Emma Yandle

Objects of Encounter: Displaying first encounters between Europeans and Pacific Islanders on the voyages of Captain Cook, in contemporary British museums

Figure 1. Māori trading a crayfish with Joseph Banks. By Tupaia, Figure 2. Joseph Banks trading with a Māori. Detail from In Pursuit of 1769. Venus [infected], by Lisa Reihana, 2015-2017. © Lisa Reihana.

Emma Yandle Faculty of Humanities, University of Amsterdam Supervisor: prof. dr. R. (Rob) van der Laarse Second reader: dhr. dr. D.A. (David) Duindam

Word count: 22,988

Emma Yandle

Abstract

This paper explores the presentation in contemporary British museums of the cross-cultural encounters that took place between Europeans and Indigenous Pacific Islanders, on the eighteenth-century voyages of Captain James Cook to the Pacific region. It takes as its central case studies four exhibitions that opened in London in 2018, in response to the 250th anniversary of Cook’s first voyage. It focuses on visualizations of encounters, ranging from British depictions created on the voyages, to the deployment of encounter iconography by contemporary Indigenous Pacific artists. Both are brought into relation with current anthropological conceptions of cross- cultural encounters: as contingent, tied to specific social locations, and with agency and complex motivations shared by both Indigenous and European actors. It analyses the extent to which the interpretative framing of these works reflects such dynamics of early Pacific encounters. It takes the view that eighteenth-century depictions of encounters are routinely deployed as documentary evidence within exhibitions, overlooking their imaginative construction. By comparison, the use of the same encounter iconography by contemporary Indigenous artists is subject to visual analysis and frequently brought into relation with anthropological ideas of encounters. However, it concludes that the interpretative framing of both eighteenth-century and contemporary visualizations of encounter still tends towards simplicity, introducing encounters as emblematic of contact within the wide Pacific region, rather than exploring encounters as specific, singular moments, within distinct temporal and spatial environments.

Key words: encounters, contact, Cook, Pacific, museums

Emma Yandle

Acknowledgments

Many thanks are due to the staff of the University of Amsterdam, in particular Dr. Robert van der Laarse for his advice and overall supervision of this work. Early conversations with Dr. David Duindam, offered valuable ideas on the structuring and scope of my research and Diederick Wildeman, Curator of Navigation and Library Collections at Het Scheepvaartmuseum (The National Maritime Museum) in Amsterdam, provided much fruitful context and widened my bibliography. I am particular grateful for the willingness of the curatorial teams of the case studies discussed here to contribute to my research: Dr. Adrian Locke and Rebecca Bray of the Royal Academy of Arts, London; Laura Walker of the British Library; Sophie Richards of the National Maritime Museum, Royal Museums Greenwich; and Dr. Julie Adams of the British Museum. All generously gave their time to discuss this research and provided valuable insights into the scope, curatorial aims and specific choices within their exhibitions. Finally, thanks are due to Miranda Reilly for her encouragement and editing advice; Kate Yandle for her pastoral support; and Peter and Jo Yandle for always being there. Emma Yandle

Table of Contents

Abstract ...... 2

Acknowledgments ...... 3

Terminology ...... 6

List of Figures ...... 7

Preface: Displaying encounters, exhibiting Tupaia ...... 9

Introduction ...... 13

i.) Talking about Captain Cook in the 21st century ...... 13 ii.) Cook exhibitions in 2018: searching for the encounters ...... 16 iii.) Methodology and theoretical underpinnings ...... 20 iv.) Structure of the work ...... 22 I. The rise of encounters in contemporary museum practice ...... 24

i.) The material legacy of Cook’s voyages and their entry into museum collections ...... 24 ii.) From discovery to encounter, shifts in anthropology ...... 27 iii.) Museums and the contact zone ...... 29 iv.) The Gweagal shield, a mobile artefact of encounter ...... 33 vi.) An encounter perspective and the limitations of the contact zone ...... 37 II. Exhibiting Visualizations of Cook’s Encounters ...... 39

i.) Visualizations of first contact: the paintings of William Hodges ...... 39 ii.) Visualizations of encounter: as documentary records ...... 42 iii.) Painting first meetings: encounters as emblematic events ...... 46 iv.) Embracing encounters’ specificity ...... 50 III. Encounter iconography in contemporary Pacific art ...... 54

i.) The appeal of encounters for contemporary Pacific artists ...... 54 ii.) Unexplored relationships: contemporary & eighteenth-century encounters in exhibitions 57 Conclusion ...... 61

Appendices ...... 63

Appendix A: Excerpt from the press release for James Cook: The Voyages ...... 63 Appendix B: Excerpts from press release from the National Maritime Museum, announcing Pacific Encounters ...... 66 Emma Yandle

Appendix C: Press release for Oceania ...... 68 Appendix D: Press release Reimagining Captain Cook: Pacific Perspectives ...... 72 Appendix E: Label text for in Pursuit of Venus [infected] in Oceania, the Royal Academy of Arts ...... 74 Bibliography ...... 75 Emma Yandle

Terminology

This work uses the broad terms ‘Indigenous’ and ‘European’, to respectively refer to cultural and social groups who are the original settlers of a land, and the countries or inhabitants of Western Europe. It does so with an awareness that both terms, useful in a comparative analysis such as this work, present an imagined collective of peoples that is not reflected by lived reality. The term ‘Indigenous’ has been used when discussing concepts or artworks ranging across the Pacific region. In individual instances, the preferred terminology of the community in question is used. Where required for clarity, countries will be named by both their European and traditional names. Any subsequent feedback on the terms employed is gratefully received. Emma Yandle Introduction Page 7

List of Figures

Figure 1. Maori trading a crayfish with Joseph Banks, Tupaia, 1769, British Library, Add MS 15508, f.12

Figure 2. Joseph Banks trading with a Māori. Detail from In Pursuit of Venus [infected], by Lisa Reihana, 2015-2017. © Lisa Reihana.

