REFORMING NATIONHOOD

THE FREE MARKET AND BICULTURALISM AT TE PAPA

In 1998 the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa opened to the public. Two key policies have come to define the new museum: biculturalism and market rationalism. Maori–Pakeha biculturalism is founded on the Treaty of Waitangi, which posits a separate-but-equal relationship between two cultural traditions. In practice, this means the museum is structured as two architectural ‘halves’ with separate galleries and systems of management. Market policies are visible both within the museum, where ‘customer focus’ is manifest in a casual institutional style and myriad interactive exhibits, and from without, wherein the museum forms a provocative symbol of corporate involvement in the public sector. This essay suggests that these policies come together in a somewhat problematic fashion. Eight years after opening, Te Papa remains poised as the captivating but troublesome result of the forces of market-driven public accessibility, postmodern curatorial revisionism and Maori cultural reassertion. While public accessibility is a predictable response to the pressures of financial accountability, the latter two interact awkwardly. While biculturalism was conceived as a way in which the museum could respond to an apparent ‘crisis’ of national identity, its execution has, paradoxically, allowed chief problems in that identity to go unexplored. Despite the museum’s novel postcolonial outlook, the topic of ‘race’ remains elemental. The uncertain, even contradictory effect of embracing an indigenous–settler racial difference while marginalising empire – when in fact empire and race are inextricably bound in New Zealand’s history – attests to the ways that former South Pacific colonies struggle to untangle colonialism.

1984: THE STATE EXPERIMENT

The institution that would eventually become the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Te Papa) was envisioned in a period of national strife. By the early 1980s the nation was on the brink of economic bankruptcy. After Britain’s entry into the EEC a decade earlier, New Zealand no longer had a singularly reliable market for its agricultural exports and had become crippled by foreign debt. The government could no longer afford to continue the state tradition of ‘socialism without doctrines’; drastic changes were needed to an economy that was perhaps the most highly regulated in the OECD (Bassett 1998). On the political front, the period also saw the culmination of a decade of Maori protests over land rights, marked by demonstrations, strikes and high-profile land occupations. Language, culture and the reaffirming of the authority of the Treaty-of-Waitangi history were key markers of unity for Maori groups asserting a new cultural nationalism.1 After earlier rejecting the treaty as ‘a fraud’, Maori rallied around the assertion that it should be afforded a privileged, semi-constitutional role in the nation’s governance.

In 1984 a new Labour Party government came to power and immediately set about remedying these urgent concerns. First, it enacted a series of economic transformations that turned New Zealand into one of the most unregulated economies the industrialised world has known. Free trade, a deregulated labour market, fiscal restraint and narrow monetarist policies aimed to reposition New Zealand as a prime destination for foreign investment. Second, The Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975 (NZ) gained its ‘teeth’ with a 1985 amendment that extended the Waitangi Tribunal’s powers to investigate Crown actions and omissions in breach of the treaty dating back to 1840.2 At once, much of the nation’s colonial history was the subject of research and possible government redress. Another important 1984 event was the great success of Te Maori. This inaugural international touring exhibition of historic Maori art attracted large crowds in American cities and significant media attention, in part due to the live performances of Maoritanga (culture) at each museum. The 1986–87 ‘return home’ tour of New Zealand was hugely popular, drawing a multitude of Pakeha (the non-Maori majority), many of whom knew little of this Maori heritage. It was hard to miss the range of bright possibilities – economic, social and political – that the Te Maori triumph augured. This cluster of events – the modification of the economy, a fresh politico-judicial framework for addressing Maori grievances and a new national pride in Maori culture – was vital in inculcating a national imaginary deliberately distanced from its colonial origins. All that was missing was a symbol to express all of this: a place, as then-prime minister David Lange called for, that would ‘speak for New Zealand’ (Project Development Team 1985, frontispiece).

The Project Development Team (PDT) convened to discuss the shape of a new national museum averred in 1985 that the ‘forbidding monumentality of the traditional museum has no place in the life of a modern Pacific nation, aware and proud of its identity, nurturing and caring of its diverse cultures’ (Project Development Team 1985, 11). The existing national museum was a cool neoclassical edifice on a Wellington hilltop that organised displays in conventional taxonomic divisions. For the PDT, a properly native institution, to be located on the city’s waterfront, would gain wide social relevance by repudiating much of this imperial museum form, not least its staid architecture. The new institution would seek to pull apart the relationship between material heritage and the cultural and class distinctions that New Zealand had inherited in its historical image of being a ‘Britain of the South Pacific’. A revalued Maori culture and emergent postcolonial Pakeha culture were the basis for the vision of a national bicultural institution.3

Planning of the new museum coincided with the government adopting (via the New Zealand Tourism Board) a ‘national brand’ for the first time, whose keywords included the following: unaffected, open and honest; young, active, fresh; not knowing ‘can’t do’; resolute; quiet achievers; and seeking contemporary solutions (New Zealand Tourism Board 1991, 21). The PDT similarly realised that a new museum could augment New Zealand’s draw as a destination for cultural tourism:

It is not an outlandish claim to note that a country’s museums can play a considerable role in establishing how a country is viewed from the outside. They can and do act as a significant trigger in tourist destination choices. Despite the high profile tourists already have among New Zealand museum visitors, it is clear from studies that cultural objectives do not figure significantly among tourist expectations of New Zealand (Project Development Team 1985, 10).

