Protecting and preserving Maori treasure

By BOB PEARCE

Paul Tapsell launches his book Pukaki: a Comet Returns in Rotorua on Friday. In many ways the title is a reflection of his own career.

He has just taken up the position of director Maori - tumuaki Maori - at the Auckland Museum.

He is responsible for the protection, preservation and presentation of one of the country's most important collections of Maori treasures.

For more than 100 years, until 1997, one of the pillars of that collection was the carved Pukaki, the taonga of the Ngati Whakaue people of Rotorua.

Dr Tapsell, a member of the Bay of Plenty Tapsell family which traces its descent from the main tribes of Te Arawa and from Ngati Raukawa ki Maungatautari, in 1995 wrote a thesis for his master's degree from Auckland University investigating the oral and written histories of Pukaki. He subsequently worked with the museum to facilitate the return home of the taonga after a 120-year absence from Rotorua.

"Pukaki had been given to the Crown, directly relating to the Crown forming the Rotorua township as a symbol of trust between Ngati Whakaue and the Crown.

"But the agents who were representing the Crown, Judge Fenton and Justice Gillies, who was the president of the Auckland Museum, thought it was better it was in the Auckland Museum as their own private gift, than being spirited down to Wellington."

As one of the biggest single carvings ever created it was always going to be an outstanding part of any collection and Dr Tapsell believes it became a tool of the politics of the day.

His thesis, written when he returned to study after time as curator of the Rotorua Museum, was inspired by his elders. His research convinced the museum that the gift had never been properly consummated. Pukaki was returned to the Crown at Rotorua on October 2, 1977, 120 years to the day that he left. The taonga now stands at the Rotorua District Council offices.

"At the time of the return, I told the [Auckland] museum director he had lost a taonga but gained a tribe. Maybe I'm part of the exchange!" Since completing his MA, Dr Tapsell has read for his doctorate in museum ethnography at Oxford University and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the Australian National Museum in Canberra.

Most recently he has been working at Auckland University on the development of a new museums and cultural heritage programme.

In his new post he has a vision of connecting with the young Maori in urban areas who have lost contact with the values the older people maintain.

"The museum can act as a bridge, a place where we can start linking them to an ancestral past and give them a sense of security in who they are, but without them having to give up their urban ways. "What the museum is demonstrating is that there are objects in the museum which are sticks in the sand. They show us where we've come from and, if we get it right, they can also show us who we are today and where we go."