The "Maori HOuse" at the Canterbury Museum


The ‘Maori House’ at the Canterbury Museum

Paul Walker

INTERSTICES 4 The ‘Maori House’ at the Canterbury Museum 1

In 1873 the Canterbury Museum in Christchurch
acquired a carved meeting house, Hau-Te-Ananui-o-
Tangaroa, from the Ngati Porou chief Henare Potae,
of Tokomaru Bay. It had reputedly been intended as
Henare Potae’s “residence.”1 But materials prepared
for it were partially destroyed during the Hau-Hau
uprising, and it was not put up.

Its designer, Hone Taahu, and Tamati Ngakaho,
another carver from the East Coast, arrived in
Christchurch early in 1874 to complete the building
and prepare it for erection. It had been expected
that this would take between two and three weeks,
b u t  t h e  r e c a r v i n g  a l o n e  o f  l o s t  o r  damaged parts
took much longer. The work was delayed further
while the Provincial Government for some months
declined to take any financial responsibility beyond
the original purchase and freight costs, while
nevertheless allowing a site to be selected for the
reconstruction, just to the east of the museum
building. There the Maori House was finally
completed in December 1874.

Located thus, the Maori House (f i g  1 ) was both an
exhibit in the museum collection and an extension of
the museum fabric. It was both a thing and a space,
trophy - or curiosity - and cabinet. It was “a valuable
and most interesting ethnological study;”2 and it was,
suggested Julius von Haast, director of the museum,
“a considerable addition to the accommodation of
the museum for holding ethnological collections.”3

Because it was considered in its new setting to be
property ( s p a c e  o r  thing, it had cost hundreds of
pounds,4) the architectural nature of the Maori
House necessarily changed. James Stack, who helped
mediate between Haast and the Ngati Porou carvers,
wrote

The first departure from the original intention, was caused
by the unexpected costliness of the materials. It was
thought unadvisable to risk the speedy destruction of the
carved timbers, which had already cost £290, by allowing
them to be set up in the grounds after the Maori fashion,
accordingly, a concrete foundation was laid for them. This
alteration in the structure, necessitated the erection of a
frame-work, by European carpenters, to which the Maori
work was fastened. And as the building proceeded, other
alterations had to be made, which rendered it still more
unlike what it was meant to be. Fluted kauri boards were

substituted for toe-toe reeds inside, and the outside of the
building was covered with corrugated iron, instead of the
ordinary covering of raupo and toe-toe, which was of too
inflammable a nature to be allowed upon a building placed
so close to the museum.5

These changes resulted in a controversy over a loss
of authenticity, or - it might be said - propriety.

In its status and in its architectural treatment the
Maori House was an ambivalent accessory. This
ambivalent status can be understood through analysis
of descriptions of the house as a relic of an art
“which must soon pass away,” 6 and through
contemporaneous accounts of the design of the
Canterbury Museum a n d  t h e  l a y o u t  o f  i t s  e x h i b i t s  a s
planned and as realised.

The Canterbury Museum was opened in 1870, but
proposals for it date back to the 1850s. The story
that is usually told of architecture in New Zealand
during the period of European settlement in the
middle of the nineteenth century is that it was made
of simple robust forms, devised to meet immediate
need. This story is often accompanied by a lament
over the subsequent loss of this direct, honest
quality. The single theoretical influence that is
sometimes allowed in early colonial architecture is
t h a t  o f  A .  W .  N .  P u g i n ,  s e e n  f o r  i n s t a n c e  i n  t h e
work of Frederick Thatcher, the architect of the
Selwyn churches. So much is this so that occasionally
Thatcher’s magnum opus , St Paul’s Cathedral in
Wellington, has been purported to be the work of
Pugin himself.7 Pugin is allowed, perhaps, because his
doctrine of picturesque utility is not so far from the
creeds of the (modernist) historians who have
identified his influence here.

The architect of the museum, Benjamin Woolfield
Mountfort, is another architect whose work has
been aligned with Puginian ideals. He has paid for
this identity with theory by having the structural
failure of his first major building, Holy Trinity Church
in Lyttelton,8 always counted against him. Although
the statement of principles that he produced, with
his partner Isaac Luck in 1857 to defend their
professional reputation as they tried to win the
commission for Government House in Auckland, is
offered in the form that Pugin had used - a series of



INTERSTICES 4 The ‘Maori House’ at the Canterbury Museum 2

contrasts of ancient and modern principles - much of
the content is Ruskinian:

architecture ... proposes to go to nature for lessons if not
for models. Accordingly, we see in Nature’s buildings, the
mountains and hills; not regularity of outline but
diversity; buttresses, walls and turrets as unlike each other
as possible, yet producing a graduation of effect not to be
approached by any work, moulded to regularity of outline.
The simple study of an oak or an elm tree would suffice to
confute the regularity theory.9

Certainly by the time that he produced his first
designs for the Canterbury Museum in 1865, Ruskin’s
views were ascendent. This first design was devised in
response to the architectural competition set up by
the Canterbury Provincial Government late in 1864.
Robert Speechly, another architect who entered the
competition, defended his proposal by citing Ruskin
when The Press criticised it for having “an air more
suggestive of gloomy piles on the dank dark canal
streets of an old Flemish town, than such as we
would wish to see under our bright skies.” Speechly
responded that the apparent gloominess was merely
a misapprehension arising from his technique of
etching his drawings, and that “many ancient
buildings of the type I followed, and which are so
frequently resorted to by our first architects for
study, and so highly praised by our great art critic -
Mr Ruskin, are to be found in Venice, where surely
the bright sky and the scenery will favorably vie with
that in New Zealand.”10

The ‘committee of taste’ that adjudicated this
1864/65 competition split the prize between
Speechly and Mountfort,11 and building was put off.

