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Recent cultural studies have demonstrated the weakness of some of the fashionable theoretical positions adopted by scholars of imperialism in recent times. This book explores the diverse roles played by museums and their curators in moulding and representing the British imperial experience. The British Empire yielded much material for British museums, particularly in terms of ethnographic collections. The collection of essays demonstrates how individuals, their curatorial practices, and intellectual and political agendas influenced the development of a variety of museums across the globe. It suggests that Thomas Baines was deeply engaged with the public presentation, display and interpretation of material culture, and the dissemination of knowledge and information about the places he travelled. He introduced many people to the world beyond Norfolk. A discussion of visitor engagement with non-European material cultures in the provincial museum critiques the assumption of the pervasive nature of curatorial control of audience reception follows. The early 1900s, the New Zealand displays at world's fairs presented a vision of Maoriland, which often had direct Maori input. From its inception, the National Museum of Victoria performed the dual roles of research and public education. The book also discusses the collections at Australian War Memorial, Zanzibar Museum, and Sierra Leone's National Museum. The amateur enthusiasms and colonial museum policy in British West Africa are also highlighted. Finally, the book follows the journey of a single object, Tipu's Tiger, from India back to London.
Maoriland at sea Scholars have concluded that ‘the prominence of indigenous reference’ in the emergence of a national consciousness in New Zealand from the late nineteenth century has been ‘unique’. 61 The years between the 1880s and the First World War marked a kind of ongoing ‘identity crisis’ in New Zealand. Pakeha , the white settlers of
1919, succeeded by the Federation of Labour in 1937. Parliamentary representation rapidly rose after the creation of the New Zealand Labour, Party in 1916 leading to the formation of a majority Labour government in 1935. The voice of labour was also vigorously expressed through its own newspaper, initially Maoriland Worker , and to a certain extent through the Returned Soldiers’ Association (RSA
adopted by Pakeha society, however, was inseparable from the representations already discussed under colonisation and tourism. Each reinforced the others. In this sense, Pakeha efforts to ‘save’ Maori culture were for the most part self-serving – driven by the ways Maori culture was seen to support Pakeha identity. ‘The dear old Maoriland’ Indigenous
secularist song literature (including songs by Gustav Spiller and Felix Adler as well as musical accompaniments composed by E. J. Troup), but Hulbert put his own musical abilities to work to produce an alternative musical setting for The Red Flag. 34 Several years later, Hulbert’s original setting appeared in the Maoriland Worker above a letter of explanation, ‘The
itself from other colonies. 35 An example was the art, design, literature and music of ‘Māoriland’ which flourished between the 1890s and the 1920s, as seen in the poem which opens this chapter. But how were indigenous elements co-opted for this national imagery without disrupting the Britishness of New Zealand society? Belich explains: A distinctive history and a distinctive set of cultural symbols borrowed from Māori provided … runes and ruins for a runeless and ruinless land. The beauty of it
ironically, underscores this point. The flashpoint occurred when a correspondent to the Maoriland Worker accused the official band of participating in a music contest with bands containing ‘scabs’, the worst form of abuse in the unionists’ lexicon. The details of the dispute are not important; the point is that among the acrimonious exchange members of other bands insisted that their members were unionists
the Maoriland Irish Society, ‘an Irish National non-sectarian body’ which ‘has for its objects the freedom of the Homeland of the Gael, the fostering of a great National spirit among the Irish of New Zealand, and the fostering and expansion of Irish ideas, ideals, music, literature, language, customs, pastimes, and industries’. 118 As J. T. Sullivan put it in his presidential address: ‘The Association is
’s typology of the organisational dimensions of ethnicity. 21 In the Irish context, this includes brief consideration of such associations as the Orange Order and Hibernians, but attention is also given to less explored Irish societies such as the Maoriland Irish Society, the Ulster Society of Otago, and the New Zealand Irish Society. For Scots, meanwhile, consideration is given to well-known associations
it was an advertisement for New Zealand as a tourist destination. The South Island was a land of wild, untamed scenery, while the North Island was scenic ‘Maoriland’ – Maori life being ‘a picturesque feature of many districts in the interior and on the coast of the North Island’. In his writing about ‘Geyserland’ and Rotorua, the district was presented as little more than the setting for Maori