Figure 3. Thomas Herbert trading with a Khoi person on the beach in Table Bay. From Zee- en lant-reyse na verscheyde deelen van Asia en Africa…, by Thomas Herbert, 1665.

Figure 4. Poster for James Cook: The Voyages displayed in the courtyard of the British Library, 2018. Photo by Emma Yandle.

Figure 5. Representing Tupaia from Pacific Encounters, 2018. Photo by Emma Yandle.

Figure 6. Joseph Banks trading with a Māori. Detail from Entanglements, by John Pule,1997. © John Pule.

Figure 7. Entranceway of James Cook: The Voyages, 2018. Courtesy of the British Library. Photo by Emma Yandle.

Figure 8. Entranceway of Pacific Encounters, 2018. Photo by Emma Yandle.

Figure 9. Entranceway to Oceania, 2018. Photo by Emma Yandle

Figure 10. Entranceway of Reimaging Captain Cook: Pacific Perspectives © The Trustees of the British Museum

Figure 11. Installation view of Indigenous Australia. The Gweagal shield is shown on the left; Vincent Namatjira’s ‘James Cook - With the Declaration’, 2014, on the right © Rachael Murphy

Figure 12. Object label for the Gweagal Shield, in the Enlightenment Gallery of the British Museum, 2017. Photo courtesy of To BP or Not BP.

Figure 13. The Gweagal shield and gararra (fishing spears) collected by Joseph Banks in April 1770, as displayed in Encounters, 2015-2016. © Jason McCarthy. National Museum of Australia.

Figure 14. Object label for the Gweagal Shield in Encounters, 2015-2016. Photo by Mark Burgess.

Figure 15. The Landing at Erramanga [Eromanga], one of the New Hebrides, by William Hodges, 1776. One of four paintings by Hodges showing Cook’s landings in the Vanuatu archipelago during his second voyage. © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.

Figure 16. ‘The Landing at Tanna one of the New Hebrides’. By J.K Sherwin after William Hodges, c. 1777. Emma Yandle Introduction Page 8

Figure 17. Globe with voyage route marked, and factsheet introducing Cook’s first voyage in James Cook: The Voyages. Courtesy of the British Library. Photo by Emma Yandle.

Figure 18. The Landing at Tanna [Tana], one of the New Hebrides, by William Hodges, 1775-1776. © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.

Figure 19. Display of William Hodges’ paintings in Pacific Encounters. The four Encounter paintings’ are displayed in the bottom right. Photo by Emma Yandle.

Figure 20. The Landing at Mallicolo [Malakula], one of the New Hebrides. By William Hodges, c. 1776. © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.

Figure 21. Contemporary artworks are displayed on the walls, with quotations from the artists above. The costume of the Chief Mourner is displayed centrally. Installation view of Reimaging Captain Cook: Pacific Perspectives Photo by Emma Yandle, 2018.

Figure 22. Vanuatu Archipelago case, sub-section entitled ‘A Brief Encounter’, including print of The Landing at Mallicolo shown against a blue backdrop on the right. Photo by Emma Yandle.

Figure 23. Blown-up graphic of William Hodges’ ‘A View taken in the bay of Oaite Peha [Vaitepiha] Otaheite [Tahiti]’ (‘Tahiti Revisited’) in Reimaging Captain Cook: Pacific Perspectives © The Trustees of the British Museum

Figure 24. Detail from in Pursuit of Venus [infected], by Lisa Reihana, 2015–17. Courtesy of the artist and New Zealand at Venice. With support of Creative New Zealand and NZ at Venice Patrons and Partners. Image provided courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

Figure 25. Detail from Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique, showing the scenes 1. (Native hut), 2. (3 dancers), 3. (Sailing boat) & 4. (Natives & goat). By Joseph Dufour (manufacturer) Jean-Gabriel Charvet (artist), 1804- 1805. Image courtesy of Art Gallery of New South Wales, Australia.

Figure 26. ‘The Splendid Land’, by John Pule, 2009. © John Pule. Image Courtesy of Gow Langsford Gallery, Aotearoa New Zealand.

Figure 27. Captn Cook in Australia by Simon Gende, 2018. Reproduced by permission of the artist Image: © The Trustees of the British Museum.

Figure 28. Installation view showing scenes of in Pursuit Venus [infected] at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2018. Artwork by Lisa Reihana, 2015-2017. Photo by Emma Yandle.

