TURNBULL LIBRARY

Evening Post, Volume CXXVIII, Issue 135, 5 December 1939, Page 15

TURNBULL LIBRARY

CENTENNIAL EXHIBITS

Everybody knows that .at the beginning of next' year* we will be celebrating the end of a century of British colonisation, but everybody also knows that 1840 did not see the beginning oi'European contact with this country. Explorers, whalers, missionaries, and traders had made the islands known to the rest of the world long before1 that, and, moreover, the British settlement was not actually the first "colonisation." That was achieved by the Polynesians, who migrated from some of the islands to the northward centuries before any European had even seen the Pacific. In arranging the exhibitions of historical material which will be carried on thi*ough the Centennial celebration's, the Turnbttll Library therefore has begun with one which gives a glimpse of things before 1840, and from the treasures have been selected books, pictures, and maps showing the work of the early navigators —Tasman, Cook, Dumont d'Urville, etc.—and something of the life of the Maori people whom they found in possession of ithe pountry. * In the section devoted to the navigators the* oldest item on view is actually pre-Tasman, It is a stout little vellum-bound atlas, published in 1631, showing the Pacific Ocean with a great imaginary continent stretchhig from somewhere about New Guinea almost right along to South America. This is the "continent" that Cook was sent* to look for, and that Tasman imagined New Zealand to be part of. Other old items include, of course, Tasman and Cook records, as well as those of other i early explorers. ! Students of Maori life have often lamented that much pertaining to the pre-pakeha life of the Maori has been lost, and perhaps this is so. A casual glance at the works featured in the exhibition, however, brings home to one that the admirers of the Maori have been numerous and enthusiastic ;if not always fortunate in their treatment of the subject. The artists accompanying the early navigators varied in competence, Hodges, associated with Cook on the first voyage, being fairly successful by comparison with Tasman's impressions. Niceties of expression were perhaps not so obvious to the French navigator Dumont d'Urville, but the painting exhibiting some Natives from nea** Cape Palliser is at least colourful; Amongst the numerous interesting items is a facsimile of the Maori declaration of independence signed in 1835, when at the same time a national flag was adopted. This move, sponsored by Busby, was designed partly to counter such claims as those of the 1 •Baron de Thierry.