Remaking the past in Hawke's Bay

Writer and film-maker PETER WELLS relived his childhood memories when he created a temple of wonder at the Hawke's Bay Museum.

Listed in the collections of the Hawke's Bay Museum is a singularly fascinating item. It is a hairball once owned by Lady McLean. Lady McLean, for those of you who've never lived in the Bay, was the wife of the nabob of Hawke's Bay, when Napier was a provincial capital.

She and her husband amassed not only land but precious possessions, some of which they left, in the high-minded way of the Victorians, to what became the museum in Napier.

There is a gorgeous armoire Armani would have given his sewing finger to own. There is porcelain, silver and plate, costumes, fans, jewels and exquisite taonga. And then there is the hairball. From a cow. Listed on a card, typed out by the keys of an old Imperial typewriter, where the letters sort of jump slightly out of the line. I really wanted to find this hairball.

I was in Napier putting together an exhibition. The Hawke's Bay Cultural Trust, which runs the museum, have this lovely idea: they ask a writer who has had some connection to Hawke's Bay to look through the collection. You sort out what tickles your fancy, put the objects together in an exhibition, then write a story binding everything together.

My forerunner was Shonagh Koea. She had made up an exhibition which appeared to be a drawing room almost straight out of a murder mystery.

Yet, when you read her short story, the murder was, characteristically, a killing of truth. She called her exhibition A Novel in a Room. A key clue was a painting by an underrated 1940s Hawke's Bay painter, Jenny Campbell.

The museum is good at reviving the overlooked. It is one of those under-funded regional museums which consistently produce ground-breaking exhibitions. This has something to do with a protean relationship it enjoys with Unitec's School of Design in Auckland.

But it is also something to do with place. Hawke's Bay is peculiarly blessed with a rich past.

Then there is the geography. Anyone who goes to Hawke's Bay is exhilarated by the beautiful expanse of space. Everything seems to have been created by a giant. The bay itself is so large I suspect one could see it from space.

There is the almost Mediterranean clarity of light.

The museum has all sorts of fascinating exhibits, including a documentary made by Gaylene Preston. In it, she takes the skills she honed in The War Years and applies them to survivors of the epochal 1931 earthquake. Preston's family came from Napier.

So it felt fitting to be asked to "go back" to Napier. But when I say "go back", I have to confess I am not a Napier-ite by birth (though perhaps by inclination).

My connection to Napier comes through my mother, Bess, who grew up there. As children, we would go down and visit my grandmother, who lived in the house in which my mother had grown up.

My whole idea of Napier came from visiting this lovely old wooden house, perched high on the hill, looking out towards the sweep of the bay.

Napier has long been an emotional touchstone in my work. In my memoir, Long Loop Home, it was one of the places I looked at. Yet I grew up in Auckland, so when I was asked to go down and, as a writer, look through the collections, I jumped at the opportunity.

There was something almost blissful in entering the tiny plane, and then, 40 or so minutes later, finding myself high above the bay, looking down on the miniaturised art-deco town which had been such a potent force in my imagination.

When I landed, I was taken straight to "below stairs" to look at the collections. I found myself in the greatest antique shop you could imagine.

It had not only beautiful watercolours by one-time Napier resident Rita Angus, but also odd and fascinating items such as a bullet-proof vest, parlourmaid aprons from the big houses "up on the hill", dolls' furniture of an obsessive miniaturisation and medical implements of a bizarre and faintly frightening sort.

I resisted the VeeDee instrument, which had something to do with relaxation rather than unmentionable diseases.

I felt as if I was in the most wonderful department store, wherein, as if in a dream, I could select whatever I wanted.

Except the hairball. My guide was the new curator of the collections, Rachael Davies. She searched inventories and opened doors into dank-seeming underground caverns. We asked, we looked. But a hairball was not to be found.

Instead, with the help of the museum's ingenious designer Josephine Hughes we created an exhibition called Temples of Wonder. I wanted to restate some of the important European art objects which seemed to be sitting lustreless and forgotten in the collection.

It was Degas who said that significant art objects should stay in the same position in museums and galleries for generations. He described these objects as having the force of an altar piece. They become touchstones.

I could remember a brilliantly showy chandelier which used to hang in the octagon at the centre of the original 1930s museum. Apparently a contemporary artist felt the competition was too great, and it had been hustled into a back room.

There was also the lovely modernist sculpture, La Baigneuse, by Emilio Greco, which looked for all the world as if it had walked out of the bay, over the black pebbles, then changed into bronze inside the foyer. By last year, she had been shoved under the stairs, her shoulders caked with a dandruff of dust.

I decided to put the sculpture in the centre of the octagon, place the shimmering chandelier over her head. And Josephine's brilliant coup de theatre was to make a false octagon in the parallel gallery. As the circus and the theatre were our theme, we made a tent of blue and white satin ribbons.

Within the tent were a series of peepholes. I've always loved peepholes. Perhaps the origin of my fascination is those shoe boxes every New Zealand schoolchild used to make, with one end covered with coloured cellophane. It also recalled for me one of the more exciting moments of my childhood: looking under the tent at Western Springs when the circus was in town.

Each little peephole revealed a tiny geography of objects I had chosen.

Some were commentaries about success, beauty, enigma - and naturally enough, for Hawke's Bay - snobbery. I also made a short film for the exhibition.

And when I went to the opening, I suddenly realised what I had been doing unconsciously. All of us carry within us an invisible house. This may be the house you grew up in, or that of a favourite relative. For me it was my grandmother's house in Napier.

In the exhibition, I had "recreated" an imaginary house, in a town I never lived in, but which had been a focus of creative energy all my life. I had remade the past in the form of an exhibition. I had, to a certain extent, created a "temple of wonder".

So in the end, if we didn't actually find Lady McLean's hairball, it wasn't really all that important. Perhaps I had found something else.

* Temples of Wonder, curated by Peter Wells, Hawke's Bay Museum, Napier, to February 24.