‘Shakey Notions’: Settlement History on Display

Abstract

This thesis offers a critical examination of strategies employed by museums and heritage sites in representing settler-colonial history. Its concerns are focused through the lens of the northernmost region in Aotearoa New Zealand, Te Tai Tokerau, an area selected for its strong significance in this history. While several chapters deal with museums and heritage sites located within the region— including Waitangi National Trust, Ruapekapeka pa, the Kauri Museum at Matakohe, Te Rerenga Wairua, and the Kerikeri basin—the thesis interprets this designation in a broader way, too. Acknowledging that the region‟s history is not confined within its own geographical boundaries, it also discusses displays which have been staged in Canberra and in Salem, Massachusetts, and which relate to Te Tai Tokerau through the movement of materials, figures and stories. The thesis draws on a range of sources and theoretical models in order to devise approaches to loosely-framed phases of settlement. In its course, it deals with international trade carried out on distinct-but-related early cross-cultural frontiers; considers the concerted transformation of new world environments in terms of historical re-enactment; examines modes of display at the so-called birthplace of the nation in relation to „privileged settings‟, „hard facts‟ and historic turning points; explores counter-conventional ways of making sense of frontier conflict; and reflects on how notions of progress may be applied to emergent possibilities for tribal museums. In each of these cases, the thesis is concerned to examine the impact of postcolonial critiques on museum story-telling, and to examine the role that resurgent indigenous populations have played in shaping or re-shaping certain kinds of representations. The thesis pays particular attention to strains evident in contemporary modes of display, interpreting these as markers of the extent to which representations of settlement continue to be unsettled by the „shakey notions‟ (Maning 1967, 44) upon which they are necessarily founded. While its interests are primarily analytical, the thesis does offer a number of „experimental‟ possibilities for alternative displays—possibilities which may well, because of their own „shakey‟ nature, prove impossible in the context of a settler society.