
There's always something exciting, inspiring and educational happening at MTG Hawke's Bay. Keep up to date with the latest news from the museum below...
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A fascinating collection of immigration archival material from the 1870’s-1880’s, including passenger lists, me...
27 November 2023
With the arrival of cruise ship season we’re looking forward to a busy time for MTG Hawke’s Bay and the region....
20 November 2023
This week we were sad to hear of the passing of Barbara Herrick. Herrick was the founder and designer of the fashi...
13 November 2023
We’re thrilled to announce that two works by Ngāti Kahungunu artist, Fiona Pardington, have been gifted to the H...
6 November 2023
Now that everything is all go with the new collection facility being built in Hastings, our collections team have a...
30 October 2023
Safely stored among the collection of the Hawke’s Bay Museums Trust, is Dr William Isaac Spencer’s 18th Royal I...
25 October 2023
Fuelling rumours that a gecko as long as your arm lived in Aotearoa until the late 1800s is an antique taxidermied ...
13 October 2023
Daylight saving and the long, lazy days of summer are on their way. With this comes a sense of freedom as time marc...
13 October 2023
The United Kingdom has for many years had ‘Arts on Prescription’, where trips to art galleries and museums are ...
13 October 2023
On the first of this month, I had the privilege of attending the site blessing for the new collection facility bein...
13 October 2023
With next week being Te Wiki o te Reo Māori it seems a good opportunity to consider this heru in terms of its name...
13 October 2023
Recently MOTAT (Museum of Transport and Technology, Auckland) gifted a cotton handkerchief to the Hawke’s Bay Mus...
4 September 2023
It’s been lovely seeing the theatre bustling during the festival and we’ll certainly be doing that again next y...
28 August 2023
The New Zealand International Film Festival opened at MTG Hawke’s Bay Tai Ahuriri this week. Opening night, Anato...
14 August 2023
The Hawke’s Bay Museums Trust is fortunate to hold in its collection three items which are closely associated to ...
7 August 2023
Most people with a sense of Hawke’s Bay history know of Leo Bestall, who was the first Director of MTG Hawke’s ...
31 July 2023
The upcoming exhibition on Te Poho o Kahungunu at the Hastings Community Art Centre, set to open Monday 24 July at ...
24 July 2023
Kia ora tatou and Mānawatia a Matariki! Last weekend MTG Hawke’s Bay, Tai Ahuriri was thrilled to be a part of ...
18 July 2023
The Hawke’s Bay Museums Trust is fortunate to have in its care an eclectic collection originally belonging to Rev...
10 July 2023
Volunteers come in many forms and they do a huge amount of social good. It’s hard to imagine a life without volun...
26 June 2023
Rarely does an art work so accurately express the psychology of its subject than this artwork by Tony Fomison. In O...
19 June 2023
In the Hawke’s Bay Museums Trust collection are many examples of Hawke’s Bay ephemera such as theatre programme...
12 June 2023
It’s been a theme of openings recently. Friday 26 May I went to Hastings City Art Gallery Te Whare Toi o Heretaun...
6 June 2023
Today, 82 years ago on May 27th 1941, German battleship Bismarck was sunk – 114 survived, 2086 did not. Three mil...
29 May 2023
This month MTG Hawke’s Bay opened an installation by Janna van Hasselt. Hailing from Christchurch, van Hasselt is...
22 May 2023
In today’s vibrant world of technology, where so much of our daily lives are bombarded with moving images on scre...
22 May 2023
Deeply moved to see the devastation that Cyclone Gabrielle brought to the Te Matau-a-Māui, celebrated artist Dr. F...
8 May 2023
Storytelling is a fundamental function of cultural institutions such as museums. MTG Hawke’s Bay’s latest exhib...
1 May 2023
Australia and New Zealand, as part of the British Empire, were, in the period of WWI, in bed with the French and Ru...
24 April 2023
Museum objects can be simple, complex, rare and fascinating but standing on their own without any contextualisation...
