Presenting
history is an art which the National Museum of Australia does very well. Cook’s Pacific Encounters is much more than a
static display of fascinating objects collected on Captain Cook’s three Pacific
Ocean voyages.
In the Nation Focus Gallery on the lower floor there is a
free photographic exhibition of Life in the Pacific: The 21st Century. In an
educational project, largely funded by the State of Hawai’i and the US National
Endowment for the Arts, to complement the Cook-Forster exhibition, digital
cameras were given to 80 school students from many Pacific Islander communities
to document their cultures.
Some show traditional arts and crafts, dance and music in
modern contexts. Many attractive shots show the beauty and importance of island
scenery and the environment, and there are photos by the young of their elders which enhance their sense of respect, as well as others of
modern youth culture. Comments by the
students emphasised how they had learned much more about the diversity and
depth of their own societies. These pictures are certainly worth a visit.
But there’s more.
On Sunday August 6, 12-3pm, an afternoon of Pacific Islander culture
will be held in the Hall at the Museum.
Free performances and activities feature Tahitian, Maori, Hawaiian,
Torres Strait Islander and Tongan groups, making arts and crafts, performing
dances, even demonstrating traditional weapons.
Films to be shown include Whale Rider, and there will be a “conversation”
on the maintenance of traditional culture with Dr Lissant Bolton from the
British Museum, NMA curator Dr Ian Coates and Ralph Regenvanu, director of the
Vanuatu Cultural Centre..
Lissant Bolton will also speak on Friday this week, July
28, with other experts including Adrienne Kaeppler of the Smithsonian Museum,
Washington, Doreen Mellor, an Indigenous Australian and Director of Development
at the National Library of Australia, and Paul Tapsell, Director Maori –
Tumuaki Maori at the Auckland War Memorial Museum. The NMA and ANU’s Centre for
Cross-Cultural Research are collaborating in this major symposium, Discovering
Cook’s Collections.
A less intensive forum will also be presented for the
general public the evening before, 6–7pm this Thursday, featuring Adrienne
Kaeppler, Paul Tapsell and Lissant Bolton.
So the National Museum has put the Cook-Forster
collection from the Georg-August University of Göttingen into the full context
of today and of the period 1768 to 1780 when Cook, with secret instructions to
find the expected Great South Land and claim it for Britain, encountered a wide
range of Polynesian peoples.
Johann Reinhold Forster replaced Joseph Banks on Cook’s
third voyage. Forster’s personality alienated most on board, but he and Swedish
naturalist Andes Sparrman described some 500 new plants and 300 animals. An account by the ‘gentlemen skilled in
natural history and drawing’ was prevented from being published by Lord
Sandwich, leaving Cook’s detailed but largely navigational account as the
version we know today.
It was Forster’s collection which the University of
Göttingen bought on his death. Now we can see the beauty and the skilled
workmanship of tools, ceremonial head-dresses, clothes, household objects and
weapons, set among paintings made both by Europeans and Pacific Islanders of
life and times 220 years ago.
Despite those who think Australian history began with
Captain Cook, he knew very well that he was meeting ancient and impressive
cultures. An important display shows the
probable migration routes of the Polynesians, leaving the islands off South
East Asia aound 1600BC, reaching the Marquesas Islands about 300BC. From there they went to Hawai’i, Easter
Island and Raratonga, finally reaching New Zealand around 1000AD. But the winds and currents left Australia
isolated.
It was actor Nigel Sutton as Robbie the Rat, who claims
to have come with the First Fleet, who showed me, among a group of young
children and their parents, how all this history is the story of real people
leading real lives. He took us on an
adventure where we saw the transit of Venus (a parent) between a small boy
Earth and a smiling, indeed beaming, young girl Sun. A highlight was the beautifully back-lit
display of fish hooks, hanging as if under water, from small to one so large
“it would catch a shark”, so one boy reckoned.
In telling how Cook was killed, Robbie made clear how
shaky historical truth can be when even people who were there told different
and even conflicting stories. But he had
no doubt about the 1769 surfing contest at Tahiti. For the adults, Robbie explained that
Tahitian “massages” were popular among the sailors,
too, “to relieve their back pain” – and such activities may well have been one
cause of the conflict which arose in Cook’s last days on Hawai’i.
Now the school holidays are over, visitors will have to
miss the art of Robbie the Rat, whose prodigious memory and ability to
incorporate unsolicited commentary from excited children into the story was a
joy to experience. At least make sure you include Life in the Pacific: The 21st
Century, Discovering Cook’s Collections and the Pacific Festival if you
can.
Discovering Cook’s Collections:
One-day Public Symposium
ANU Centre for Cross-Cultural Research at National Museum
of Australia,
Visions Theatre, Friday July 28
Register at
www.anu.edu.au/culture/cook_conference_july/cook_conference.php
Free Evening Public Forum
Visions Theatre, Thursday July 27, 6-7pm
Cook’s Pacific Encounters
Cook-Forster Exhibition from the Georg-August University
of Göttingen
Until September 10
Adult: $10 Concession: $8 Child: $4
Family: $22
Life in the Pacific: The 21st Century
Free Photographic Exhibition
Nation Focus Gallery
Until September 10
Pacific Festival
Main Hall, Sunday August 6, 12-3pm
Free entry
Details: www.nma.gov.au
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