‘Walking Backwards into the Future’: Music, Museum Culture, and the New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition (1889–1890)

Abstract

In 1889–90 the city of Dunedin staged the New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition, commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the colony instigated by the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi by indigenous Māori and representatives of the British Crown. In acknowledgement of the bicultural perspective encoded in the Treaty, this article takes a tour of the musical artefacts of the exhibition, including both Māori and Western instruments and musical works, to reveal how colonial identity was forged through museum culture: whereas Māori instruments (taonga puoro) were curated by settlers and exhibited as the curiosities of a supposedly dying race, Western musical instruments and practices were beholden both to narratives of progress and to the rhetoric of the imaginary museum of musical works, inherited from Britain. However, while the framing of music at the exhibition often contradicted Māori perspectives, a closer look at the exhibition of music in New Zealand in 1889–90 reveals unexpected resonance between the two Treaty parties. Moreover, by tracing the afterlife of one of the Māori instruments displayed at the exhibition, this article reveals how Māori have more recently helped to reshape museum culture itself.