I do not know if Mountfort read Ruskin, but there
are intimations of Ruskin’s influence in Mountfort’s
designs for the museum when at last it proceeded,
piecemeal, between 1870 and 1882. There are
indications of influence also in the important design
he made for the Canterbury Provincial Council Chamber.
This building was completed in 1865. The Council
Chamber is an elaborately decorated High Victorian
gothic space. It features stonework carving of plant
and animal forms by the mason William Brassington.
This carving was said by The Press to have a life-like
quality because “here the fancy of the artist is
allowed free range.”12 The emphases on natural
forms as a source of ornament, and on the active
r o l e  o f  t h e  m a s o n  i n  i t s  d e s i g n  r e c a l l  o n  t h e  o n e
hand Ruskin’s “Lamp of beauty,” and on the other
his “Lamp of life.” It was these lamps, and perhaps
more likely Mountfort’s Council Chamber, that The

Press had in mind when it stated in its review of the
museum design competition:

Of all our public buildings a Museum most demands the
stamp of excellence and completeness. Beyond being
commodious for the reception and display of its contents,
the building itself ought to be as good a specimen as may
be possible of the architecture of our day ... Such sculpture
as capitals, corbels, and the like, might be allotted to
picked workmen; and while conventional details should be
executed with scrupulous exactitude, in a few instances we
w o u l d  h a v e  t h e m  c o p y  t o  t h e  b e s t  o f  t h e i r  a b i l i t y  r e a l
foliage and plants.13

This article goes on to suggest of the museum
building that “Every variety of granite building stone,
slate, and marble to be found in Canterbury would
naturally find a place in the fabric, either in its
exterior or interior, as may be expedient; and we
can imagine even the crystals from our mountain
ranges introduced with the best effect among the
details of an edifice which might fairly be called the
Cathedral of our Art.” This strategy of gathering
together building stones and minerals to act as a sort
of synecdoche for the territory from which they
came was employed by Mountfort in the Provincial
Council Chamber. He had also proposed the use of a
representative collection of building stones in his
unsuccessful design for Government House in Auckland
in 1857.14 This strategy had a precedent in the design
of a building with which Ruskin was closely
associated, the Oxford Museum of 1855-60 by Deane
and Woodward. A notable feature of the Oxford
building is the use of a large number of different
British stones in the column shafts of its court: a
reflection of Ruskin’s interest in geology, and of his
conflation of science and aesthetics. Garnham writes
o f  t h e  Oxford Museum that it reflects the common
view of Ruskin and its founding director, Henry
Acland, that the world is “a living whole in which
we are immersed and from which we draw meaning
as well as minerals.”

The gathering of mineral specimens did not, in the
event, become part of the Canterbury Museum’s
architectural strategy. 15 But geology and
palaeontology were key elements in its collections,
and in their growth. These collections were initiated
in 1861 by Julius von Haast, the first director of the
museum, when travelling in New Zealand with the
Austrian geologist Dr Ferdinand Hochstetter. That
same year Haast was made the Provincial Geologist, a
position which had important economic significance
to the colonial enterprise of the Canterbury
settlement. The collections put together by Haast



INTERSTICES 4 The ‘Maori House’ at the Canterbury Museum 3

were temporarily placed in rooms in the Provincial
Government Buildings, where they were opened to
public inspection in December 1867. In 1866 a very
large number of moa bones were found in a swamp
at Glenmark, and presented to Haast’s museum.
Haast was widely vilified for failing to find gold
within Canterbury’s boundaries,16 but the bones
turned out to be just as profitable, at least for
Haast’s purpose, in building up the museum’s
collection and prestige. These moa bones were
exported all over the world in exchange for artifacts
and natural history specimens. The Oxford Museum
was a major partner in this trade, and indeed it came
to have an important connection with the province.
William Rolleston, the Superintendent of
Canterbury from 1868 to 1876, was the brother of
George Rolleston, Professor of Anatomy and
Physiology at Oxford, Henry Acland’s colleague,
and his successor as director of the museum.

As Superintendent, William Rolleston officially
opened the temporary exhibition staged to mark the
completion of the new Canterbury Museum building in
1870. He gave a “thoughtful speech,” in which he
“took Ruskin’s view of Art as the servant and
interpreter of Nature.”17 More interesting than this
was the inclusion among a few photographs in the
architecture and archaeology section of some “from
the Museum, Oxford” and one described as
“photograph - museum - Oxford.” They were
exhibited by Mountfort.18 Haast was sent more
photographs of the Oxford Museum (of its interior) by
George Rolleston the following year, 1871.19

There is a striking likeness between photographs of
the Oxford Museum and ones of the Canterbury Museum
as it was after 1882, when it was in its ‘complete’
state (figs 2, 3). This state, however, was the
outcome of erratic development that reflected the
political and economic fortunes of the Canterbury
province during those years and the influence that
Julius von Haast was able to wield with successive
Provincial Governments. It simply was not as much
a s  h e  w o u l d  h a v e  l i k e d .  T h i s  s h a p e d  t h e  building
rather more than did any consistently followed line
of development. Nevertheless, the look of the Oxford
Museum was known in Christchurch, and in
particular to Mountfort, throughout the period of
the Canterbury Museum’s early development.

From the beginning Haast and Mountfort had
intended a large (and fundamentally symmetrical)
complex;20 a n d  i n  1 8 7 4  H a a s t  h a d  p r o p o s e d  t o  t h e
Government that considerable additions be made in
two stages to those parts of the museum that had

b e e n  p u t  u p  i n  1 8 7 0  a n d  1 8 7 2 .  H e  s t a t e d  i n  t h e
memorandum he submitted to the Superintendent of
the province “this is the main point I wish especially
to draw to your attention, if not a proper plan be
now worked out and the money set aside, the
Building will become simply a congeries of rooms
without purpose and design.” (This is an apt
description for what did happen and for the plan of
the building in its 1882 condition.) Accompanying
Haast’s appeal were drawings - in Mountfort’s hand
- that showed extensions to the west of the existing
buildings, extensions that would have defined the
sides of two courtyards that would then be covered
over with iron and glass roofs.21 These, too, echoed
Oxford: Deane and Woodward’s building had a
glazed iron roof over its courtyard, a structure with
which there had been notorious problems. F. A.
Skidmore, the iron master who supplied the iron
work at Oxford, was known to Mountfort who had
commissioned his firm to fabricate an iron clock
tower for the Canterbury Provincial Government
Buildings. It was not used for that purpose;
Mountfort included it in his design for the 1865
museum competition.22

