Te Papa weighs up collections purge
Te Papa will consider the future of five guardians of its collections next week. Critics say their decades of knowledge are irreplaceable and the museum’s restructure further erodes its ability to care for our national treasures. Nikki Macdonald investiga
Should it stay or go? That’s the question being asked of Te Papa’s 2.5 million collection of objects, as the museum rethinks what a national collection should look like.
Preliminary work found the current story of New Zealand in 2.5 million objects is mostly the story of middle and upper-class Kiwis. The art collection lacks work by female artists and the history collection is Eurocentric, poorly documented and under-represents religion, schooling, popular culture and work.
Te Papa’s Collections Strategy 2018-2023 outlines plans for a ‘‘focused, rather than comprehensive’’ collection ‘‘to grow New Zealanders’ understanding of who we were, are and can be in the world we live in’’. It is on the hunt for items ‘‘of low value’’, duplication and objects that no longer fit.
In the gun are likely to be the museum’s international collection – including the mummy and sarcophagus of Egyptian girl Mehit-emWesekht – and international art. The historical photography collection is also under review and could be rehomed elsewhere.
Te Papa director of collections, research, and learning Dale Bailey said it was important to constantly reassess the collection and the stories it told.
Te Papa was yet to decide what to get rid of, but expected to have a plan by the end of June on how to tackle the collection review, Bailey said.
The museum is pulling back from its international art collection, deeming it ‘‘low priority’’ and axing its specialist curator. Bailey said it would not expand the collection, which includes British works predating New Zealand’s colonisation. However, it had no immediate plans to offload it.
The international collection, which includes the Egyptian mummy, will also be ‘‘reviewed for fit’’, documents say.
Bailey said storage was increasingly squeezed and room was needed for future collecting ‘‘because New Zealand hasn’t finished yet’’. Te Papa’s planned South Auckland offshoot would include an extra 8000m2 of shared storage, but it was not known what collections might move.
Items can be removed from Te Papa’s collection if they are ‘‘no longer relevant’’, in irreparable condition or are to be repatriated or transferred to another institution. Only seven objects have been removed since 2014.
Bailey will not decide the collection’s future, having resigned on Tuesday to return to Auckland, from where he commutes weekly. He will leave at the end of March, after completing the controversial restructure that scientists fear jeopardises critical expertise and collections care.
Scientist Mike Rudge, who looked after the national collections from 1994 to 1998, said there was a danger in discarding anything, as technology was constantly unlocking new secrets.
It’s the smallest of sentences, but it hit Anton van Helden like a ton of bricks. The second of three Te Papa restructure documents highlighted priority areas for the new structure: ‘‘key gaps are seaweeds, marine mammals, spiders’’.
Van Helden used to be the marine mammal guy. The guy who identified stranded whales. The guy who responded when a beach-walker wanted to know if they’d found the motherlode of sperm whale vomit, better known as ambergris. The guy who looked after the precious whale bones that were last year found covered in bacteria. But he got the boot in the national museum’s 2013 restructure.
‘‘It still hurts me every time I think about it. Because I love that collection. That is what I am about.’’
Now, another restructure threatens another tranche of collection management expertise and passion, which critics say is crucial and irreplaceable. It has also rekindled concerns about the country’s commitment to its nationally significant collections, which provide the key to understanding New Zealand’s past, present and future. To understand why Te Papa’s collections matter, you have to understand their purpose. New technology is constantly unlocking new possibilities for dusty flakes of history to reveal how the world is changing.
Nic Rawlence, an Otago University lecturer in ancient DNA, spent three weeks in museum basements in Canterbury, Te Papa and Otago measuring old bones, to understand the shape of the giant swan that once roamed New Zealand. Te Papa’s collections are a treasure trove of New Zealand’s archaeological and natural history, he says.
‘‘Photos can help, but they can’t replace holding something . . . There are fossils in Te Papa that I work with going back 60,000 to 70,000 years. I would not be able to do the research that I do and answer the questions that matter to New Zealanders without Te Papa’s collections. And that’s looking at what New Zealand was like when humans arrived, the impacts of climate change in humans. How can we learn from it? How do we take that info on how New Zealand has changed to conserve what we’ve got left and possibly turn back the clock?’’
Mike Rudge looked after the country’s natural history collections from 1994 to 1998. He remembers a visitor asking if a 1.4-metre, 1200kg fossil of an ancient ocean ammonite was a concrete replica.
‘‘When I said ‘No’, they were thunderstruck – that a creature like that could be moving around in the ancient seas. I felt quite moved by that, because that’s the power of the genuine object.’’
He’s all for digitisation and augmented reality, which could allow people to virtually swim with an ammonite. But there’s no replacing the real deal.
‘‘I think it’s a huge mistake for anybody to say we don’t need the real object. It’s like saying we’ve got all these David Attenborough films, we don’t need lions any more . . . Let’s by all means augment, but not trash on the way through.’’
Te Papa’s head of collections, Dale Bailey, doesn’t disagree. He rates the importance of Te Papa’s physical collections, including its 1.4 million natural history specimens, a 10 out of 10.
‘‘We are not a museum without them. They are at the very core of what we do.’’ The disquiet started in July last year, when Te Papa threatened up to 25 job losses across the organisation. Plans to cut, from 16 to 10, the number of natural history and humanities collections managers – the guardians of our national treasures – provoked outrage within the science community.
Collections staff had already been slashed by 42 per cent in the 2013 restructure that ousted van Helden. Further cuts would jeopardise Te Papa’s ability to care for irreplaceable gems, critics said. Just look at those mouldy whale bones.
