In 1969 North Shore man Stanley Hunt lifted an axe over his shoulder and swung its blade down hard on an old wooden chest. As the casing splintered into shards of kindling, sheaves of paper and parchment fluttered out from a secret compartment that had been exposed by his blows.

Will Ye Marry Me - Click to view transcription

After years of concealment, an odd assortment of papers was revealed, all written in Scotland between 1727 and 1834. Here was a list of accounts, birth and marriage testimonials, rental receipts, details of an annuity and, most peculiar of all, a rhyming advertisement for a wife written by a man in Forfar jail (click on the image on the right for a large version with a transcription).

Whose were these papers? Most of them related to either James Cowie or his son John from Auchterhouse, Angus (Forfarshire), Scotland. One document concerned the Earl of Airlie, David Ogilvy, of Cortachy Castle.

Stan Hunt had found the chest abandoned in a shed when he bought his North Shore property. He contacted the previous owner who said the chest was given to her by her father, but she did not know how he had come by it. Its origins remain a mystery. Stan gave the chest to Motat who passed it on to the Auckland Museum where it is in the care of the manuscript’s librarian Martin Collett.

Martin says secret compartments were fairly common, especially in Scottish chests. It is most likely chest came to New Zealand from Britain in the 19^th century, but there are still other possibilities as well, such as, Nova Scotia in Canada.

The papers tucked away for posterity inside may never have been exposed to the New Zealand sun before Stan Hunt picked up his axe to render an old chest into kindling.

As for whether any woman was so taken by the advertisement, we may never know. If you happen to know anything about the Cowie family in New Zealand or Scotland please let us know.

Some of the birds just back from the taxidermists.

Over the last five months a variety of rare bird visitors have made their way to the Museum’s collections, having flown to New Zealand from as far afield as the tropics and subantarctic islands.

They include a crested tern, brown booby and tropic birds (all classified as rare tropical vagrants) as well as a brown skua that is normally at home in the subantarctic.

The birds were found dead on beaches near Tauranga, Muriwai, Coromandel and Tawharanui. The specimens will enrich our already substantial collections.

They first come to the Museum’s freezers. Those that are in a good condition are turned into ‘skins’, while those that have begun to decompose have the rest of their flesh and feathers removed (in a smelly process which basically involves letting them rot in jars of water) so their bones can be kept.

This week the specimens came back from the taxidermist, along with a variety of other birds, including a brown teal and a black shag.

A crested tern (bottom) and a tropic bird back from the taxidermist

They become part of a vast and valuable collection and associated database. Researchers might use them to glean information about the changing distribution or speciation of birds in the Pacific.  Or they may be useful in years to come by researchers using technologies that haven’t yet been invented.

Recently specimens collected in the 19th century for identification and display were used by a researcher unlocking secrets of pigmentation and evolution using new spectrometry technology.

Auckland Museum holds about 14,500 birds in our collection. And counting.

Poster calling for protests agains the US Invicible's visit to Auckland

In a wee storeroom off the top of a stairwell is the Museum’s collection of ephemera. The array of acid free cardboard boxes contain everything from dance cards to fast food menus. The box that is the subject of this blog is a window into two of the great protest movements in New Zealand’s recent history.

It contains pamphlets from the anti-nuclear protests of the 1970s and 80s, and from the Springbok Tour protests of 1981.

It seems a fitting subject for an end of year blog, given that Time magazine declared “the Protester’ its 2011 person of the year (yes, they still use the singular).

Nearly every right we enjoy today, from the right of women to vote through to equality before the law came through people who stood up and demanded change. People who protested, who argued and who mobilised.

A nuclear warhead heads for NZ

New Zealand’s anti-nuclear protests gathered intensity during the 1970s. Visits by nuclear capable US navy ships brought thousands out to demonstrate their opposition to nuclear weapons. It was a time when the annihilation of life on Earth felt imminent. It seemed an exchange of warheads between the two great Cold War superpowers, Russia and the United States, could be precipitated at any momemnt by an accident or geopolitical incident spiralling out of control.

New Zealander’s anti-nuclear campaign culminated in the decision by the then recently elected Labour government to declare New Zealand nuclear free in 1984.

The most divisive protest movement in recent New Zealand history came when the New Zealand Rugby Football Union invited the Springboks to tour in 1981. Opposition was instantaneous. The first protests attempted to dissuade the NZRFU from hosting the Springboks, who were representing the racist apartheid regime of the white South African government.

Handbook for Springbok tour protestors in the north of the country

Protests began well before the Springboks arrived

The NZRFU went ahead with the tour and the protest movement grew and grew. The country came as close to a kind of civil war as was imaginable. The protests culminated at the final test in Auckland’s Eden Park. A pamphlet from that protest informs marchers that there is “no place for dogs, bicycles, babies or WEAPONS”.

Handout for protestors at the Eden Park match, who had been placed in the Biko group

It also tells them to be prepared to manoeuvre

- To jog

- To stop

- To wheel

- To turn on the spot

Which seems fitting advice to anyone who wants to make the world a better place.

