He aha tēnei? What is this?

Choosing taonga to put on display at the Museum is like choosing an image to illustrate a story in a book. Taonga can help us understand the past – what’s happened, where we’ve come from, and who we are now. One of our jobs at the Museum is to open up those stories and share them with everyone.   

Accompanying most items on display is a little text label that tells you what you’re looking at, but also places the taonga in its historical and cultural context. These labels try to capture the essence of a story and to do it the limit of just a few words.    

Our goal is to have te reo Māori texts alongside English wherever possible. We want our visitors to enjoy rich stories woven between exhibits and displays. Where the labels are bilingual, visitors who can read both English and te reo Māori will notice that the two versions aren’t translations of one another. This is deliberate.

The Museum’s Exhibitions team has two writers: Mason Lawlor, who writes in te reo Māori, and Amy Stewart, who writes in English. Mason and Amy work together with Curators and Interpretive Planners to share the story of an object. Labels need to be accessible, inspiring, and – where appropriate – entertaining for those who read them. After receiving the same direction, Mason and Amy write separately, coming together at the end to compare, contrast, and edit their texts.   

Mason and Amy write with their respective audiences in mind, though these audiences do often overlap – by and large, people who speak te reo Māori as a first language also know English. Mason sees this as a unique opportunity to bring depth to the reo Māori text, which can be a little more poetic, drawing on the richness of waiata, whakataukī, and pūrākau.     

There’s also a practical element at play. When writing for te reo Māori or English, it’s not just another way of talking, it’s also a different way of thinking. The way we view the world informs the way we talk about it. Mason and Amy both write to audiences with different levels of fluency in their languages. But with tight word counts, Mason doesn’t need to explain what mana is, why Te Tiriti o Waitangi matters, or who Tāmati Wāka Nene was. In an English label, Amy needs to provide context and translations of all three for audiences who may be visiting from overseas, for example.

It can also be challenging if a concept in an exhibition doesn’t have a Māori word or phrase at the ready. Words like camera, for example: many speakers would recognise kāmera, which is an English loan word (an English word adopted into te reo by using sounds of the Māori alphabet). In an attempt to steer away from loan words, a new word for camera – pūrere whakaahua – was created, but it’s not yet as well known. So which to use? When we have a whole exhibition about photography, Mason has to make many decisions like this, conducting research and consulting other Māori writers. Both Amy and Mason have to find a balance between making the words engaging and getting the key messages across.    

Whether you’re early on in your te reo Māori journey, or a confident bilingual reader, take a look at the labels and see what you can learn. Regardless of their language, labels are an invitation for readers to engage with the taonga on display. We hope our labels spark curiosity and encourage our visitors to go on to learn more about the stories that make up our history.