The process was halted while an international panel reviewed the museum’s setup, although it was later revealed the panel was not told of the planned staff cuts. The panel found the museum was documenting and managing its collections well and praised its worldleading fish collection and facilities.
However, the review panel also highlighted the need to reduce the digitisation backlog, to make the collections more accessible. Panel member Tim White, of Yale University’s Peabody Museum, told Stuff that Te Papa’s collection management staff were ‘‘thin’’.
‘‘For an institution of that size, and for the breadth of collections that they have, and being a national museum, it seems like they are lacking staffing.’’
Nonetheless, the restructure continued, in a watered-down state. The third and final restructure document, released in December, replaced the five science collection managers with two collection managers, two assistant curators and a technician. One collection manager would cover all animals and insects and the other would cover all plants – a generalisation that a source described as ‘‘further dumbing down’’.
There are also three new lead curator jobs, which the staff made redundant get first bite at (although it’s not clear whether they have the qualifications to be considered). Overall, the science team loses one position, with the axing of the bicultural science researcher. Further reductions are possible, as the restructure documents say if existing curators are promoted to lead curators, their curator jobs may not be replaced. However, Te Papa says it does not plan to reduce numbers further.
There’s debate about exactly how much collections care falls to collection managers, and how much is done by curators. Van Helden says collection managers can be the difference between the unmarked crate in Raiders of the Lost
Ark disappearing into the storehouse never to be rediscovered, and every specimen being in the right place with the right information. They do everything from splitting a marine mammal into its component parts and safely storing and cataloguing the skeleton, the wet parts, the teeth; to arranging specimen loans, to checking for pests and leaks.
He worries that increasing
generalisation could jeopardise collection care.
‘‘How you prepare and look after mollusc shells is completely different to how you would look after bird skins or whale skeletons . . . The more you understand a group, the easier it is to manage them.’’
The assistant curator job also involves up to 40 per cent research, reducing the time available for collection care. The technician’s priority would be to help cut the backlog of 700,000 specimens (about 50 per cent of the natural history collection) still not digitised for online access.
A Te Papa source, who says morale is so low that staff are randomly swearing in corridors, says the restructure is ‘‘nonsensical’’.
‘‘We desperately need more staff, and if we can’t do that because you don’t have the money to do so, you’d be getting rid of more curators and have more collection managers.’’
Nic Rawlence calls the restructure ‘‘a great leap backwards’’. While more curators is good, it should not come at the expense of collection management.
Mike Rudge believes Te Papa has been seduced by the ‘‘front-of-house glamour’’ of exhibitions and is neglecting its collections. ‘‘If you had reduced the complement of people that was there in my time to considerably less than 50 per cent, a lot of things are not being done.’’
Rudge asked the auditor-general to investigate the impact of the 2013 staff cuts, alleging the museum was failing in its statutory obligations to safeguard its collections. However, the appeal was rejected, after the office found no evidence Te Papa was breaching the law.
Te Papa’s head of collections, Dale Bailey, defends Te Papa’s collections care. He can’t comment on the 2013 staff cuts – or the fact they’re now looking for marine mammal expertise, after axing van Helden – as those decisions pre-dated him. However, he does not accept that staff cuts mean the collections are receiving less care.
He says the point of this reorganisation is to keep the collections in the very best of care and maximise their usefulness for both Te Papa and New Zealand. If Te Papa were a hospital, curators would be doctors and collections managers would be nurses, he says.
‘‘Access is driven through insight into the collection and relationships with researchers, and that’s largely led by curators.’’
Bailey resigned on Tuesday and will return to Auckland at the end of March, after the restructure’s completion. He has not decided if he will remain in the museum sector. It’s as much about the people as the positions. The five disestablished collection managers represent decades of irreplaceable expertise. Mollusc expert Bruce Marshall has been researching and collecting since 1967. He’s so renowned in his field he’s had 23 species named after him. He has also published more than 120 scientific papers and described and named 451 new species – the highest in Te Papa’s history.
Andrew Stewart has been the fish collection manager since 1982 and coauthored the definitive four-volume tome on New Zealand fish.
Antony Kusabs has looked after the botany collection since 2010 and previously worked for Landcare Research and the Department of Conservation.
Tom Schultz toured with Te Papa’s whale exhibition and entomology collection manager Phil Sirvid is a spider expert.
Given only two collection manager positions remain, three of those disestablished would have to take a pay cut to technician or assistant curator, or leapfrog existing curators into a lead curator job. Sources fear for Marshall and Stewart, as their expertise doesn’t fit the priority areas stated in the second restructure proposal.
‘‘What you’re getting rid of is something you can’t replace,’’ Rudge says. ‘‘You might get some bright young chap or chapess with a masters or PhD but they don’t have this mysterious thing called experience – knowing the context. If you showed Andrew a fish, he might be able to say that’s a such and such, where did you catch it? You say Ka¯ piti and he says, no you didn’t, it doesn’t come any further than the Poor Knights Islands. That’s taxonomic knowledge and experience. So he can say – wow, now we’re talking climate change.’’
Bailey could not comment on who would survive the restructure, but was confident the museum would ‘‘retain the skills we need to go forward’’.
The collection managers’ fate will be decided in the coming weeks. Tim White, who is director of collections and research at Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History, sums up the importance of collections and their keepers: ‘‘It’s important to have them, it’s important to take care of them, and there’s no substitute for having well-informed, educated staff.’’