding these collections. He encouraged the numerous collectors, whose previous

activities were largely undirected, to prioritise on these particular facets of ethnology.

Skinner wished for as much documented evidence as possible to be given about each

item found, most importantly its location, so that there would be information about

the artefacts when put on display either in the Otago Museum or in a loan collection.

In 1937, when Skinner took the reigns of the museum, the Māori and Pacific

anthropological collection had about one thousand items to its name. On his

retirement, there were more than seventy-thousand items in the collection.41 In 1940,

one of the sections of the Otago Museum that visitors in general enjoyed, according

to a journalist from the Otago Daily Times, was the display which illustrated the life

of the Māori, in particular the display of pounamu, a variety of jade “recognised by

the pākehā under the unimaginative name of greenstone.”42 At first, visitors were

unable to fully appreciate the beautiful green coloured stone as museums had always

put objects in cases, lying flat down. With new innovative thinking, a new method

was engineered and used on a collection of hei-tiki at the Otago Museum with

splendid results. Rather than simply lying the artefacts down, they were hung or

propped up on a vertical sheet of glass, which enabled visitors to fully experience the

allure and translucency of the stones. As well as this new method, supplementary

cards went along with the exhibits. These cards explained the series, where each

piece was found, the relationship between Māori tiki and other amulets with similar

items from different areas of Polynesia, according to Anthropological thought at the

time, and also explained the techniques used in the working of greenstone.43

In 1953, it was suggested that Skinner consider retiring as he would have

turned sixty-seven that year. However, he wished to stay on to finish the

ethnographic work, that he had been working on part-time at the museum, before he

retired and passed his directorship onto someone else. He wanted to leave his work

41

41 G. Blake-Palmer, “Henry Devenish Skinner – An Appreciation,” The Journal of the Polynesian Society 67, no. 2 (1958): 99.

42 “Art in Greenstone: Presentation of Valuable New Pieces – Interesting Museum Progress,” Otago Daily Times, 17 February 1940, in “Clippings Book volume 1” David Teviotdale Papers, MS-3994/002, Hocken Collections, University of Otago, Dunedin.

43 “Art in Greenstone.”

consolidated for his successor, rather than “hanging in mid air”, as would have been

the case had he retired when suggested.44 He continued as relieving director, working

part-time at the museum, until his eventual retirement in 1957. Atholl Anderson

eloquently describes Skinner’s impact on the development of ethnology and

anthropology as profound. He goes on to say,

His comparative, taxonomic analyses of Maori material culture prescribed the method and objectives of the discipline for more than 50 years. His teaching inspired several generations of archaeologists, especially in southern New Zealand, and his distinguished directorship of the Otago Museum brought it from provincial obscurity to national significance.45

Atholl Anderson makes a good point, as it appears that without Skinner, the Otago

Museum would be nowhere near as popular, would not be known world-wide, nor be

as vast in its collections. Skinner had a fresh and new view of not just anthropology

and ethnology, but also of life in general. He was articulate, which is perhaps how he

got so many accessions to the Otago Museum during his time as director, and why he

was such a favoured lecturer. For example whilst talking about the history of man in

a public lecture, he said, “Each of us is an epitome of the past, a compendium of

evidence from which the labours of the comparative anatomist have reconstructed

the wonderful story of human evolution. We ourselves [are] the past in the present.”46

Not only did Skinner revolutionise the collections and the objects that were

collected but also the administrative structure and methodology of the museum, the

interior design, and the way items were displayed. The original layout of the museum

had not been changed since the building had been constructed in 1877. Skinner

changed what was a “crowded, dingy Museum with musty animal exhibits” into well

designed spacious areas, with clear show cases and comprehensible lettered cards

explaining the exhibits on display.47 According to the unsigned author of the speech

“Centennial Memorial”, Skinner and his team at the Otago Museum were the first to

42

44 H.D. Skinner to Dr. Aitken, Vice-Chancellor of University of Otago, 24 April 1953, Charles Brasch Collection: University Museum, MS-0996-003/024, Hocken Collections, University of Otago, Dunedin.


46 H.D. Skinner, The Past and the Present - Popular Lecture, undated, Henry Devenish Skinner papers, MS-1219/071l, Hocken Collections, University of Otago, Dunedin, 7.

47 Centennial Memorial: Museum Extension from King Street to Cumberland Street, 1943, Charles Brasch literary and personal papers, MS-0996-010/103, Hocken Collections, University of Otago, Dunedin, 2.

institute modern museum displays, such as dioramas, in New Zealand and they set an

example for other museums here.48

His pioneering work, combined with his enthusiasm towards applying new

scientific methods of classification to the study of curios and artefacts, brought the

Otago Museum and its collections to the forefront of the Anthropological field, and

the world of museums.

43

48 Centennial Memorial: Museum Extension, 2-3.

Chapter Three:

Inventing Identity? Through Indigenous Collections

When it comes to a person’s identity and heritage, most will agree they are

important aspects of the interplay with their personal characteristics and

accouterments that combine and contribute to making them who they are. Identity is

essentially who a person is. It is the sum of their beliefs, their values, and their

relationship to the past. Heritage consists of those aspects of the past that are relevant

to and/or have an influence on or importance to a person. As well as intangible

concepts, heritage can be found meaningful in tangible objects such as carvings,

tools, and art, to name just a few, which is why people often visit museums, to

connect with their heritage and history. However when it comes to museums, the

question is, what identity or identities are being displayed, how is this done and to

what extent is the identity a construction according to the curator’s belief and to what

extent does it reveal the actual representation of the particular item or event?

