Spiralling histories: reflections on the 1923 Dominion Museum East Coast Ethnological Expedition and other multimedia experiments

Abstract

In March and April 1923 the Dominion Museum undertook an ethnological expedition to the East Coast region of New Zealand’s North Island, which was initiated and hosted by politician and scholar Apirana Ngata. Along with researchers Johannes Andersen, Elsdon Best and Peter Buck (Te Rangihīroa), the Museum’s acting director, James McDonald, took photographs and made films which recorded the cultural practices and traditions of the Ngāti Porou people. These traces in manuscripts, photographs and movies of the relationships that shaped the expeditions still travel through space and time, spiralling into the future as they allow contemporary and future listeners and viewers to reconnect with the past. Although these people have long since died, they live on in McDonald’s films and photographs, along with the many Māori people from the communities they visited, in documentation of ways of life which provide invaluable resources for cultural heritage and contemporary tribal development today. In this paper, McDonald’s uri ‘descendant’ (his great-granddaughter Anne Salmond) and Billie Lythberg reconstruct the activities of the team on the expedition, drawing on a rich range of archival and other sources, and then reflect on the meaning of these “reflections” drawn with light on wax cylinders, nitrate film and paper, as well as current digital technology. Whether present in these recordings or as the eyes through which we see and the ears through which we hear, these hoa aroha ‘dear friends’—McDonald, Ngata, Buck, Andersen and Best—cannot be disentangled from the archive, the people who hosted them, and the whakaahua ‘images’ they created together.