Records of the Canterbury Museum Volume 31 2017 

Matthew D Shaw, Joanna Z Szczepanski, Sarah F Murray, Simon Hodge and Cor J Vink

ABSTRACT: In 1882, Canterbury Museum purchased a series of intricate glass models of invertebrates made by Dresden artisan Leopold Blaschka (1822–1895) and his son Rudolf Blaschka (1857–1939). This article considers both the historic context and scientific theories that are likely to have shaped this purchase. With museums around the world seeking to assemble encyclopaedic collections, the Blaschka models were a way of ensuring that even difficult to preserve aspects of the natural world could be displayed and used for education. The Museum’s founding director Julius von Haast (1822–1887) was particularly interested in communicating science to the Canterbury community. T his article examines Haast’s purchase by comparing and contrasting Canterbury Museum’s Blaschka collection with two other collections (at University College Dublin and Otago Museum) as a way of exploring the possible influence of their scientific-educational context. This comparison provides evidence for the influence of several evolution-based theories as a preference bias for certain taxonomic categories amongst Canterbury Museum’s collection of Blaschka models. In order to make the Museum’s Blaschka models more accessible, this article concludes with a comprehensive illustrated catalogue of the collection.

Daniel C P Smith

ABSTRACT: Principally active from the early 1880s to c. 1910, John Henry Menzies (1839–1919) was a carver in wood and stone, and an architectural designer. About 80 pieces of his furniture are extant; Rehutai, one of the three houses he designed and decorated also survives, as does his church, St Luke’s. He also produced the pattern studies for Maori Patterns Painted and Carved (1910, 1975). Menzies’ creative period coincided with the growth of the New Zealand Arts and Crafts movement and with New Zealand’s search for a national identity. His creative output reflected both of these currents. In particular, the indigenous is apparent in his work, both flora, and the focus of this essay, the f igures and patterns of Māori art. The surviving works, with the interpretations and themes they embody, serve to inform us about identity formation and Pākehā perceptions of Māori art. Several family histories tell us about Menzies’ life, particularly as a settler, farmer and patriarch. However, surprisingly, he has received little scholarly attention as an artist and interpreter of burgeoning national identity. This essay reviews the likely influences of anthropology, the role of identity, and some of Menzies’ main decorative themes, with a particular focus on the works that exist in the public realm.

Marguerite L Hill

ABSTRACT: This paper will explore the personal collection of Sydney Lough Thompson, an internationally successful artist originally from Canterbury who spent much of his career overseas. In 1968 and 1969, Thompson gifted a number of kākahu (cloaks) and other taonga to Canterbury Museum. Thompson had received these taonga in recognition of his portraits of Ngāti Tūwharetoa who he had painted in the early twentieth century. This paper is a catalogue of these four kākahu and an overview of his life story.

Joanna Z Szczepanski and Francis Yapp

ABSTRACT: Arthur Lilly’s large-scale choral work, Life, drew inspiration from his brother Leslie’s military service. Largely written in 1915 and first performed in 1930, Life portrays regret over a lost innocence, but it also expresses hope for the future. These themes are drawn from William Wordsworth’s poem ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Early Recollections of Childhood’, the poem Arthur used as the basis for his work. Although Life, as a very early New Zealand work, does not convey a recognisable New Zealand stylistic voice, it nevertheless provides a glimpse into New Zealand’s cultural and civilian reaction to the First World War.

Phillip R Moore and Michael Trotter

ABSTRACT: Previous work has shown that a distinctive green silicified tuff, termed palla by Julius von Haast, was utilised by early Māori in the Canterbury region to manufacture small numbers of adzes. T his paper presents new information on the source, composition and visual characteristics of this lithic material, along with a re-assessment of the evidence for its utilisation. A re-examination of museum collections indicates that palla artefacts were not as widely distributed as previously thought, but are largely confined to the coastal mid Canterbury area. More recent radiocarbon dating of archaeological sites near the mouth of the Rakaia River, and at Wakanui, suggest that palla was being utilised in the fourteenth century.

Theresa L Cole and Jamie R Wood

ABSTRACT: The New Zealand endemic Brown Teal (Anas chlorotis Gray, 1845) was once widespread on the three main islands of New Zealand, some offshore islands and the Chatham Islands. Hunting and drainage of wetlands during the early years of European colonisation, however, resulted in a severely reduced range for the species and by 1990, the last remaining wild populations were on Great Barrier Island, and in eastern Northland and Fiordland. However, by 2007, the Fiordland population of Brown Teal was assumed extinct. The potential role of hybridisation with Mallard (Anas platyrhynchos Linnaeus, 1758) and Grey Duck (Anas superciliosa Gmelin, 1789) in the decline of the Fiordland population of Brown Teal has previously been recognised, though specimen details and tissue voucher samples associated with the DNA sequences were not retained. Here, we provide new mitochondrial DNA sequences from four specimens of Fiordland Brown Teal registered in the collections of Canterbury Museum. The results provide evidence for hybridisation with Mallard/Grey Duck in all four individuals, and support previous suggestions that hybridisation could have played a role in the decline of the Fiordland Brown Teal population.

The full volume of Records of the Canterbury Museum 31.