Jim Barr and Mary Barr asked a good question about digitisation priorities in their blog. There are 3 parts to digitising Te Papa’s Collection. Information about the artwork or object – information about all the art collection was released on Collections Online last year Photography – do we have a digital photograph? CopyrightRead more

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  The other night we hung the two McCahons we bought last year – Scared and Mondrian’s last chrysanthemum. They’ve gone up in Toi Te Papa. In the mid-1970s Colin McCahon did a lot of paintings on a thick high quality paper called Steinbach. Legend has it that McCahon’s dealerRead more

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An infestation of a giant horsetail, Equisetum hyemale, has been found near Levin. It was spotted by eagle-eyed Department of Conservation staff. They gave us a specimen for Te Papa’s herbarium collection of dried plants.   No horsetail species occur naturally in New Zealand, but several have been purposefully orRead more

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One of my previous posts discussed a recent study on New Zealand’s only endemic spider regarded as dangerous to people, the katipo. I thought readers might be interested to learn a little more about what’s behind the bad reputation of katipo and its’ close relatives. As I said then, katipoRead more

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Most hen & chickens ferns in cultivation are the false hen & chickens fern, Asplenium ×lucrosum, rather than Asplenium bulbiferum.  The two are easily distinguished. Asplenium ×lucrosum is a sterile hybrid between Asplenium bulbiferum and Asplenium dimorphum.  The “×” preceding “lucrosum” indicates it is a hybrid. The two parent speciesRead more

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To the left is a war memorial that I discovered in Nelson. It is on the grounds of St Marys Catholic Church in Manuka Street. I don’t know anything about this memorial and it’s not listed on the register of war memorials on NZHistory.net.nz. Any information about it would be gratefully recieved. ItRead more

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In February I was in Collingwood, a small town in Golden Bay at the top of the South Island. Like many towns and cities around New Zealand, Collingwood has war memorials dedicated to local men who died in both world wars.  My grandfather, who was born in Collingwood, was only eightRead more

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Te Papa has a strong collection of Colin McCahon’s early religious works, including three paintings from 1947 that depict events from story of the Passion: Christ taken from the cross, Entombment (after Titian), and King of the Jews. One of the enduring myths surrounding McCahon’s early paintings is that wereRead more

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This amazingly comprehensive compilation of archival material relating to William Colenso’s botanical collections has just been published by the New Zealand Native Orchid Group. The material has been researched by Ian St George and includes unpublished work by the late Bruce Hamlin (former Curator of Botany at the National MuseumRead more

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Chris Horne of the Wellington Botanical Society recently sent me a fern frond they collected on one of their trips. Although the frond is small and lacking the diagnostic reproductive characters, I think it is the introduced holly fern (Cyrtomium falcatum). It looks like the shining spleenwort (Asplenium oblongifolium), but theRead more

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Breaking news from our squid fix-it team – the work is complete and we are on track to reopen the colossal squid exhibition to the public from tomorrow 21 March 2009. Yesterday Robert Clendon our Conservator and Hutch Wilco, one of our exhibition preparators finished the last few tweaks to theRead more

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