17 April 2023
Museums have undergone significant changes in recent years to become more relevant and interesting to visitors. MTG...
13 April 2023
Printmaking has always been regarded as playing second fiddle to painting, so as a printmaker I was interested to k...
3 April 2023
It was a bit of a dilemma this week deciding whether to write something cyclone related or not. There’s no doubt ...
27 March 2023
People of Aotearoa have got right behind those who have lost much in the wake of the Cyclone. The whole country see...
20 March 2023
During this incredibly trying time many people have lost a lot, if not all, of their treasured possessions. For the...
16 March 2023
Like many people who work in museum collections, and in particular Collection Management like myself, over time you...
6 March 2023
It’s a relief to be back in my home this week and sleeping in my own bed again. I feel exceptionally lucky that m...
1 March 2023
Like many across the region I am currently not in my home. I’m writing this column from a friend’s house high a...
21 February 2023
Iconic artist Fane Flaws died in 2021, leaving a legacy of prodigious artistic output and a bevy of bereft fans. ...
30 January 2023
In the Hawke’s Bay Museums Trust collection there is a strange assortment of objects belonging to the ship Montmo...
30 January 2023
As we know there are many stories in our oral histories that are in conflict with each other, and they are all corr...
30 January 2023
Looking to the year ahead there’s a lot going on at MTG Hawke’s Bay. Our collections team will be hard at work ...
16 January 2023
Like most people, I think, I have found the past two or three years quite tough and I was hugely relieved when Covi...
4 January 2023
In August 1959, Lester Masters along with a group of ardent tramping friends, ceremoniously delivered an old wooden...
28 December 2022
MTG Hawke’s Bay had very exciting news last week – receiving the full $9 million requested from the Regional Cu...
19 December 2022
“An indigenous invisibility pervades the national approach to monuments, to tombstones, flags and to plaques asso...
12 December 2022
In MTG’s collection there are approximately 6500 taonga Māori. Lists that read adzes and instruments of green...
7 December 2022
In the Hawke’s Bay Museums Trust collection is a sheet of music titled, the “All Blacks”, dedicated to the Br...
28 November 2022
Let me introduce you to the delightful Rashington Palace lI, a recent addition to the Hawke’s Bay Museums Trust c...
21 November 2022
Within spinning circles, there is an unsung celebrity known for her spinning, weaving, and textile design. She is B...
14 November 2022
If you found last week a bit startling with all those ‘little horrors’ roaming the streets, holding their neigh...
7 November 2022
On Friday October 28 at 1730 hours MTG Hawke’s Bay opened the exhibition Operation Grapple by Denise Baynham, pho...
5 November 2022
Amongst some of the more evocative ephemera in the Hawke’s Bay Museums Trust archive, are In Memoriam cards, made...
4 November 2022
Fresh, like cut grass, wafts of raw harakeke greet you as you enter the gallery. It’s a bit surprising inside wha...
17 October 2022
The Hawke’s Bay Museums Trust collection is filled with beautifully preserved examples of our fashion history goi...
17 October 2022
Talofa, Today is the end of Tuvalu Language week – Vaiaso o te Gana Tuvalu. The island group is categorised...
3 October 2022
Reflecting on the passing of Rangatira Queen Elizabeth II and the national day of commemoration to mark this, it is...
28 September 2022
When Laura Vodanovich assumed the role as MTG Director, she gave a series of talks to interested groups throughout ...
23 September 2022
Nature’s influence is omnipresent in our lives. Like a river in meander or a flower in bloom, te taiao (the natur...
Nature’s influence is omnipresent in our lives. Like a river in meander or a flower in bloom, te taiao (the natural world) is always growing, retracting, refracting — never stationary. It’s a kind of planned dysfunction, the perfect imperfection of Papatuānuku, and it's all on display in the art of gardening and botanicals.
