From Heritage New Zealand, Autumn 2009

by Paul Little

Humans, among other qualities, have a passion for collecting things. Fortunately, many of those things have ended up in Historic Places Trust properties.

It was good to meet with you the other day – I should have mentioned to you at the time, you were sitting on one of Governor William Hobson’s dining chairs – the stories it could tell! – Kind regards, Belinda Burgess.

This is the sort of e-mail you get when you come anywhere near the extraordinary New Zealand Historic Places Trust project to catalogue every item in the properties it owns. These range from lead nipple shields to a table on which the Treaty of Waitangi was signed, from an early 18th-century portrait to Bishop Selwyn’s bed, and tens of thousands of items in between. Wherever you look in NZHPT properties, otherwise innocuous appearing items turn out to have rich and complex histories.

If I had known at the time that I was one settee of separation from Governor Hobson, would my fascination have been any greater? Probably not – it was already nudging 100 per cent.

The overall manager of this engrossing project is NZHPT Heritage Destinations Manager Elizabeth Cox, working with a team of cataloguers headed by Collection Registrar, Wellington, Rebecca Apperley, along with Collection Registrars Belinda Burgess and Pip Harrison, cataloguing assistants Léonore Decout, Catherine Morgan and Anika Klee, and a number of specialist contractors.

There have been earlier catalogues of NZHPT-owned items, but they were far from definitive, and much information on individual objects was missing. They were also pre-digital.  Another complicating factor in keeping track of things has been the sometimes random way items entered the properties, occasionally being abandoned on doorsteps, like orphaned babies in a melodrama.

The first step was to transfer the information on the old NZHPT index cards to Vernon, a museum-standard database. Following that, the team members have been visiting each property, confirming the objects from the cards are there, adding items not on the cards and photographing everything, as well as recording their description, condition and location. “And in the process, we have found the most amazing objects,” says Cox.

“We were expecting a total of 30,000 items in the database,” says Rebecca Apperley, who has worked on a similar project at the British Museum. But before Christmas the team had already listed 35,000 items and, with six months to go, were expecting to have 80-90,000 pieces held within Vernon. “That is like a national museum-size collection, but spread around the country, which is fantastic because more people can see them. Te Papa’s history collection, by comparison, has 25,000 items.”

Consistency in everything is vital with such a geographically and historically diffuse assemblage of objects. Apperley, Burgess and Harrison talk once a week to ensure they are all on the same page.

We have a specific format of what we do and how,” says Burgess. “We have controls and cross-referencing to double check that we are all calling things by the same classification. For example, whether to call that piece of furniture a sofa or couch or settee – that conversation can last an hour.”

The team settled on sofa.

“We even discussed whether it should be ‘tea cup’ or ‘teacup’. Some people go, ‘Really? Why bother?’ We are bothering because in 10 or 20 years someone might be doing a search, and if we have two spellings of teacup, they won’t find them all in that search.”

Despite the generous amount of time devoted to such minutiae, the cataloguers are hopeful that the task, which has benefited from Lottery Grants Board funding, will be finished by June.

One property presented big challenges: Hayes Engineering, the notoriously diverse site with its conglomeration of disparate cogs and creations that fill its buildings and form the legacy of the brilliant inventor Ernest Hayes. “Thankfully, we contracted that out to Guy Williams, an expert in the history of the property,” says Apperley. “I might have cried if I’d had to do it – all those thousands of nails and patterns. Specialist knowledge was needed and Guy has that.”

At any of the properties, for any of the items, cataloguing involves minimal variations on the theme of picking something up, taking notes, putting it down again and moving on to the next. The cataloguers start at one end of a property and work their way through to the other until every item has been listed.

