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Press, 18 October 1978, Page 1

What should you do if you find a Maori carving, paddle, bowl, digging stick, or other wooden artefact? 1. Do not remove it from its presen* environment. Remove it for even a short time and it is in danger of splitting and disintegrating. 2. Don’t dig about for other pieces This could destroy valuable information on the history of the artefact. Indiscriminate digging is also illegal. 3. Cover the artefact fully and call your local museum which will arrange for competent archaeologists to record and lift the work. 4. Remember, the artefact is the property of the nation and cannot be sold or exported.

Priceless Maori carvings and artefacts are being needlessly destroyed. In most cases it would be better to leave them where they are being found — in New Zealand swamps. Their destruction is the conern of Ken Gorbey, an archaeologist and director of the Waikato Art Museum, who makes a plea for national facilities to help save these precious and fragile treasures. The masterpieces of Maori carving in our museums are distinctly New Zealand; many of the decorative • motifs are used as a means of national identity. They have been in museums for years, and to the casual visitor are an unchanging record of Maori artistic endeavour and skill. But this is not really so, for each year new treasures of Maori art are being found in swamps around the country. Random finds and archaeological excavations also bring to light many items of everyday use, such as agricultural and domestic implements, house timbers, parts of, and in some cases whole, canoes, and fishing gear. One of the great problem areas faced by mu« seums is that they are not really certain how to preserve wooden artefacts recovered from swamps. Where they have been preserved for hundreds of years in the airless environment there, but which

on exposure to the air are immediately liable to crack and warp, or even be totally destoryed. Maoris used the swamps to store and hide wooden objects. The preservative nature of the swamp environment had been tested and was partially understood. .Exposed wood is subject to attack from many forms of bacteria. In the airless environment of swamp, however, this attack is greatly reduced. Decay is therefore slowed significantly, but it still does occur. Cellulose of the wood cell eaten out is replaced

by swamp water, thus preventing the collapse of the cell. On removal from the swamp this water is lost and the cell collapses. Some woods, perhaps inherently sound or which have not been buried too long, survive intact this traumatic drying out process. Others do not, and it is this last group that is of particular concern. Until a few years ago little could be done. Oils were applied as a bulking agent but with varying degrees of success. Now there is some hope — if the work can be fully developed. Under the guidance of a young English archaeologist, Wilfred Shawcross, an excavation in a swamp on the shores of Tauranga Harbour uncovered' hundreds of waferthin wooden combs. Many of them are exquisitely carved; they represent one of the most important Maori art finds of the century. The problem was to preserve the fragile slithers of wood. Wilfred Shawcross brought with him some knowledge of experimental work being done in Scandinavian countries on preserving water-logged wood. Museums there had begun to concentrate on the use of a synthetic wax, polyethylene glycol (P.E.G.). Water in artefacts placed in a solution of P.E.G. would, theoretically at least, be displaced by the wax which when dried would solidify. In this way the cell structures would be bulked out so preventing their collapse. Other restoration methods were tested by Wilfred Shawcross. The experiments were bold but they had to be as the combs were threaened with destruction. Some of them were lost; others rvived in a warped and cracked state . . . but most preserved perfectly. This was the beginning of modern conservation of swampwood artefacts in New Zealand. The concern to preserve, and preserve well, had been established, and technicians at universities and museum workers are now looking at new processes to complement the P.E.G. inpregnation of valuable swamp artefacts. Today, the Waikato Art Museum has 126 wooden artefacts in various holding tanks, which are all in need of urgent conservation. Only two artefacts have been successfully conserved. In 1974, the Waikato Art Museum technician, Dante Bonica, laboriously pulled back into shape two hinaki (eel traps) that had been flattened lying in a Waikato swamp for many years. Once back in shape the kinaki were frozen with a plastic solution. But this is not a good record and relates to one museum only. Other areas have similar problems. A recent Auckland University archaeological excavation produced more than 100 wooden artefacts requiring conservation. Some of the artefacts recovered, perhaps one or two finds a year, are treasures of national importance. Such was the find made this year in the backyard of a home in the middle of Hamilton city. While levelling a drying gully swamp the owner, who had had previous dealings with the Waikato Art Museum, discovered a magnificently carved pataka (store-house) front. Archaeologists lifted the carving, after carefully recording what they were doing. It is now one of the many artefacts awaiting conservation. But where can this work be done properly? New Zealand has no central laboratory to which major problems can be referred. There are the beginnings of a few regional conservation studios, and new freeze drying unit being developed at Auckland University Anthropology Department might eventually handle the pataka carving.

