This project is intended as a pilot study for a larger investigation of the ways in which local histories are made, collected, presented and received in regional history museums in New Zealand.[1] Concerned with the way that understandings of the ‘past’ are both made and circulated through regional history museums, and with the types of historical narratives that are constructed in this process, the project also reflects its wider context: a growing interest in the study of the presence and meanings of the ‘past’ in New Zealand and elsewhere.

In this paper, we introduce this project and the key issues that it raises in terms of public history and representations of the past. Local history museums produce social histories that are often made or supposed marginal to the broad concerns of ‘New Zealand history’, whatever that might be. Located in regional settings, these museums might be seen to be focused on merely local stories about the past; of significance only to local communities and valued in terms of regional tourism. Yet these museums, through their collections and exhibitions, are telling stories about the past, and provide intriguing evidence of the ways that history-making takes place in New Zealand. Just as Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen were interested in the ‘presence of the past’ in the American context, we are keen to look at how regional history museums in our own place ‘connect people to the past’.[2]

Our project focuses on social history collections and exhibitions in the Waikato/Bay of Plenty region from 1970-2000. It examines three interrelated themes. First, the kinds of social histories produced in these museums, in terms of the development of history collections and displays in New Zealand and internationally. Secondly, how the social histories are collected and interpreted within individual institutions. And finally, what audiences make of the social histories that are produced. These three themes traverse the history of museum history, the material culture of history, and visitor responses to these.

The relationships between local histories and national historical narratives will also be considered. Arguably, national historical narratives are organized around the ‘big’ events in the past such as war, while local or regional histories are more concerned with the ‘distinctive local patterns’ of work, the economy etc. whilst also taking account of the ‘big’ events and their impact on the local setting. We are also interested in the impact of debates about post-colonial histories on the making of history and historical narratives in New Zealand.[3] To use an obvious example, have James Belich’s New Zealand Wars and other key revisionist public interventions into our historical consciousness made an impact in local museums? If, so, what kind of impact can we trace?

In setting up this project we are focusing on history rather than heritage. We see a key distinction between the two. The boom in heritage studies and heritage or tourism sites does, however, provide an interesting context for our study of the making of local histories, broadening the meanings of ‘local’ and ‘history’ in specific places and within the national context.

This project will involve visiting and viewing museum collections and exhibitions and the staff involved in their development; investigating the documentary histories of the museums and their development; and attempting to assess visitors’ responses. We plan to visit the Buried Village Museum, The Te Awamutu Museum, The Tauranga Historic Village Museum and the Rotorua Museum of Art and History. These museums span a range of types of ‘history’, from the more commercial, tourist orientation of the privately-owned Buried Village Museum, to a living history museum, to a small local example at Te Awamutu, to a bigger regional example which is also bound up with organized tourism at Rotorua. We are looking at what kinds of social history collections and displays these museums have, the changes in them over time, what historical meanings they have produced for various audiences, and their relationship to national historical narratives. It has been noted in the American context that the influence of the so-called ‘new’ social history has not spread evenly over the museum landscape; its effects have varied according to the size, purpose, and focus of differing institutions.[4]

In thinking about these issues and designing this project we found that the international literature on local history and museums is not large. Partly this is a reflection of the fact that ‘history in museums in relatively new’.[5] Partly it is a reflection of scholars’ concerns. There is much more written on indigenous concerns and anthropological collections, particularly in terms of colonialism and post-colonialism. We focus on social histories and social history collections rather than ethnographic collections and the many different displays and meanings of Maori culture and history within these regional museums. This does not mean we are talking about Pakeha history only, but the historical experiences of people in these localities and the historical stories and events that are represented. History, in this more specific sense, is under-studied, usually appearing in terms of history curatorship and in examinations of objects and material culture, but not always linked to historical narratives and people’s sense of the past. History as history easily disappears from consideration. Witness the paucity of comment about historical exhibitions at Te Papa, except in terms of what is absent or ‘should’ be there. Yet there has been some comment on Te Papa’s version of history, usually in terms of national identity. The local has been left to local historians and historical societies and has not been the subject of such analysis.

The chosen time period (1970-2000) covers an era of major changes in the development of museums. In this period many regional museums were set up and there were considerable changes in what they collected and, towards the end of the period, in how they displayed local history. These changes were stimulated by three factors: the rise in social history as a field of historical studies; broader changes in museology so that there was much more emphasis on local concerns and visitor perceptions and needs; and a greater interest in New Zealand history, evidenced by more people studying it, reading it and the growth of local historical societies.

