Reliving the Colonial Past: Histories, Heritage, and the Exhibition Interior in Postwar New Zealand

Abstract

ABSTRACTWhen New Zealand's colonial history began to be displayed regularly in museum exhibitions in postwar New Zealand, it usually took the form of an interior. Most often focusing on either period rooms or shop window displays in “colonial streets,” these representations lent themselves to particular understandings of New Zealand's past that focused on settler commerce as much as culture and the domestic lives of elite women and families. This article examines the reasons for the mounting of period rooms and adjacent interiors and their key characteristics, through a case study of the Dominion Museum, from the 1940s to the 1980s. The contemporary understanding of “history” and “heritage” focused largely on nineteenth-century Pakeha (European) settlement. These interior spaces narrated a domestic story of pioneering triumph over adversity, with strong links to a wider British world. The replication of interiors also provided more space for women in a predominantly male history, associated as they were with household objects and consumption. The notion of immersing oneself in a past that was clearly marked off from the modern present through looking into an interior setting proved immensely popular and led to further collecting and display of domestic forms of heritage and “history.” They are valuable records of popular postwar conceptions of colonial history in a former settler colony and demonstrate the importance of the interior as a key mode of representation.