It is clear that before H.D. Skinner took charge of acquiring artefacts for the

Otago Museum, Māori and other indigenous cultures were not considered important,

and in fact their artefacts formed an insignificant part of the Museum’s collection of

items prior to 1919. Skinner, a student of Cambridge University, was taught the

Anthropological beliefs and thinking of the early twentieth century. These thoughts

were about the importance of telling the antiquarian story behind artefacts once they

were collected, such as where they were found, what they were made of, how they

were made, who purchased, gifted or loaned them to the museum and/or how old

they were. Museums all over the world, not just in the United Kingdom and New

Zealand, have exhibited works of Māori art for a long time. The most common items

to be displayed have been delicately decorated sculptures made of wood, pounamu

ornaments such as hei-tiki, and bone and wooden weaponry. They have always been

appreciated and praised for their beauty, and academically analysed by scholars, such

as Skinner, who attempted to understand their origin, significance and meaning.1

It appears that Skinner collected in a rather ad hoc fashion, probably as a

result of trying to maximise the return on his limited resources. The consequence of

44

1 Mick Pendergast, Te Aho Tapu: The Sacred Thread – Traditional Maori Weaving (Auckland, N.Z.: Reed Methuen Publishers Ltd, 1987), 4.

this being that his collection of material culture told only a partial story of Māori

history. A lot is omitted using this Cambridge approach to Anthropology, but at the

time, that was the accepted procedure and what was carried out for each artefact.

Rather than what can be seen through this approach, it is important to look for what

is not present. Although the word taonga will be used to describe Māori treasures

and artefacts here, to Skinner, Māori artefacts were curios. It was from the 1970s

onwards that this classification started to change. Curios such as hei-tiki, mere, patu,

koauau, for example, were part of the pākehā construction of “Maoriland.”

Maoriland was used as a romantic image of New Zealand that supplied European

New Zealanders, or Pākehā, with a local identity. According to Conal McCarthy, who

is the current Programme Director of the School of Art History, Classics and

Religious Studies at Victoria University, exhibiting Māori material was principal to

the creation of colonial discourse. By the 1930s, “curio” changed to “artefact”, which

was the term most often chosen to describe Māori objects in museums, before the

more recent change to using “taonga.”2 Current ideas and perceptions today are still

largely and consistently presentist, documenting only very small accounts of the

historical bearings of objects.3

It is the absence of the social, cultural and religious connections of the

artefacts which this method does not address. When displaying indigenous

collections, it is necessary to connect with the people whose treasures are being

exhibited. This was hardly ever done due in part to items being passed through

numerous hands before ending up in a museum, and also to the sheer lack of interest

in the people behind the object. But whose history and heritage are museums telling?

The story of the Westerners or the Indigenous? Or something else altogether?

According to Allan Hanson, a professor in the department of Anthropology at the

University of Kansas, museums offer depictions of Māori culture, a process which

developed from the turn of the twentieth century onwards, which was formed by

scholars who valued the political aspirations of absorbing Māoris into Pākehā

45

2 Conal McCarthy, Exhibiting Māori: A History of Colonial Cultures of Display (Wellington, N.Z.: Te Papa Press, 2007), 28, 67.

3 Paul Tapsell in Exhibiting Māori: A History of Colonial Cultures of Display by Conal McCarthy (Wellington, N.Z.: Te Papa Press, 2007), 3-4.

culture.4 Claudia Bell, a sociologist, has a similar view in that although displays

censor political views, they “offer ‘untainted’ versions of the myth of colonial [and

precolonial] life.”5 What Bell is referring to is that both colonial and precolonial

histories, and to some extent postcolonial, though not necessary in this instance, are

constructs. Museum exhibitions have a history of offering reproductions,

romanticisations and nostalgic versions of the past.6 Benedict Anderson, Emeritus

Professor of International Studies at Cornell University believes that “political

museumizing” during the late colonial period tremendously formed the way that the

colonisers visualised their territory and the authority of their settler ancestry.7

According to Paul Tapsell, objects in museums are used to tell stories.

However, the stories that are given to the articles on display are decided by the

curator in charge, even if there is some accuracy in the story chosen, it is more often

than not a construction. There is often a tendency for items to be used not for their

own story, or an existing story, but one which is devised with the intention of

thrilling and imposing wonder on those who come to see them. Those who are the

elite, tell the story of the past. Indigenous people are still not telling their own stories

through their objects in today’s museums. Really, nothing has changed in the last

eighty years, although on the surface, through museum policies, it may look like it

has.8

As a European descendant and a seventh generation New Zealander, or

Pākehā, I personally see museums as a treasure trove of the past in terms of national

identity and identities, values and meanings. Before studying the layers that made up

a museum, they were to me, something waiting to be explored. It was about

discovering secrets and being able to take control of your own learning. The public

visitors to museums probably rarely consider the ethics behind the collection of

indigenous material and the concepts behind ownership of the material which is

46

4 Allan Hanson, “The Making of the Maori: Culture Invention and Its Logic,” American Anthropologist 91, no. 4 (1989): 897.

