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Otago Daily Times, Issue 23671, 1 December 1938, Page 13

In keeping with the general plan of sorting the displays and leaving only the significant exhibits, arranged as artistically as possible in the existing cases, the Moriori collection at the Canterbury Museum has just been reorganised by Mr R. S. Duff, the museum's ethnologist. Unfortunately, only two cases are available in the Maori house for displaying this collection, which is considered to be the finest in New Zealand. The exhibits are so laid out that the unmistakable similarity between the articles of Maori and Moriori material culture is clearly shown. This is notably thp case when the curved whale-ivory cloak pins are compared, and also the grooved stone sinkers, the one-piece whalebone fish hooks, the bird spearhead of barbed bone, and bone flutes carved with an identical criss-cross decoration, one of which was found in the Chatham Islands and the other at Charteris Bay. The two Native races that have peopled New Zealand are very similar in other respects; alone in the Pacific they share the use of the short stone club. The only major respect in which they differ is that the art of wood carving never developed in the Chatham Islands to the extent that it did on the mainland.