Drawcard for generations

Press, 28 January 1988, Page 13

Drawcard for generations

More than 40 years ago when I was a child living with my parents in a country district 75 kilometres north of Dunedin, the highlight of our infrequent trips to town was a visit to the Otago Museum. One of my favourite exhibits was a rhinoceros just inside the entrance doorway. The Canterbury Museum has also had a rhinoceros on display for many years, but it has been overshadowed, both in size and in popularity, by an Indian elephant. For several generations, parents have been bringing their children to see the elephant that they admired wih awe in their own childhood. The history of this beast is closely bound with the history of the Canterbury Museum itself. The skin was obtained in 1872, just two years after the first part of the museum building was opened. It was prepared and mounted by Andreas Reischek, an Austrian taxidermist, who is best known for his book, “Yesterdays in Maoriland,” and who achieved notoriety for having secretly taken the “mummified” remains of two North Island Maori cave burials back to Vienna. The “Lyttelton Times” of the day described how a framework of iron and wood was built in the museum, and the shape of the

elephant’s body was modelled over it in clay. The wet skin, which weighed upwards of 1200 pounds (545 kilograms) was fitted over this artificial carcase with the aid of a series of pulleys. Missing or damaged portions were restored “in such a manner as to defy detection.” Like so many things dating from the past, the museum elephant has acquired several versions of its own “traditional history.” The one I like best is that it was a zoo elephant in Paris at the time of the Franco-Prussian war in 1870. Because of the war, food was in very short supply, so the people ate the elephant and had the foresight to save the skin for later sale to the highest bidder — which happened to be the Canterbury Museum on the - opposite side of the world. At the other end of the scale is the story that the elephant died in Christchurch in the 1930 s as a result of eating a box of matches. Our records make it clear, however, that the skin was obtained from Europe in 1872. The hall in which the elephant has been exhibited for so many decades is one of those that has to be strengthened to bring it up to modern earthquake resistance standards. All the exhibits in the hall have.to be removed to allow contractors to erect reinforced &

concrete walls against the old stone masonry and to pour concrete floors in place of the wooden ones. When we came to move the elephant, however, we struck problems. Massive iron bars which form the framework of the legs, project down through the feet into a wooden base that once had wheels on it. This makes the over-all height of the elephant too great to get it through existing doorways. We would have to either increase the height of the doorways or cut the iron bars. It would be necessary to turn the elephant on its side to cut the bars, and this would require the use of a crane, which we could not get inside the museum, or heavy block-and-tackle from the overhead beams which would put. undue strain on the aged timbers. The cost and distruption of cutting concrete and stone doorways brought into question the value of the elephant from an historic, a display and a scientific viewpoint. A hundred years ago, the only way that many Cantabrians could see an elephant was at the museum. Today, however, more people travel and have' the opportunity of seeing live elephants. Everyone, too, has plenty

of opportunities to see extremely good wildlife prorammes on television, and they can see and learn more about elephants this way than they ever could from a museum display. While our elephant might have been “executed with wondrous fidelity” last century, the effects of time, and more stringent requirements for modern museum displays, have made it distinctly sub-standard today. Considerable portions of it are actually not elephant, but moulded plaster-of-paris. The skin has shrunk, hardened and cracked, producing a misshapen appearance. We are planning an African waterhold diorama for the revamped animal hall, but this is an Indian elephant, and the space it would occupy elsewhere could be used to better advantage to display some other aspects of our natural heritage. In similar circumstances, Auckland Museum recently decided it would have to dispose of its elephant. If we do the same, we are bound to disappoint many people to whom it is an old friend. If we keep it, we are faced not only with a storage problem, but with a very expensive and time-consuming task to bring it up to an acceptable display standard.

By

MICHAEL M. TROTTER