5 Claudia Bell, Inventing New Zealand: Everyday Myths of Pakeha Identity (Auckland, N.Z.: Penguin Books, 1996) 68.

6 Claudia Bell, Inventing New Zealand, 79.

7 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 183.

8 Paul Tapsell, interview by the author, Dunedin, New Zealand, 19 June 2014.

displayed. Do Māori view museums differently from Pākehā? According to Tapsell,

Pākehā continue to believe that they “own” museums, their contents and how they

are run. They have formed them to referentially exemplify impressive representations

of their own British repositioned and grafted cultural heritage.9 Europeans have

always had an innate sense of difference, especially when it comes to people.

Historically white people have considered those who are perceived as dissimilar, as

being “other”, and Westerners are still the perpetrators of producing this “otherness”

in society. Another word that tends to go hand-in-hand with the “other” is

“primitive”, and for some time museums made use of these two words within their

walls, especially in enticing the public through the door. It is even possible to see, in

this train of thought, the museum as the inert object version of the freak show.

Although this is an extreme idea, the point is that museums were interested in the

reaction to and acceptance of exhibits, the “shock” factor if you will, rather than the

educational and true nature of the objects.

Museums and museum displays tend to lack Māori perspectives on them,

sometimes due to the absence of Māori language material, and often due to the

deficiency in Māori participating or being asked to participate in exhibitions. There

are also instances where museums have not considered the agency of the indigenous

people in question. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, a professor of indigenous education at the

University of Waikato, views museums as another result of the discourse western

society brings. In allowing the Europeans to rule over the indigenous peoples, they

present them as the ‘other’ and study, describe and authorise their cultures, where

they already existed in the first place without the necessity to be commanded.10

Māori in New Zealand are not the only people who have had this data collection of

information commodified into a “cultural archive and body of knowledge” belonging

to the West, any colonised country whether Asian, African, Pacifican or American,

have endured this treatment. The fever of collecting took away any thought of

concern for how the indigenous may feel about their taonga being traded through

47

9 Paul Tapsell, ““Aroha mai: Whose museum?” The Rise of Indigenous Ethics Within Museum Contexts: A Māori-tribal Perspectives,” in The Routledge Companion to Museum Ethics: Redefining Ethics for the Twenty-First-Century Museum, ed. Janet Marstine (London: Routledge, 2011), 96.

10 Conal McCarthy, “Before ‘Te Māori’: A Revolution Deconstructed,” in Museum Revolutions: How Museums Change and Are Changed, eds. Simon J. Knell, Suzanne MacLeod and Sheila Watson (Oxon: Routledge, 2007), 120-121.

collectors and museums and ending up on the other side of the world. Where

Europeans call it “collecting”, some indigenous see it as “stealing.” The

legitimization of the practice of collecting from the indigenous themselves, was

through the belief that they were actually “rescuing artefacts from decay and

destruction.” This belief also led to profit-oriented trade and theft.11 It seems that

although Europeans and indigenous nationalities already coexist, as is the case in

New Zealand, we are still working towards an actual coexistence, one that incurs

equality.

In the 1930s, there was a loss of land and property for the indigenous Māori,

and the cities came calling with their employment opportunities. Before this time,

Māori for the most part lived in rural communities rather than the urban sprawl of a

city. When it came to Māori viewing their taonga in Western museums, they found

that they were unable to acknowledge the differing levels of the components of

mana, tapu and korero. Mana being “ancestral prestige”, tapu being “spiritual

protection”, and korero being “genealogically ordered narratives.”12 The taonga were

in glass cases, and in some cases, barriers enforced further distance from their

treasures. Māori also were brought face to face with the antiquarian way of labeling,

which of course said little to nothing about whose treasure it had been, let alone

which ancestral line the artefact had come from. “The greater the ancestors, the

greater the mana” was for the corresponding taonga.13 These actions, according to

Paul Tapsell, deprived the taonga of their individuality through “legal possession and

insurance premiums”, but also set the taonga apart from their ancestral lands and

their lineages.14

In contrast to Paul Tapsell’s belief, Ian Griffin says that at the Otago Museum,

there is much interest in the story or stories behind each and every object. It is the

stories that sell an exhibition and inspire visitors. Another story of interest to Griffin

is the tale behind how objects were collected and the correspondence that exists

48

11 Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed Books Ltd., 1999), 61.

12 Paul Tapsell, “Taonga,” in Māori Treasures of New Zealand: Ko Tawa by Paul Tapsell (Auckland, N.Z.: David Bateman Ltd, 2006), 17.

