Historical artefacts wheeled out to celebrate Kiribati independence

A small crowd gathered at the Auckland Museum to remember the past last Thursday, as a vast collection of historical i-Kiribati items were wheeled out as part of the country’s independence celebrations.

About 1600 i-Kiribati live in New Zealand, and the idea behind the exhibition was to reconnect the community with their historical treasures, thousands of kilometres away from their scattered homelands.

This collection is one of the largest among the museum’s Pacific artefacts, largely due to a former administrator and his wife, who were both anthropologists in the colonial administration of the then-Gilbert Islands.