The Oxford Museum w a s  a key building in several
respects: in its use of iron, of course, but more
important than this it symbolised the role of the
natural sciences in the university and - bound up
with this - its architects tried overtly to implement
the case put by Ruskin in The Stones of Venice,  a n d
alluded to also in The Seven Lamps of Architecture, that
the worker should be “allowed to translate nature
into ornament after his own design”23 ( f i g  4 ). It may
b e  d i f f i c u l t  f o r  u s  t o  understand how the gothic
forms and decor of the Oxford Museum c o u l d  h a v e
been appropriate to science and laboratory research,
but at the middle of the nineteenth century it seems
a connection was apparent. The gothic revivalist
architect G. E. Street said “Surely where nature is to
be enshrined, there especially ought every carved
stone and every ornamental device to bear her marks
and to set forth her loveliness.”24 And this could only
b e  d o n e  w h e r e  t h e  workers were not bound to
designs determined by someone else, but could
follow their own interpretations of nature. William
Brassington was again allowed the ‘free range’ that
The Press had seen in his work at the Provincial Council
Chamber when he carved the window decorations of
t h e  1 8 7 6  w i n g  o f  t h e  Canterbury Museum. Another
mason, Mr J. Smith, carved the capitals of the
Museum’s 1878 portico as “an artistic mingling of
foliage and animals’ heads carried out in the Gothic
style, the general effect being emblematical of the
Museum ... Mr Smith does his work unaided by any



INTERSTICES 4 The ‘Maori House’ at the Canterbury Museum 4

pictorial design, and undoubtedly exhibits high
artistic culture”25 (fig 5).

How was Mr Smith’s carving “emblematical” of the
Museum? It was an emblem of the mid century
connection of theology and science, wonder at
creation and a desire to know about it. The architect
John Hendry, who designed the last major extension
to the Canterbury Museum, of 1977, has noted in
connection to this conflation of faith and science that
the Canterbury Museum is sited at one end of a street
(now Worcester Boulevard) such that it faces the
Cathedral of Christchurch at the other. 26 T h e y  s h a r e  a
common architectural language and their makers
shared a common view of the world. Ruskin himself
had said:

How strange it seems that physical science should ever have
been thought adverse to religion! The pride of physical
science is, indeed, adverse, like every other pride, both to
religion and truth; but sincerity of science, so far from
being hostile, is the path-maker among the mountains for
those who publish peace.27

He had the expectation that science would enlighten
the world and free it of pestilence and starvation.

The most important scientific treatise of the middle
years of the nineteenth century was Charles
Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, published in 1859.
The controversies over this book destroyed the
prospect of a unity of science and theology.
Darwin’s theories were reported in some detail in
the Christchurch newspapers and were apparently
widely discussed locally. Samuel Butler, resident in
Canterbury from 1859 to 1864, amused himself
during 1862 and 1863 writing articles for The Press
and letters to its editor under various pseudonyms
contrarily attacking On the Origin of Species  and
defending it. In a letter to The Press of June 13 1861,
titled “Darwin among the Machines,” Butler - writing
under the pen name Cellarius - rehearsed thoughts
that he would later pursue in Erewhon (1872): “day
by day the machines are gaining on us ... it is our
opinion that war to the death should be instantly
proclaimed on them.”28 The evolutionary paradigm
had been quickly carried over from natural history
into the realm of material culture.

Haast was strongly influenced by Darwin. He had
none of Butler’s doubts. He described On the Origin
of Species as “the great work of the age,” of particular
importance to those with an interest in New Zealand
natural history faced, as they were, with the
unexplained extinction of moas and other defunct

bird species (fig 6).29 There was some
correspondence between Haast and Darwin during
the 1860s and Haast arranged for James Stack, who
was to have a close connection to the Maori House
and its carvers, to contribute observations on Maori
for Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and
Animals of 1873.30

The categorizations of nineteenth century natural
history were an abstract spatialization of
evolutionary time. In the arrangement of the
museum, this abstract space was physically realised:
the temporal schema of natural history was given
spatial extension, made directly available for
experience. Haast reports in 1875 that:

the addition of further space ... has afforded me the
opportunity to arrange the collections more systematically
than they have hitherforto been. The mammals have been
placed together as near as possible to their natural
classification. The birds, with the exception of the
extensive NZ species have been arranged systematically,
according to Gray’s list of birds.31

Ethnology and art collections were also shown in
the Canterbury Museum, accessories to what was
basically an assemblage and display of geology and
natural history specimens.

The Canterbury Museum was founded not only on the
idea of revealing the gradual improvement - as it was
conceived - in life forms and human material
conditions in the past; as an extension of this it was
also committed to improvement in the future. It was
committed to education. This is clear in the
museum’s role in the foundation of Canterbury
University College in 1870; Haast was Professor of
Geology there while continuing his duties as director
of the museum. The commitment to education was in
turn linked to the ideas of material progress that
drove the colonial enterprise, as is outlined in
Haast’s 1862 address to the Canterbury
Philosophical Institute:

The erection of a museum of economic geology and of
natural history generally, will also be of the highest
importance; not only on account of those who are desirous
of instruction, as a mere matter of intellectual enjoyment,
but also of those who already understand the great value of
well arranged collections, as aids to the development of the
resources of the Province. How often have I been struck with
the eager zeal, with the desire for knowledge, displayed by
all classes of settlers who have come to inspect the
collections made during our geological survey.32



INTERSTICES 4 The ‘Maori House’ at the Canterbury Museum 5

There were likenesses in the architectural strategies
of the Oxford and Canterbury Museums; their
institutional agendas were also alike. Ruskin’s
expectations for the Oxford Museum and the
knowledge it would produce were directly
connected to English colonial undertakings and
ambitions:

For much as I reverence physical science as a means of
mental education ... I reverence it more at this moment,
more as the source of utmost human practical power, and
the means by which the far-distant races of the world, who
now sit in darkness and the shadow of death, are to be
reached and regenerated. At home or far away - the call is
equally instant - here, for want of more extended physical
science, there is plague in our streets, famine in our fields
. . .  A l l  t h i s  i s  t e r r i b l e ;  b u t  i t  i s  m o r e  t e r r i b l e  y e t  t h a t
dim, phosphorescent, frightful superstitions still hold their
own over two-thirds of the inhabited globe.33

Twelve years later, giving his first lecture as the
Oxford University Slade Professor of Fine Arts,
Ruskin emphasises England’s destiny as the colonial
power, and links this explicitly with the making of
art and of science. “The art of any country is the
exponent of its social and political virtues.”34 He
suggested that England should delegate unpleasant
economic activities to “less fortunate and more
covetous races.” 35 English “simplicity and good
humour,” “love of the grotesque” and “love of
adventure,” as well as the country’s developing
knowledge of physiognomy would “enable us to give
to the future inhabitants of the globe an almost
perfect record of the present forms of animal life
upon it, of which many are on the point of being
extinguished.”36 The arrogance of these statements
fades, however, in comparison to the virulent
comments with which Ruskin ended his inaugural.
English destiny is to govern the world:

Within the last few years we have had the laws of natural
science opened to us with a rapidity which has been
blinding by its brightness; and means of transit and
communication given to us, which have made but one
kingdom of the habitable globe. One kingdom; - but who
is to be king?37

England must found colonies wherever she can,
teaching her colonists that “though they live on a
distant plot of ground, they are no more to consider
themselves therefore disenfranchised from their
native land, than the sailors of her fleets do, because
they float on distant waves.”38 Ruskin described
England’s colonies as parts of its “fastened fleet.”39

Evolutionary arguments and colonialism are clearly
brought together in nineteenth century
anthropology, with the museum, during that time, its
principal disciplinary site. Johannes Fabian has
outlined how anthropology has made its object of
study, the other, by locating it in a time other than
that of the anthropologist. For mid-nineteenth
century anthropology, the time in which the other
was located was the natural time of evolution.
Anthropology was made practically possible through
colonialism, but the links between them were more
fundamental than this. They were epistemological:
anthropological knowledge might have been
facilitated through European expansion, but an
anthropology which took evolution as its paradigm
in turn gave colonialism a philosophical basis. “It
promoted a scheme in terms of which not only past
cultures, but all living societies were irrevocably
placed on a slope, a stream of Time - some
upstream, others downstream.”40 Upstream and
downstream in Haast’s museum would ideally have
become downstairs and upstairs. In his 1874
proposal for expanding the museum (f i g  7 ), Haast
describes how the museum collection would be
disposed between the various floors and wings. The
ethnological specimens and art works would be
arranged in their own wing “beginning in the lower
part with pre-historical remains, antiquities and
Ethnological collections and advancing gradually to
the Gallery upstairs built for the purpose with lights
from the top to contain works of Art, showing the
gradual advancement of the human race from the
manufacture of rude flint implements to the highest
productions of great Artists.”41 E u r o p e a n  a r t  i s  the
peak of human evolution, and by implication of
natural evolution too.

The Maori House was necessary to the Canterbury
Museum in its role in producing an other, the Maori.
This Maori was a coherent and singular other -
signified in the building’s designation as ‘the Maori
House,’ and not - for example - ‘the Ngati Porou
house.’42 Thus, the Canterbury Museum employed Hau-
Te-Ananui-o-Tangaroa in the disciplinary discourses
of ethnology in a way that European and American
museums employed other artifacts from New
Zealand and elsewhere at the same time. And in
some sense (but only some) it was as foreign to
Christchurch as it would have been to Europe or
America. The Dunedin periodical The Illustrated New
Zealand Herald wrote:

It may seem strange to residents of New Zealand that a
Maori building should possess any novelty, but the
explanation is not far to seek. The 40,000 Maoris who



INTERSTICES 4 The ‘Maori House’ at the Canterbury Museum 6

still inhabit New Zealand are confined to the North
Island. A mere handful, numbering only a few hundreds,
are scattered over the South Island; and to a Southern
Colonist a Maori is quite a novelty, and such a thing as a
‘runanga-house’ is almost unknown.43

What was this other like? How was it exemplified in
this building? (Ruskin had said the art of a country is
an exponent for its virtues.) What was this other’s
future in the evolutionary scheme of things? The
Illustrated New Zealand Herald:

On entering the building ... visitors find themselves within
the walls of a genuine Maori whare, carved, painted, and
embellished in the highest style of ancient Maori art.
Many of the carvings are of course very grotesque -
haliotis-eyed monsters in every variety of attitude, with
tongues protruded, and their faces rendered more hideous by
the elaborate ‘tatoo’ markings ... The building is
substantially erected, on solid foundations, and may
probably last long after the Maori race has become extinct.

This is of course popular journalism, but it is not far
removed from the aesthetic and ethnological
discourses proper to the museum. Ruskin, for
example, wrote in The Stones of Venice of “the
barbarous grotesque of mere savageness, as seen in
the work of the Hindoo and other Indian nations;
or, more grossly still, in that of the complete savage
of the Pacific islands;” and the German
anthropologist Adolf Bastian, writing in 1881, said:

For us, primitive societies are ephemeral ... At the very
instance they become known to us they are doomed.44

Canterbury was, of course, in competition with
other museums in its acquisition and display of
objects. Haast was first informed of the availability of
Hau-Te-Ananui-o-Tangaroa in a telegram from
Samuel Locke, Native Commissioner in Napier, in
January 1873:

I have just heard of a Maori house as good as Wellington’s
one but it would cost full £200. There appears to be great
difficulty in getting Poverty Bay house & it is not a first
class one.45

How were such values - £200, ‘first class’ -
determined? Presumably in a marketplace where the
buyers were museums, tourists, and other collectors,
the suppliers were entrepreneurs such as Henare
Potae and Samuel Locke, and objects became
property.