Despite having been rapidly urbanised in the postwar period, New Zealand’s tourism draw had been its outdoor environment. To capitalise on the cultural and natural, a museum that could draw tourists inside and then away was seen as an ideal outcome. An early policy concept was that of the museum as a waharoa (gateway) to New Zealand’s natural wonderland and cultural uniqueness.

If museums were traditionally conceived as an exemplary refuge from overt economic transactions, Te Papa was designed as a provocative symbol of corporate involvement in the public sector. The government program to ‘change the culture’ signals how ‘culture’ referred, in this context, to the complex of social values, customs and beliefs informing workplace relations. In this sense, economics became cultural policy inasmuch as it assumed the status of ideology and generated its own world view and institutional language (such as Te Papa’s twin ‘corporate principles’ of ‘customer focus’ and ‘commercial positivity’). Meaghan Morris has observed how, in such projects, ‘culture’ is redefined ‘as merely the malleable, consumable environment of economic action’ (Morris 1992, 56). The Department of Internal Affairs (that oversaw the museum’s development) stated:

[it] is difficult to separate out cultural policy from social and economic policy… it is clear that cultural diversity and an innovative society are necessary ingredients for economic development. There is a strong argument for the Government’s involvement in the arts and cultural area on economic grounds alone (Department of Internal Affairs 1989, iii).

When market liberalism itself constitutes a cultural world view, the conceptual separation of ‘customer focus’ (as cultural policy) and ‘commercial positivity’ (as economic policy) is obfuscated. This conflation strongly suggests that the wider systems of belief and values culturally generated and transmitted – and the public policies through which they find expression – will eventually be harmonised with individualistic concepts informing market liberalism. As it was planned, Te Papa was not just affected by a sharp dive into market-oriented policies, but was positioned as a symbol of the nation’s sleek, new international competitiveness. The museum meant business, and Maori and Pakeha cultural identities were its assets.

THE VIEW, TWO DECADES ON

More than two decades after that period of transformation, and almost a decade after its 1998 opening, Te Papa has largely emerged publicly triumphant. Despite an art–religion controversy, a fiscal crisis, content and interpretation predicaments that have necessitated two peer reviews and significant alterations, a Maori censorship dispute, and the surprise resignation of its initial chief executive officer, the museum’s larger story has been its huge public appeal. Its first-year visitation target of 723,000 was achieved in three months; after the first year the figure was 2 million. By June 2001, this had risen to 5 million; the 10 million mark was passed in 2005 (Museum of New Zealand 2005, 4). Currently, Te Papa receives around 1.3 million visitors annually, making it the most visited museum in Australasia. Significantly, the museum has attracted visitors whose age, sex and ethnicity closely mirror that of the larger population (Museum of New Zealand 2005, 12). In all, visitor statistics are Te Papa’s main cause for celebration and the chief weapon in its defence.

Te Papa is now closely associated with, and has played a role in the construction of, an image of ‘the little country that could’. An incisive case involves the way in which the museum has tied its reputation to that of the Lord of the rings film trilogy. In December 2003 the entirety of Wellington’s inner city was partitioned as several hundred thousand gathered for a street parade, cultural performances and an opening speech by Prime Minister Helen Clark. Postage stamps, billboards, city flags, TV advertisements, specially painted aeroplanes and signs at the airport effectively made the New Zealand countryside ‘Middle-earth’. Indeed, Wellington’s daily newspaper temporarily renamed itself the Middle Earth Evening Post, and a senior cabinet member was named ‘Minister for Lord of the Rings’, whose remit was to exploit the economic opportunities the film represented. Weekly updates on box-office takings underscored the David versus Goliath nature of this triumph. The last time such a commotion had been seen – the large crowds, street performances and prime ministerial speeches, followed by frequent updates on visitor numbers – had been at the opening of Te Papa. The two phenomena were mutually rewarding: Te Papa’s immersive Lord of the Rings exhibition (2002–03, 2006) broke museum attendance records, before travelling to Boston, London, Sydney and Singapore. Not since Te Maori had a New Zealand-produced exhibition fared so well internationally. This time around, the message was the ingenuity of the nation’s creative economy. The hardware and software displayed not only attested to the film, but also endorsed the interactive style and heavy use of Internet technology in Te Papa’s design structure (Kaino 2005, 37).

Perhaps the most surprising aspect to emerge in the Lord of the rings frenzy is how the films were financed. In an extraordinary move, the government created a special tax shelter for the film that allowed New Line Cinema, a US-based company, to defray one-third of its NZ$600 million production costs against tax. (The OECD criticised this move as providing an unfair competitive subsidy.) According to Treasury, the net cost to the country was around NZ$217 million (Campbell 2004). State largesse had earlier been extended to Te Papa: while the museum is required to fund 25 per cent of its operating costs, taxpayers paid for its original $320 million cost (Tramposch 1998a, 343). These cases do not involve the same kind of speculation in arts and culture; public funding of museums has a long tradition in Australasia, and can be expected to produce educational and social benefits that blockbuster films do not. Yet the investments in both are justified in similar economic terms, including the creation of local jobs, export earnings and flow-on effects in tourism. Indeed, the museum might consider itself vindicated: while international visitors represented one quarter of Te Papa’s total in its early years, by 2005 they represented a 54 per cent majority (Positively Wellington Tourism 2005). ‘Our Place’, the museum’s brand name, now inevitably proceeds aware of the tension between serving as a place of national self-recognition and as our place for them. Yet these outcomes are not necessarily at odds: where self-recognition is celebratory rather than critical, there may be little tension at all. But what remains of that unquantifiable asset: the educational and social benefits?

