From 6 to 11 January this year, Mātauranga Māori Curator Dr Amber Aranui dusted off her excavation gear and joined Dr Monica Tromp and three Otago University students for a community-based archaeological excavation at Butler Point in Hihi. The excavation was led by Dr Justin Maxwell and Dr Jennifer HuebertRead more
For the last few months, Master’s student Manon Verdello has been working with the Mātauranga Māori team on the Acknowledging our Colonial Past project. A part of her internship at Te Papa was to work on reconciling the original collection records from the 1860s to the current collection database. Here,Read more
Humanities Technician Cassandra Bahr has been working in the Collected Archives at Te Papa, cataloguing and rehousing papers from people connected to Te Papa’s collecting areas. Here, she highlights parts of the archives held at Te Papa of the sculptor John Edgar. Edgar was committed to being a full-time artist. He maintainedRead more
Gallipoli: The Scale of Our War reopened after essential maintenance on Saturday 13 September. In this blog, Education Specialist Laura Jones and Curator History Stephanie Gibson reflect together on recent changes to the exhibition and the critical thinking behind their work with students and history. Learning programmes can be an amazingRead more
Botany curator Leon Perrie and researcher Lara Shepherd recently visited the Allan Herbarium in Lincoln to examine its speargrass/taramea (Aciphylla) specimens as part of their ongoing taxonomic research into these plants. The herbarium’s historical specimens offer valuable insights that enhance our recent collections, particularly around morphological diversity and species distributions.Read more
Master’s student Felix Stribling unpacks their research into Aotearoa New Zealand’s queer heritage collections and the importance of centring queer and takatāpui voices in GLAMs (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums).Read more
Nancy Adams (1926–2007) was one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most prolific botanists and a talented artist. She produced many botanical illustrations, which were included in widely distributed and well-regarded books about the New Zealand flora. During her botanical career at the Dominion Museum (predecessor to Te Papa Tongarewa), she wentRead more
Last year a Te Papa curator approached the library team with an intriguing question. Could we help them find more information about the story that in the 19th century whales in the Wellington Harbour were so noisy that they kept people awake at night? The curator couldn’t find any first-hand contemporary accounts, known as primary sources, from the 1800s to confirm the tale and hoped the library team might be able to help. Cataloguing and Acquisitions Librarian Kim McClintock talks about her discoveries.Read more
Nancy Adams was a key player in the early decades of the Dominion Museum (predecessor to Te Papa), making substantial curatorial contributions to collections spanning from colonial history to botany and producing illustrations, now a valuable part of the Te Papa Art collection. As Lucia Adams and Margo Montes de Oca discovered during their summer research this year, traces of her influence and curatorial eye can be found not only in Te Papa’s archives but also in the outside world, specifically in the gardens by the old Dominion Museum building in Buckle Street.Read more
Te Aka Matua Research Library at Te Papa currently has a collection of over 60,000 books and supports the work of Te Papa kaimahi with its wide-ranging books and resources about Aotearoa New Zealand history, Pacific cultures, mātauranga Māori, art, natural history, and museum studies. The library was first mentionedRead more
The possibilities of using Generative AI in a positive way to enhance collection accessibility and findability has sparked a pilot project by history curator Katie Cooper and Collections Data Manager Gareth Watkins. In the first of a series of blogs, Katie and Gareth take you on their AI journey.Read more
With Halloween coming up and summer around the corner, it is time for bloodsucking beasties to come out. Insect curator Julia Kasper specialises in flies and bloodsucking insects and has a strong interest in the historical and cultural aspects of entomology. Here, she sheds a bright light on the vampire world and explains what actually caused the diseases that were blamed on – and furthered the belief in – the vampire.Read more
When we think about New Zealand’s national museum, we often think about Te Papa, with its enormous building on the waterfront and bicultural philosophy. ‘Our Place’. Or we might imagine the National Museum at Buckle Street with the National War Memorial or the carillon standing tall in front – a place you might remember visiting as a child. But our national museum’s history begins over 100 years before that, in 1865, to be exact. Curator Mātauranga Māori Amber Aranui takes us back to this creatively documented time. Read more
In 1997 Te Papa purchased approximately 1000 nineteenth- and twentieth-century silversmiths and jewellers’ tools. The collection was started by jeweller Norris Blaxall in the early 1920s and his son Kevan continued to assemble and document the collection. Jessa Roylands, a Museum Studies student at Victoria University of Wellington, has been researching the tools, and shares some insights into the process of creating beautiful, glossy enamelled jewellery.Read more
In 2021, with the Te Papa Foundation’s support, Te Papa acquired a rare book of tapa cloth samples, one of many assembled by Alexander Shaw in 1787. At the wānanga in 2023, artists were given the opportunity to respond to the Shaw book and exchange knowledge between tapa experts from acrossRead more