Property entails propriety. Stack’s description of the
Maori House makes it clear, however, that its
reconstruction involved various compromises: the
timbers were not set directly on the ground; the
carvings were attached to a framework; fluted kauri
boards were used on the interior instead of toe-toe;
the exterior was covered with corrugated iron.
These changes and others became the subject of a
local controversy over an imputed loss of
authenticity. (In the marketplace, authenticity
becomes a pressing issue.) The work of the Ngati
Porou carvers was closely scrutinised. Thomas Potts,
member of the Provincial Council (and the builder
of Ohinetahi, now the home of Sir Miles Warren)
wrote to the Superintendent in June 1874 setting out
his concerns about work that was being done on the
building:

It may be thought somewhat persistent to trouble your
Honour, but I feel strongly that if any alteration takes
place in the erection of the Maori House other than what is
simply restoration, such a departure from the original
building will only be accomplished at the costly price of
losing a valuable and most interesting ethnological study,
illustrating the old habits, manners and customs of so
many of our fellow subjects.46

Why, he asked, had the carved slabs been cut? Were
the timbers being used of the same kind and quality
as those in the “original building?” What authority
was there for the use of “patent paints” by the “native
artificers?”

Haast responded that “as it was impossible for me to
procure for them shark oil or any other nasty
compound used by them I was obliged to allow
them a substitute, taking care that the shades of
colour were as near as possible to those they obtain
in the Northern Island.”47 The carved slabs had been
cut to allow the painted rafters to be fitted to them
“according to the original design.” Haast finished by
saying “I trust that no meddlesome interference of
persons who know nothing about it will be
allowed,” and appended to his statement another,
from James Buller “whose knowledge of the native
race ought to give to his opinion a far greater value
than of any other person in Canterbury” (including,
presumably, those Maori who lived locally at
Kaiapoi and on Banks Peninsula).48 Buller’s letter
backs up Haast’s. The colours being used - red,
white, green, blue - were the closest possible to
those used in the North Island; the natives rejected
all foreign timber; cutting into the carvings was
explained by the carvers as simply a matter of
course. Buller expresses his fullest confidence in the



INTERSTICES 4 The ‘Maori House’ at the Canterbury Museum 7

two Maori workers, their skill and trustworthiness.
T h e y  “ e x p e c t  t o  h a v e  a l l  r e a d y  i n  a b o u t  2  weeks
time.”49

Four months later, however, the work was still not
complete. In Haast’s absence from Christchurch it
was apparently felt necessary for Buller to
superintend the final stages of Hone Taahu and
Tamati Ngakaho’s work. His trust in them had
seemingly waned. He wrote:

The carvings in front have a very imposing appearance. I
mean those covering the mouldings to the doors and
windows. I suggested painting out the silly fancy work on
the outside post and giving it a coat of red ... The only
defence the Maori artist could offer was that this
illustrated the ‘moku’ or ‘tatu’ markings on a woman’s
breast and arms. I told him we wanted a house and not a
woman. He grinned and said he would paint it out. We
must be careful to have nothing introduced that we cannot
defend. 50

Apparently, though, not all the “fancy work” was
painted out. In his description of the completed
house, read to the Philosophical Institute of
Canterbury in August 1875, James Stack wrote: “The
artist unfortunately did not confine himself to
ancient patterns, but introduced various novelties of
his own designing, consisting for the most part of
representations of the leaves of different plants and
shrubs.” Could paintings such as these have been so
far, say, from Ruskin’s own, or from Mr Smith’s
carvings on the portico of the museum (f i g  8 )? The
responsibility and inventiveness argued for the
worker by Ruskin in The Stones of Venice a n d  i n  The
Seven Lamps of Architecture, and argued by The Press f o r
the masons at the Canterbury Museum, was denied to
the colonised subject.

Charles Darwin included information about Maori
that he had received from James Stack in three
sections of his book, The Expression of Emotions in Man
and Animals.  T h e y  w e r e  t h e  sections on sulkiness,
anger, and blushing. The point of Darwin’s book
was to establish that all humanity shared certain
traits which were not culturally specific, but had a
basis in common physiology. Paul Carter has
criticised Darwin for decontextualising the
information that he used, and for failing to account
for the complexities of communication between
individuals from different cultures.51 What could the
grin of a Ngati Porou carver told to erase the moko
from a meeting house mean? How could it be read?
What did the carvers think of Christchurch and the
situation in which they found themselves? We know

they were disenchanted with the wrangles between
the Provincial Government, Haast, and the Board of
Governors of Canterbury College (which at this time
controlled the museum) over money and
responsibility. In May 1874, Haast wrote to the
Provincial Secretary for Public Works that the
carvers “were very dissatisfied” (apparently at the
prospect of being sent home before work was
complete); in June they threatened to go home of
their own volition.52 And what was at stake for them
in the introduction of elements and techniques which
were “novelties” (according to the European arbiters
of Maori culture), and in the representation of
leaves of different plants and shrubs? I do not know.
Roger Neich’s recent book Painted Histories has
started to investigate questions such as these in the
wider context of around 100 meeting houses built
between 1860 and 1920 many of which feature
unconventional paintings (see note 1).

Adverse reaction in Christchurch to novel aspects of
the Maori House’s paintings was perhaps based on
the necessity of maintaining difference. Differences in
culture - for which evidence was found in objects
such as the Maori House - were reinscribed by
nineteenth century ethnology as differences in value.
But the Maori House was not just an object; it was
also a space. It was an extension of the museum,
tenuous to be sure, but an extension nevertheless. In
its status as such the stakes were different. Stack:
“The incongruities of style would, doubtless,
provoke less remark, if the building were called
what it really is, the Maori Court, instead of the
Maori House.”53

The Maori Court housed a collection of Maori
artifacts, which were, therefore, out of sequence
with the rest of the ethnological collection. The part
of the building to which it was attached, the first
part of the museum complex to be built - in 1870 -
was, after extensions ceased in 1882, the location of
the New Zealand natural history collections,
likewise anomalously separated from the rest (f i g  9 ).
H a a s t  -  a s  w e  have already seen - attended very
carefully to the layout of his institution. The
museum not only told a story about evolution, but
also one about New Zealand.