For one night only, on Thursday, September 22 at 6.15pm, MTG Hawke’s Bay will offer a paid public programme entitled “Inspiring Your Nature Wonderland.” Art curator Toni MacKinnon will share her expertise in a floor talk of the Nature Culture exhibition, followed by a screening of The Gardener film in the Century Theatre, a love letter to the Les Quatre Vents gardens.
Tended to over 75 years and spanning three generations, horticulturist Frank Cabot cultivated paradise in his work that still stands in Quebec, teeming with colours that might only ever be identified by hex code. With the involvement of gardening experts, the film pieces together the thoughts and feelings of Cabot and his family. It’s the truest triumph of a man who invested his entire being into creating the best garden in Canada, and though previously released overseas, the film is brand new to our shores.
The Nature Culture exhibition puts our human connection with the natural world under a microscope, invigorating the imagination and recalling the keen imprint of nature on our senses. “I will be talking about the way artists respond to garden environments, whether they be landscaped or naturally formed,” Toni MacKinnon says of the upcoming floor talk. “The work of well-known artists such as Louise Henderson, whose work is included in Nature Culture, show just how inspirational these environments can be.”
Henderson’s craft is at once both meditative and labouring on the senses, like you are breathing the quiet. You don’t think yourself above the bounty of nature, but rather become tasked with a necessity to experience it from the inside.
The museum’s connection to nature is embedded in our history, and prolifically underpinned by botanicals. Dr. Robin Woodward curated the “Cultivating Paradise” exhibition in 2002, borne of Napier City Council’s desire to upgrade what we now call the Botanical Gardens, which endured relentless beginnings. Any hope of a popularity bloom was clipped at the stem following WWI, and uprooted entirely after WWII, as society changed and residents did away with promenades and garden outings. Today, the gardens remain full of life and wonder.
Aspects of Napier’s botanical history live on in Dr. Woodward’s publication, also titled “Cultivating Paradise,” available in the MTG shop. Significant figureheads of Aotearoa’s early botanical scene fill its pages; William Colenso and Georgina Hetley, among others. Hetley’s work currently enjoys a space on the first floor in the Native Flowers of New Zealand exhibition, effusing her passion for local flora, and her concern that deforestation could destroy our native plant species. With an abundance of plants and flowers in Hawke’s Bay, and a respect for te taiao, who could go wrong?
As Frank Cabot puts it in The Gardener: “Gardens, really, are not just physical or natural. They’re metaphysical, they’re at times transcendent, they’re incorporeal. They just have an extra numinous spirit there if they’ve been successful and you sense that. And it is a way to connect at a different level than one normally does.”
Inspiring Your Nature Wonderland is a paid public programme being held at MTG Hawke’s Bay, Thursday, September 22 at 6.15pm.
Image credit: Bush Series No.24. By Louise Henderson. Collection of Hawke’s Bay Museums Trust, Ruawharo Tā-ū-rangi
14 September 2022
Talofa lava, In the MTG Kuru Taonga: Voices of Kahungunu exhibition is a photo of Hauhau. They are prisoners. Co...
Talofa lava,
In the MTG Kuru Taonga: Voices of Kahungunu exhibition is a photo of Hauhau. They are prisoners. Collection records read, “Group of Māori Pai Mārire prisoners seated on a sloping hill. Standing behind them, holding bayoneted rifles are colonial militia”. Written on the reverse is “November 1865, Hauhau Māori Prisoners. Napier. New Zealand”.
These prisoners of the British Empire are photographed waiting on the Napier shore to be shipped away to one of two global Imperial prisons in the Southern Hemisphere. In this picture, Māori were not considered New Zealanders. Imperial Law imported from Europe was used to ‘extinguish’ all human rights for Māori born in Aotearoa, such as these men pictured. Extinguishment was enacted with the use of fire and guns administered by Crown redcoats and police under Imperial Law.