Figure 29. First meeting between Tupaia, Cook and Māori chief. Tupaia is the figure in the left, wearing a white cloak. Detail from in Pursuit of Venus [infected], by Lisa Reihana, 2015–17. Courtesy of the artist and New Zealand at Venice. Image provided courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

Emma Yandle Introduction Page 9

Preface: Displaying encounters, exhibiting Tupaia

This thesis was inspired by research I conducted as Assistant Curator of an exhibition on cartography and Dutch voyaging in the seventeenth century. Entitled Maps & Marvels (Dutch title Cartografie & Curiosa), it opened at Het Scheepvaartmuseum (The National Maritime Museum) in Amsterdam on 9th May 2019. When conducting research into Dutch travel accounts, I became fascinated by engravings published for a European audience, that purported to visualize these early encounters and moments of first contact between two drastically different cultures. With no common language and differing attitudes towards central concepts such as property and the role of ceremony, travel accounts revealed the complications, variation, confusion and ongoing negotiations that early encounters involved. I was struck by the disparity between such a reality, as mediated through contemporary and subsequent European publications, and the order, stability and symbolic visual presentation in the engravings showing encounters that accompanied these works. A specific example comes from Thomas Herbert’s travel account (1627/1665) (See Figure 3), in which he discusses his time in South Africa. As my research continued, I came to recognise here a distinct iconography in the depiction of first meeting and early trading between Europeans and Indigenous peoples. I was surprised to find that this subset of European visualizations of Indigenous societies, which as a wider topic has received much scholarship,1 had been Figure 3. Thomas Herbert and a Khoi person trading a piece of copper for a little discussed in detail, specifically for sheep, on the beach in Table Bay. From Zee- en lant-reyse na verscheyde deelen van Asia en Africa…, by Thomas Herbert, 1665. the ways in which it brings together two distinct social groups into one image. With post-colonial theory challenging dominant accounts of European history, they appeared to me particularly useful objects for reintroducing Indigenous narratives into history exhibitions. However, the tension between acting as an historical record, and an artistic work that embeds ideas about cultural contact, made the specific engraving above difficult to adequately frame within our exhibition. How could a depiction of historic contact be utilised by a museum display, without repeating or endorsing the inequities of the symbolic iconography it contains? I wondered, what has current museological practice made of such drawings that overlap documentary and artistic disciplines? With 2018 marking the 250th anniversary of the first voyage to the Pacific of one of Britain’s most famous naval explorers, Captain James Cook, a number of cultural institutions programmed exhibitions to open for varying durations throughout the year.2 In London alone, four exhibitions from major institutions specifically

1 See Smith, 1992; Moser, 1998; Sloan, 2007; Gaudio, 2008; Pratt, 2009. 2 In 2018, the Director of Royal Museums Greenwich Dr. Kevin Fewster referred to the opening of the Pacific Encounters exhibition at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich as “usher[ing] in more than a decade of commemorations in Britain and overseas. Among them are Cook’s landings in Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia, to be commemorated in 2019 and 2020 respectively; in Hawai’i and the north- west coast of America in 2028; and, of course, his death in 2029.” (Fewster, 2018, p.7). In Australia, following the Australian Museum & Galleries National Conference in 2019, initial plans for ‘Project 2020’ commemorations include: a First-Nations led response to the 250th anniversary in an exhibition at the Australian Museum in Sydney; a re-enactment of Cook’s contact with the Eastern coast of Australia on his first voyage on a replica of the Endeavour; The Newcastle Weaponry Museum will collaborate with local Indigenous Elders to fire Emma Yandle Introduction Page 10 tied themselves to the Cook anniversary in their marketing materials3. This offered an unusual opportunity to compare museological practice on a similar topic and with similar collection items. The first to open was James Cook: The Voyages at the British Library. One of its lead press images, displayed as a poster outside the building (see Figure 4), bore clear similarities to the engraving of Herbert and the Khoi in South Africa. The exhibition revealed this to be a depiction of contact drawn around 100 years later, in 1769, of British botanist and collector Joseph Banks, who travelled on Cook’s first voyage, bartering with a Māori (for a detailed view see Figure 1). It was drawn and painted by Tupaia, an Islander from Ra'iātea, who also joined Cook’s first voyage.4 The similarities between the two works are stark, from the flat presentation of the figures in profile, to the moment of exchange suspended just before its completion, objects held in outstretched hands, the trade left visually unfulfilled.5 Tupaia is believed to be the first Pacific Islander to draw using European techniques with paper and water colour and it is striking how similar his figuration is to an established European tradition of which he almost Figure 4. Poster for James Cook: The Voyages certainly was not familiar. The differences between how the trade displayed in the courtyard of the British Library, 2018. Photo by Emma Yandle. is shown in his drawing and its description in a letter written by Banks that displayed alongside it in the exhibition6, offered further evidence of the unclear role played by visualizations of encounter, as documentation or as artwork. Developed centuries apart, these two examples of early contact bolstered my idea that the iconography of encounter contained encoded assumptions and biases, but also representations of agency and parity. Both were available to be highlighted by museum interpretation. Tupaia’s drawing led me to assess the wider role afforded to him, as an Indigenous Pacific Islander, within this exhibition, that took James Cook as its eponymous subject. Recent scholarship has highlighted the crucial role played by Tupaia in the peaceful unfolding of Cook’s landing, 127 years after a violent first encounter with the Dutch, and the development of friendly relations between the British and Māori (Salmond, 1991). Tupaia joined Cook’s crew when they visited his homeland in what is today known as Society Islands, where he was a navigator and ‘aroi (a high-ranking religious figure). Tupaia’s role as a go-between was highlighted by an audio-visual intervention in the exhibition: alongside Tupaia’s drawing, excerpts from Māori television series Tupaia’s Endeavour played (Rolls, 2017), in which activists and scholars from the Pacific describe how he was

