Unknown soldier’s evocative message from the past

Research into New Zealand’s history enriched as Museum digitises much of its vast collection

Native land snails, poignant wartime writings from a Japanese prisonerof-war camp and a quilt crafted by an unknown soldier during the New Zealand Wars all have one thing in common.

They are among more than 190,000 objects held among the millions in storage at Auckland Museum that have come to light in a project by Museum staff to photograph and digitally catalogue parts of the massive collection.

The project, designed to make it easier for people to access the collection anywhere, anytime couldn’t have been better timed. Begun in 2016 it pre-empted the recent government decision to make the teaching of New Zealand history in schools compulsory from 2022.

The subject will be part of the national curriculum and will span many of the key events of New Zealand’s history including the arrival of Maori, the Treaty of Waitangi, colonisation, the New Zealand Wars and the evolution of the country’s national identity through the late 19th and early and late 20th centuries.

A senior collections technician Louise Weston says she expects the curriculum change is likely to heighten interest in New Zealand artefacts: “It was timely for us to catalogue and image these collection objects as interest in the history of Aotearoa continues to gain momentum.”

Established under the umbrella of the Future Museum strategy, the cataloguing aims to improve the Museum’s digital offering and increase public engagement through these channels.

Weston says the work has uncovered many interesting items. One, a large quilt made of hundreds of one-inch squares of fabric from uniforms worn by soldiers during the New Zealand Wars “is very evocative”.

Although the identity of the soldier who made the quilt is unknown, Weston says the Museum’s records suggest it was the work of an infantryman from the English Army’s 58th regiment who was being held prisoner.

“I guess it was a way of spending his time and having something to do with his hands,” says Weston. “The amount of work that has gone into it is amazing and it would be good to know more about it.”

The 58th regiment was deployed to New Zealand in 1845 and saw action in the Whanganui campaign. In 1858 the regiment helped fight a major fire in Auckland which destroyed an entire city block.

Although some men from the regiment chose to settle in New Zealand, most of them returned to England in 1859.

The quilt which measures almost 2sqm was passed to the Museum in 1965. It had previously been held in the Old Colonists Museum in Auckland which opened in 1916 and occupied the same building as the Auckland Art Gallery. It closed in 1956.

Letters written home by a New Zealander imprisoned in a Japanese camp in Mukden in China (now Shenyang) during World War II tell an affecting story about survival, perseverance and finding humanity under the most testing conditions.

The letters, another collection item brought to light, were written by 1st Lieutenant Arnold Lessel Greig who was captured at the fall of Singapore in 1942 while serving with the Federated Malay States Volunteer Force. Initially imprisoned at Changi, he was soon sent to Mukden where he spent the remainder of the war.

Greig had a natural talent for languages and while incarcerated learnt Japanese, using it to not only understand the guards but read and translate newspapers for fellow inmates.

Vast Natural Science collections are also among the items being brought to light online with more than 123,000 objects catalogued in the last four years. Many are considered important for research into New Zealand flora and fauna and include more than 18,000 specimen lots of New Zealand land snails, many of which are critically endangered.

Weston says these and many other stories, would not have been available to public had the cataloguing project not happened.