13 Paul Tapsell, “Taonga,” 17.

14 Paul Tapsell, “Pareraututu,” in Māori Treasures of New Zealand: Ko Tawa by Paul Tapsell (Auckland, N.Z.: David Bateman Ltd, 2006), 52.

between traders. For example, the Otago Museum holds artefacts from the HMS

Bounty wreck, such as the nails that held it together, which were traded between

Skinner and Parkin Christian. Griffin says that to his mind, the reasons behind the

acquisition enrich the story of the object.15 People come to our museum not only to

see interesting things but also to hear about where our artefacts came from and what

their existence actually means. “The Otago Museum has an incredibly powerful role

because […] of the efforts of folks like Skinner as director. We don’t just have a

collection from Otago, so we can put our culture in [to a] world context.”16 In

accordance with Ian Griffin, Chris Gosden agrees and explains by saying that if a

singular artefact can travel through countless hands before being incorporated into a

museum’s collection, then with it comes a succession of complex networks of

people, of which a great number would not have come into contact with each other,

had it not been for the artefact in question.17 However the question here is, is the

purpose of a museum to create something new or to preserve the old?18 As already

stated in chapter one, ICOM defines a museum as an institution which “conserves,

researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of

humanity and its environment.”19 Conservation is to do with preserving the old,

whereas what follows will, through research, ideally include creating something new.

The creation of the new is to improve current understanding of some aspects of

heritage that have been largely ignored in the past due to a monocultural viewpoint.

In other words, as David Hodges, a professor of anthropology at the Hunter College

in New York, suggests museums are searching for new relevances to old artefacts.20

What was missing from the exhibitions at the time of Skinner was an

understanding of Māori society, history, culture and language. It is a benign history

that is given, one that lacks tragedy, conflict, love, respect and taonga, among other

49



17 Chris Gosden and Frances Larson, Knowing Things: Exploring the Collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum 1884-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 5.

18 Outi Turpeinen, “Recombing Ideas from Art and Cultural History Museums in Theory and Practice,” Nordisk Museologi no.2 (2006): 84.

19 “Definition of a Museum,” International Council Of Museums (ICOM), accessed 27 July 2014, http://archives.icom.museum/definition.html.

20 David Julian Hodges, “Museums, Anthropology, and Minorities: In Search of a New Relevance for Old Artifacts,” Anthropology & Education Quarterly 9, no. 2 (1978).

things. There is no mention of the New Zealand land wars, nor the musket wars.

There is no mention of Māori social structure, or belief systems, and how they prized

and praised the land. There is no mention of the Māori significance of pounamu. It is

as if the artefacts have been stripped bare, and have been placed anew, telling but one

wisp of a single story. This lack of ability to tell other stories seems to be because

there is a predilection for a “decorative version of the past.”21 According to Adrienne

Kaeppler, an American anthropologist who works at the National Museum of Natural

History in Washington as curator of Oceanic Ethnology, the most problematic aspect

for a museum in exhibiting Māori taonga and Polynesian materials, is in finding the

way to communicate the intrinsic relationship of visual and verbal modes of

expression.22

Taonga, or ancestral treasures, are central to the “genealogically-ordered

narratives” of the Māori. Paul Tapsell questions whether it is possible for such

treasures which have been frozen in time within museum walls to come alive and

illustrate the creative arts of kin-beholden relationships, or utu, as they would have

done had they been left within the maraes, connecting with the elders.23 Taonga

convey information to those who connect to them and are willing to listen, they are

not lifeless entities. They are interwoven with history and people. They are, as

Kaeppler explains, “the material manifestations of social relationships and societal

transformations.”24

One of Skinner’s papers in Comparatively Speaking is on what he calls the

“Culture Areas of New Zealand”, pertaining to Māori. (see figure 8). At first, it looks

as if his culture areas may be in connection to the location of different iwi, although

his boundaries are close to the regional groupings, his diagram is not complex

enough and Skinner says that they actually respond to the different types of material

culture found in each place. First published in 1921, the paper identifies eight

50

21 Claudia Bell, Inventing New Zealand, 68-69.

22 Adrienne L. Kaeppler, “Keynote Address: Taonga Māori and the Evolution of the Representation of the “Other”,” in Taonga Māori Conference: New Zealand (Wellington, N.Z.: Department of Internal Affairs, 1990), 16.

23 Paul Tapsell, The Art of Taonga (Wellington, N.Z.: Victoria University of Wellington, 2011), 10.

24 Adrienne L. Kaeppler, “Keynote Address,” 11.

cultural areas, where the material culture differs from each other, which is in contrast

to the countless groups of iwi, particular in the North Island.

The first cultural area being the Moriori area which included only the

Chatham Islands, this area was distinguishable due to its “numerous cases of great

crudity” in relation to skills of working bone and stone, its rectilinear designs in

artworks, its variety in adzes, its habitual use of circular huts, its specialised type of

wash-through boat and paddle to go with it, among other things.25 Skinner also

mentions the absence of certain things, as if he is expecting to find particular

qualities in the cultural areas, such as the “absence of earthworks or any system of

fortification”, which he makes note of with the Morioris.26 The next three areas were

classified in the South Island. The second cultural area was identified as the

Murihiku area, which included southern Canterbury, Otago and Southland, it was

distinguished as using double canoes regularly, a type of tattooing different from the

North Island even though some of the northern patterns were occasionally used, and

by paintings on rock shelter walls. The third area, called Kaiapoi, to the north of the

Murihiku region right up to the Awatere River in Marlborough as well as Westland

up to the Buller River area. This culture area was characterised by fortified pa

especially in the north, the infrequency of carvings on canoes and houses, and

rectangular shaped houses. The only aspect, according to Skinner, that this area

lacked was houses on piles, which the two previous areas also lacked. The fourth

culture area, was named Wakatu, which included the remainder of the South Island.