cannons at the replica Endeavour when it reaches Newcastle. The National Museum of Australia have elected not to put their Cook collection on display. (H. Joscelyne, personal communication, 17th May 2019). 3 The terminology employed by promotional materials for each exhibition is recounted in footnote no.10 of this work. 4 Tupaia was only identified as the artist of this work – previously described only as ‘The Artist of the Chief Mourner – when Harold Carter presented a newly-discovered letter written by Joseph Banks, discussing this moment of barter, at the Science and Exploration in the Pacific conference held at the National Maritime Museum in 1997. It has been described as “a moment that has had a profound effect on subsequent studies of Pacific encounters.” (Rigby, 2017, pp.236-7) Tupaia’s drawing appears to show a crayfish being traded by the Māori for a piece of white tapa (Tahitian bark cloth), held in Banks’ hand (Salmond, 2017, p.8). 5 As Nicholas Thomas has described it is this strange fixity of a dynamic act that is the notable feature of depictions of trade, for “what is most telling about the image of barter is that it does not speak…We have no sense of what is said or thought.” (1991, p.11). 6 The exhibition displays a letter in which Banks describes this trades, with details that differ to Tupaia’s drawing. Writing in 1812, Banks claims that Tupaia: “drew me with a nail in my hand delivering it to an Indian [sic] who sold me a Lobster but with my other hand I had a firm grasp on the Lobster determined not to Quit the nail till I had Livery and Seizure of the article purchased” (The British Library, 2018) Emma Yandle Introduction Page 11 able to communicate with the people of New Zealand, and recount the respect with which he is remembered in their oral history. As I visited more exhibitions, I saw Tupaia again and again being afforded a central or influential position within the narrative of the voyages, contributing to the knowledge, art and material culture that they brought back to Europe. In the National Maritime Museum’s Pacific Encounters, he is profiled alongside other significant voyage participants ranging across Indigenous and European. The inequities of material evidence, resulting in two portraits within the collection of Cook and none of Tupaia, were responded to by a newly-created portrait entitled Representing Tupaia (See Figure 5).7 In the Royal Academy of Arts’ Oceania, which includes the original of Tupaia’s ‘Drawing of a Tahitian scene’8, the interpretation highlights how eighteenth-century European records of Cook’s voyages reference Tupaia, but purposefully Figure 5. Representing Tupaia from do not give him his due credit.9 In the British Museum’s Reimagining the Pacific Encounters, 2018. Photo by Emma Yandle. Pacific, Tupaia is introduced to challenge ideas of how objects changed hands in New Zealand and to highlight the role in general of Indigenous go-betweens in the collection of material culture.10 Tupaia’s trade makes another appearance in Oceania, within a panoramic video work by Lisa Reihana. One of its 70 dramatic vignettes, depicts Banks and Māori in an exchange, here playing out in real time as a dynamic negotiation11 (see Figure 2). Beyond using Tupaia to disrupt a Eurocentric account of the history of contact in the Pacific, within these exhibitions he is shown to have significance and imaginative lure for Indigenous artists working across the vast region. One such example is found in the British Museum’s Reimagining Captain Cook. Niuean artist John Pule’s Entanglements, 1997 (See Figure 6), reproduces Tupaia’s drawing, flipping the orientation, and placing within a wider composition of scenes that depict different Figure 6. Joseph Banks trading with a Māori. Detail from Entanglements, by John Pule,1997. © John Pule. ‘entanglements’ of his country with Europe that occurred

7 The full label text reads: “Representing Tupaia. There are no existing portraits of Tupaia. This representation aims to give Tupaia a presence in this gallery and acknowledges his importance to the Endeavour voyage. It uses a painting and map drawn by Tupaia when he was on board the Endeavour, and a silhouette of Lyall Hakaraia, artist, performer and gallery contributor.” (National Maritime Museum, 2018) 8 This drawing is used as the background for Representing Tupaia. 9 The label states: “Tupaia was instrumental in helping the HMS Endeavour to navigate and communicate in the southern Pacific, but his role was diminished from Captain Cook’s official record of the voyage.” (Royal Academy of Arts, 2018). 10 A facsimile of his trade drawing from the British Library (Figure 1) is displayed alongside a dog-hair cloak. The interpretation suggests that much of the material culture collected on the voyages may in fact have been given to Tupaia, as a highly respected individual. A flax and dog-hair cloak from Joseph Banks’ collection is now held by the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford. Tapsell (2009/2010, p.103) has suggested that this cloak may actually have been gifted by Māori to Tupaia, and only later made its way into Banks’ collection, after his death. In the exhibition, the label on Tupaia’s death, on the voyage’s arrival in Batavia (present-day Jakarta), suggests that “[a]fter his death, the many treasures he had been given probably passed to Joseph Banks”. Banks’ bequest to the British Museum makes up a large part of their Cook collection, some of which is exhibited here. 11 Reihana describes two dramatic scenes within her work as relating to Tupaia’s drawing: ‘Banks bartering with a Māori Chief for a crayfish’ and ‘Tupaia drawing the Chief Mourner Costume and Bartering Scene’ (Reihana, 2012, p.45)

Emma Yandle Introduction Page 12 during and after contact.12 Tupaia’s treatment across the exhibitions shows curators drawing from scholarship by anthropologists.13 However, I was interested to see if the approach taken towards Tupaia and the encounters he was a part of was an outlier, or if it extended to other depictions of early and first contact found within these exhibitions: a line of research that is pursued in this work.