BETWEEN THE MUSEUM’S WHORLS: THE STRUCTURE AND STYLE OF BICULTURALISM

The museum’s logo, a thumbprint, communicates its infatuation with New Zealanders’ unique cultural imprint. If whorls suggest a labyrinth-like variety of cultural spaces and experiences, those new to Te Papa may be surprised to learn that it is architecturally structured as two distinct ‘halves’ – one Maori, one Pakeha. Overlooking the harbour to the sea are the Maori galleries; on the landward side towards the city are the Pakeha galleries. The interpretive plan states that ‘the northern (Maori) part of the museum, aligned with the harbour axis, expresses the natural elements associated with papatuanuku tangata whenua [the earth people of the land], while the southern (Pakeha) part is aligned with the urban grid of the city’ (Museum of New Zealand 1992, 87). This spatial dichotomy constructs the Western and indigenous in a familiar scheme that opposes the Maori natural world to Western built forms, the spiritual to the material, and ecological harmony to capitalist exploitation. The Treaty of Waitangi exhibition Signs of a Nation physically cleaves these spaces and aims to express the concept of the encounter of world views. Indeed, it is the treaty that explains and accounts for this separate-but-equal design scheme, also found in Te Papa’s management structure, which is similarly divided into Maori and Pakeha ‘halves’. As a Crown entity created in the years since the mid-1980s, Te Papa was inevitably structured in relation to the Treaty of Waitangi ‘principles’, which, since that era, has forged the idea of (a sometimes contested) partnership between two forms of governance.

I now want to describe four permanent exhibitions that are fairly representative of the museum’s approach to cultural history: Golden Days, On the Sheep’s Back, Mana Whenua and Signs of a Nation. I can only briefly refer to its other parts and functions: Te Papa is also the national art museum. Made in New Zealand displays selections from the national collection, centered around works that depict forms of Maori–Pakeha exchange; Te Papa also contains significant natural history exhibitions. Awesome Forces uses interactive displays to depict the nation’s precarious geology and meteorology; Mountains to Sea showcases national flora and fauna; Bush City is an outdoor recreated native environment. Each of these displays applies both Western scientific and indigenous cosmological interpretive frameworks. Another section worth noting for its novelty is The Time Warp and its motion simulator rides. ‘Future Rush’ takes visitors on a tour of Wellington in a ‘state-of-the-art flying car’ in the year 2055. Strapped on their backs in moving seats, the ride takes visitors through a futuristic house before zooming around electrified Wellington city streets and onto a ski field. ‘Blastback’ uses digital animation to fuse geology and Maori creation myth. New Zealand is torn from primordial Gondwanaland and mythical Maori ancestors fashion the landmass in the same seamless story. These simulated rides offer sensation with little specific cultural context; ‘they simply produce effect, and in so doing they erase the social conditions of their production’ (Harvey 1998, 153). Te Papa’s vision of the nation’s future is one where technology and cultural diversity can be effortlessly integrated.

GOLDEN DAYS

Among the Pakeha galleries, persistent queues form outside a small weatherboard bungalow. An old bicycle leans against the painted yellow facade. ‘Flat 2 – Keep Out’ is roughly painted on a window. About 20 visitors at a time are led in by a Te Papa ‘host’ and seated on a motley collection of chairs. The dimly lit room is stacked with bric-a-brac. A newsreel whirrs into action and the screen shows the window of a junkshop looking out on to Willis Street, a short distance from Te Papa. An old man appears and pulls down the shop’s grille, ending his day’s work. Instantly, like magic, the footage changes to old New Zealand newsreels, movies and advertisements. Simultaneously, announcements and accompanying sounds bombard the audience and the previously immobile curios spring to life in animated synchronicity. War footage shows troops in lemon-squeezer hats on Europe’s battlefields, while toy soldiers march across a coffee table and two Vickers guns reel off rounds. A storm blows up on screen, and a ferry figurine capsizes. Queen Elizabeth is crowned and a spotlight falls on a biscuit tin lid depicting her wedding photo. Shots of a suburban front lawn are shown as a Victa lawnmower runs up and down a strip of fake grass. Disasters, wars, sporting triumphs, pop music, cinema and local industry are orchestrated in this clever marionette theatre.