The defining aspects of this area according to Skinner was that there was nothing

known about the ancient Māori dialect from this region, kumara was grown in large

quantities in sheltered areas. The people of the Wakatu region were also known for

their skills in making tools from argillite, which is a sedimentary rock that does not

split easily and is formed from consolidated clay.27

What is shown here is that Skinner was only interested in the materials, skills,

tools, foodstuffs, and mechanical ways of living of the Māori. Although he mentions

dialects of the Māori language, he does not investigate any further than comparing

51

25 Henry Devenish Skinner, Comparatively Speaking: Studies in Pacific Material Culture 1921-1972, (Dunedin, N.Z.: University of Otago Press, 1974), 21.

26 Henry Devenish Skinner, Comparatively Speaking, 21.

27 Henry Devenish Skinner, Comparatively Speaking, 21.

them with each other. As with building types and fortifications, Skinner does not

extend this interest into why the northern Māori had fortified pa, and the southern

Māori did not. It is now possible to say that the different iwi in the north were living

far closer together than those in the south, and understanding their traditional

observance of utu, pa reinforcements were far more necessary.

Taking greenstone, or pounamu as it is known to the Māori, as an example,

the information cards that were associated with each artefact merely mentioned

where each pounamu piece was found, and the relationship between Māori and

Polynesian amulets.28 What was missing was any information on how the artefacts

came into being, how they were made, who made them, the life of the Māori who

made them, what they were used for, what they meant in Māori society, and whether

they were just a tool or had some higher significance in their complex belief system.

Skinner was not interested in the person behind the object, only about the object

itself. Museums were not interested at that time in accepting the challenge of

displaying concepts, rather than just the artefacts. Exhibitions that do not portray the

context behind the collections, really have little to no educative value.29 There were

some exceptions, where the explanation given to the artefact stated either the name

of the pounamu artefact, see figure 9, or whose ancestors originally owned the

pounamu tool, see figure 10. The traditional Māori value of pounamu is that it was

treasured as the hardest stone to be found in New Zealand, and because of this, in

Māori eyes, it meant that it was also the most valuable as a tool. Found only in the

south island, pounamu is moulded in the Southern Alps, with only seven main fields

of the green stone to be found. “Nelson, Westland, South Westland, Whakatipu

(including the Dart), Wanaka, Livingstone and Milford”, with the southern most

Māori tribe ‘Ngai Tahu’ laying claim over the stone in all regions but Nelson.30

According to Bronwyn Labrum, Associate Professor of Massey University’s

School of Design, museums and their collections tell valuable narratives of the past,

and supply compelling evidence of how “history-making takes place” on national,

52

28 “Art in Greenstone: Presentation of Valuable New Pieces – Interesting Museum Progress,” Otago Daily Times, 17 February 1940, in “Clippings Book volume 1,” David Teviotdale Papers, MS-3994/002, Hocken Collections, University of Otago, Dunedin.

29 Adrienne L. Kaeppler, “Keynote Address,” 14.

30 Meredith Gibbs, “Indigenous Rights to Natural Resources in Australia and New Zealand: Kereru, Dugong and Pounamu,” Australian Journal of Environmental Management 10, no. 3 (2003): 143-144.

regional and local levels.31 This can be seen with Skinner. Although he was using the

artefacts that he had collected to construct a story of his own, this in turn is

important, as it shows the thought processes he went through, and what he

considered was important at the time. As Claudia Bell explains, drawing something

from times gone by, means that one needs to recreate attitudes, events and policies

from that time period from the perspective of what is known presently. This means

“selecting, decontextualising, recombining, and inevitably distorting.” In this regard,

museums are a large part of the activity of local, regional and national myth

making.32

Another viewpoint, far more positive towards Skinner, is that of Chris

Gosden, chair of European Archaeology at the University of Oxford, and Frances

Larson, an Honorary Research Fellow in the anthropology department at Durham

University, who states that the museum is not in fact a confined repository of

motionless artefacts. Rather, a museum is a place of embarkation, where infinite

anthropological escapades are sent into both the past and the future, and “to study a

museum is to study an endless, endlessly shifting, assortment of people and

things.”33

Skinner was part of a worldwide trend that was happening throughout the

time he was director, he was not alone in his views or in his manner of presentation

of indigenous artefacts. The displays and the collections in the Otago Museum served

as a memory place for the white postcolonial community.34 Although he took

artefacts out of context, Skinner still applied scientific ideas of how things could be.

His association with Otago University further cemented the teaching elements used,

and the ways of arranging and describing the collections. Skinner created an identity

within his museum, not so much a unique one, but to some extent a disjointed one.

53

31 Bronwyn Labrum, “Making Pakeha histories in New Zealand museums: community and identity in the post-war period,” in Museum Revolutions: How Museums Change and Are Changed, ed. Simon J. Knell, Suzanne MacLeod and Sheila Watson (Oxon: Routledge, 2007), 149.

32 Claudia Bell, Inventing New Zealand, 81.

33 Chris Gosden and Frances Larson, Knowing Things, 5-6.

34 Amiria Henare, Museums, Anthropology and Imperial Exchange (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 252.

