Hands across the ocean

Taiaha, chiefly fighting weapon, from the 1820s.

In the western Sydney suburb of Parramatta there is a park named Rangihou Reserve. In 1793 it was the site of the first Church of England mission there. It marks an important exchange between Aboriginal and Maori.

The passing of mauri (life essence) between the ancestors of Maori taonga and the traditional owners of the Parramatta land has also opened new cultural connections for Maori living in Sydney. It has also demonstrated a significant shift in the way in which museums handle treasures of other cultures.

The fulcrum of this is Auckland Museum's Ko Tawa exhibition, the collection of taonga given to colonial soldier Gilbert Mair. It includes a rain cape presented to him by the legendary leader Te Kooti - who Mair, as head of the No 1 Arawa Flying Column, pursued for years - and Murirangaranga, the flute made of human bone that Tutanekai used to guide his lover Hinemoa to him.

Ko Tawa is on at the Australian Museum in Sydney after touring New Zealand.

And it was the ceremony welcoming the taonga to Australia's biggest city that brought the threads together.

Ko Tawa curator Dr Paul Tapsell, Auckland Museum's director of Maori, says Parramatta was the site of the first recorded contact between Maori and Aborigines. Rev Samuel Marsden established the first mission there on land traditionally owned by the Duhrug and Eora tribes.

Maori elders accepted the tuku rangatira (land gift to the Church) from the Duhrug and Eora people in a ceremony and named the land Rangihou Reserve.

Three weeks ago descendants of the Aboriginal donors gathered to meet the Maori elders accompanying Ko Tawa to Sydney. The New Zealanders were greeted with a smoking ceremony; in turn they passed the mauri stone to the care of the Aboriginal people for the three months the exhibition will be in Australia.

Later, Australian Museum director Frank Howarth watched as an Aboriginal elder passed through another smoking ceremony with the mauri and placed it at the head of the exhibition. Maori elders then moved around the taonga with their blessings.

There were other connections.

Much of the Australian Museum's large Maori collection was given to it by its New Zealand counterpart when the Auckland Museum was established in the 1920s. The exchange included sending other Pacific and Aboriginal items back across the Tasman.

Since then the Australian Museum's association with New Zealand and the Pacific has strengthened, supported by the growing Maori community in Sydney.

Tapsell said Ko Tawa had been designed to bridge present and past, and so ex-pat Maori could see it, as well as giving others an insight into the contemporary world of the Maori.

Added Howarth: "There is a very significant New Zealand community - especially a Maori community - in Sydney. The exhibition is a continuing part of our desire to keep the people living here connected with the objects we are custodians of.

"We've celebrated Waitangi Day for a number of years in various different ways in conjunction with the New Zealand community. This is a continuation of that - and it's a bloody good exhibition."

Ko Tawa also demonstrates a major change in the attitude of museums.

Howarth said that through the 19th and mid 20th centuries, museums such as the Australian Museum - which blended natural history and human culture - tended to work on the principle of collecting objects for academics and researchers to study, with only occasional exhibitions.

"What changed in the latter half of the 20th century was a shift to recognising that museums are really custodians of the material culture of a whole lot of peoples - the objects are things that trace those communities over an awfully long time.

"One of our main obligations is to unlock these collections and get people back into connection with them."

The Australian Museum's collection includes about 1600 Maori objects, including several hundred taonga, attracting the attention of Maori groups in New South Wales, especially elders and children.

There has been no anger directed at the museum's collection nor any demands for its return. Howarth's predecessor Des Griffen was a passionate advocate of returning sacred objects and human remains to communities demonstrating a connection and who wanted them back.

In the Australian Museum's case, most of these have been sent back to Aboriginal communities and to North America. Few requests for repatriation have come from New Zealand or the Pacific.

"I think that in many cases there are significant communities here in Sydney for those people and they are quite happy for those materials to be here for that reason," Howarth said. "Also, they're relatively happy and quite upfront about acknowledging that they are safe here, and in some cases that can be a significant issue.

"There are a lot of countries at the moment that unfortunately could not guarantee the physical safety and integrity of museum objects for a whole range of reasons - places like the Solomons or even Papua New Guinea - and they're happy that we hold them."

Howarth said Maori people held similar views and were pleased to see taonga in Sydney.

"There is a desire to keep Maori traditions alive amongst Australian Maori. Certainly elders are very keen to make sure the kids understand the significance of the objects, as part of understanding the significance of the meaning of the past."

And it is a two-way street. Through its collection the museum has been able to help fill in gaps of Pacific and Melanesian history, while its researchers have been able to learn more about some of what they are holding.

The history of many objects in the museum's collection remains obscure: "Often they were collected by anything from rogues and villains through to missionaries - not mutually exclusive - to all sorts of other people who were charging around the Pacific in various different ways.

"They were often traded, they were stolen, they were presented - and a place like us, or Auckland Museum, for that matter, ends up with this sort of collection of highly diverse material."

And from the other end, colonialism often decimated culture and tradition.

Howarth said a good example was the Vanuatu island of Erromango, the population of which plummeted from 30,000 to just 95 within years of the first contact with Europeans, mainly because of disease.

While its people were being decimated the island was stripped of much of its culture, and many objects ended up at the museum. Now the Vanuatu Cultural Centre, the tiny state's museum, is working with the Australian Museum to restore some of the knowledge and traditions lost through depopulation and cultural pillaging.

"We've had some people from Vanuatu here studying a whole lot of things we have here to learn about a part of their own culture, and restore some skills back into their community," Howarth said.

"At the same time they've been telling us about a whole lot of things we didn't know.

"We haven't been doing exactly that with the Maori community, but that's an example of how I think cultural-cum-ethnographic collections should be held, and if anybody from the Maori community - or otherwise - in New Zealand wants to come and work with, study, photograph, or whatever, our collection, we would welcome that sort of collaboration."