Art curator and critic Robert Leonard doubts whether social history can be done successfully in museums. He writes: ‘Social history museums aspire to tell stories. Which is odd, because they tell stories rather badly compared to books or movies, which can be gripping and immersive.’ The lack of relevant or authentic objects in collections also hinders its display. Museums ‘seldom have enough artefacts or the rights ones, so they routinely make do with stand-ins’. In fact by ‘[g]rafting different logics – the genuine and the replica, the actual and the index, the signifier and the signified – museum displays suggest history coming unstuck, knowledge in ruins’ (Leonard, 2006: p. 222).

These frank observations about the limits of social history in museums introduce Leonard’s essay on Argonauts of the Timor Sea, an art installation by New Zealander Michael Stevenson. It was selected for the fifth Asia-Pacific Biennale and consists of ‘elaborate, fastidiously researched pseudo-museum displays’. Works like this one of Stevenson’s ‘flaunt, deconstruct and adore the already shaky logic of museum displays’. Leonard’s verdict is that his ‘pseudo-artefacts’ beguile the gallery-goer: ‘[u]ltimately, they convince’ (Leonard, 2006: p. 222).

DOUBLE CHALLANGE

Leonard is agent provocateur here, juxtaposing two quite distinct ways of revealing and unravelling stories and ideas. Artists’ (and art curators’) intentions are not the same as those of history curators; nor are the expectations of their respective audiences. Each group has its own set of assumptions about why art and artefacts are displayed. However Leonard identifies two critical issues faced by anyone who creates social history experiences for museum audiences. Firstly, how can material culture be deployed to tell stories, convey intangible social processes and give form to social history concerns such as identity and everyday experience? And secondly, how can history curators mesh storytelling and social history in museums with collections that bear the mark of long-standing organising principles such as taxonomies, the ‘hall of fame’, ‘icons’, social progress, excellence, innovation, and connoisseurship? The following article considers how these issues were confronted whilst developing Te Papa’s community exhibition, The Scots in New Zealand.

Te Papa devotes 70 square metres of floor space to migrant communities where they can tell their own stories. This small community gallery enhances and refreshes the generic overview of mainly European immigration to New Zealand from about 1800, featured in the neighbouring Passports gallery. It is also adjacent to an area dedicated to Pacific peoples in New Zealand, recently reopened as Tangata o le Moana. The community gallery enables the expression of the statutory requirement that Te Papa has ‘regard to the ethnic and cultural diversity of the people of New Zealand, and the contributions they have made to New Zealand’s cultural life and the fabric of New Zealand society’ (Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa Act 1992, s. 8(a)).

EXHIBITING MIGRATION

Community exhibitions are usually on the floor for two and half years. Working together with Te Papa staff, community advisory groups (CAGs) from the selected community develop narratives and present a selection of treasured objects and artworks in this gallery. Often members from the wider community lend objects to display next to items from Te Papa and other public collections. The Chinese, Dutch, Indian and Italian communities have been showcased in the gallery so far. A decision was made in early 2005, that the fifth group to feature in the space would be the Scots, one of New Zealand’s largest migrant groups. This decision was timely as scholarly interest in Celtic immigration is percolating through academia. There is also the long tradition of Scottish cultural associations that Te Papa staff could tap into to, especially for setting up the CAG, as well as the ever-popular interest in genealogy.

SCOTS WHA HA'E?

By choosing one of the major British migrant groups, which has a broadly-spread presence both geographically and chronologically (although concentrated in the nineteenth century), a different challenge from those of previous exhibitions presented itself. The issue was not a lack of relevant objects in public collections; rather, that many Scots-related objects were collected according to aims that were not always easy to align with the exhibition’s objectives or with social history as it is practised in the museum today.

So what kinds of Scots-related objects are in public collections? There is a plethora of snuff mulls, samplers, documents and things associated with old identities, ‘first white babies’ and other district ‘firsts’, and objects with scanty or perplexing provenance details such as ‘very old spoon’ (figure 1). History, of course, explains this approach to collecting. The bulk of Scottish migrants were implicated in the colonisation of New Zealand; texts and objects associated with the pioneers were markers of founding, settling, and civilising a new country. It is notable that New Zealand’s first history museum was Otago Settlers Museum in Dunedin, which evolved from an association set up to celebrate jubilees of the arrival of the first migrant ships from Scotland (Brosnahan, 1998). Individuals and groups in the late nineteenth century collected their recent history as tangible yet fugitive evidence of the foundations of a European New Zealand. In this history the ‘pioneers were given an important role in the metanarrative [of progress] circulating in contemporary Pakeha culture at this time: they were witness to progress, instigators of it and reference points for it’ (Hamilton, 2002: p. 71). Any interesting item connected with colonisation or closely associated with the ‘early days’ had currency as a museum object. The mission was, in the words of Dunedin-based collector and amateur historian, Dr Thomas Hocken, ‘raising from oblivion a thousand interesting details connected with … settlement’ (cited in Hamilton, 2002: p. 66).

NOT THE USUAL SUSPECTS

However, the exhibition team and the CAG agreed that colonising and settling would not be dominant storylines in the exhibition. This meant taking a closer look at material culture that would tell alternative stories and reveal other concepts, particularly the Scots’ ongoing subtle and pervasive contributions to the cultural life and fabric of New Zealand society. We were also committed to showing ‘Scottishness’ as a dynamic, subjective and relevant category of experience and identity in New Zealand today. Finally, we wanted to avoid stereotypes and clichéd notions of Scottish identity and how it is expressed. How did we realise these objectives in light of the collections described above?

