South Seas Artifacts

Oldman Collection Distributed In New Zealand

THE recommendations of the Art Gal leries and Museums Association of New Zealand for the distribution of the W. O. Oldman collection of Maori and South Sea artifacts, bought by the New Zealand Government in 1948 for £44,000 have been approved by the NZ Government. As a result, the Canter bury Museum will have the first choice of two of the sections in the collection which were most highly prized by Mr.

Oldman —the Hawaiian and Easter Is land sections.

The Maori collection and three of the 12 South Sea sections will go to the Dominion Museum in Wellington, and the choice of the remaining nine South Sea sections has been decided by ballot among the other three metropolitan museums. The duplicates in each sec tion will be shared among the four major museums and the remainder will be distributed among smaller museums.

The collection is regarded as the best private collection in the world of Maori and South Sea artifacts. The new ar rangement is designed to give New Zea land students a chance to study all phases of Maori and Polynesian arts and crafts without travelling to the British Museum, the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, or the Museum of Ethnology in Berlin, which previously held the best collec tions. One result of the allocation will be that research in the area covered by each section will be the responsi bility of the museum with that sec tion. The Marquesas will be covered by the Dominion Museum, Tahiti, Tonga, and Samoa by Auckland, and the Cook Islands by the Otago Museum.

One of the main exhibits allotted to Canterbury Museum will be the largest and most perfect example in existence of the feather cloaks worn by kings and chiefs of old Hawaii. This cloak, which is five feet from neck to hem and 13 feet along the bottom margin, is entirely covered with red and yellow feathers from birds which are now extinct, worked in by hand on a network base. It was brought to England in 1812.

The Easter Island section contains a number of small carved wooden figures, which next to stone statues are the most famous products of the island’s art. These apparently represent departed ancestors and are shown as emaciated corpses; but their exact purpose has still to be

properly ascertained. These gures were collected before the islanders began to produce inferior carvings for trading with European sailors.