Apart from their professional zeal, which is not inconsiderable, the team is motivated by the possibility of yet another fascinating discovery just around every corner. “I’m always getting enthusiastic e-mails from the team, telling me the new and wonderful thing they have just catalogued. The museum-quality William Norrie wardrobe at Ewelme is an obvious thing to be impressed by,” says Elizabeth Cox, “but we have also found some exciting, really New Zealand things, such as a Depression-era cupboard at Fyffe House in Kaikoura, made out of biscuit tins. When you open them, you can still see the wrappers from the old biscuit tins inside. The greatest pleasure is from things that relate to families who lived there.  Also at Fyffe is the teapot that always sat on the table when the Low family lived there – and it’s still there.”

Guy Williams knew Hayes Engineering, in Central Otago, pretty well before working on the project, but enthuses about the new depth of understanding he has gained. “Looking at the objects so closely, as we had to for this project, has meant lots of great discoveries,” says Williams. “It is now clear that Ernest Hayes was building and marketing windmills from as early as 1895, much earlier than we previously thought. And because the family never threw anything away, we can effectively watch the family at work. We have found lots of old models for new things they were trying to develop – the first made from cardboard, the next perhaps from an old kerosene tin, and then an articulated, moving model. It is like watching their creative process.”

There is also, Williams notes, “evidence of whimsy” in the work they were doing, with the remains of children’s toy cars, with the V8 sign still attached. Rebecca Apperley nominates the Ewelme collection of items belonging to or associated with the Lush family as her favourite for its diversity.

“We have all the commonplace objects that have been collected alongside high status ones,” says Apperley. “That means the William Norrie wardrobe, which is a very high quality piece, next to a pair of Victorian nipple shields for breastfeeding mothers – the sort of things that would have been chucked out from other places.”

The collection at Te Waimate Mission House, in the north, has items that bear comparison for status and interest with those anywhere else in the country, such as the christening gown of Thomas Holloway King, the first European child born in New Zealand. That ceremony was performed by Rev. Samuel Marsden. Also there: Bishop Selwyn’s bed and his mother in law’s shoes.  

Belinda Burgess nominates “collections within collections” as among the more surprising discoveries in the project. It’s perhaps not that astonishing that the Lush family had a collection of Melanesian artefacts, but who would have expected the most comprehensive collection of works by the Victorian writer Charlotte Yonge, now forgotten but incredibly popular in her time for her more than 100 books.

The volumes at Ewelme alone form a perfect specimen of a Victorian family library. They are being catalogued by Raewyn Hendy, a retired librarian who is relishing doing what she was trained to do but which members of her profession seldom get the opportunity to do. “The trick is not to read every book you pick up,” says Hendy, who advises caution in introducing children to historic locations as her three daughters have all grown up to work in the field.

Another stand-alone collection of some merit is the Northcote-Bade Wallpaper Collection. “There are about 500 pieces of late Victorian wallpaper rolls,” says Burgess. Donated to the NZHPT by Stanley Northcote-Bade, the author of Colonial Furniture in New Zealand, the collection includes papers from different countries and examples of different production methods.

As Burgess goes on, each item seems rarer and more fascinating than the last: “There is this piece,” she says, unwrapping something you wouldn’t be surprised to see Indiana Jones trying to appropriate, “a 1680s baby rattle, whistle and teething soother.” Oh, of course it is. “There is a later, similar piece in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, so we are finding objects here which are world-class museum quality.

“In the understairs cupboard, which has taken some time to get through, tucked in the back corner were some ceramic pieces. We pulled them out and found hand-painted teacup, saucer and side plates with beautiful manuka and kowhai designs. You can just see a woman sitting there painting this. And that gives you a connection with the time when a New Zealand aesthetic was coming into objects.”

Some of Raewyn Hendy’s discoveries teeter on the brink of racy, because the younger Reverend Lush – Edward – was interested in moral hygiene. “He was this bachelor who sat here writing sex education pamphlets, among other things” says Hendy. “There’s a tract here I haven’t catalogued yet: The Parental Duty of Preserving Innocence by Purified Knowledge.”

