Magazines - Tribal Art Autumn 2007

By Moira White, a curator in the department of Human and Social Sciences at the Otago Museum in Dunedin, with a speciality in Oceania.

Introduction:
A visit to Dunedin, New Zealand, provides a rare opportunity to evoke some great figures of the South Pacific––scientists, collectors, missionaries, and art dealers such as William Ockelford Oldman, Henry Devenish Skinner, James Chalmers, Walter Ivens and Augustus Hamilton. While New Zealand is widely known as the cradle of one of the most refined art forms in the South Pacific, that of the Maori, some forget that today its many museums have substantial collections of old Oceanic artifacts on par with more famous institutions throughout the world.
One of four large general museums in New Zealand, the Otago Museum in Dunedin was established in 1868 and has occupied its present site on Great King Street since 1877. Although the early collecting emphasis was on the natural sciences, an important collection of Oceanic artifacts had been accumulated by the mid-twentieth century.
The museum's first three curators, Frederick Wollaston Hutton, Thomas Jeffrey Parker, and William Blaxland Benham, were biologists who also held positions at the University of Otago, which was the first university to be established in New Zealand. All accepted––and Benham on occasion sought––ethnographic material during their tenure. In the museum's 1902–1903 annual report, Benham wrote under the heading "Ethnology" that "The accommodation in the Museum is, of course, inadequate to allow more than a small number of objects to be exhibited, and this is unfortunate, for, to the ordinary visitor, this department is of considerable interest." The first appointment of someone with anthropological training was made when Henry Devenish Skinner, recently graduated from Cambridge University, became assistant curator with special responsibility for the ethnographic collections in January 1919.
Although he retired more than a decade before the museum's Hall of Melanesia opened, Skinner (who finished his career as director of the museum) remained a constant background presence. This gallery exists today because of a network of museum professionals, missionaries, private collectors, anthropologists, and supportive Dunedin citizens that Skinner brought together in his attempt to establish a significant Pacific collection for the museum. For an ambitious institution with limited funds, these links were essential. An important factor in his success in developing the collections was the establishment of the Fels Fund in 1920, "2,500 fully paid-up preference shares, the interest to be applied to the purchase of objects required in the teaching of Ethnology," through the initially anonymous generosity of Willi Fels, a Dunedin businessman who provided strong financial and political support for the museum from 1919 until his death in 1946.
Skinner's Pacific collecting deliberately emphasized artifacts that represented indigenous lifestyles prior to European contact. A shortlist of priorities in the early 1920s identified artifacts from Polynesia as the most urgently sought, since they were perceived to be more rare than those from other areas and most likely to disappear soon from the market: "There will always be plenty of Western Pacific stuff to be got by exchange or by gift" (H.D. Skinner to Willi Fels, 1 March 1923).
The H. D. Skinner Hall of Polynesia opened in 1966 in the Centennial Memorial Wing of the museum and the Walden Fitzgerald Hall of Melanesia, named after orthopaedic surgeon and council member of the Association of Friends of the Otago Museum, Henry Walden Fitzgerald (1903–1974), opened in the same wing in 1972. Prior to this, material from Melanesia had been displayed in a variety of locations and contexts over the years. A revitalization project was recently undertaken to upgrade artifact mounts and lighting in the gallery, and to address the perception of a generally dated appearance of the displays. The gallery reopened to the public in October 2006.