12 The call for museological practice to reflect the research of related disciplines has been characterised as a central aim within what has been termed a ‘second wave’ of the so-called new museology in the 21st century (Macdonald, 2011; Boast, 2011, p.58) 13 The figure of Tupaia and the artworks he created, are employed across these exhibitions to make points that show a range of influences: of current thinking within anthropology; calls for inclusivity in museum representation; and Indigenous challenges to European institutions to decolonize their spaces and displays. In the realm of anthropology, his inclusion and treatment particularly seem to draw on the work of Anne Salmond (1991, 1997, 2003) and Nicholas Thomas (1991, 1997, 2012). Emma Yandle Introduction Page 13

Introduction

i.) Talking about Captain Cook in the 21st century

In August 1768, Captain James Cook set sail from Plymouth onboard the Endeavour on the first of what would comprise three voyages: the first spanning 1768-1771; the second 1772-1775; and the third 1776- 1780. Collectively they constituted over a decade of travel and marked the beginning of sustained contact between Europeans and the island nations of the vast Pacific Ocean, including but not limited to Tahiti, Australia, New Zealand and Hawai’i, and the north-west coast of North America (Banner, 2007, p.7). In a lecture given in 2016 at the Tairāwhiti Museum in Gisborne, New Zealand, Dr. Julie Adams, curator of Oceanic collections at the British Museum, spoke of the uncertainty with which British museums approached the upcoming anniversary of Cook’s first voyage. She remarked that few major museums had exhibitions planned, reflecting personally on the interest and value of such exhibitions and whose need they would be meeting. Of planned exhibitions at the National Maritime Museum and Royal Academy of Arts in London, she stated only, “It remains to be seen how these new interpretations will grapple with the legacies of the Cook voyages.” (Adams, 2016). That Cook’s voyages are to be “grappled with” responds to changes in thinking from the past decades across historical, anthropological and museological disciplines. Post-colonial reassessment has shifted focus from the ways in which Cook’s voyages represented European achievements, to the perspectives of Pacific Islanders and the afterlives of contact with Europeans for Indigenous communities (Clifford, 1988; Hallam & Street, 2013). Within museum studies, an understanding of museums as mediators of cultural history, has highlighted the political nature of collections and displays, whose interpretative strategies can confer authority, and as such become sites that can either represent or exclude social groups (Trofanenko, 2006, pp. 95- 109; Dubin, 2011, pp.477-494; Bennett, 2013, pp. 49-69). To be reflective of current academic thinking, exhibitions concerning Cook’s voyages in the 21st century must to engage with both of these areas. The role that Cook has been afforded within narratives of history, over time and by different cultural groups, is notable for the heights of heroizing and the depths of demonizing that he has been successfully used to embody. Swiftly positioned as a martyr following his death on the beach of Kealakekua Bay in Hawai’i during the third voyage in 1779 (Sivasundaram, 2004, pp 201-229), the symbolic role afforded to Cook in eighteenth-century British accounts transformed the man into a metonym for a European endeavour to make the world knowable, presenting the pursuit of knowledge, rather than enabling trade or expanding an empire, as his primary motivation. This depiction of Cook continued with authority well into the twentieth century. Propagated through books, prints, artworks and works of popular culture (Smith, 1992, pp. 225-240), the creation of his reputation has been discussed in detail (See Smith, 1992, pp. 225-231; Williams, 2004, pp. 230-232; pp. McAleer & Rigby, 2018, pp. 201-203). It was enabled and supported by the unprecedented breadth of new data and information that was brought back from Cook’s voyages. From the outset, description of the voyages moved beyond accounts of specific historical events, to frame them in terms of the ‘firsts’ they offered to European knowledge: of land masses, of societies and their cultures, of flora and fauna. In cartographic terms, Cook’s voyages led to the first accurate map of the breadth of the Pacific region, the last area of the world at the time that remained largely unknown in Europe. Cook’s extensive surveying and charting completed the shape of Emma Yandle Introduction Page 14

Australia on world maps, by mapping its Eastern coast for the first time. By circumnavigating New Zealand, he produced the first comprehensive survey of its coastlines. Numerous South Sea islands were placed on the world map with a degree of accuracy for the first time. Of particular significance for eighteenth-century Western geography, his voyages definitively dispelled its most persistent myth: that there was a large southern land to be found at the base of the earth. In so-doing, Cook led the first ships in recorded history to enter the Antarctic circle. Cook’s voyages also brought specific Europeans into contact for the first time with individuals from social groups of specific Pacific islands, whether through making first contact, such as with Hawai’i, or through lengthier contact with the inhabitants of islands where Europeans had previously landed, such as Tahiti. This cross-cultural interaction led to unprecedented movements of individual Pacific islanders, such as the Ra’aitean’s (known in Europe as one of the Society Islands) Tupaia and Mai who joined Cook’s ships on the first and second voyages. Mai became the first Pacific Islander to visit Britain in 1774. Alongside such firsts, Cook’s voyages also heralded the end of the centuries long European project to explore and map the world. When his ships made contact with Hawaii in 1778, it represented a meeting with the last ancient civilization to have developed in isolation from the rest of the world (Thomas, 2003). The breadth of his scientific achievements and hardships endured on such long voyages remain impressive to this day. At the time they were presented in Britain as a distinct source of national pride. With the stirrings of global expansion amongst European nations and accounts of Cook’s persistent and fearless personality, he “provided the material from which a new kind of hero…was fashioned.” (Smith, 1992, p. 225), one who could be called upon to embody the collective achievement of the voyages he commanded, and the country he hailed from14. Few figures have been more thoroughly reassessed by post-colonial thinking than Cook. With the rise of identity politics in 1970s, with its focus on the self-determination of marginalised groups and their need for cultural representation; to post-colonial theory’s proposition that Western achievements must be understood in relation to their concurrent colonial rule; alongside the activism of Indigenous Pacific communities both outside and inside the museum space15, Cook’s well-documented metonymic usefulness was harnessed for a different purpose. Particularly within the Pacific regions that were subsequently colonized by the British, Cook’s first contact or landings had been used as markers of a foundational, imperial national narrative, and frequently visibly memorialised in public heritage from statues to street names (Williams, 2004, pp. 236-237). As a response in part to this visibility and prevalence, Cook has been harnessed by Indigenous activists as an exemplification of European imperialism16. He has been used to symbolise the devastating impact of

