The We Are Not Your Dusky Maidens! project began with Flora: Celebrating Our Botanical World, a trans-curatorial publication exploring Te Papa’s botanical collections. Published in 2023, the book drew connections between plants, people, and place, led through the collaborative work of Te Papa editors and curators Rebecca Rice (Art), Claire Regnault (History), Carlos Lehnebach (Botany), Isaac Te Awa (Mātauranga Māori), and then Curator Pacific Cultures Dr. Rachel Yates-Pahulu.
At the time this project began, I was Curator Pacific Cultures, immersed in the museum’s collections. When filming for We Are Not Your Dusky Maidens! began later that year, it was intended to be a digital element of an extensive exhibition inspired by the book. While that next step never materialised, those ideas and conversations germinated into a new digital project, carrying forward stories that might otherwise have remained unseen.
This blog reflects on that journey, how questions of representation, memory, and the so-called ‘dusky maiden’ intertwine with flora and with museum collections, and how Pacific women continue to push those conversations into new terrain.
They introduced me to the concept of plant blindness, the tendency that I, along with millions of others, had to overlook the plants around us, to forget that they form the living backdrop to almost everything we see, touch, eat, and quite literally breathe. It made sense, and I joined the project with a desire to learn more.
Across our research, one theme kept surfacing. The way women are personified as flowers, whether named, adorned, or offered as symbols of beauty and love. In many societies, including the Pacific, flowers and women are often described as delicate, ornamental, and even consumable.
Thinking through a Pacific lens, this entanglement was clearest in the figure of the dusky maiden, a trope born of colonial imagination and epitomised by the Pacific woman.
The dusky maiden
The imagery fused women with tropical flora, fixing both within fantasies of paradise. Within Te Papa’s collections, these depictions appear across travel posters, black-velvet paintings, postcards, films, keepsakes purchased by travellers, and in hundreds of photographs. Together, they show how the dusky maiden became a symbol that both romanticised and objectified.
Purchased 2001. Te Papa (GH009292)
An urgent conversation
During the exhibition development phase, I approached the topic with hesitation. Long examined, critiqued, and reimagined within Pacific discourse, writers and artists have unpacked her presence. In conversations with my peers and colleagues, there was also a sense that perhaps this ground had been covered, that the dusky maiden had already been deconstructed, discussed, and, in some ways, exhausted.
Did we really need to return to her again?
That hesitation lingered until I began working through a new acquisition, a vast collection of photographs from across Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa, thousands of images spanning decades.
The volume alone was overwhelming. As was the presence of women, mostly unnamed, posed with a flower behind the ear, smiling softly into the camera. The repetition revealed not nostalgia, but endurance. The dusky maiden wasn’t just a relic of the past; she was still quietly shaping how Pacific women are seen and how we see ourselves.
It was confronting, even painful. I’ve long respected photography’s ability to capture custom, dress, and ceremony, offering glimpses into moments of our collective past. Many of the images we reviewed hold immense cultural value and will continue to do so. But engaging with them also required emotional labour.
One image of a young Kiribati woman, posed at the beach, stayed with me. I suspect she was uncomfortable, though I can’t know for sure. What I do know is that seeing her image enter the archive left me uneasy – and I questioned whether it should. These weren’t decisions made lightly; the curatorial conversations were long, sometimes emotional, and not without tears.
Through a Pacific lens, flora in adornment carries deep knowledge; it can hint to its medicinal, ceremonial, and ancestral uses. Yet within the dusky maiden frame, we lose much of that complexity. Working with those photographs reminded me that this conversation is not over. The stereotype continues to circulate in ways that demand our attention.
Speaking back
We Are Not Your Dusky Maidens! was conceived as a response, an act of speaking back. We invited eight Pacific women to engage with taonga in Te Papa’s collections and to reflect on their relationships with flowers beyond the stereotype. The resulting multivocal, cross-generational film series privileges Pacific women’s voices, each grounded in heritage, knowledge, and identity.
Their perspectives offer a powerful counterpoint to the colonial gaze. Some reject the dusky maiden entirely, refusing her passivity and the limitations imposed upon her. Others choose to complicate her image, reclaiming the cultural strength that persists within it. All, in their own ways, reveal how flora connects them to community, spirituality, and lineage, connections that have always existed beyond the colonial frame.
Through these conversations, we sought to give voice to the anonymous women who appear, nameless, throughout our collections. These are not just women in pictures, nor flowers arranged for display. They are storytellers and knowledge-holders, their voices resonating across time.
Acknowledgements
The transition of this project from a closed exhibition space to an online platform brings with it a particular kind of vulnerability, one that comes from being visible in the digital world. I want to acknowledge the eight women who agreed to take part in this project. Their willingness to speak, to be seen, and to share their stories on film carries immense generosity. Each voice adds depth to how we understand the relationship between flora, identity, and the ongoing legacies of representation.
On that, I also want to acknowledge the hands that continued to shape this work at Te Papa amidst a lot of change. My gratitude to Prue Donald, Vioula Said, Catherine Halbleib, Adrian Kingston, Jane Harris, and Emelihter Kihleng, whose care, advocacy, and persistence brought this work to life. Your commitment ensures that we keep these conversations growing, across the museum, across disciplines and across the Pacific region.
References
[1] See Jolly, M. (1997). From Point Venus to Bali Ha‘i: Eroticism and Exoticism in Representations of the Pacific. In Sites of Desire, Economics of Pleasure: Sexualities in Asia and the Pacific, edited by Lenore Manderson and Margaret Jolly, 99–122. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
[2] See Tamaira, A. M. (2010). From full dusk to full tusk: reimagining the “Dusky Maiden” through the visual arts. The Contemporary Pacific, 1-35
Watch We Are Not Your Dusky Maidens!
Watch the five interviews with Pacific women on the trope of the sensual ‘dusky maiden’ and the significance of flower culture in the Pacific Islands. Then read about how the project came about, and responses to the videos from four Pacific women in the arts.
We Are Not Your Dusky Maidens! on Te Papa’s website.
Dr. Rachel Yates-Pahulu
Dr. Rachel Yates-Pahulu (Vaisala, Savaii) is Pou Hītori Moananui-a-Kiwa Senior Pacific Historian at the Ministry of Culture and Heritage, a role that ensures the histories of Pacific peoples in Aotearoa New Zealand are documented and preserved for future generations. Previously, she was Pacific Cultures and Histories Curator, specialising in projects with Pacific communities within New Zealand and the wider Pacific region, which included co-collecting climate change stories in Tokelau, a local community tapa cloth exhibition, and Making Histories: Communities and Covid-19. Her PhD in Pacific Studies at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington is a qualitative project that explored gendered skilled migration in the 21st century and the experiences of Pasifika women teaching English in South Korea.