If Te Papa is viewed as a microcosmic advertisement for New Zealand’s ‘great outdoors’, then Golden Days is a microcosm of the museum. Its fast, fractured sequence of images aims to jog the memory, rather than provide any linking narrative or chronologic cause and effect. The events depicted – generally isolated, one-off occurrences like a disaster, coronation or musical performance – are suited to this narrative style. ‘Chronology doesn’t matter’, Steve La Hood, the installation’s creator has stated; ‘people just want to know emotionally where we are’ (quoted in Robinson 1998). The film aims for recognition rather than understanding: Te Papa likens the film to ‘a national home movie’. This domestic metaphor is consistent with Te Papa’s institutional theme, yet it more directly points to the role of TV in producing a shared national culture, and also reinforces the elision of the domestic and public that the consumption of TV, in particular, has helped to produce. The multimedia cinema of Golden Days represents a broadly postmodern narrative technique. As an exhibition aesthetic, postmodernism is characterised by ‘the kaleidoscopic approach, the ambition only to provide a “series of impressions”, the abandonment of a master narrative and the frequent collage-like use of pre-existing statements (films/objects/images)’ (Cochrane and Goodman 1988, 38). The arrangement of images around a nationalist narrative in Golden Days lifts events out of their specific histories and de-politicises them as ‘golden moments’. The exhibition appears to have given up on history as a disciplinary system of organisation. Its superficial narrative style draws attention to the distinction between a critical analysis of the national past and the sentimental construction of national history, where ‘good history’ is ‘history that feels good’. If history can be conceptualised as a convention that organises experience across time, then Golden Days effaces historical depth and simulates history.

This criticism does not mean, however, that Golden Days lacks a message altogether. Rather than seeing this emptying of meaning as a melancholic reflection of current curatorial practice, it is more useful to note the location and function of Golden Days among the social history displays. The theatrette is physically cloistered from the other permanent Pakeha history exhibitions: Passports, which deals with immigration, and On the Sheep’s Back. It is revealing that Golden Days is the only place in Te Papa that familiar, mainstream events (such as war, sporting victories and coronations) are represented. Rather than viewing this as a base-covering tactic, the superficial treatment of this material is perhaps more pointed: their relegation to nostalgia communicates the museum’s desire to show the nation’s distance from the dusty symbols of nation associated with its colonial past. After all, as repositories of the sentimental, provincial and kitsch, junkshops contain memories piled in disarray; they are connotatively antithetical to the fresh and progressive. The name ‘golden days’ also suggests a somewhat ironic, knowing standpoint towards this well-trod material. The sophisticated digital orchestration of the show also suggests a mastery over this past, implicitly marking it off as lacking the vital new perspectives that might inform a newer national identity formation.

ON THE SHEEP’S BACK

On the Sheep’s Back focuses on wool as the emblematic base for a broad field of meaning encompassing Pakeha material comfort, rural social life and communion with the physical environment. ‘We’re all farmers at heart’, chief Pakeha ‘concept leader’ Jock Phillips asserted. ‘Farming culture has deeply penetrated the New Zealand identity’ (quoted in Poot 1998, 117). Perhaps out of the awareness that wool represents a rather dour subject, the tone of the exhibition is distinctly playful. Visitors see several mini-displays. ‘Shear Hard Work’ shows images of Pakeha shearers at work, wool samples, an old wool press, and a photomontage of record-breaking shearing feats set inside a reconstructed wooden woolshed. ‘Home Is Where the Art Is’ celebrates ‘the home-spun creativity of New Zealanders working with wool’. This area includes material items such as tea-cosies, Maori cloaks, socks from the World War I Great National Sock Appeal (which yielded over 30,000 pairs), and woollen flowers made by a schoolgirl in 1885. In ‘Woollen Yarns’, fashion garments from contemporary designers are displayed alongside pristine woollen suits stockpiled on remote Stewart Island in case of shipwreck. This section also features the results of Te Papa’s competition for the best tale about a ‘Swanni’ (woollen bush shirt). One man used his to bury his favourite sheepdog. Another, trapped in a flooded creek, apparently turned his into a raft by tying it up and (somehow) inflating it.

On the Sheep’s Back is incongruously placed in a new hi-tech museum representing an emerging postcolonial nationhood. This is particularly palpable in the Time Warp section. One ‘game’ provides the chance to test one’s shearing skills, using a barcode reader in place of a razor handpiece. To play, visitors swipe the plastic sheep’s barcodes in sequence as quickly as possible. If the sheep takes the shearer over 41 seconds, he or she is declared a ‘townie’! The effect of witnessing the general ineptitude of local visitors playing this digital game, in front of a reconstructed shed inside a museum, situated on a waterfront location near downtown Wellington, produces an uncanny relation to Phillips’s idea of a nation of ‘farmers at heart’. The shearing game hints at how the cultural use of ‘country’ (a word used by New Zealanders for both the rural and the nation) has been urbanised – and even made virtual: the game suggests a perceptual shift from the country as the farming backbone of the nation to the country as a play-space for tourists and film producers.

On the Sheep’s Back is one of several exhibitions that expose the limitation of Te Papa’s stringent bicultural segmentation. While Maori are not explicitly excluded from the theme of working the land (and indeed Maori have historically comprised a high proportion of farmhands and shearers), the exhibition is located on the Pakeha side. As we shall see shortly, visitors could scarcely be blamed for forming the impression that the ‘real’ Maori relationship with the land is environmental rather than agricultural. This disconnection denies Te Papa the opportunity to engage with a major area of twentieth-century Maori labour history. Moreover, Te Papa does not (and perhaps cannot) reconcile farming culture in On the Sheep’s Back with its attention in Signs of a Nation to the swathe of injustices that flowed from treaty-sanctioned land acquisition. This incommensurability is captured in a revealing exchange between Georgina Te Heuheu, a board member, and Ronald Trotter, former chairman of the board:

[Georgina Te Heuheu:] How do we make that [biculturalism] underpin our exhibitions? If we’re talking about peopling ourselves and exhibiting ourselves, then we have to bring Maori into the equation. While the sheep runs were being developed, Ngai Tahu [the principal South Island tribe] over 20 years, lost all their land.