The exhibition is organised roughly chronologically, from 1769 to the present, into three parts or segments: ‘First Footing’, ‘Cutting a New Cloth’, and ‘Scots Here Now’. ‘First Footing’ has three themes. The first – ‘Migration and Settlement’ – shows the main waves of migration and settlement through case studies and personal stories, delivered via a touch screen interactive map and audio-visual material, not through material culture. This meant we could concentrate many diverse personal stories spanning more than two centuries in a small space.

The segment’s second theme, ‘Settling and Interacting’ shows the founding of three distinctive Scottish settlements, Otago, Waipu, and Turakina, and settlers’ ensuing community life and interactions with Mäori. As this theme focuses on settling – a key paradigm for past collecting – the selection of objects was relatively easy. Our final choice included a broad axe that probably split timber for one of the ships that brought Scots to Northland between 1853 and 1860 (borrowed from Waipu Museum), a crow bar used on a settler’s farm at Turakina (from the husband of a CAG member) and Reverend Thomas Burn’s parish visitation book (from Otago Settlers Museum).

‘Home and Spiritual Life’, the third theme in the first segment, shows Scottish and Scots-owned objects from the nineteenth century used in churches and domestic settings. Again, because these were stories about settling, we identified many relevant objects, including a sampler made by a young Scottish girl, from Te Papa’s collections (figure 2), communion tokens (borrowed from the Presbyterian Church Archives) and a decanter that came in the luggage of migrants who travelled on the second ship to arrive at the Free Church settlement of Otago (from Otago Setters Museum).

Overall, objects in established history collections matched the storylines in the first segment of The Scots. However, some sleight of hand was required for the middle segment ‘Cutting a New Cloth’, which veers away from stock museological topics. Here the subtle, pervasive, distinctive and lasting contributions of the Scots to New Zealand are explored in relation to intellectual life, society and politics, and industry and the economy. The second theme (‘A Civil Society’) explores political philosophy, particularly the rights and duties of the individual. Its stories are oriented towards a shared, yet contested, social activity – drinking – a decision that enabled intangible ideals to be materialised using the objects that were to hand.

Some of the objects in this theme include a block of peat originally from Invernesshire (borrowed from Otago Settlers Museum); a silver drinking quaich (from a CAG member); Women’s Christian Temperance Union badges (from the NZWCTU); a Campbell & Ehrenfried Co. beer bottle; and a milk can (from the Hokonui Heritage Centre). This mixture of alcohol-related objects shows the Scottish stamp on civil society and political fabric of New Zealand. We focus on various Scots’ attitudes towards alcohol to reveal certain aspirations and ideals of self-improvement and rough equality, and beliefs in personal and social responsibility. Booze marshals a range of actions, philosophies and people to reveal a complex picture of the relationship between the individual, community and visions of an ideal society.

Attitudes to alcohol reveal a range of views about social relations and political ideals. It brings together and materialises diverse stories and a range of individuals. Covered here are the radical tradition and craft of the home distillation of whisky in Southland and the importance of hospitality and sharing a dram with kith and kin, but also the Scottish women who fought for the vote in the Women’s Christian Temperance Union so society would be rid of drunkenness. The commercial potential of alcohol is not excluded; nor is the class-based critique of, and solutions to, social inequity advanced by Scots-born tea-drinking, teetotal Prime Minister, Peter Fraser (figure 3). To round off the theme, a ‘whisky interactive’ gives visitors a whiff of four ingredients in the ‘water of life’.

LATERAL THINKING FOR SOUTHERN LATITUDES

This object-rich part of the exhibition raises questions about civilised behaviour and suggests internal contradictions and diversity rather than polarised Scottish stereotypes of wowsers and whisky-sodden wastrels. The objects materialise social history without it becoming, as Robert Leonard would say, ‘unstuck’. And, just as the demon drink inflames the passions, causes debate and incites political action, I believe that lateral thinking around social history and material culture generates interest in the intangible, the complex and the contradictions within any community and is critical for convincing social history exhibitions.

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Te Ara - Journal of Museums Aotearoa; Volume 32; Issue 1 & 2; December 2007

Figure 1: Dr Robert Fulton, a founding member of the Otago Settlers Association and committee member from 1898-1923, donated this utensil to the Otago Settlers Museum. It belonged to Dr Thomas Burns. Collection of Otago Settlers Museum. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: OTAGO SETTLERS MUSEUM

Figure 2: This sampler was made in 1888 by Agnes Lawson. It is one of three samplers in Te Papa’s collectionsmade by two sisters, Jeanie & Agnes Lawson,who attended Kilconquhar School in Fife, Scotland. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: MUSEUM OF NEW ZEALAND TE PAPA TONGAREWA

Figure 3: Scots-born Peter Fraser, Prime Minister from 1940- 1949, famously said, ‘It’s a terrible confession for a Scots-man to make, but I get as much exhilaration out of a cup of tea as some people get out of champagne or whisky.’ This Companion of Honour medal was awarded to him in 1946, for his contributions to politics. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: MUSEUM OF NEW ZEALAND TE PAPA TONGAREWA