Thus, while the Maori House was necessary to the
museum’s ethnological role, it was also implicated in
what was perhaps a nationalist discourse to which
the museum was party. This would of course be a
story of unity; not, however, fabricated as was
Darwin’s. It was a unity based not on biological
similarity, but on the prospect of cultural



INTERSTICES 4 The ‘Maori House’ at the Canterbury Museum 8

assimilation. This nationalist discourse had as its
object the determination of the character of
something called New Zealand. This was something
that did not indefinitely consider itself to be
necessarily a part of England’s ‘fastened fleet.’
Mountfort, for instance, allowed in his little tract of
1885, Other Places , that though it should be
postponed as much as possible, there might come the
day when “the exigency of political combinations may
require that New Zealand shall not form part of the
British Empire.”54 New Zealand was something which,
to the minds of nineteenth century Christchurch,
might not have seemed as necessary as it does to us;
in Dunedin there was discussion, after the abolition
of the provincial governments in 1876, of the South
Island separating politically from the North.55

What might a story of New Zealand say? Robin
Craw has shown that in a story told about nature in
New Zealand in the nineteenth century (and in
recent years too) it was said to be unlike nature
elsewhere. And this difference could be used to
establish national identity, in the kiwi, for instance,
and the fern. 56 What might a story of New Zealand
say about the place’s culture? The problem was, as
Mountfort put it “we [Europeans in New Zealand]
cannot boast of a past.”57

This was not a uniquely colonial condition,
however. Following Foucault, Stephen Bann has
suggested that the great welling up of European
interest in history during the nineteenth century was
t h e  r e s u l t  o f  a  s e n s e  o f  l o s s ,  o f  l o s s  o f  t h e  past:
“19th-century man did not simply discover history:
he needed to discover history, or, as it were, to
remake history on his own terms.”58

An apparent lack of history was reason enough,
thought Mountfort, for New Zealand to remain an
extension, an accessory, to Britain. But perhaps some
history - some cultural difference - could be made
with materials at hand. It may have been necessary to
import these from the North Island, to attach to a
European framework, accessorizing it, making it
unique. In this regard the position of the Maori
House at Canterbury could be identified not only
with that of ethnological exhibits in western
museums (which implicates it in the production of an
other) but also with new kinds of historical museums
and collections that appeared in the nineteenth
century, and then with the national architectural
exhibits erected at world expositions during the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While
undoubtedly the foreign architectures shown at the
expositions had the role of producing cultural

stereotypes of ‘otherness,’59 exhibitions of local
architecture - historic English architecture at English
expositions, historic French architecture at French
expositions, and so on - had a more ambivalent role.
Certainly they established the past as another other
which progress had left behind. But at the same time
they had an affirmative and legitimizing effect of
producing national identity, ‘not otherness.’60 I n  h i s
writing about outdoor building museums and period
Americana rooms introduced into American art
collections in the early decades of this century,
Edward N. Kaufman identifies these two effects: on
the one hand the differentiation between the past
and the present; and on the other the celebration of
national traditions that emphasised the idea of a
common American experience. The nineteenth
century World Fairs, says Kaufman:

had, of course, done a great deal to emphasise concepts of
nationhood. But American craft collections had to expound
not only a uniquely American tradition but one that was
quite specifically independent of European values.61

New Zealand, too, was not the same as Europe, and
Maori culture could be deployed as evidence of this.

An important aspect of this was the sheer weight of
evidence, the filling of space with things evoking a
mythic ‘Maoriness’: cloaks, weapons, tools,
ornaments, carvings, clothing, mats. They
supplemented the ‘Maoriness’ of the Maori House.
This fullness is a quality identified by Bann in early
historical collections such as that of Alexandre du
Sommerard (now the Museé de Cluny ): “Broadly
speaking, the strategy of the historically minded
pioneer in the 1820s is to delimit an area designated
as authentic and to people it with objects which will
collectively attest that authenticity”62 (fig 10).

In this alternative reading of the Maori house, as a
space rather than a thing (a space full of things), it
s t o o d  n o t  f o r  a  r a c e  t h a t  w o u l d  s o o n  b e  e x t i n c t .
Rather, it represented another kind of colonial
desire, one for assimilation. Potts had described the
House as “illustrating the old habits, manners, and
customs of so many of our fellow subjects.” In his
report on the Progress of Canterbury Museum for
the eighteen months ending March 31 1875, Haast
wrote

The ethnological objects of New Zealand, both of historic
and prehistoric times have been placed in the Maori House
a n d  i t  o u g h t  t o  b e  o u r  e n d e a v o u r  t o  m a k e  t h e  s a m e  a s
complete as possible, so as to save the records of an
interesting people which doubtless in years to come will



INTERSTICES 4 The ‘Maori House’ at the Canterbury Museum 9

entirely lose their former original customs and habits and
assimilate with the European immigrants and their
descendants.63

By 1906, the Maori House not only contained Maori
artifacts, but also what the museum guidebook
described as ‘pakeha relics’ (relics of non-Maori
New Zealanders), itself an interesting list: a cast of
the Korotangi, an object reputed to be from the
Maori ancestral home of Hawaiki; remains from a
grave, apparently of a European seaman, found at
New Brighton in 1854; a copper plate from the Port
Levy whalers; a flag taken from Pai Marire warriors
in 1867; and another flag, a red ensign, taken by
Maori during the land wars (fig 11).64

There was a certain tension between the role of the
Maori House as a thing, and the Maori House as a
space; between a discourse of separation and death,
and a discourse of integration and dispossession. This
ambivalence was never resolved at the Canterbury
Museum. The house was moved at least twice as the
museum grew and rearranged. In 1881 it was taken
down so that the space between the 1870 and 1876
wings could be enclosed with a roof, to make a
r o o m  f o r  ‘technological science’ (fig 12 ). It was
shifted to the western side of the 1870 wing where it
was rebuilt with dado eliminated, and the wall slabs
directly touching the floor.65 Skylights were installed
(fig 13). Then in 1894 it was taken down again, the
floor replaced (had it been directly touching the
ground?) and turned so that the carved front,
previously and appropriately facing north now faced
south, enabling it more easily to be seen (fig 14).66 I t
was finally dismantled in the 1950s when a large
extension to the museum was commenced, and it was
stored in the museum basement.67

