Dialogue: If we forget our history, we have nothing to define us

RODNEY WILSON* says that as we face the challenges of the future, our experiences and our past anchor and define us.

Ka haere whakamua, ka titiro whakamuri. We walk into the future facing the past.

It is almost as if that Maori truism was coined as a raison d'etre for museums, a principle upon which the entire business of collecting historical, cultural and scientific stuff, exhibiting it and interpreting it is based.

It is a powerful concept. Our identity is formed by our past; without an identity we are adrift, rudderless, directionless. Our identity defines our goals; our goals take us forward.

The Herald is sponsoring a timely debate on the values that underpin us as a people - values that are sometimes articulated but often not, values that we intuitively understand but talk about only infrequently because they are so wrapped up in our self-identity.

Can you imagine yourself without a past? Even the most minimal of us, the light travellers, will acknowledge that we hold objects, stories, experiences from family, school, community - our past, deep and recent - which anchor and define us.

For many, the family heirlooms, the photograph album, the flotsam and jetsam of our personal histories are precious. We couldn't conceive of discarding them, assigning them to the next municipal rubbish collection. Others of us are determined collectors of history or researchers of genealogy.

We have an active interest in securing those things of the past that act as touchstones along the way of our development. We chart the webs of family lineage and in so doing uncover the twists and turns of fate and fortune that have shaped our families and ourselves.

Can we imagine a society in which that didn't happen, a society with no yesterday, a people who stood historyless, soulless, storyless, virginal on this Earth?

What notions could we have of ourselves, what aspirations would we have, how could we form directions or even conceive of growth and development?

Museums are to our community what the attic, the china cabinet, the sporting trophies, the family Bible, the photo-album, grandma's lacework and grandpa's fob watch are to our families.

They are the archive and resource in which all our interrelationships can be discovered. They are a huge part of our personal, and an immense part of our collective community, histories.

They contribute more than any other single thing to our understanding of who we are: we the individual, we the family member, we the civic citizen, we as New Zealanders, we as products of long Pacific, European and Asian histories which converge in New Zealand; we as part of the extraordinary story of homo sapiens' ascendancy from the primates; we as a species which now threatens the very future of our planet.

Can we conceive a Greek history, a French history, a British history without museums protecting the treasures of those nations pasts? Can we imagine China without its palaces, temples, museums and the collections they contain? Can we imagine our modern New Zealand without the collections of taonga from Maori, Pacific, European and Asian New Zealand histories? I think not.

When the refurbishment of Auckland War Memorial Museum was started in late 1994, we asked ourselves some fundamental questions about why we show our collections, for whom and to what purpose. We asked ourselves what we wanted to say, and why. What were the messages that we New Zealanders - and Aucklanders, in particular - needed to hear? What would we tell visitors from abroad about ourselves? What were the values we would espouse in telling these stories? Where would all this take us?

As the nation's most visited war memorial, and with a solemn responsibility to honour the sacrifice of those countrymen who gave their lives in the name of the values and ambitions that the museum houses and protects, we decided we wanted to say something about the effect of war on us.

We weren't too interested in the big strategic stories. Books can do that. But we were interested in the ordinary soldier's story, and the story of his family back home. We wanted to talk about the unheroic hero - the ordinary bloke - his courage, but also his fear; his conviction, but also his doubt.

We ended up producing an essay about the emergence of a sense of nationhood and identity. The journey from red-jacketed soldiers of a faraway empire squaring off against our nation's first people, to the mighty contributions of a tiny country in the world's efforts at maintaining peace and stability; the journey from colonialism to nationhood and a sense of place in the world.

When we came to the natural history galleries, we decided to talk about our origins in deep geological time, the biodiversity of our islands, the fragility of our environment and its vulnerability to people and imported plants and animals.

In so doing we described our whenua, a place indelibly etched into the identity of all New Zealanders. This is our turangawaewae - sometimes subtly different, sometimes profoundly different from any other.

These are our high-country tussock vistas, complete with the creatures that inhabit them. These are our rocky foreshores, tidal pools, mangroves, sandy beaches, beech forests and wetlands, limestone caves and kauri forests.

And so to the new ground-floor galleries. Here are the stories, the parallels and the divergences of the microcultures of Oceania - diverse island communities spread throughout Micronesia, Melanesia and Polynesia, a collective culture of people whose lives are at one with the sea and who were the greatest navigators of all time.

Here, too, is the story of New Zealand Maori; a history unique to this place. A story of arrival from the Pacific, of adaptation to a new topography, new climate and new scale of place, of expansion and development and the flowering of a remarkable artistic legacy.

Here are our nation's great masterpieces - triumphs of craftsmanship, the waka Te Toki a Tapiri, the wharetupuna Hotunui, the miraculous Ngati Pikiao pataka Puawai o Te Arawa, the great gateways Tiki and Top Hat, the mysterious (so-called) Kaitaia Lintel and the burial chests which exude such frightening power.

Nowhere else is the material culture of all Maori - and the values and beliefs from which it arises - so powerfully portrayed and readily accessible.

Finally, the arrival of other New Zealanders. City and Wild Child galleries chart our passage from colony to today. The bike shed, the murder house, dad's garage and workshop with the Morrie Minor, television news in the 1960s, the Chinese, the arrival of the Dutch and so on - so familiar, so saturated with our values and aspirations. And asking questions, challenging our futures as well.

Would we discard these histories and the values embedded in them?

Would we consign them to the municipal rubbish collection along with grandma's doilies and the shoebox of photos of the family bach and endless summers?

Would we deny museums as treasure boxes and custodians of our history and the values and beliefs implicit in them? I think not.

* Dr Rodney Wilson is director of the Auckland Museum.

Herald Online feature: Common core values

We invite to you to contribute to the debate on core values. E-mail dialogue@herald.co.nz.