Epilogue:

H.D. Skinner’s Legacy

The hope that we may some day free ourselves from what is past is in itself a fine thing, but it is only a dream. For the present is one with the past, and the future grows out of the present, one with it and indivisible from it, changing a little, perhaps growing a little, progressing a little, but past and parcel of it.

Henry Devenish Skinner, from “The Past and the Present - Popular Lecture.”1

For twenty years H.D. Skinner was the brains behind and the face of the

Otago Museum. The year of 1957 saw Skinner ultimately retire from the frontline of

directorship with the change in leadership following the appointment of Raymond

Forster. Despite this, the leadership and memory of Skinner still lives on. Upon his

initial retirement from full-time directing, the Museum Management Committee

placed on record its genuine gratitude of the work Skinner had done for the Otago

Museum over the period of around thirty-five years.2

In 1959, to acknowledge Skinner’s vast contribution to the study of New

Zealand Anthropology, a company of his younger colleagues bestowed a

compendium of essays on him. It was also suggested to Skinner that he should

consider having some of his Oceanic dissertations reprinted into one volume.

Skinner’s book, published in 1974, is not entirely illustrative of Oceanic ethnology

but a fifty-year study of one man’s approach to the history of Pacific cultures.3

Comparatively Speaking offers a range of essays on New Zealand and other Pacific

indigenous material culture, ranging in dates from before Skinner’s directorship, to

during and after. It is also distinctive and significant due to the vast range of quality

photographs and drawings of adzes, tattoos and art, wood carvings, amulets, and

weapons, among other things, which are included extensively throughout the

volume. A journalist who reviewed the book on its release said that Skinner’s

meticulous studies, his comprehensible style of prose, and his lengthy relationship

54

1 H.D. Skinner, “The Past and the Present - Popular Lecture,” undated, Henry Devenish Skinner papers, MS-1219/071, Hocken Collections, University of Otago, Dunedin, 6.

2 Angus Ross, Proposed Minute for Annual Report of Otago Museum on the Retirement of Dr. H.D. Skinner as Director, 1953, Professor Angus Ross papers, MS-2721/012, Hocken Collections, University of Otago, Dunedin, unpaged.

3 Peter Gathercole, Peter Gathercole, introduction to Comparatively Speaking by H.D. Skinner (Dunedin, N.Z.: University of Otago Press, 1974), 11.

with his subject material comprising both Māori in particular and more widely

Polynesia in general, made it possible for such research and stimulating theories to

be made, especially in a field such as anthropology which was particularly abstruse

at the time.4

Skinner’s reputation as the Otago Museum’s director, as an anthropologist

and ethnologist is known far and wide. The legacy of Skinner is today seen in the

length and breadth of the museum’s collection. The Otago Museum is not just a

museum that collects material relating to Otago, but collects items from all over the

world which, according to Ian Griffin, is a direct effect of Skinner’s interests and

skills.5 His eminent directorship of the Otago Museum, in more ways than one,

transformed a small, unheard of, provincial entity, into an establishment of national

importance, which it still is today. Skinner had a great and far-reaching influence on

both the development of anthropology and of ethnology in New Zealand, and indeed

worldwide.

The methods and objectives he used in analysing Māori material culture,

comparing, classifying them systematically, were the way of doing things for over

fifty years. His visionary teaching and ways with words prompted, stimulated and

influenced many generations of archaeologists, anthropologists and ethnologists

around New Zealand, particularly in Otago and Southland.6 The ways in which he

described things, even the most dry and boring aspects of his lectures, such as the

definitions of words, made them enjoyable and easy to understand. Before delving

into the nitty-gritty aspects of the day’s topic, it is clear that he liked to tell a good

story, letting his students wonder a little, before going on. In explaining the

distinction between ethnography and ethnology he instructs with examples of

zoology, and talks about worms and Bushmen, before stating that the word

“ethnographic” is used to scientifically describe material objects with their mutual

differences, customs and habits, or independent social institutions. “While

“ethnology” is the science, the structure of theory and explanation built up on the

55

4 Mary Thomas, “Painstaking Studies of Pacific Cultures,” Hawkes Bay Herald Tribune, 3 May 1975.


6 Atholl Anderson, “Henry Devenish Skinner,” in The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography 1921-1940 vol.4, (Auckland, N.Z.: Auckland University Press, 1998), 480.

facts.”7 In an address given in 1944 by the great benefactor and friend to Skinner,

Willi Fels recounted how Skinner had the ability to bring things to life. Items that to

a normal person may look like just a piece of bone, Skinner was gifted the vision of

life, was able to see the items as they were used by men, who shaped their forms, and

was able to tell others the meaning of the primitive items and implements. Although

this may sound a little farfetched and science-fiction like, Fels was describing

Skinner’s sentience and his drive to identify any indigenous material, as he

understood it.8

Skinner’s lasting legacy according to the current director of the Otago

Museum, Ian Griffin, can be seen in the breadth of their collection. As well as being

the first New Zealand born director, Skinner was also the first director to also be an

ethnographer of sorts, someone trained in the art of collecting, which as a result took

the gathered material in entirely different directions from his forebears. “He was the

right man, at the right time”, in a city of wealth, during Dunedin’s golden age.9