NOTES

1 James Stack, “An account of the Maori House
attached to the Christchurch Museum,” read before
the Philosophical Institute of Canterbury, (August 5
1875). Most subsequent reports of Hau-Te-Ananui-
o-Tangaroa have d r a w n  h e a v i l y  o n  Stack’s paper
which was published in Transactions and Proceedings of
the New Zealand Institute (1875), v. 8, pp. 172-176.
H .  v o n  H a a s t  r e p e a t s  parts o f  i t  verbatim in his
biography of his father. The L i f e  a n d  T i m e s  o f  Sir
Julius von Haast, explorer, geologist, museum builder
(Wellington: H. F. von Haast, 1948), pp. 683-685.
Other texts which have cited Stack are: Guide to the
Collections in the Canterbury Museum (Christchurch:
Canterbury Museum, 1906); W. J. Phillipps,
“Carved Meeting Houses of the Eastern Districts of
the North Island,” R e c o r d s  o f  t h e  Dominion Museum

(1944), v. 1, n. 2, pp. 111-112; and Roger Neich,
Painted Histories (Auckland: Auckland University
Press, 1994), pp. 271-272. Stack’s paper was
reprinted in Te Karanga ( 1 9 8 9 ) ,  v .  5 ,  n .  2 ,  p p .  1 1 -
13.

2 Thomas Potts, letter to William Rolleston,
Superintendent, (June 25 1874), National Archives,
Christchurch, CP 349d.

3 Haast, letter to Secretary for Public Works, (March
31 1874), Canterbury Provincial Government,
National Archives, Christchurch, CP349d.

4 £200 was paid to Henare Potae. Costs of removal
of the house and the carvers to Christchurch were
£91.2.2. The estimate for the cost of erecting the
Maori House was £478.17.0. (Statement of accounts
attached to letter from the Chairman of the
Canterbury College Board to the Provincial
Secretary, (June 16 1875), Estimate of cost of
erection, signed by B. W. Mountfort, architect,
(March 20 1874), National Archives, Christchurch,
CP349d.) The Illustrated New Zealand Herald
suggested the total cost at £1000 (November 1875),
n. 99, p. 6.

5 Stack, “An account of the Maori House,” p. 173.

6 James Buller, letter to Julius von Haast, (June 26
1874), National Archives, Christchurch, CP349d.

7 Margaret Alington, Frederick Thatcher and St Paul’s: An
Ecclesiological Study  (Wellington: Government
Printer, 1965), p. 39.

8 Holy Trinity was built in 1852 and demolished
shortly thereafter. Peter Shaw, New Zealand
Architecture from Polynesian Beginnings to 1990
(Auckland: Hodder and Stoughton, 1991), p .  3 0 ;
Ian Lochhead, “The Early Works of Benjamin
Woolfield Mountfort 1850-1865,” (MA thesis,
University of Auckland, 1975), pp. 44-47.

9 Letters to the Governor of New Zealand concerning
the designs for the new Government House,
Auckland (1856-1857), Colonial Secretary’s
Notebook, National Archives, Wellington IA1
60/1708.

10 The Press  (May 11 1865), p. 3.

11 ‘Committee of taste’ report to Canterbury Provincial
Executive Council, (May 5  1860), National
Archives, Christchurch, CP349a.

12 The Press  (November 22 1865), p. 2.

13 The Press  (May 9 1865), p. 2.



INTERSTICES 4 The ‘Maori House’ at the Canterbury Museum 10

14 Lochhead has noted these parallels with Oxford.
“The Early Works of Benjamin Woolfield
Mountfield,” pp. 84, 91.

15 A collection of building stones was kept there,
however. The Lyttelton Times (February 16 1881), p.
5.

16 Haast, The Life and Times of Sir Julius von Haast p p .
456, 560-563.

17 Haast, The Life and Times of Sir Julius von Haast  p .
599.

18 catalogue, Art Exhibition, 1870 (Christchurch: Art
Exhibition Committee, 1870); The Press (March 14
1870), p. 2.

19 George Rolleston, letter to Haast, (February 1871),
mentions that Thomas Acland had “offered to take
charge of our Dodo’s head for your museum,” and
that “some photographs of views in the interior of
our Museum” were being sent. Haast papers,
Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, MS Papers
37, folder 132.

20 The Lyttelton Times a r t i c l e  o n  t h e  opening of the
museum notes that “We are informed that it is part
only of an extended design, and n o  d o u b t  w h e n
complete will fall into its proper place with effect,”
(October 1 1870), p. 2.

21 Haast, memorandum to Provincial Council (May 30
1874). National Archives, Christchurch, CP658a/21.
The 1876 extension consisted of a reworking of this
design, much reduced and relocated to the eastern
side of the 1870 building. The 1882 portion was a
t i m b e r  v e r s i o n  o f  o n e  o f  t h e  proposed iron and
glass roofs of 1874.

22 Trevor Garnham, Oxford Museum (London: Phaidon,
1992), unpaginated; The Press  ( M a y  9  1 8 6 5 ) ,  p .  2 .
The tower w a s  t o  b e  f i n a l l y  set up as a free-
standing edifice.

23 Garnham, Oxford Museum bibliography.

24 Street cited, Peter Fuller, Theoria: art and the absence
of grace (London: Chatto and Windus, 1988), p. 96.

25 The Press  (May 9 1878), p. 2.

26 Historic Buildings o f  N e w  Zealand: South Island ed.
Frances Porter, (Auckland: Methuen, 1983), p. 87.

27 John Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin (London:
George Allen, 1903-1912), v. 16, p. 221.

28 On the relationship between his pieces in The Press
and Butler’s later writings, see The Works of Samuel

Butler eds. Henry Festing Jones and A T
Bartholomew, (New York: AMS Press, 1968), v.
20, pp. 32-49; and Joseph Jones, The Cradle of
Erewhon (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press,
1959), pp. 98-113. Cellarius’ distaste for machinery
could be compared to Ruskin’s dislike of machine
made ornament.