[Sir Ronald Trotter:] I came from a tough Scottish farming stock who came out in 1860 to the South Island where there were none of Tipene’s [Sir Tipene O’Regan, leader of Ngai Tahu] people – it was too cold for them – and if we don’t give pride to that, well, we wouldn’t be here. I mean we wouldn’t be the country we are today. If we only stole things, and god knows they never thought they were stealing, then that’s also part of our understanding on the other side (Cottrell and Preston 1999).

The total avoidance of the 1845–72 New Zealand Land Wars in On the Sheep’s Back shelters Pakeha from the less desirable aspects of their formative history and, indeed, the exclusion of any Maori perspective masks the political, social and economic dominance that allowed Pakeha to enjoy unhindered ownership of land. The considerable wealth that Pakeha extracted from farming meant that workers’ wages remained comparatively high. If this contributed to a national myth of egalitarianism celebrated at Te Papa, it concealed the real division between Maori alienated from their land and settlers, among whom the wealth from Maori land functioned to reduce class conflict (Steven 1989, 30–31).

MANA WHENUA

Te Papa’s Maori collection, numbering almost 16,000 items, dates predominantly from the late-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Carved pieces include meeting houses, canoes, storehouses, palisade posts, weapons, musical instruments and burial containers. Weaving consists of feather and dog-skin cloaks, flax skirts, baskets, fish nets and war belts. There is also a wide range of stone adzes, fishing and food cultivation tools, and domestic implements. Over the past 20 years, the ownership, lending, handling and display of this material have become a flashpoint between Maori and museums. Museum workers have become particularly concerned about their role in the political climate of Waitangi Tribunal treaty decisions, international indigenous rights protocols, and the governmental shift to an official bicultural policy. These pressures have generally encouraged strident support for Maori aspirations – and a rhetorical endorsement of Maori culture that is evaluative rather than analytic. Consider Te Papa’s description:

Mana Whenua [customary authority over lands] captures and conveys the richness, complexity and dynamism of the Maori people… contemporary Maori artworks explore and reinforce the continuum of tipuna [ancestor] culture and whakapapa, linking past generations to present day descendants and the dynamics of cultural continuity... these taonga, or treasures, reconnect through whakapapa, or genealogy, to the living descendants of today in dynamic and meaningful ways… Mana Whenua presents and celebrates the mana (power, authority, dignity) of our culture… (Museum of New Zealand n.d., my emphasis).

This assenting description contains two competing currents often invoked in contemporary accounts of Maori identity. One is essentialist, rooted in tradition and formalised in legal and bureaucratic spheres as a bounded ethnicity. The other discourse, articulated in the academic, cultural and artistic spheres, stresses a dynamic, postmodern and reflexive approach to identity. Tension recurs throughout Te Papa’s work between an official Maoritanga located in indigenous custom and knowledge that is a constituent part of a biculturalism, and the multiple and unstable interpretations of identity that apply to the creative realm.

In general, Te Papa seems to firmly support the former conception of Maori culture. A striking aspect of Mana Whenua in the context of Te Papa’s overall tone is its traditional ethnographic feel; taonga were not exhibited in greatly dissimilar ways at the old national museum. At both institutions, taonga have been displayed on the basis that race and cultural material are isomorphically related, and that there is a natural fit between art and cultural style. In this scheme, Maori art and ethnography are not opposite categories but complementary modes based on a common epistemological premise. Mana Whenua is dominated by a meeting house, canoe and storage house, which are held to be almost-mandatory elements in Maori displays.4 Around these large objects visitors see smaller displays on topics such as Pacific voyaging, traditional musical instruments, and the ancestors, places and customs significant to particular tribes.

As the authoritative statement of Maori culture at Te Papa, Mana Whenua amplifies and aestheticises difference through what appears to be a strong nineteenth-century focus. While there are contemporary works in the gallery, they are often faithful to traditional forms, as if to demonstrate that old techniques have not been abandoned. Taonga are simultaneously presented as fine artworks and as examples of the sacredness of Maori culture. Conventionally, there has been a strategic division between the curatorial principles of natural history and anthropology museums, and those of art museums. In the former, objective and dispassionate information ideally allows visitors to reach their own conclusions. Art museums, by contrast, are concerned not only with supplying information, but with aesthetics and conveying abstract interpretive frameworks (Ames 1992, 51–52). In recent years, several commentators have expressed a concern that this distinction has collapsed – particularly in the display of indigenous cultures. For example, in a review of the Bunjilaka Aboriginal Centre at the Melbourne Museum, Peter Timms reports that the gallery has opted for an ‘unashamedly biased presentation that makes few claims to objectivity’. He argues that the Bunjilaka gallery intermixes art and artefact as the basis for conveying a system of ideological beliefs about the nature of identity, rather than supplying factual information about Aboriginal history and life (Timms 2000, 7). James Clifford has called this new approach to indigenous displays, brought about by the erosion of the opposition between art and anthropology, ‘aestheticized scientism’ (Clifford 1988, 203). A reluctance to define taonga solely as art is no longer justified on the grounds that they lack the aesthetic qualities of European art. Instead, Maori express unease about defining their objects through a ‘Western’ lens, and argue that the spiritual presence that inhabits objects enlarges them beyond the status of ‘art’. Accordingly, Maori stress that the category of taonga embraces a far greater sphere than ‘artworks’ – it includes, for instance, greenstone pendants, geothermal pools, weaving techniques, a proverb or a song (Tapsell 1997, 331). In Mana Whenua, utilitarian objects, previously distinguished from artworks in older taxonomic displays, are accorded the same status as taonga precisely because they also have an ancestral past. The principle that taonga encapsulate a whole world view plays a vital role in rejecting structuralist anthropological categories, which may be charged with artificially disconnecting, say, spirituality from war or kinship from carving.