14 Bolton highlights that “One of the notable features of Cook's public fame has always been the focus on him as an individual...Undoubtedly a leader and a man of many striking qualities, his voyages were team efforts in which many individuals collaborated on a single project. The products of the voyages, the written records, paintings and drawings, the collections, were all made by a group of people, not by Cook himself alone...Very commonly, however, Cook is made to stand for the group and the others - the officers, seamen, men of science - are far less well known. The collections made on his voyages are commonly described as Cook Collections, while in fact the objects were acquired by a whole range of expedition members for a whole range of diverse reasons. Indeed, not many objects can be definitively associated with Cook himself. This process of simplification also means that Cook is very commonly made to stand in for all early European exploration in the Pacific.” (Bolton, 2009/2010, p.122) 15 For a general overview of worldwide Indigenous perspectives on engagement and self-representation in current museological practice see (Onciul, 2015). For a detailed Pacific case study, see (McCarthy, 2018) on the reopening of the Aotearoa New Zealand’s national museum in 1998 as the Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand (its Māori title translating to ‘Container of Treasures’). As mandated by a 1992 Act of Parliament, the museum was re-organized to acknowledge and represent Aotearoa New Zealand as a state with two national cultures, placing Indigenous Māori culture on equal footing alongside settler-colonial New Zealand society. 16 The specific appeal of Cook is shown by how he has been deployed by the colonial governments of countries where he did not in fact make first European contact or found new settlements, notably Australia and New Zealand Emma Yandle Introduction Page 15 colonisation on many of the Indigenous Pacific groups that he encountered, ranging from both acts of violence that occurred during his voyages, to the population decimation and settling of Indigenous land that followed them. The consolidation of these legacies into a ‘concept’ of Cook as a shorthand for oppression however blurs the “fine line between Cook the individual and the culture their ancestors inherited in the wake of his vessels” (Smith, 1992, p.240; See also Bolton, 2009/2010). Such critiques of Cook entered mainstream European publications in the latter half of the 20th century (Williams, 2004, pp. 238-243), yet British museums have been slower to reassess how they narrativize Cook17. In contrast to museums in the Pacific region, where settler colonisation has made negotiating their relationship to imperial history more urgent and a part of wider political struggles, there has been less of a sense of urgency within Britain for museums to reconsider the presentation of Cook through their collections. For British museums, he has remained the ‘familiar stranger’ through which Pacific history can be accessed and mediated for a European public (Bolton, 2010, p.123) and surprisingly “[t]he level of interest has not diminished in recent years, despite the discredited status of the imperial ideologies with which Cook was for so long associated.” (Thomas, 2003, p.xx). How Cook’s voyages are displayed in British museums, in comparison to within Pacific institutions, has particular political significance, revealing the extent to which (primarily state-owned) spaces, are able to balance an acknowledgement of Cook’s achievements, with critical scrutiny.

17 The British Museum loaned objects to two exhibitions in the early 2000s that demonstrate the co-existence of both traditional and dialogic approaches to discussing Cook’s voyages. Pacific Encounters. Art & Divinity in Polynesia 1760-1860, ran from 21st May – 13th August 2006 at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich, England, presenting Cook’s voyages as elements of a wider Pacific narrative and, as its title suggests, highlighting contact and meeting of cultures and ideas within the region (see Hooper, 2006). By contrast, James Cook and the Exploration of the Pacific, displayed in the Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany in Bonn from 28th August 2009 - 28th February 2010, describes itself as “a major exhibition dedicated to the great navigator and to the Pacific”, described elsewhere as “the exotic world of the South Seas”, and thus implying a distinctly Eurocentric and romanticized approach to this period in history. (See “Media Release”, 2010). Emma Yandle Chapter One Page 16

ii.) Cook exhibitions in 2018: searching for the encounters

Contrary to Adams’ prediction of limited museological responses to the 250th anniversary of his first voyage, as already introduced four exhibitions opened in Britain in 2018, that directly linked themselves to Cook’s voyages. All specifically claimed to be ‘marking’ the anniversary in their marketing materials.18 Despite the similarity of their topic, these exhibitions varied hugely in all other concerns. Although all organised by large institutions located in the capital, with considerable status and renown in both the domestic and international museum field, they ranged across state and private institutions19. Beyond this they differed in the genre of their collection on display; whether as displays of the museum’s permanent collection or temporary exhibitions of primarily loaned material; the size and design of their exhibition spaces; and the role given to Cook’s voyages within their narratives. For clarity, the titles, institutions, dates and curatorial teams of the exhibition are recounted below, in chronological order of their opening:

James Cook: The Voyages British Library, London20

Figure 7. Entranceway of James Cook: The Voyages, 2018. Courtesy of the British Library. Photo by Emma Yandle.