29 Haast, typescript of address to the Philosophical
Institute of Canterbury, as its first president, (1862),
pp. 23-24. Haast papers, Alexander Turnbull
Library, Wellington, MS37 244.

30 Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man
and Animals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1965). The Haast papers at the Alexander Turnbull
Library, Wellington, include a folder of
correspondence from Darwin. Darwin wrote to
Haast on January 2 1868 thanking him for Stack’s
answers to his queries (apparently sent to various
correspondents in the form of a checklist) regarding
human expression. The answers were few “but
decidedly the best and clearest I have received from
any quarter.” MS37 51.

31 Julius von Haast, report on Progress of Canterbury
Museum for eighteen months ending March 31st
1875, National Archives, Christchurch, CP 349d.

32 Haast, The Life and Times of Sir Julius von Haast p. 8.

33 Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin v .  16, pp. 220-
221.

34 Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin v. 20, p. 39.

35 Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin v. 20, p. 21.

36 Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin v. 20, pp. 31-32.

37 Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin v. 20, p. 41.

38 Ruskin, The Works o f  J o h n  R u s k i n  p .  4 2 ;  Edward
Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage,
1994), pp. 123-127.

39 Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin v. 20, p. 42.

40 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: how anthropology
makes its object ( N e w  Y o r k :  Coulmbia University
Press, 1983), p. 17.

41 Haast, memorandum to Provincial Council (May 30
1874), National Archives, Christchurch CP658a/21.

42 This could not h a p p e n  n o w .  I n  r e c e n t  years the
Canterbury Museum has pondered what it might do
with the carvings that made up the building. One
proposal was to erect it at a marae at the University
of Canterbury. This was opposed by local Ngai



INTERSTICES 4 The ‘Maori House’ at the Canterbury Museum 11

Tahu, who did not want a marae set up where the
appropriate protocols would not be theirs. Personal
communication from Chris Jacomb, Canterbury
Museum archaeologist and ethnological curator;
(May 1995).

43 “The Maori House, Canterbury Museum,” The
Illustrated New Zealand Herald (November, 1875), n.
99, p. 6. This ‘absence’ of Maori from the South
Island should perhaps be considered with Homi
Bhabha’s reading, in the context of colonialism, of
the word ‘territory’ as “a place from which people
are frightened off.” “Sly Civility,” October  (1985), n.
34, p. 78.

44 Ruskin, The Works o f  J o h n  R u s k i n  v. 11, p. 189;
Bastian cited, Johannes Fabian, T i m e  a n d  t h e  W o r k  o f
Anthropology (Chur, Switzerland: Harwood Academic
Publishers, 1991), p. 194.

45 Samuel Locke, telegram to Julius von Haast,
(January 6 1873). National Archives, Christchurch,
CP349d. The Provincial Government had apparently
already approved the expenditure of £100 for “the
Maori house at Poverty Bay.” Haast, note to
Provincial Secretary, (January 7 1873), - on the
back of Locke’s telegram.

46 Thomas Potts, letter t o  t h e  Superintendent (June
1874), National Archives, Christchurch, CP349d.

47 Haast, “Statement re Maori House,” (June 26 1874),
National Archives, Christchurch, CP349d

48 Haast, “Statement re Maori House.”

49 James Stack, letter to Julius von Haast, ( J u n e  2 6
1874), National Archives, Christchurch, CP349d.

50 Haast cited, Haast, The Life and Times of Sir Julius von
Haast  p. 684.

51 Paul Carter, Living in a New Country: history,
travelling and language (London: Faber, 1992), pp.
75-77.

52 Haast, letter to the Provincial Secretary for Public
Works (May 1874), National Archives, Christchurch,
CP349d.

53 Stack, “An account of the Maori House attached to
the Christchurch Museum,” p. 173.

54 B  W  Mountfort, Other Times (Christchurch:
Whitcombe & Tombs, 1885), p. 4. For an account
of the relationships between New Zealand and
Great Britain during the late nineteenth century see
Keith Sinclair, A History of New Zealand (Auckland:
Penguin, 1991), pp. 213-233.

55 Sinclair, A History of New Zealand p. 154.

56 Craw, “Visible Difference: Nationalist Repertoires
and the Semiotics of Place in New Zealand
Science,” Antic (1990), n. 4, pp. 5-7.

57 Mountfort, Other Times p. 3.

58 Bann, “The Sense o f  t h e  Past: Image, Text, and
Object in the Formation of Historical Consciousness
in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” The New Historicism
ed. H  Aram Veeser, (New York &  London:
Routledge, 1989), p. 103.

59 “ I n  s u c h  a n  environment the stereotype acquires
authenticity; it gathers strength for a seemingly
inexhaustible cycle of repetition and regeneration.”
Zeynep Celik &  L e i l a  Kinney, “Ethnography and
Exhibitionism at the Expositions Universelles,”
Assemblage (1990), n. 13, p. 35.

60 O n  p r o g r e s s  a n d  nationalism at the World Fairs,
particularly at the Paris Exposition Universelle of
1900, Michael Wilson, “Consuming History,”
American Journal of Semiotics ( 1 9 9 1 ) ,  v .  8  n .  4 ,  p p .
131-153.

61 E d w a r d  N  Kaufman, “The Architectural Museum
from World’s Fair to Restoration Village,” Assemblage
(1989), n. 9, pp. 33-34.

62 Bann, “The Sense of The Past,” p. 109.

63 Haast, report on the Progress of Canterbury
Museum.

64 Guide to the Collections in the Canterbury Museum p p .
218-219.

65 The Lyttelton Times (February 3 1881), p. 5.

66 This information is contained in notes, apparently
taken from annual reports for the period 1890-
1939, in possession of C  Jacomb, Canterbury
Museum.

67 I would like to acknowledge the Victoria University
of Wellington Internal Grants Committee for its
support of the research presented in this paper.