Auckland Museum blog

9000 sharks…11,000 baskets of potatoes…4000 conversations (and counting)…

9000 ngā mango…11,000 ngā kete riwai…4000 ngā kōrerorero (ka piki ake) …

In exhibition development we trim the text to give visitors enough information, but not an excess. This sounds simple, but sometimes there is so much to say it’s hard to know where to make the cut. Luckily the digital medium knows no such bounds. So on behalf of our team, I’m returning to the raw detail of the Maori feast at Remuera in May 1844, a key story in Kai to Pie, to launch a longer conversation about an extraordinary event of which there are many stories.

“Maori Feast at Remuera” – a lithograph by Star Steam of Auckland (based on the watercolour by Joseph Jenner Merrett) presented with Brett’s Auckland Almanac for 1890. Auckland Museum Pictorial Collections (Print M296)

The feast (hākari) was recorded in a watercolour painted by Joseph Merrett; lithographs based on this watercolour; newspaper articles; and eyewitness accounts of those who were actually there – though their details differ, all record an immense amount of food (kai). Governor Robert FitzRoy visited Remuera on the morning of Saturday 11 May. He described a 500 metre long line of small dried sharks (mangō) suspended above baskets of potatoes (ngā kete riwai). Each basket (kete), FitzRoy wrote, was a “fair load for a man to carry to market”. If you zoom into the detail beneath Remuwera (Mt Hobson) you can see this spectacular spread.

Exactly how much food was there?

In the exhibition we say that 9000 sharks and 11,000 baskets of potatoes were presented to 4000 people. You might wonder how we landed on these figures. They are printed in the caption beneath the lithograph made in 1890. The person who wrote the caption might have drawn the numbers from an article in the Daily Southern Cross of 27 April 1844 which reported the preparation of “11,000 baskets of potatoes… 9000 sharks… and 100 full grown and well fattened pigs…”

So, what might have begun as an estimate – perhaps one journalist’s rounding-up, was published in a newspaper, later beneath a lithograph and then in more than one book. This tally has become legendary, and you can understand why – exact numbers are explicit; they’re easy to hold onto and to pass onto someone else; and they stir the imagination.

Still, we don’t know for sure that these neat numbers are correct. Similarly, we don’t know for sure that there were 4000 people in attendance – this was FitzRoy’s summing up, but others estimated there were near to 6000.

Most importantly, researching the feast, we’ve found that people have different views as to why it was held and the reasons for attending it. FitzRoy declared unequivocally the feast was given by the principal chiefs of Waikato (Te Wherowhero and Wetere) to reciprocate one given to them a year earlier and “to show the extent of… their influences and alliances” in the Auckland area to Maori and Pakeha alike (a view supported by many secondary sources since). This may well have been the main motivation, but amongst a crowd of 4000, representing at least 17 iwi, there were bound to be other reasons for attending and numerous conversations to be had.

Do you have knowledge of this feast? We are keen to hear it.

Maua ko Hinana ti uta, Hinana ki tai ('Maori Court West', Tamaki Paenga Hira)

Ko Kotuku Tibble toku ingoa, no Ngati Tuwharetoa ahau. He uri ahau no Iwikau nana i hanga mai i tenei paataka kai, hei tohu mo te kaupapa whakatuu i te Kingi Maori I Pukawa ki te pito taitonga o Taupo moana i te tau 1856.

Hinana ki uta, Hinana ki tai! He paataka kai tenei no Ngati Tuwharetoa.

He paataka tenei hei pupuri i nga kai, hei whangai i te taha tinana i te taha wairua hoki o te tangata.

Tino kaingakau ahau ki tenei taonga, ka taea e au te hono atu ki oku tupuna.

Ka mau te wehi!

Rajah the elephant on display in the Auckland Museum Wild Child gallery

The Auckland Museum blog is still finding its footing a little bit. And that’s OK. Like stuffing an elephant, good things take time.

Meanwhile I thought I’d chip in and share some pictures that I came across during a recent visit with some of the curators who look after our wonderful collections.

Behold then: the making of Rajah, one of Auckland Museum’s best-known exhibits – and a somewhat mammoth exercise in taxidermy.

Rajah the elephant has a special place in my memory just as he does in the memories of many visitors to Auckland Museum of a certain age.

Funnily enough I don’t recall ever considering how he came to be stuffed. Possibly, like my teddy bear, he was alive in my childhood imagination (just keeping very still around others who didn’t understand him like I did).

Here he is when he was actually alive, trumpeting around the Auckland Zoo.

Rajah the elephant in the flesh (ID:C23261)

The Zoo bought him for 125 pounds in 1930. Not sure what the equivalent of that would be today.

I’m sad to discover that Rajah wasn’t a happy elephant when he was alive. Aside from being in captivity, some horrid person had stubbed their cigarette out on his trunk, making him (rightly, I’d say) rather hostile to visitors.

So the Zoo put him down – all 4 tonnes of him (or 4000 kilograms, the equivalent of around 200 six-year old boys).

Enter Charles Dover, a taxidermist on Auckland Museum’s staff, who got to work making him into a museum exhibit.

Here’s how our curator of land vertebrates (things that live on the land and have backbones), Brian Gill, describes the rather gruesome process in a New Zealand Geographic article from 2002:

“Three weeks were spent on the hide alone, scraping and paring it down on the inside to remove fat and connective tissue. Meanwhile the scraped-down bones were placed on the roof of the museum to weather. [...]

Dover built a framework of timber struts and iron rods, incorporating papier mache casts of the skull and pelvic girdle for added fidelity. Wooden replicas of the ribs were made. The framework was finished with a layer of fine wire-netting covered with scrim and packed out in places with fine wood shavings.

The outer most layer was papier mache, painted when dry so as to be waterproof. Finally, the wet skin was taken from a tank of preservative and slid into place on the framework, which had been oiled to make the job easier. While still pliable, the cut edges of the skin were sewn together, final adjustments made and the finished mount left to dry” (The full story is called “The rogue’s return” and is published in Volume 55 of the New Zealand Geographic, on pages 8-9).

And here are the photos that I found on my tour with our pictorial collections curator, Gordon Maitland, during a welcome chance to leave my computer and my desk in the part of the Museum that does digital stuff.

(It seems somewhat cruel irony that Charles Dover is often pictured smoking).

Prepare the hide (ID:C23258)

Build a framework to replace the skeleton. (ID:C23262)

Flesh it out with Scrim (a kind of gauze) and woodshavings. (ID:C30452)

Result. One stuffed elephant. (ID:C23255)

So there you have it. The making of Rajah – a project that took seven months to complete. And you were thinking this was going to be another food post!

You’re either a taxidermy person or you’re not. I’m not sure I am…

But I do enjoy finding out about how things get made, and what lies beneath the surface of the objects we encounter around us in the world.  I hope that you do too.

As one of the Kai to Pie exhibition label writers, I’d like to talk about how a caption can draw people to look a little deeper into a photograph.

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?