Today his legacy can be seen in the recent opening of the HD Skinner Annex,

which was formerly the North Dunedin Post Office. Here is located the Postmaster

Gallery, Otago Museum’s newest exhibition space, with its first exhibition titled

“Heritage Lost and Found: Our Changing Cityscape.” The annex also houses a coffee

window, as well as space for hire for functions, meetings and the such like. It has

been described as an “engaging cultural space”, a description which could easily

have been given to Skinner, as he was something of a culturally engaging person.10

His legacy can also be seen encapsulated in the permanent gallery called

“Pacific Cultures”, which would not be in existence had it not been for Skinner. He

played an important and substantial role in enabling the collection of Polynesian

items. This area and the Hall of Polynesia is named after him. His legacy can also be

seen in his family who came after him. There are still Skinner family connections to

the museum. In fact there has been continual Skinner involvement with the Museum

56

7 H.D. Skinner, Popular Lecture 2 in 'Ethnological, Methods – Historical', Henry Devenish Skinner papers, MS-1219/083, Hocken Collections, University of Otago, Dunedin.

8 Willi Fels, Papers on Otago Museum & others read to University Club, 14 January 1944, Charles Brasch literary and personal papers, MS-0996-010/103, Hocken Collections, University of Otago, Dunedin, 4.


10 Otago Museum, “About the Otago Museum H D Skinner Annex,” accessed 27 August 2014, http://www.otagomuseum.govt.nz/h-d-skinner-annex/.

http://www.otagomuseum.govt.nz/h-d-skinner-annex/


for nearly a century. His son Richard was involved with the restoration of the gun

and Albatross Colony at Taiaroa Head,11 and Skinner’s granddaughter Julie Pearse

serves on the Otago Museum Trust Board today.12

Each time we enter the halls of the Otago Museum, we are walking the halls

that Skinner once walked, we view items he once collected and placed on exhibition,

we wonder at the stories behind the objects, objects that Skinner sought to know and

tell the whole story of. In 1978, aged ninety-two, Skinner passed away, signifying the

end of an epoch in New Zealand anthropology.

To end with a quote from the profound HD Skinner himself:

Each of us is an epitome of the past, a compendium of evidence from which the labours of the comparative anatomist have reconstructed the wonderful story of human evolution. We ourselves [are] the past in the present.13

57

11 Debbie Porteous, “Getting into wrong truck a blessing,” Otago Daily Times, 24 April 2010, accessed 27 August 2014, http://www.odt.co.nz/your-town/dunedin/103080/getting-wrong-truck-a-blessing?page=0%2C0, and Ellie Constantine, “Peninsula service rewarded,” Otago Daily Times, 7 May 2009, accessed 27 August 2014, http://www.odt.co.nz/your-town/dunedin/54466/peninsula-service-rewarded.


13 H.D. Skinner, “The Past and the Present,” 7.

Conclusion:

The world of museums as a field of research and enquiry is an ever growing

and ever changing one. Museums have changed incredibly in a very short time, and

have branched out into a series of categories of museums. A museum was once a just

a place of curios to show wealth or war booty, now there are museums for natural

history, social history, cultural history, different types of art, and science centres.

Some are traditional in the way they display their collections, while some are modern

and contemporary, coming up with new ways to display their artefacts in order to be

able to produce the best viewing effect for their visitors.

H.D. Skinner was a man of his time, prominent and a pioneer in the sphere of

anthropology, museum theory and practice, artefact collecting, effectively swapping

items with other museums, and teaching at the Otago University, with the Otago

Museum as his centre of operations. He is remembered today by the Museum itself,

with the permanent ‘Pacific Cultures’ gallery and the H.D. Skinner Annex. Many of

the anthropological items that are part of the Otago Museum’s collection, particularly

those of Māori and Polynesian cultures were collected by Skinner or his generous

benefactors. Before him, there was little or no interest in preserving items belonging

to the Māori race or to other Pacific Island peoples. Skinner’s schooling through

Cambridge limited his anthropological vision somewhat and resulted in his

exhibitions telling only part of the story, at least by today’s standards. Each item

displayed would have information about the tools and articles themselves rather than

about the person or people behind them. In a sense, not telling the whole story, meant

that the artefacts invented another identity. A romanticised version, a version of

accuracy, rather than the accurate objective view itself. The contribution of this thesis

to this field of research is an individual focus on H.D. Skinner, showing that for his

time he was helping set the standards, and highlighting his innovative ideas and their

introduction, development and presentation at the Otago Museum. This dissertation

also offers a new perspective at the creation of identity through artefacts, by looking

at what was absent in an exhibit rather than emphasising what was present.

In chapter one there are numerous contemporary insights to the topic

surrounding the focus question of ‘what is a museum?’ There is an overview of the

history of museums internationally, followed by a brief history of museums in New

Zealand. This gives a basis for chapter two and an understanding of where and when

58

H.D. Skinner came into the field of museums and anthropological study. Chapter one

also includes an examination of changes in how exhibits were displayed, ethics –

especially the ethics relating to indigenous collections, material culture, museums

and commercialisation, and modifications in collection management.