18 “The exhibition marks the 250th anniversary of the Royal Academy, founded in 1768, the same year Captain James Cook set sail on his first expedition to the Pacific on the Endeavour.” (“Oceania Press Release”, 2018); “New major exhibition marks 250 years since James Cook’s ship Endeavour set sail from Plymouth” (“James Cook: The Voyages Press Release”, 2018); “To mark the 250th anniversary of Captain Cook’s first voyage, the British Museum today presents a new exhibition which re-examines the explorer’s relationship with the people of the Pacific.” (“Reimagining Captain Cook Press Release”, 2018); Whilst the press release for Pacific Encounters does not repeat this terminology, in the foreword to a National Maritime Museum publication to coincide with the opening of this new gallery, Director of Royal Museums Greenwich Dr. Kevin Fewster describes the opening of Pacific Encounters as “Marking the 250th anniversary in 2018 of the departure of this momentous voyage.” (Fewster, 2017, p.7) 19 The British Museum, British Library and National Maritime Museum (as part of Royal Museums Greenwich) are state owned institutions with a permanent collection that is free to enter, and an offering of both free and charged exhibitions. The Royal Academy of Arts is an independent charity, with some free displays of its permanent collection, but a core focus on its temporary exhibitions with a charged entry. 20 Temporary exhibition: 27th April – 28th August 2018 Curators: William Frame (Head of Modern Archives and Manuscripts) and Laura Walker (Archivist and Curator). Charged admission. For press release, see Appendix A. It should be noted that a much smaller photography exhibition was programmed from 6th July – 23rd September 2018, to crossover with the main exhibition’s run. Entitled Tūhuratanga – Voyages of Discovery: Photographs by Crystal Te Moananui-Squares, and curated by the artist herself, Crystal Te Moananui-Squares, in collaboration with Māori producer Jo Walsh. Twenty photographic portraits were displayed, to “document[s] people of Te-Moananui-a- Kiwa (the Pacific Ocean) living in the United Kingdom today” and positioned as “ a response to the historical context and interpretation of images, objects and text currently on display in James Cook: The Voyages (Tūhuratanga – Voyage of Discovery Press Release, 2018). Laura Walker, curator of James Cook: The Voyages explained that the exhibition developed out of a consultation with Jo Walsh, and that the space was fully curated by the external community group. She described it as “a really important part of the exhibition to do that, but it was limited by its location”, in a small space on the second floor. The exhibition, however, isn’t referenced within James Cook: The Voyages and is physically positioned quite far away from the main exhibition space. It is consequently likely that many visitors were not aware of its existence. Emma Yandle Chapter One Page 17

Pacific Encounters National Maritime Museum, Royal Museums Greenwich, London21

Figure 8. Entranceway of Pacific Encounters, 2018. Photo by Emma Yandle.

Oceania Royal Academy of Arts, London22

Figure 9. Entranceway to Oceania, 2018. Photo by Emma Yandle

Reimagining Captain Cook: Pacific Perspectives The British Museum23

Figure 10. Entranceway of Reimaging Captain Cook: Pacific Perspectives © The Trustees of the British Museum

21 Permanent collection: opened 22nd September 2018. Curators: Sophie Richards (Exhibitions Interpretation Curator), Dr. Katy Barrett (formerly Curator of Art), Dr. Nigel Rigby (formerly Curator of Exploration). Free entrance. For press release, see Appendix B. 22 Temporary exhibition: 29th September – 10th December 2018. Curators: Professor Nicholas Thomas (external: Director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge), Dr. Peter Brunt (external: Senior Lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington) and Dr. Adrian Locke (Senior Curator). Charged entrance. Subsequently travelling to Museé du Quai Branly Jacques Chirac, Paris, 12th March – 7th July 2019. For press release, see Appendix C 23 Temporary exhibition: 29th November 2018 – 4th August 2019. Curators: Dr. Lissant Bolton, (Keeper of Africa, Oceania and the Americas); Dr. Julie Adams (Curator of Oceania), Dr. Gaye Sculthorpe (Senior Curator, Oceania collections), Mary McMahon (PhD student) and Theano Guillaume-Jaillet (Former Director of the Tahiti Museum, visiting research fellow in early 2018). For press release see Appendix D Emma Yandle Chapter One Page 18

The exhibitions’ titles alone provide clues to their different narrative approaches to Cook’s voyages. James Cook: The Voyages at the British Library is a detailed chronological account of the events during Cook’s travels in the Pacific, primarily exhibiting documentation and visual records created on board and on the return to England. In Pacific Encounters, a new permanent gallery at the National Maritime Museum, Cook is displaced as the central subject for the Pacific region itself: its islands, peoples and cultural traditions. The exhibition switches between thematic and chronological presentations of objects, to narrate specific events and moments of encounter between Europeans and Indigenous peoples, across a history of contact of which Cook is a part, but as part of a wider framework of Pacific culture that extends before and after these decisive moments in its history. In Oceania at the Royal Academy of Arts, as its title implies, it is the region that is on display. Cook is introduced at the outset but then entirely de-centralized, as thematic groupings of objects from across the Pacific are displayed, interrupted by works of contemporary art from the Pacific today. Stating its aims in its title, the much smaller Reimagining Captain Cook: Pacific Perspectives pairs an historical account of events from Cook’s voyages, with the ways in which they have been questioned, criticized or extended by contemporary Pacific artists. Their artworks are displayed in cases alongside historic objects that were collected or created during the voyages. However, alongside these differences in content, focus, and curatorial approach, there are noticeable consistencies in the choice of language the exhibitions use to discuss the meetings of Europeans and Indigenous peoples on Cook’s voyages. Interactions between Europeans and Indigenous groups are primarily referred to as ‘encounters’. The term is both a linguistic choice and a thematic element in the exhibitions. It is observable to varying degrees across the exhibitions, from structuring the whole exhibition around encounters (Pacific Encounters); to a thematic room (Oceania) or thematic cases (Reimagining Captain Cook: Pacific Perspectives); to its discussion within audiovisual interventions and text (James Cook: The Voyages). Language that reflects this point of view is also included across object labels and in accompanying catalogues and publications. What might at first appear to be merely transparent, politically neutral choice of language for discussing contested periods of history, the word and the idea of an encounter itself, has a far from neutral meaning in the fields of anthropology and history. To allow for the complexity of cultural interactions, new terms have gained traction across academic disciplines for describing the meetings that occurred between European explorers and Indigenous peoples during voyages of exploration. This is tied to a wider movement within anthropology that gained traction in 1970s and 80s, to “decolonize the discipline by recognizing the colonial politics that underpin our theoretical categories and ethnographic practice” (Faier & Rofel, 2014, p.364). From the impact of early racial science on the conception of ethnic groups,24 to the presentation of Indigenous cultures as a-temporal and static,25