While Mana Whenua is not light-hearted or interactive in the manner of the rest of the museum, it is not lifeless. Objects gain a renewed charge through their display at Te Papa, partly out of the public drama and fresh display tactics of a new museum, which includes Maori language placards, traditional background music and personable Maori ‘hosts’. The gallery also sits next to the self-consciously novel Te Marae. Te Papa claims to be the world’s only museum to have a culturally functioning marae (ceremonial meeting space). Carved by young Maori apprentices from throughout New Zealand, the appearance of Te Marae is quite unique:

The decorative three-dimensional figures are cobbled together from pieces of composition board, embellished with pieces of galvanised iron cut with tin-snips, and painted with aerosol shading in garish non-Maori colours such as peacock blue, purple, apricot, and pale emerald, surrounding an inverted Japanese archway leading into a shallow interior surmounted by a row of Turkish minarets leading up into an impossibly sapphire sky (Haden 1998, 6).

Figure 2.1. Detail of Te Marae

© Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. Used with permission.

Carvings of mythical Maori creation figures, gods and ancestors are positioned beside settler figures such as a missionary, farmer and schoolmaster. Its interior walls feature carved reliefs similar in appearance to stained-glass windows, while the back section features medieval Gothic doorways. The structure is an explicitly bicultural meeting space. As conceived in museum policy, Te Marae represents a novel arrangement whereby ‘the shared genealogy of the museum’s collection’ allows all peoples to feel ‘at home’ on the marae. Te Papa asserts that the ‘concept of Mana Taonga [the authority of ancestral treasures] will enable the marae to extend its mana, or spiritual power, over the treasures of both cultures, and will allow both cultures to use the marae for events and ceremonies’ (Museum of New Zealand 1992, 17). While its appearance is unorthodox, the issue of the cultural ownership of the marae space is arguably more contentious: traditionally, the marae is the key symbol through which tribes assert their customary possession over land (and recognise another’s). The local tribe exercises rights of invitation and procedure that governs the conduct of outsiders. In this case, however, the concept of the marae has been nationalised.

In Te Papa’s bicultural model, Maori indifference to chronological ‘national time’ has nothing to do with ideas of relative cultural progress. The almost entire absence of ‘Maori history’ – understood in categories like labour relations, war, urbanisation, demographic changes, gender relations, significant sporting or cultural events, or education and health standards – is revealing. Compared with, for example, the Bunjilaka display at the Melbourne Museum, the First Australians Gallery at the National Museum of Australia, or the Indigenous Australia Gallery at the Australian Museum, Te Papa is much less forthright about twentieth-century racism and inequality. While this may reflect the lesser degree of historical persecution Maori have suffered, it might also say something about the differentiating effect of bicultural museum policy. That is, the desire to absent Maori artefacts from national social history categories may represent a resistance on the part of Maori to define the Maori historical experience in accordance with the assimilative effect associated with a national institution. The projected image in Mana Whenua is of a self-secure and self-contained Maori culture that possesses pathways to advancement somewhat independent of the larger nation.

SIGNS OF A NATION

Signs of a Nation is the physical and conceptual meeting point of Pakeha and Maori sections. The space is dominated by a huge glass replica of the (largely illegible) Treaty of Waitangi itself. On each wall are six-metre-high wooden panels inscribed with the full text. On one side is the Maori version; on the other is the English. Seats in front of these versions of the treaty provide a place for visitors to contemplate its articles. A theme of contestation is communicated in several ways. A small display that places an English translation of the Maori text alongside the English text shows how the two versions do not match. It asks the reader to judge which text offered Maori more (the evident conclusion being the Maori version). At the entrance, visitors are surrounded by a thicket of poles (highly reminiscent of the Edge of the trees installation outside the Museum of Sydney) from which a variety of voices of ordinary New Zealanders articulate conflicting views about the treaty: ‘These protestors – you never know what they want’; ‘The Treaty is just a gravy train for the rich Maori elite’; ‘We need to stop this bickering, we are one people – at least that’s what Governor Hobson said’; ‘We can support a symphony orchestra, but a full time Maori culture group wouldn’t even be considered’. Historical conflict is also represented by three display cases that organise objects according to the three treaty articles. The ‘Government/Kawanatanga’ display contrasts Maori icons such as a 1830s United Tribes flag, Huia feathers, a Rakau whakapapa (staff with notches for reciting genealogy) and a toki poutanga (greenstone weapon), alongside Crown items such as the colonial flag, a ballot box and an 1841 Seal of the Colony. A video shows a range of historical dramatisations of Maori and Pakeha talking about the effect of the treaty on their lives: we see Maori women peeling vegetables and discussing the Queen’s impending 1954 visit; contemporary Maori rugby players comparing treaty relations to sport; a young Maori woman likening 1970s prime minister Norman Kirk’s appreciation of the land to that of Maori; a Scottish female colonist indignantly describing their own claim to the new country; and postwar Maori shearers doing the same. In ‘Land and Cultural Heritage/Te Whenua me Nga Tikanga tuku iho’, we see the iron ruler, surveyor’s chain and theodolite, and gold pocket watch that were tools of land appropriation. Maori objects next to these include an eighteenth-century whenua pot (for burying placenta) and a nineteenth-century carved pouwhenua (signpost). In ‘Citizens’ Rights/Mana Tangata’ the shared experience of Maori and Pakeha is signified by a copy of the Magna Carta, a barrister’s wig, a bayonet, wire-cutters, and a World War I Maori battalion helmet.

