By MICHELE HEWITSON
The items on the lists Kirsty Norman made as a child, of treasured things to put in her suitcase, have long been forgotten. They probably included a favourite stuffed toy, something nice to eat, perhaps a jigsaw puzzle.
"Everybody says, 'you must have liked jigsaw puzzles'. I did actually," says Norman, standing in front of a glass case of painstakingly restored Turkish ceramics - jigsaws of a sort.
Norman, the conservator for The Art of Islam: Treasures from Kuwait exhibition at the Auckland Museum, has been talking about lists. Conservators (her full title is archaeological conservator) are big on small details.
Those early lists, drawn up when she was growing up in Hong Kong where her father was a civil servant, set out what she would pack in the event of being removed to an internment camp. Her father and her grandparents had been taken prisoner by the Japanese in Hong Kong during World War II.
"I had to be prepared."
But the lists she had forgotten.
This rent in the fabric of childhood memory was repaired by her mother after Norman was released from an internment camp in Southern Kuwait in 1990. She and other British, American and French nationals had been taken by the invading Iraqi Army to be used as human shields.
In the days after the invasion began, she sat in a friend's apartment and watched the tanks gather in the street below. Here is the list she made: shampoo, multi-vitamins, books, writing materials.
While Norman was being held in a camp, the treasures she had come to Kuwait to work on, the al-Sabah collection of Kuwait's royal family, one of the most valuable in the Islamic world and housed at the Kuwait National Museum, were being carted in open trucks across the desert to Baghdad on the orders of Saddam Hussein.
NOW HERE is Norman at the Auckland Museum, looking after these once-lost treasures, reading reports about the looting of other treasures at the National Museum of Iraq.
Distance makes it harder, she says, despite knowing that even if she was in Kuwait, where the freelance conservator spends three months a year, there would be nothing she could do to help salvage the collection.
But Norman is optimistic. It is possible, she says, that there are significant items too large to have been removed or destroyed. It is also possible there are items that have been hidden. This, from a conservator, amounts to a prayer to the god of missing artefacts.
Because Norman has already witnessed what she calls a miracle: the return of most of the al-Sabah collection.
She was part of the rescue mission. Under the auspices of the United Nations, after the liberation of Kuwait, she was a member of the team who walked through the doors of the Iraqi Museum to claim back the porcelain, jewellery, rare books and ceramics.
DESPITE the overwhelming emotion Norman experienced in seeing the pieces she thought were lost forever, there was a chill.
Overseeing the operation were members of Iraq's secret police, posing - not at all successfully - as museum staff. "There was an element of walking into the lion's mouth."
The lion is now toothless: his own country's treasures looted or destroyed.
It is, says Norman, "a terrible tragedy".
One that creates, particularly for the conservator, a horrible dilemma.
She had worked in Iraq (those six weeks with the United Nations), and had met its people.
"It's not that I don't feel for the Iraqi people, and yet when I heard about the museum being looted, somehow that had an even greater impact. Which is a terrible thing to say.
"You see those images and those wretched children who have been caught up in bombing and who have lost limbs, and you think, 'I should feel much more for those kids'. And you kind of feel guilty."
The guilt is attached to caring so much about "something inanimate". But, "it is much more than that: it is our heritage. The cradle of civilisation".
There is also a terrible irony in all of this. Consider the Kuwaiti treasures taken by Saddam: stolen, damaged but mostly stored and able to be retrieved.
Now consider the Iraqi treasures: looted and smashed by the people Bush vowed to free from the tyrant.
Norman is a perfect example of crisp British resolve and black humour (in the camp the British had a committee set up within a day: "we do like our committees and I can tell you, in a crisis they're jolly useful. If you ever get caught in an invasion, stick with the Brits").
She is not about to apportion blame, but she is obviously distressed. All the more so because months before the coalition forces began their campaign "academics around the world ... put together a petition to the American Government to ask them to protect these ancient sites and museums".
It is a consideration that leads back to the central dilemma: "You could say if they were going to guard the museums they [the coalition forces] should have guarded the hospitals. Surely human life is more important than museum objects?"
Norman does not believe that the Iraqi looters went in to destroy, or not deliberately.
"We in the West perhaps tend to underestimate the degree to which the Iraqi people came to hate any institution seen to symbolise Saddam."
A national museum is an institution. And, she says, it is quite likely the looters thought the museum "was full of gold. People in the Middle East who aren't very knowledgeable about archaeology have this idea that what we are doing is digging for gold."
THERE IS an easy way to cheer up Norman. Take a wander with her through the exhibition hall (The Art of Islam is at the museum until June 15).
And then remind her of what an exciting life she has: all that travel to interesting places, all that hobnobbing with the royals.
Surely she has a smallish palace to live in when in Kuwait? No she doesn't, she laughs, she has "a perfectly ordinary small flat".
Even the Sheikha, director of the collection, who you hope would wander about dripping in gold and emeralds, is, says Norman, terribly elegant instead in her Italian clothes, which she accessorises with one (one!) tasteful item of jewellery at a time. What a waste.
If I owned that gold necklace with the diamonds and enamel from the Mughal empire, I'd wear it with the ruby and diamond bracelets. At breakfast.
Norman is more than happy for you to head straight for the gold. She doesn't mind a bit if you forgo the cultural significance and opt to drool instead. "Just come and look at gorgeous things."
It is just that she gets excited over things in a more, well, conservatorial sort of way.
The really wonderful thing about her job is this: the chance to touch things (with gloves, of course) that most of us only ever see inside cases.
In another such case is a book opened to a page that shows a drawing titled View of Venice.
It is The Book of the Mariner, written by a captain in the Ottoman Admiralty, published in 1688-89. You may look at it as long as you like, admiring the cursive script and charmingly naive map of Venice.
But Norman, and she delights in telling you this, knows what is on the next page.
That sort of thing gets conservators - even those in mourning for missing antiquities - really excited.
Sentimental about civilisation
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