The foundation of the Pacific Collection was laid in the early days of the Colonial Museum in the nineteenth century, when some important gifts were received. These gifts included a cloak made from wool and fibre derived from an indigenous Cook Island plant. It was presented to the New Zealand government by a Cook Island chief.
The collection was boosted by major gifts in the early years of the twentieth century - by Lord St Oswald’s Collection, for example, which was derived from the voyages of Captain James Cook. It has been growing ever since.
Of special importance are the several groups of items collected during the voyages of Cook, and particularly the magnificent feather cloak presented to Cook by the Hawaiian chief Kalani‘ōpu‘u on 26 January 1779. Other outstanding objects include historic canoes from Samoa and the Cook Islands, and many beautiful examples of mats and tapa (decorated bark cloth).
It is only since 1993 that Te Papa has managed its Pacific treasures as a separate collection. For most of the institution’s history, Pacific items formed a significant part of what was called the Foreign Ethnology Collection.
As currently defined, the collection consists of about 13,000 items and includes both historical and contemporary material from the Pacific Islands, including Papua New Guinea but excluding Indonesia, the Philippines, and Australia. An exception is made for the Torres Strait Islands, part of Australia but culturally more aligned to Papua New Guinea.
There is now an important focus on the art and material culture of Pacific peoples living in New Zealand.
Highlights from the Pacific Collection
The Pacific Collection has been shaped by changing institutional and curatorial priorities, which have in turn been influenced by the history of New Zealand as a Pacific nation, the roles that New Zealanders have played in the Pacific islands, and the migration of Pacific peoples to New Zealand in recent decades.
What began as a comparative collection of ethnographic ‘specimens’ - in other words, objects collected in the scientific study of peoples and cultures - has broadened to include contemporary works by known artists. This expansion of the collection’s scope has tended to blur the boundaries between the Pacific, Māori, History, and Art and Visual Culture Collections.
The nucleus of the collection is a small but important group of items acquired by the Colonial Museum in the nineteenth century. They include objects given by British administrators in the Pacific, such as Sir Arthur Gordon and the Marquess of Normanby, and the gift in 1872 by the Rarotongan chief Te Aia of his splendid cloak.