The initial inspiration for this project was Chris Healy’s 1997 Australian study From the Ruins of Colonialism, which examines history, social memory and colonialism and argues that the way in which the past is constructed in the public imagination produces something called ‘Australian history’ and raises key questions about what history can mean in a post-colonial society.[6] Healy examines small, regional museums as part of his study. Writing about the museum at Silverton, a mining town in regional New South Wales, Healy says that ‘it has become almost compulsory for history-minded towns to have a museum as evidence of their historic status’.[7] His reading of the Silverton museum and other museums like it suggests that these places are more like ‘memory palaces’ than the newly-fashioned, technologically sophisticated museums the public has come to experience in metropolitan centres. What functions do such museums have in their local settings? Healy makes much of the fact that objects at Silverton were not meaningful or accessible to a visitor because they simply marked the place as ‘historic’ and were meaningful, once, to collectors but had since become ‘anachronistic’.[8] Do local or regional museums only function as places where objects are simply meaningful as/to local memories? On the other hand many regional museums in New Zealand have trained curators and carefully articulated collection policies, making the reading of Silverton regional museum less applicable.

Like Healy, other scholars have written about the way that regional history museums and historical/heritage sites are part of ‘cultural landscapes’ all over the world, and how they provide evidence of history-making in many different settings.[9] Museum scholars have argued that museums have ‘authority’, particularly to represent ‘other’ cultures.[10] Historians Rosenzweig and Thelen argue that museums and historic sites are ‘trusted’ by members of the public to convey stories about the past.[11] Some studies, like those that focus on specific places like Colonial Williamsburg, explore the way that visitors from anywhere in the US can experience a personal relationship with their national history and identity through the museum’s use of a dominant historical narrative of the past.[12] Other studies, such as one study of Israeli pioneering settlement museums, examine more explicitly the way that this ‘collective remembering’ has been utilised within museums for ideological purposes.[13]

These studies all ask questions about the meanings given to history in different societies in recent decades. History and its meanings, perhaps more than ‘heritage’, has become central to public, and often highly political, debates. At the recent Australian Historical Association Dr Ian Hoskins from the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney presented a paper called ‘Museums and the presence of the past in Australia’. He talked about the project at the Powerhouse to investigate people’s interest in the past through their involvement with local historical societies, museums and similar activities in regional New South Wales. These people were surveyed and interviewed about their engagement with and understandings of ‘History’, following the Rosenzweig and Thelen study in the United States.

Hoskins and his researchers have come to several fascinating conclusions about the ‘presence of the past’ in regional communities thus far. One of the most significant conclusions, of relevance to our study, is the way that the participants felt themselves to be the custodians and interpreters of the past in their specific contexts. The researchers found that these people shared a sense of the way that ‘History’ is important to communities, both small and large (both regional and national). They shared an understanding of history’s capacity to command authority, to be important in people’s lives. What they did not share, as Hoskins and his researchers found, was a ‘common language’ about how histories are constructed and produced and therefore, how ‘History’ with a capital H can be contested, rejected, reinterpreted and rewritten. For instance, respondents/participants named some events and not others as ‘political’. ANZAC Day commemorations were not seen as political, while ‘Sorry Day’ to highlight the plight of Australian indigenous peoples taken from their families, or the ‘Stolen Children’, was political.

Hoskins was not trying to argue that postmodern histories had not found their way to regional New South Wales in Australia. He was trying to show that certain meanings of history as a discipline that might adequately represent the past, created through local historical societies and inside museums, were important to the people in communities beyond the academic environment and beyond the environment of the national museum. This shows that histories are made outside these settings and that these histories have something to say about the importance of the past in people’s lives.

We suggest that by looking at the kinds of social history collections and displays found in regional museums in New Zealand we can see evidence of the way the past has been ‘imagined’ and interpreted in local settings. These histories may contest, disturb, reinforce or simply reflect national historical narratives, or do all of these things at different times. Moreover, what are the meanings of NZ history when it is in a ‘local place’ not a ‘national place’?

In terms of the first theme, the history of museum history, we want to test a tentative chronology of the kinds of display and kinds of artifacts we expect to find. If, as has been suggested by Barbara Kirchenblatt Gimblett, museum exhibitions ‘display the artifacts of our disciplines’,[14] then will these museums reflect the major changes in emphasis and inquiry New Zealand history underwent during the 1980s and 1990s? Or will we find, as has been said about Australian museums, that the displays ‘avoid many conflicts and tensions that pervade this history as it is presented in academic studies’[15] and that they are securely rooted in conservative values and avoid such key concerns as multiculturalism, gender equity and reconciliation. How has recent social history scholarship been translated into presentations?

It may be the case, however, that academic studies do not have relevance for the local audiences. As Gaynor Kavanagh has observed in the context of history curatorship, ‘the conventions of and traditions of historical studies, particularly those expressed through narrative history, have their limitations within museum practice.’[16] Curators working with community groups and dealing with displays which touch areas of regional identity or local mythology have to perform a ‘perilous balancing act’ in this regard.[17] In museum exhibitions it is impossible to separate content and form and to avoid other constraints under which they operate.[18]

Many local history displays focus on the colonial history of the area, the founding fathers, the pioneers, using traditional techniques and conventional and expected story lines. Their collections are suggestive; from the ‘rare collection of militaria’ at Te Awamutu Museum, used in an exhibit about the ‘Waikato Land Wars’, to extensive photographic collections. This project will examine histories in part through these collections and their histories, including the histories of their collectors. As recent studies about collecting have argued, collectors often charge themselves with the responsibility to preserve the ‘disappearing’ past, and create meanings about the past in that process. How are the meanings about the past negotiated by local history museums and their collections? What meanings do such collections hold beyond their locality? How have they been used to construct readings of the past for the public?

