Earlier this month, I was invited by the Dunedin Public Art Gallery to travel to Dunedin to talk about Archives – Te Wāhi Pounamu, Areta Wilkinson and Mark Adams currently on at the gallery. A large exhibition, the show is made up of examples of Areta Wilkinson and Mark Adams individual practices’ across time. It features bodiesRead more
100 years ago in the early hours of 20 December 1915 the last party of New Zealand men left Anzac Cove, Gallipoli. The campaign was over. For those of us who worked on the exhibition, Gallipoli: The scale of our war, the stories of the Anzacs’ tenuous presence there fromRead more
The movie Star Wars: The Force Awakens opened in New Zealand on 17 December. But did you know the franchise has a connection to the warriors of 19th century Fiji? Fijian weapons had a small role in the imaginings for one of the most successful science fiction films of allRead more
To quote Bing Crosby, ‘every Christmas card I write’, would be enveloped and stamped unless the friend or relation receiving it was literally close. For me and surely millions of others, the stamp itself needed to be a Christmas one. Notice how I use the past tense. In the daysRead more
As I write this blog I have the ‘My Little Pony’ tune playing around in my head – it’s a catchy tune and quite a sweet song but I hope it doesn’t stay there all day – it so easily could! You’ll know what I mean if you were born inRead more
This year’s Te Papa Little Penguin research programme was focussed at Motuara Island in Queen Charlotte Sound, just out of Picton, where there is a population of several hundred little penguins that breed between August and December. We deployed GPS trackers on adult birds throughout their breeding season to find out their main foragingRead more
Do you have that end-of-the-year feeling? Everything compressing and accelerating towards a sense of an ending? I love walking through Te Papa’s art galleries on Level 5, especially at this time of the year. Ngā Toi | Arts Te Papa is an escape from the everyday, from schedules and deadlinesRead more
One of my favourite paintings in Ngā Toi | Arts Te Papa is a small oil by Douglas MacDiarmid – Papa cliff pool with bathers, Taihape. Whenever I see it, I’m struck by its clarity and intensity. Everything contributes to the sense of dream-like wonder: the emerald-green water, the sensuousRead more
Last week I was invited to give a talk at my son’s class at South Wellington Intermediate School (SWIS) about what it is like to be a botanist at Te Papa. To help me prepare, the students wrote down questions they had about botany or being a botanist. Their questionsRead more
The year was 1997 and Te Papa was about to open on the waterfront. Two buildings waited in the wings, Buckle St, the then National Museum and Tory St, the soon to be collection store and science facility. At the time the buildings were in a state of flux. Still clinging toRead more
We are all saddened by the passing of Jonah Lomu (1975-2015). In the last few weeks, there has been a constant flow of tributes that attest to his legacy both on and off the field. On social media some have shared their memories of meeting him while others recall wakingRead more
After an albatross specimen was collected on a Wellington beach and taken to Te Papa, curator Alan Tennyson and his colleagues were astounded to see a shark’s tail protruding from its neck.Read more
This is one of my favourite Brian Brake photographs, and it was one of his as well. You can see it exhibited in Ngā Toi | Arts Te Papa on level 5 of Te Papa at present, and in my book New Zealand Photography Collected. The only time it has previouslyRead more
Today is World AIDS Day. It’s an opportunity for people worldwide to unite in the fight against HIV and AIDs, show their support for people living with HIV, and to commemorate people who have died.Read more
A couple of months ago I received an unlikely phone call from a gentleman asking whether Te Papa was interested in purchasing a laughing owl specimen.Read more