Figure 2.2. Poles at the entrance to Signs of a Nation

© Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. Used with permission.

Rumination of the treaty in Signs of a Nation works alongside other performances (such as rubbing greenstone in Te Marae or removing one’s shoes to enter Mana Whenua’s main meeting house) that encourage the practice of ‘being bicultural’. The exhibition is promoted as providing a contemplative space removed from everyday life where visitors can discuss and debate the treaty without interference. A text panel reads:

The Treaty of Waitangi is a living social document. Debated, overlooked, celebrated. A vision of peaceful co-existence, or the cause of disharmony? An irrelevancy, or the platform on which all New Zealanders can build a future? The meaning of the Treaty changes depending on who’s speaking. Engage with our founding document… The floor is open for discussion.

Signs of a Nation can only struggle to make biculturalism, at heart a state strategy for managing difference, a democratic topic. Due to the ambiguous language of the original treaty document (exacerbated by changes in wording across translations that encompass several different versions, combined with the nuances of tribal oral histories) the Waitangi Tribunal makes its recommendations based on ‘the spirit of the Treaty’ rather than any literal meaning. While drawing viewer attention to the original text may help the public to appreciate the original intentions of the Crown, it does little to elucidate what the treaty spirit, so critical in political decisions, might entail.

If Te Papa’s goal (encapsulated in its mission statement) is to act as ‘a forum for the nation’, it appears to have achieved this chiefly in the way it contains a multitude of experiences. It is a place, according to Te Papa’s William Tramposch, ‘where something is always happening’ (Tramposch 1998b, 32). While this activity faintly gestures towards the forum in that it offers visitor (or ‘customer’) choices, it does not alone necessarily invite debate over, say, the legacy of colonial history, contemporary social inequality or, indeed, issues that originate far beyond New Zealand. Te Papa’s strategy of immersing visitors in sights, sounds, activities and emotional responses is probably more an issue of display strategies than a rethinking of the museum’s role in the public sphere. After all, although visitors will undoubtedly take different ‘experiences’ away with them, these remain tightly choreographed by the museum. Te Papa’s one-way communication is geared towards allowing the visitor to ‘try out’ and gauge the emotional appeal of a variety of ideas about cultural roots and national identity. This tactic, which Gary Edson calls ‘socioexhibitry’, is premised on the belief that people’s cultural identities rather than objects should be the starting point of the museum’s work (Edson 2001, 40–44). The idea of communicating in a wide variety of modes to a broad array of private selves may be a popular and inexorable museum tactic, but it is not one that is suitably described as a public forum.

Instead, my position is closer to that of Arjun Appadurai, who is interested in how the granting of expressions of minority and indigenous self-representation and uniqueness can ultimately act as a state strategy of containment:

National and international mediascapes are exploited by nation-states to pacify separatists or even the potential fissiparousness of all ideas of difference. Typically, contemporary nation-states do this by exercising taxonomic control over difference, by creating various kinds of international spectacles to domesticate difference and by seducing small groups with the fantasy of self-display on some sort of global and cosmopolitan stage (Appadurai 1996, 39).

Appadurai’s reference to both ‘taxonomic control’ and ‘the fantasy of self-display’ hints at the double-inscription of museums both as modern institutions of governmental classification and as spaces of glorification, descended from competitive imperial projects. His use of the phrase ‘to domesticate difference’ – particularly apt for a museum branded as ‘Our Place’ – describes the ideological effect when cultural difference is publicly celebrated within an entirely national frame. Consideration is needed to how the ‘forum’ can be utilised, in a postcolonial environment, as a promotional tool for nationalist articulations. That is, in a time when unitary national cultures are viewed suspiciously (particularly by the liberal consensus that often dominates the institutional climate of museums), metaphors that cluster around the ideas of contact, meeting, dialogue and engagement provide a way of dramatising and enlivening the museum itself and its subject – in this case, the nation.