Chapter two focuses on the pioneering attitude, accomplishments, and life of

H.D. Skinner, as a curator and then director of the Otago Museum, bringing

numerous changes, particularly in the areas of exhibition and artefact display, but

also administration structure and interior design. His accession of many artefacts to

the Otago Museum’s collections, particularly Māori and Polynesian items. Skinner

was able to see the possibilities in collections and artefacts, where other directors and

curators did not, and he brought recognition of the Otago Museum’s status as a

world-standard museum.

Chapter three examines how indigenous artefacts and exhibits invent identity.

There were a few resources which contributed to the idea of the creation of identity

within museum spaces, but there were none to be found that focused on what was

absent rather than what was present in exhibitions. This idea leads me to suspect that

a new observational point of view has been highlighted.

The epilogue focuses on Skinner’s life after he retired from the Otago

Museum. Whilst he was most remembered for the period he spent at the helm of the

museum, it is as important to include the period previous and post this phase in his

life as he was also producing important research during that time.

This research may help others discover, as I did, that although H.D. Skinner

was a pioneering individual and made major contributions not only for the Otago

Museum during his years there, but also in the surrounding region of Otago and the

field of Anthropology in general, he did have his shortcomings. It was the flaws in

his methodology which resulted in actions and conclusions that are today considered

unethical, such as not giving the indigenous people the chance to speak for their own

treasures.

Future research into this subject area could be extensive. Museum

establishments are forces of change that could have an effect on the future, due to

how they tell the stories of the past, whether constructed or accurate. It is an ever

changing field, especially today with the extensive use of technology in museums.

Another research interest in museum studies is in visitor experiences and identity.

59

Focusing more inwardly on the third chapter of this thesis, one could look at how the

creation of identities through the use of indigenous exhibits reflects on the

experience of museum visitors.

The significance of this research is in the production of a clear and concise

analysis on one the greatest museum directors the Otago Museum has ever had. The

investigation highlighted one of the issues museums have had since the introduction

of displaying indigenous artefacts. Skinner was the first real advocate of displaying

Māori and Pacific Island material culture. The main problem was that of producing

new identities through the artefacts, identities that may not have existed in the first

place, and what this means to those who currently run, direct and curate within

museums. There is often a disparity between the museums’ interpretations and the

indigenous population’s knowledge of the their own culture and artefacts. This study

has brought together a snapshot of the history of museums in general, the history of a

great museum director in particular, and highlighted some of the difficulties in

displaying artefacts belonging to other cultures and races. My hope is that my

dissertation will encourage further research into these areas of the museum world.

60

Appendix:

Fig. 2: Otago Museum Management Committee, 1948. (Skinner seated front row, second from right).

[Annual Report for the Year 1948, MS-0996-007/025, Hocken Collections, ARC-0124].

61

Fig. 3: Three Nephrite Adzes found together at Lower Portobello. [Annual Report for the Year 1949, MS-0996-007/025, Hocken Collections, ARC-0124].

62

Fig. 4: ‘Waka Huia’ (feather-box) and ‘Kumete’ (food-bowl). [Annual Report for the Years 1957 and 1958, MS-0996-007/025, Hocken Collections,

ARC-0124].

63

Fig. 5: Class Group 1: Structure of a Wharenui [Annual Report for the Years 1957 and 1958, MS-0996-007/025, Hocken Collections,

ARC-0124].

64

Fig. 6: Class Group 2: Using a Māori chord drill (tuwiri, porotiti). [Annual Report for the Years 1957 and 1958, MS-0996-007/025, Hocken Collections,

ARC-0124].

65

Fig. 7: Otago Museum, Ground Floor of Old Block, looking south. [Annual Report for the Year 1956, MS-0996-007/025, Hocken Collections, ARC-0124].

66

Fig. 8: Culture Areas of New Zealand [Comparatively Speaking: Studies in Pacific Material Culture 1921-1972 by H.D. Skinner].

67

Fig. 9: Three mere pounamu, heirlooms of the Te Kahu family.[Annual Report for the Year 1956, MS-0996-007/025, Hocken Collections, ARC-0124].

68

Fig. 10: ‘Tira’, mere pounamu, from the ancestral line of the Parata clan.[Annual Report for the Year 1951, MS-0996-007/025, Hocken Collections, ARC-0124].

69

Fig. 11: One of several sketches of proposed future extensions to the Otago Museum.[Annual Report for the Year 1956, MS-0996-007/025, Hocken Collections, ARC-0124].

70

Research Bibliography

Primary Sources

Unpublished Sources

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Association of Friends of the Otago Museum Records, MS-0409.

Brasch, Charles Literary and Personal Papers, ARC-0124.

de Beer family Papers, ARC-0139.

McIndoe, John Limited, Records, ARC-0585.

Otago Museum Annual Reports, 1937-1958, ARC-0124.

Otago Museum Management Committee Minutes 1930-50, ARC-0524.

Otago Museum Records, ARC-0524.

Ross, Angus, Professor Papers, ARC-0504.

Skinner, Henry Devenish Papers, ARC-0484.

Teviotdale, David Papers, ARC-0432.

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Star, Dunedin, 1975

71

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Skinner, H. D. The Morioris of the Chatham Islands. Honolulu, Hawaii: Bernice P.

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Cultural Appreciation or Inventing Identity? H.D. Skinner and the Otago Museum.

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