Merry Christmas.

Andrew Lancaster's vampire hare, on display in The Poisoners!

An example of his work, a hare with vampire teeth and bloodshot eyes, is on display in the Lab of Madness in The Poisoners! exhibition, which has just opened here at Auckland Museum.

Throughout the almost 11,000 kilometres of New Zealand’s state highways, animals from possums to magpies lie strewn and lifeless. To Andrew Lancaster they are offerings to the art of the taxidermist.

“I live in the country so I drive out the gate and every other morning there is something that’s been hit, possums and rabbits, sometimes ducks.,” Andrew tells me on the phone from the Bay of Plenty.

Andrew learnt taxidermy as a teenager growing up in Yorkshire where he used to help his brother, who was working to become a professional taxidermist.

“You make as small an incision as you can get away with and get everything out that hole. Turn it inside out basically. Preparing the skin for mounting is the hardest part and that’s what I did for my brother.”

One of Andrew's mix and match creations

A baby-dove.... or a dove-baby

But it wasn’t until Andrew moved to New Zealand about 15 years ago that he took up taxidermy as a hobby. “I just thought it was a shame seeing them [road kill] all lying on the road.”

A few years ago he started playing around with the animals, mixing up body parts. “I got a bit tired of doing the everyday natural looking ones and with road kill some parts are badly damaged but there might be a nice pair of wings or legs so I just cut them off.”

He uses an old fashioned method of taxidermy, using wire and woodwool (fine wood shavings), rather than the expanding foam favoured by most modern taxidermists.

Not all his animals are road kill, occasionally hunters will give him animals to mount. And only recently an obliging thrush flew into his workspace, hit the window and landed dead on his bench ready to work on.

Which is fitting for an exhibition that features its very own Poacher’s Lair and wildlife smuggler, Anastasia van Abs.

Asian medicines containing endangered species are the most commonly seized items

Every week rare and endangered animals are confiscated at New Zealand’s borders under the Convention for International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). All species listed by CITES require a permit for import or export.

“They contain anything from tigers to pangolins, to parts of elephants, to ground ivory. It could be absolutely anything,” says Anita Jacobs, one of New Zealand’s four CITES officers.

She says there are about 50-60 seizures each week of items without a permit. Most are traditional Asian medicines containing endangered plants or animals.

Most of what is confiscated is destroyed, but some objects can be lent out to institutions like Auckland Museum for education purposes. And that is how the Museum comes to have a tiger skin, snakes in whiskey bottles, a wolf pelt and a mounted bear all going into The Poisoners.

A tiger skin confiscated under the CITES agreement

Auckland Museum technician Jason Froggatt, who spent time working as field conservationist in the United States, says handling the CITES objects was interesting.

An elephant tusk. It is illegal to import such an item without a CITES permit.

“Having dealt with live conservation, the stark absurdity of killing an elephant, and cutting off its tusks to make a beautiful ornament, of an elephant, is hard to deal with.”

Anita says the worldwide trade in illegal wildlife is worth almost as much as the illegal drugs trade. For those caught bringing in endangered plants and animals without a permit the punishment can range from three years in jail and/or a $50,000 fine up to $200,000 and/or five years in jail.

She says it is important travellers know not to buy tourist items which contain animal or plant material unless they can get a certificate showing they’re not from endangered species.

“CITES is not about prohibiting trade it is about managing it. It is about the need for international permits so we can monitor the trade. People are slowly but surely coming to understand that if they bring these things into the country they need a permit otherwise it will be seized.”

A black bear, mouth open, teeth bared

One floor underground an upright black bear stands guard over a host of animals and plants ready to go on display in The Poisoners at Auckland Museum. I’m down here, in the exhibition preparation room, with museum technician Dhahara Ranatunga to get a sneak preview of some of the creatures you’ll see in the exhibition.

Dhahara was a member of the team responsible for selecting, locating and gathering many of the 200-odd natural history objects in The Poisoners, a murder mystery that opens on December 16.

Arranged on shelves and in boxes are crayfish in pickling jars, snakes in whiskey bottles, birds, reptiles, beetles, butterflies and crustaceans.There are stuffed marsupials, what remains of a wolf when you take away everything except the skin and skull, and a king baboon tarantula (capable of catching and eating small helpless birds). It is not a collection of creatures you often see in one place.

What a wolf looks like without its bones and innards

When Te Papa developed The Poisoners four years ago the selection of animals and poisonous plants was based on their collections. Working alongside the natural history curators, Dhahara, (and her colleague Jason Froggatt), were given the job to find the same or similar objects from Auckland Museum’s natural history collections.

A possum forever climbing a branch

Some were easy. In a quirk of the taxidermists art both museums are home to possums in an almost identical arboreal pose – mid-climb up a bare branch. Others were harder to match. Specimens of the poisonous fly agaric mushroom and the malaria carrying Anopheles mosquitoes were particularly elusive, says Dhahara.

