‘From Niu Tireni to Northampton: Mapping New Zealand Wars materials in UK military museum collections’, Dr Rowan Light (University of Auckland & Auckland War Memorial Museum, New Zealand).

The ‘New Zealand Wars’ were a series of conflicts fought by the British Army, colonial forces, and Māori allies, against Māori tribes across the North Island of Aotearoa New Zealand from 1843 to 1881. The circulation of material culture between Britain and NZ was a crucial part of this experience, whether part of the materials brought by the 14 British Army Regiments that occupied NZ up to 1870, or through the looting and trading of taonga (ancestral treasures), as souvenirs, trophies, curios, and other artefacts from New Zealand Wars sites. These collections – which included items taken out of scientific or ethnographic interest, or as mementos to remember fallen comrades or promote the prestige of the Regiment – travelled back with soldiers and were eventually donated to regimental museums. 

Despite its significant volume, the material legacy of the New Zealand Wars in British and Irish museum collections has not been assessed. New international research around military collecting since 2021 has offered new interrogations of colonial collecting relating to British Army campaigns in Africa and Asia; yet Oceania has been omitted, leaving a major gap in public and scholarly understandings of these military collections and the legacy of colonial conflict today. 

This presentation explores what the mapping of New Zealand Wars collections in UK military museums might look like, the historical and theoretical knowledge required, and the methodologies necessary to analyse these materials and understand their trajectories and representations as military collections. This work brings together museum and historical expertise and lays the foundation for an extensive cataloguing project that would map the extent of these collections, their meanings as military objects, and their connections to New Zealand communities, especially tangata whenua (Māori). 

Dr Rowan Light is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Auckland and curator for the New Zealand Wars at Auckland War Memorial Museum which holds the largest collection of materials relating to colonial conflict in Aotearoa. Light has published on this collection and its exhibition at Auckland Museum in the New Zealand Journal of History and a short text Atarau: Stories of the New Zealand Wars.

In collaboration with the Manchester Centre for Public History and the Histories of Race, Gender, Sexuality and Identity research group.