Laying claim to uninhabited territories, European powers enacted a programme of colonisation supported through a papal bull, the Doctrine of Discovery. This legal concept, drafted in the 15th and 16th centuries by the Catholic Church, advocated the colonisation of native peoples as subjects. Under this bull, any land not inhabited by Christians was deemed ‘uninhabited’ on the basis that non-Christians were in fact, non-human. European monarchies were given the right to conquer and claim lands, converting or killing the native inhabitants.
Sanctioned in Aotearoa, the bull was applied in the name of God, to save the souls of the ‘unrestrained barbarous savage’. In 2012, the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues denounced this fifteenth century Christian principle as the “shameful” root of all the discrimination and marginalisation that indigenous peoples face today.
In Aotearoa New Zealand it underpinned a programme of land acquisition that continues to this day.
Her Majesty first administered ‘Scorched Earth’ policy in the 1860’s in the ‘land of the mist’ upon Tuhoe. Continuing the assault on Tuhoe fifty years later, police re-entered their lands to kill those at Maungapohatu. Further police attacks occurred 90 years later in 2007. In practice ‘Scorched Earth’ policy saw the red coats round up the ‘natives’, block them in, and then incinerate them and their homes. The N.Z. Police attack on Maungapohatu in 1916 ended the ‘Imperial Land Grab Wars’ of Aotearoa. The government embedded Imperial Law and safeguarded the needs of settlers for a new New Zealand, resulting in the imprisonment of Māori to maintain control which continues with the status quo of Māori being the majority prison population today.
These Hauhau seen here restrained, had taken umbrage against these practices. Their full name is Pai Mārire Hau. Pai Mārire, Peace and Goodwill, and Hau, Breath of God. It was, and still is a Christian religion, with a twist.
Pai Mārire came out of the New Zealand Defence Force first committing genocide in Taranaki- the pre-cursor of practices to create a New Zealand and British Domain. In Taranaki lived Te Ua Haumeene, a baptised Wesleyan. He was a supporter of the King Movement to unite Māori against colonisation and Imperial Law. Te Ua had a vision of the Archangel Gabriel. Gabriel told Te Ua to cast Pākehā out and restore Aotearoa. He wrote a Gospel, the Gospel according to Ua, Te Ua Rongopai. So begat Pai Mārire, more commonly known as Hau Hau.
These Hau Hau men fought against imported Imperial Acts of Law. The New Zealand Settlement Act 1863 legalised the genocide in Taranaki, providing for the confiscation of Māori land when the Crown determined Māori were in rebellion against Her Majesty. In January 1865 Taranaki was declared confiscated and in November 1865 these Hau Hau men with other survivors, were shipped off, convicted as rebels and overstayers. Māori as all those pictured in the MTG Kuru Taonga: Voices of Kahungunu exhibition were not settled in this country as New Zealanders under the New Zealand Settlement Act.
Pictured historically, these Hauhau men were deemed criminals for not wanting their Aotearoa being dragged and drawn into someone else’s New Zealand. In this picture, Māori are not New Zealanders. The Deed of entitlement from this civilising force is for the profit and benefit of New Zealanders.
He mihi aroha, he mihi tangi mamaeroa kia ratau kua tae pō
Image: Pai Mārire Prisoners Napier 1865, collection of Hawke's Bay Museums Trust Ruawharo Tā-ū-Rangi
Published in Hawke's Bay Today on on 3 September 2022 and written by Te Hira Henderson, Curator Taonga Maori at MTG Hawke’s Bay.
5 September 2022
We have an amazing selection of activities for your tamariki during the July school holidays.
28 June 2022
The Government has recently announced changes to its Covid-19 traffic light framework, announcing that it will drop...
26 March 2022
After a thorough review by Napier City Council to ensure that our risk assessments around vaccine pass requirements...
8 February 2022
We have an amazing selection of activities for your children during the January school holidays from photography, a...
21 December 2021
From 3 December, we’ll be operating under the government traffic light system (also known as COVID Protection Fra...
2 December 2021
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