In other settings many of these items would be kept under strict archive conditions or temperature- and light-control systems, but it is much more difficult at an NZHPT property, where the buildings were once people’s homes and workplaces, not custom-built museums. The most extreme example is at Hayes Engineering where the temperatures can range from -20 degrees to 35 degrees over the space of the year.

Therefore the NZHPT must continue to strive to do its best to keep the objects safe, while still in their original context, so that they will last through the generations. The team will make recommendations after their visits to each property about how this can be improved. Burgess does observe, however, that in some cases “the objects
have been in the house so long there has been an acclimatisation – the objects and the house have their balance.”

Cox emphasises that the standard and number of such items – don’t forget the table at Mangungu from the second Treaty signing, or the earliest example of written te reo Maori, on a slate at Kerikeri – do indeed constitute a national history collection of major importance. It also offers a unique kind of museum-visiting experience.

Pip Harrison, working on the Northland properties, talks enthusiastically about seeing the past lives of the ex-residents all around her at Mangungu Mission in the Hokianga Harbour. She explains that the historic house is, in effect, the largest object in a particular collection: “The unbeatable thrill for visitors is to see objects once held, used, worn, seen by the people who lived in that house, saw that view, walked that carpet. The domestic setting is matchless for letting people understand past times and how people lived.”

It is clear that she is finding her job fascinating. “It is nothing short of extraordinary. Here I am holding books that the missionaries packed in their luggage to bring out with them from England, having only the haziest idea of what they would need in their new lives to survive, thrive and spread the message. Then there is another layer, because later the missionaries started printing their own books here at the Mission, and those books are still here in the house as well. The collections tell us so much about society, technology, aspirations, convictions. That is the privilege of working in a historic house.”

As a result, the properties do give a hauntingly realistic impression of stepping back in time. A visitor can easily feel like a phantom, haunting a house whose residents have just stepped out and could be back at any moment.

For those involved in the project, the end of their working day can be like making a journey back to another century – the 21st. But not in every respect. One of the major lessons Burgess has taken from the project is that many things have not changed a lot at all, especially in the kitchen, where much the same items are still used for slicing and dicing and grating and peeling.

Burgess and Hendy, who have been working side by side at Ewelme, have also been moved to see how the items therein encompass the whole of life’s journey, from a baby’s teething ring to memento mori, such as a black-bordered card bearing Bible verses, written by paterfamilias Vicesimus Lush when his daughter Margaret died at 16. “It was put inside a book that was the equivalent of a Sunday School prize,” says Hendy. “That’s Victorian death for you.”

Once the project is completed it will be an invaluable resource not just for the NZHPT but for scholars here and overseas who should all, ultimately, be able to gain access to its information online. Apperley says, “It will be a living database and grow as we learn more things. We hope to put it on the internet, where it will be a fantastic research tool. I would love for our website to have a 360-degree view of a room and the objects in it so that you could click on them to get information about them.”

Harking back to the Lush Melanesian items, Burgess speculates that an overseas researcher could come across one online, discover a pattern with which they were not familiar and thus build up a more complete picture of that culture.  Looking this closely at the Ewelme collection has given the team an understanding of the Lush family that they believe they could not have acquired any other way.

Burgess points out an 1846 map of New Zealand, with the main islands given the labels New Munster and New Ulster, which suggests a gaze that also looked here from England. “That map was purchased by Vicesimus prior to his departure. As much as they looked back to the UK [when they were here], they were also thinking about where they were coming, too. Imagine them looking at this map and thinking, ‘We’ll go here,’ or ‘Shall we try this?’ That’s the reading of a collection. “You see the person’s life and the objects and you can see this was a major interest, this was their study, this was their profession.”

Glad to learn the story is progressing well – I’m currently in Thames, working at the School of Mines, and have discovered we have pieces of a meteorite (collected by one Flossie Bly of Coromandel in 1880), and a chunk of rock from Antarctica – the collections cover every continent and, it seems, the outer space!
– Kind regards, Belinda