CONCLUSION: MAKING A SPECTACLE OF OURSELVES

If, as David Lowenthal (1999) has avowed, ‘the most successful museums are those that are able to play on the divisions and problems of nations’, then how does Te Papa fare? Outwardly, Te Papa directly addresses New Zealand’s chief social and cultural schism through its bicultural focus. Yet bicultural nationhood is realised at the exhibition level in a highly idiosyncratic manner. The difference between what visitors might expect, involving some representation of how Maori and Pakeha have lived together, and what is portrayed, in the form of conceptual and substantive disconnection, is quite disconcerting. Empire, for instance, is almost absent at Te Papa, even as a point of Pakeha origin. G. B. Dahl and Ronald Stade have observed:

Once a museum was either the self-glorifying institution of national romanticism seeking the roots of a nation in an idealised rural background, or an exoticising museum depicting the colonial other. In territories where indigenous peoples were subjected to European conquest these two categories are today often muddled, signalling new relations between nation-building and indigenous-ness (Dahl and Stade 2000, 157).

While Te Papa stresses a new postcolonial outlook, the central issue of ‘race’ remains fundamental. The uncertain, even contradictory effect of embracing a settler–indigenous racial difference while marginalising empire – when in fact empire and race are inextricably bound in New Zealand’s history – attests to the ways that former colonies struggle to untangle colonialism.

In nationalist discourse, cultural identity is asserted as both a fixed object, passed from one generation to the next, and as a territorial claim, where the space of culture becomes imbricated with ethnic and national ideas. This forms a potent combination of blood and soil – precisely the link that tangata whenua articulates. However, the spiritual aspect of Pakeha heritage is not presented in a continuum with the notion of taonga. Yet the blithe tone of exhibitions like Golden Days and On the Sheep’s Back does not necessarily reflect the security of Pakeha identity. Unlike parts of Europe and America, where national museums helped to make national histories in the service of nation building, New Zealand’s museums do not have a long background in narrating national history. However, Te Papa is engaging with this topic at precisely the time when ‘national history’ itself has become unfashionable among many public historians. The result is the demystification of something that was arguably never mystified – at least in the museum setting. An internal inquiry found that:

The material culture of the Pakeha is profoundly under-represented in the Museum, such that it is neither fulfilling its fundamental statutory function as the repository of comprehensive collections of truly national significance, nor is it capable of presenting Pakeha history and culture in public displays (Review Team Report 1994, 7).

In this sense, Te Papa has leapt towards a postmodern critique of national history, without having exhausted the modern history of the nation. The historical disparity in collecting practices – where Maori material culture was hoarded according to the needs of a ‘salvage ethnography’ while Pakeha believed that they scarcely had a history worth documenting – again reflects the nation’s colonial origins. Further, a scant object-base also partly explains Te Papa’s reliance on technologically mediated experience. Paradoxically, then, the museum’s bright postcolonial veneer owes a kind of debt to an institutionalised form of colonial cringe. In sum, the received message is that Pakeha identity is a malleable historical experiment, whereas Maori is an immutable cultural world view.

Eight years after opening, Te Papa remains poised as the captivating but troublesome result of the forces of market-driven public accessibility, postmodern curatorial revisionism and Maori cultural reassertion. While public accessibility is an emergent and inevitable response to the pressures of financial accountability, the latter two interact awkwardly. Biculturalism was con ceptualised as a way in which Te Papa could respond to the crisis of national identity. Its implementation has, paradoxically, allowed important problems in that identity to go unexamined. By presenting biculturalism as an achieved postcolonial state, Te Papa overlooks not only a history of colonialism, but also the continuing inequality between Maori and Pakeha that made biculturalism a necessary response in the first place. For now, however, the glamour of international at attention (and growing international tourists) seems to produce the sense that constant museological innovation in display tactics supersedes the need to reinterpret overarching cultural concepts.

ENDNOTES

1     The 1840 Treaty of Waitangi was an agreement between the British Crown and Maori chiefs, which remains, in essence, contested. For the purposes of the treaty, the British recognised those Maori who signed it as representing the whole of Maoridom. The treaty consists of a preamble and three articles. The first article signs the rights of sovereignty in New Zealand over to the British Crown. In the Maori version, something quite different (kawanatanga, or governorship) was granted to the Crown. The second article reserved Maori tino rangatiratanga (full sovereign authority) over their lands, forests, fisheries and me o ratou taonga katoa (everything they valued). The third article stated that everyone in New Zealand would have the rights and privileges of British subjects.

2     The Waitangi Tribunal is a permanent commission of inquiry charged with investigating and making recommendations to parliament on claims brought by Maori relating to actions or omissions of the Crown that breach the promises made in the Treaty of Waitangi.

3     The act establishing the museum stated that the board shall: ‘Endeavour to ensure both that the Museum expresses and recognises the mana [authority] and significance of Maori, European, and other major traditions and cultural heritages, and that the Museum provides the means for every such culture to contribute effectively to the Museum as a statement of New Zealand’s identity’. Although this wording suggests the possibility for a multicultural framework, there was very little subsequent development of ‘other major traditions’ in policy. See Department of Internal Affairs (1992), section 8, part b.

4     The objects to which I refer are the whare wananga Te Hau ki Turanga (1842), the waka taua Teremoe (1860), and the pataka Te Takinga (1820).

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Cite this chapter as: Williams, Paul. 2006. ‘Reforming nationhood: The free market and biculturalism at Te Papa’. South Pacific Museums, edited by Healy, Chris; Witcomb, Andrea. Monash University ePress: Melbourne. pp. 2.1–2.16.

© Copyright 2006 Paul Williams
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