The open lattice screens, tapa panels and floor graphics immediately connect visitors with the Pacific cultures whose story this exhibition tells. Artefacts ranging from rare carved representations of deities and intricately fashioned body armour to jewellery and similar ancient pottery found in widely separated island groups delight the eye and engage the imagination.
Centrepiece canoes drawn from Auckland Museum’s world-renown Pacific collection impress with their skilled design and construction, lending weight to the depiction of the world’s first ocean-going culture.
Among the artefact treasures on display are a Maori patu collected by Captain Cook, an extremely rare Tongan goddess figure handed to early Christian missionaries, exquisite traditional Pacific jewellery bearing witness to the special role of sea life in Pacific cultures and a bowl from Rurutu in the Austral islands, carved from the jaw of a whale.
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Ocean A dark blue environment alive with projected ocean swells greets visitors as they enter the exhibition, inviting the mind to contemplate the vast sweep of the Pacific and signalling the entry into a many stranded story of exploration and settlement.
To many people the ocean, which embraces a third of the planet, appears empty, featureless and threatening, but early Pacific peoples thought of it in entirely different terms —as a place of nurture. As ‘Home’.
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Island People The island’s of the Pacific were the last habitable parts of the globe to be discovered and settled. Today’s diverse Pacific cultures arose from shared ancestors. Their stories are also diverse, but speak of origins in the West.
Entering this section, visitors meet the imposing 2.2m-high Kave, a goddess figure from Nukuoro, a Polynesian outlier in the eastern Caroline Islands. Kave, one of the museum’s treasures, has been in the museum collection since 1878.
An inter-island outrigger canoe from Tikopia, a small island in the Solomon Islands, rests in the centre of the circular space. Carved ancestor figures from other Pacific cultures line one curving wall and against the other side are photographs of 16 different island communities. Audio-visuals present a range of Aucklanders with Pacific Island backgrounds talking about their understanding of their ancestors and their origins.
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Search for Origins Ever since European explorers first encountered Pacific peoples there has been speculation about who their ancestors were and where they came from.
Archaeology, ethnology, traditional knowledge and comparative linguistics, along with computer modelling of voyaging possibilities and comparative DNA of humans, plants and animals, have helped researchers piece together the probable answer to this puzzle. It is now believed that there was a common ancestor — the Austronesian societies living throughout southern China and Southeast Asia some 5000-6000 years ago (before the rise of modern Chinese civilisation).
Visitors gain an understanding of Pacific exploration through a large map of migration paths and settlement dates. A huge panel of tapa cloths and a language tree show cultural similarities and differences, while objects from Taiwan, including paddles, pots, an ancestor goddess figure and a shaman’s box, make a connection with distant western origins. Displays of ancient Lapita pottery and modern Pacific pottery also suggest the Pacific-wide spread of a common culture.
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Navigation Unaided by maps or instruments, Pacific navigators relied on their immense knowledge of stars, sea conditions, wind and weather patterns and the many natural indicators of the whereabouts of distant land. Such skills earned these navigators great respect.
Visitors standing beneath a dome of the night sky hear a spoken explanation of the many ways in which ancient voyagers were able to accurately find their way across the vast Pacific and unerringly retrace their journey home to bring news of new discoveries.
A computer-controlled voyaging strategy game allows visitors to test different approaches to exploring the Pacific.
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Vaka In order to set out across the Pacific Ocean, entirely new tools were needed. The result was the vaka, the world’s first blue-water technology. The hulls, sails and outriggers of these vessels developed by the world’s first maritime culture demonstrate an extraordinary achievement in design, construction and handling.
A double-hulled canoe from the southern Cook Islands introduces visitors to some of the design principles behind the voyaging canoes. Though this canoe was used as a lighter to island trading ships moored outside the island reefs rather than for ocean travel, the nearby full-size cross-section of a large vaka gives visitors a sense of the scale of the ancestral canoes.
The vaka’s dimensions are based on an actual vessel seen in Tahiti by James Cook, which measured 32 metres in length — the size of Cook’s Endeavour. Though most likely a war canoe, carrying 50 or more warriors, the original is thought to have been similar to the voyaging canoes that sailed the Pacific 500 years before Cook.
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Landfall As the islands of the Pacific became populated diverse cultures arose in response to the very different environments — ranging from volcanic islands to coral atolls — that they found themselves in. Gradually, as the possibility of finding uninhabited islands diminished, canoe technology was adapted to new purposes, including trade, travel and warfare within their own island groups.
Here visitors encounter one of the canoe developments — a bonito-fishing canoe from the Solomon Islands that has been in the care of the Auckland Museum for more than 90 years.
Objects in this part of the exhibition, including a range of adzes and ornaments along with Kiribati body armour, suggest ways in which the new lands encouraged the development of cultural diversity.
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Two Worlds Europeans encountering Pacific cultures for the first time were astonished at the sophistication of the ocean-going technology they saw and tried to learn something of their navigation techniques. The Islanders, for their part, often crewed in Western vessels and leaders in Tahiti, Hawaii and elsewhere came to own considerable fleets of them.
One result of cultural contact was the abandonment by Pacific communities of their traditional vessels, sailing routes and navigation skills.
Visitors can examine a wall of canoe models, some representing types of craft no longer built, along with original watercolours capturing the impressions of early Europeans. Engravings from the reports of these early explorers can also be seen, along with period maps which illustrate the increasing European understanding of the Pacific.
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Renaissance Thought by the 1970s to have been completely lost, the ancient Pacific navigation skills were recorded by New Zealand sailor and academic David Lewis, who found them being used by a few old navigators in Micronesia.
In Hawaii, Ben Finney spearheaded the interest in replica voyaging with the Polynesian Voyaging Society’s double-hulled vessel Hokule’a, which in 1975 made a groundbreaking voyage from Hawai’I to Tahiti. Since then, Hokule’a has sailed to most parts of Polynesia, including New Zealand and Easter Island.
Today these traditions are being embraced as part of a wider renaissance of Pacific culture.
This section features a single-person vaka ama — a modern racing canoe — which was specially commissioned for the exhibition, along with recorded interviews with some of the people involved and original unpublished photographs.