fhe latest marble palace will have wood-panelled offices with 16ft ceilings, rise nine storeys high and have a roof-top restaurant and two private baths in every office. The sawdust Caesars who will inhabit this edifice will be members of the United States Senate. Not all of them, of course. The Senate is composed of 100 people, and if you think a nine story building is adequate to house a hundred people, you have a good deal to learn about senators. Senators require a lot of space in which to wage their ceaseless struggle against bureaucratic waste, bio..led budgets and fiscal irresponsibility. To fight the battle they now have only two other office buildings and the Capitol building itself, in addition to free parking spaces and a couple of Berger chairs in which they can fight profligacy by getting cutrate haircuts. The inadequacy of this space is well illustrated by the trouble they have had fighting bloat in the budget for their third office building. In 1976 the building’s

project cost was $47.9M. It soon became evident, however, that a senate jammed into a mere Capitol and two buildings occupying only two blocks lacked the room for manoeuvre needed to turn back the forces of big spending, for the latest cost estimate has risen to SI22M. Some senators say it will go higher than S2OOM. This would put it in a class with such monuments to the taxpayers’ forbearance as the Copagon of Pennsylvania Avenue, where the F. 8.1. is now based in its struggle against big spending, and the Raynurn Building on the south side of Capitol Hill, where the House of Representatives toils to protect us all from wastrels. Not surprisingly, the senate has been embarrassed by being caught with its new building in a cost overrun of 250 per cent just now when the famous taxpayers’ revolt is thought to be raging. With elections only four months away and everybody furious about the things the Government has been doing with the

money, not many politicians, even of senatorial grandeur prefer to be caught treating themselves to the creature comforts of Croesus. Accordingly, Senator John Chafee, of Rhode Island, led a group last week trying to wash their hands of the money. They proposed to stop the new building and turn it into a park or a garage. Cooler spirits carried the day. One of the glories making the Senate numb to common passion is the fact that only one-third of the members have to stand for re-election every two years. While the onethird who must contend with the enraged taxpayer in November might prefer not to explain what the public is getting or those 16ft ceilings, the other two-thirds can afford to take the longer view. The building wall will rise. Grandly. Members did, however, vote to put a ceiling of SI3SM on its cost. This will give senators who have to campaign a fighting argument: to wit, reelect me and I will hold Government cost overruns to only 280 per cent.

With 50 new officials equipped with 100 private bathrooms, they might just have space to do it. The new rooftop restaurant, which will be reserved for senators only, should give them a strong defensive position from which to counterattack spending. If spending tries to advance from the Capitol building they will be able to bombard it with rolls and celery stalks. The Congressional real estate boom is a reflection of what Senator Daniel P. Moynihan has called the rise of “the Imperial Congress.” It is his thesis that once the Congress had no alternative but to do the same, that there was in fact a hisotrical inevitability in the development. Imperialism at the Capitol is not only a matter of spreading marble, its most important manifestation is the rise of a huge congressional bureaucracy using computers and all the other weaponry that has long been at the President’s disposal. Congress has little ability to do things — witness the public inertia in

the present era of Congressional Government — but immense power to prevent the executive from doing things. It recently discovered, however, that even this negative power required huge staff backup forces to withstand executive onslaught. One result is the spreading blight of Congressional office building, which may engulf every station from Union Station to the R.F.K. Memorial Stadium by the end of the century unless Congress is content to let its staff work in more modest hives as the President’s drones must do. If not, we may eventually see the day when each senator is housed alone with his staff in a S2OOM office building. The 435 members of the House will be quick to follow the example. The late Senator Everett Dirksen, chiding his coh leagues for spending money or. a project in which he had no interest, once summed up the threat succinctly. “A billion here — a billion there,” he said, “and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.”