Since the Auckland War Memorial Museum was built in 1929 there have been eight decades of storing things, getting them out and putting them away again. It goes without saying that among this great haystack of history, science and culture some objects are easier to find than others.

For a start, not everything is always where it ought to be, or what it ought to be. The albino bird cupboard is home to a pigment-less sparrow, kiwi, blue penguin and chicken. But Dhahara says it turned out the chicken’s whiteness was work of chicken breeders, not the result of a rare mutation.

Some objects, like the big red, white-spotted fly agaric mushrooms, had to be sourced from outside the Museum.

“Fly agarics,” says Dhahara, “you’d think they would be common. I went out in March and April and found only one in the Domain.  In spring I spent the day out in Woodhill forest and found every species of mushroom but fly agarics.”

A not so blue penguin

Sourcing dead Anopheles mosquitoes, which are malaria vectors, was also tricky. An Auckland University researcher had thrown out specimens only a week before Dhahara made contact. Dhahara eventually tracked down a source in a Madagascan research centre.

And Dhahara’s favourite thing in the exhibition? A spider whose brain has been rewired by a nematode, but the full story of that has to wait for another blog.

Getting ready for the new murder mystery coming to Auckland Museum

What links a mouse dissolved by the digestive juices of a tarantula, a spider that’s been invaded by a nematode worm and malarial mosquitoes from Madagascar? They are all clues to a murder mystery at Auckland Museum this summer.

Along with more than 200 other strange, beautiful, creepy, dangerous and deadly plants and animals they are on display in The Poisoners in the Museum’s exhibition hall from December 16 2011.

All done! The Poisoners opens on 16 December 2011

When the exhibition opens, get your sleuthing brain into gear and work out which object was used by one of four equally suspicious suspects to kill the brilliant scientist Dr Felix Splicer. Clues will help you eliminate the innocent as you pinpoint the murderer and their weapon of choice.

Developed by Te Papa in Wellington The Poisoners came with a list of natural history objects, from stag’s heads to scorpions, used in the exhibition when it ran in 2007.  Gathering all the dangerous and delightful objects together for the Auckland’s Poisoners exhibition has been the job of technicians Dhahara Ranatunga and Jason Froggat.  The quest to find suitable specimens from our own rich collections began in March.

A grey wolf, albino birds, horseshoe crabs, blue beetles from Papua New Guinea and angler fish have all been selected. Jars of sea creatures pickled in alcohol have been brought in from offsite storage. A stuffed brown bear has been moved downstairs from its home in Weird and Wonderful.  Mosquitoes have even been flown in from Madagascar.

An albino house sparrow (Passer domesticus)

Over the next few weeks I will bring you behind the scenes stories from the exhibition, from the search for Anopheles mosquitoes to the tale of a spider whose brain was rewired by a worm.

Take a moment to look closer... (ID:B4338)

There they are, the Lush family, 1884, pouring tea into china cups in the bush near Thames. The women are all seated or reclining, their skirts voluminous about them, wide brimmed hats hold floral decorations as the wind shakes the fronds of a ponga into a fixed blur.

The three men frame the family group like apexes of a triangle. Two are standing in top hats, one is seated, with his legs almost ladylike and daintily drawn up about him; he scowls somewhat as he offers something to… his sister?

Our first glance at the picture is often perfunctory. Our brain whirrs and whizzes, ruthlessly efficient in removing extraneous detail, it presents us with just enough information to tell us that this is a photo of people having lunch in the bush, and that it was taken some time ago.

But this picture is filled with curious components.  Odd little things that reward a longer look. The image caption that appears in the exhibition reads:

Walking into the bush in long skirts and fancy hats, while carrying fine china cups, ornate teapots and circular-handled umbrellas (look at the one on the right), once made eating outdoors a more complex affair than it is today. On public holidays in late 19th century New Zealand, even picnickers wore their Sunday best.

The circular handled umbrella gets a mention in the hope that visitors revisit the picture to look for it, curiosity piqued, and then search their eyes through the other objects, while the mention of Sunday best encourages another look at the people, who’ve set out in all their finery.

A caption cannot attempt to tell everything. And most people don’t have hours to peer into each photo untangling the details from the whole. But a good caption should encourage just that, while also setting some context.  That’s the attempt, anyway.

The caption tells us the photographer was John Martin Hawkins Lush (1854–1893), who would have been about 30 when he took the photo of his family members.

We can imagine the moment of the photo. John, having lugged the camera over his shoulder to this sunlit clearing, would have set it up atop the tripod, arranged his family, called for silence and stillness, put his head under the black cloth and pressed open the shutter for a second or two. Done.

Days later they’d get to find out who couldn’t manage to sit still. The two at the back as it transpires. The man’s face is nought but a smudge of moustache but you can detect merriment in the movement of the woman’s face (or can you?). Was she disappointed to discover her features rendered out of focus?