There are exceptions to this colonial focus of course – the Blue Baths at Rotorua is one and contains displays about people’s experiences of going there and changes in swimwear and expectations over time. How is the twentieth century history displayed in other institutions? How are the locals, who have different stories and experiences, catered for? These contrasting kinds of displays cannot be isolated from the complex social, cultural, and historical contexts in which they are situated. ‘An examination of what they display must also ask why museums tend towards certain representations (and sometimes misrepresentations) of the past’.[19]

In terms of our third theme, what audiences make of the social histories that are produced, we are guided by the observation that ‘to centre the discussion solely on curatorial aptitude and output is to acknowledge only half the process in constructing history in museums’. Studies often assume that the curator or critic has the correct view. As Gaynor Kavanagh has so eloquently put it, ‘In many ways, museums are a meeting ground for official and formal versions of the past called histories, offered through exhibitions, and the individual or collective accounts of reflective personal experience called memories, encountered during the visit or prompted because of it’. [20] Yet this fascination with ‘public memory’ and the ways in which the memory of a society is created, disseminated, institutionalised and understood, has had few insights from public historians and the field of public history.[21]

The investigation of the consumption, as opposed to the production, of museum exhibitions is a common issues for museums now. Many use focus groups, questionnaires and other forms of feedback to identify audiences’ needs and expectations. We aim to trace, in the local case, this apparent shift from a modernist museum focused on education around the object to a post-modern museum focused on audience and experience and entertainment as well as education. The increasing use of personal stories and personal identification with the displays is a very 1990s mode of communication. How has it been expressed in these museums and what has it meant for the audiences?

To return to our initial considerations: the past is very much in the present in the museums that form part of our project. And we aim to consider the collections, displays and audiences of these local history museums as part of the practice, process and presentation of public history. Just how these museums connect people to the past and which or whose pasts are involved is at the heart of our study and we welcome comments and feedback on the issues we’ve raised or your experiences of them.

[1] We are grateful to the University of Waikato’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Research Committee for awarding a grant in support of this project.

[2] Phrase suggested by Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (Columbia University Press, New York, 1998), p. 32.

[3] Kent Ryden, ‘Writing the Midwest: History, Literature and Regional Identity’, The Geographical Review, 89:4 (1999), pp. 511-32.

[4] Warren Leon and Roy Rosenzweig, eds, History Museums in the United States: A Critical Assessment (University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 1989), p.xviii.

[5] David Carment, A Past Displayed: Public History, Public memory and Cultural Resource Management in Australia’s Northern Territory (NTU Press, Darwin, 2001), p.97.

[6] Chris Healy, From the Ruins of Colonialism: History as Social Memory (Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, Cambridge & New York, 1997).

[7] Healy, p. 77.

[8] Healy, p. 78.

[9] See for instance Tamar Katriel, ‘Sites of Memory: Discourse of the Past in Israeli Pioneering Settlement Museums’, The Quarterly Journal Of Speech, 80:1(1994), pp. 1-20.

[10]Henrietta Riegel, ‘Into the heart of irony: ethnographic exhibitions and the politics of difference’, in Sharon Macdonald and Gordon Fyfe, eds, Theorizing Museums: Representing identity and diversity in a changing world (Blackwell/The Sociological Review, Oxford, 1996), p. 87.

[11] Rosenzweig and Thelen, p.105.

[12] Eric Gable & Richard Handler, ‘Public History, Private Memory: Notes from the Ethnography of Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, USA’, Ethnos, 65:2 (2000), pp. 237-52.

[13] Katriel, p. 5.

[14]Barbara Kirchenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums and Heritage (University of Calitfornia Press, Berkley, Los Angeles, London, 1998), p.2.

[15]Carment, p.170

[16] Gaynor Kavanagh, History Curatorship (Leicester University Press, Leicester, 1990), p.62

[17]Carment, p.174.

[18]For a discussion of this in the context of the development of the Dutch Community Gallery at Te Papa, see Bronwyn Labrum, ‘Exhibiting History’, in Professional Historians’ Association of Aotearoa/New Zealand E-Journal, <www.nzhistory.net.nz/phanza/journal - labrum.htm>, 17 October 2001.

[19] Leon and Rosenzweig, p.xix.

[20] Gaynor Kavanagh, ‘Making Histories, Making Memories’, in Gaynor Kavanagh, ed., Making Histories in Museums ((Leicester University Press, London, 1996), p.1.

[21]Carment, p.vii