24 This is particularly evidenced in the Pacific through the division of the islands into geographic and ethnic regions in 1831, by French explorer Jules-Sébastien-César Dumont d’Urville. His proposal of island groupings termed Polynesia, Micronesia, Malaysia and Melanesia, was devised based on an hypothesis of shared ethnicity within groups of islands, in which the darkness of Islanders’ skin was a primary differentiator. Despite originating out of discredited racial science, such geographical divisions are still commonly used today. 25 The late 20th century saw criticism of anthropology’s use of what has been termed the ‘ethnographic present’. This term was used to refer to anthropological writings that adopt the viewpoint of “the present which existed in the traditional past and not the period when the ethnographer was in the field” (McKnight 1990, p. 58). As Sanjek elaborates, “[s]uch writing conveys none of the independence of rule and action experienced in the ethnographer's own world, nor does it present behaviour as contingent, situational or deliberate…The ethnographic present…functions to take the society so described out of the timestream of history in which ethnographers and their own societies exist.” (Sanjek, 2013, p. 86). Broadly speaking, it refers to a trend of earlier anthropology to focus on the perceived traditional life of Indigenous groups, at the expense of their present-day reality. Emma Yandle Chapter One Page 19 assumptions within anthropology have impacted the ways in which these moments of contact were perceived. In the arena of cultural interaction, first contact was initially defined primarily as a ‘fatal impact’ whereby the force of European culture would inevitably cause the destruction of Indigenous ways of life. Within the Pacific region this idea achieved mainstream attention through Alan Moorhead’s work on Australia (1966). Whilst the devastating effects of contact in many instances is undeniable and an important aspect of this history, recent anthropologists have strongly criticised the fatal impact theory. They argue it continues the same one-sided view of agency that was present in European exploration writings from the outset, with their persistent talk of ‘discovering’ lands and peoples. Contemporary anthropology has sought to replace this with a two-sided notion – of ‘encounters’ or ‘contact’ and ‘entanglement’ - between European and Indigenous groups. In works that return to the primary sources from Cook’s voyages to reassess the moments of encounter, the idea of the encounter has been used to reframe historical events, creating a history “in which Europeans and Pacific Islanders alike were historical agents”. (Salmond, 1991, p. 12) Within Pacific scholarship, the work of Marshall Sahlins’ (1985) was an influential example of how returning to encounters can alter a mainstream account of history. Sahlins proposed a radical reassessment of the circumstances of Cook’s death, which occurred at the hands of Indigenous Hawaiians on the third voyage in 1779, on the beach of Kealakekua Bay. Traditionally positioned as an example of Indigenous violence and aggression (albeit it in response to Cook’s attempts to kidnap their ruling chief Kalaniʻōpuʻu to force the return of a small cutter vessel the Islanders had stolen), Sahlins’ argues it was in fact due to the ways in which Cook’s arrival accidentally coincided with an Hawaiian religious cycle, the festival of Lono. Although this argument has in turn been subject to criticism26, it was a seismic demonstration of the new perspective required of anthropology, in which Indigenous world views must be centrally placed to move it away from being fundamentally “a discourse of alterity” (Thomas, 1991, p.3), defined by Europeans. Sahlins’ reassessment of Cook was an early move towards allowing Indigenous cultures to inhabit the subject position of history. In a ground-breaking research project published in 1991 as Two Worlds: First Meetings Between Māori and Europeans, 1642-1772, Anne Salmond brought together for the first time British and Māori accounts of early encounters in New Zealand. In the preface to her work she directly addressed the surprising lack of collaborative scholarship27. Written almost thirty years ago, the anniversary of Cook’s first voyage offers an apt occasion to reflect upon the extent to which Salmond’s approach has been embraced by museums, through their exhibitions.

26 Gananath Obeyesekere strenuously contested Sahlins’ claims in his publication The Apotheosis Of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking In The Pacific (1992), initiating a long-standing debate between the two academics and their respective camps. For a summary of the key areas of debate see Borofsky, 1997. 27 “After two hundred years or more of shared history in New Zealand, one might have thought that scholars would have considered each of these interpretative traditions, if only to set them to question each other, but by and large this has not happened.” (1991, p.12)

Emma Yandle Chapter One Page 20

iii.) Methodology and theoretical underpinnings

I will rely on two core theoretical concepts for this analysis: that objects have situationally-contingent meanings, and that exhibitions can be usefully understood as texts and their interpretative strategies elucidated through the tools of narrative theory. Objects have been termed ‘mutable mobiles’ by Bruno Latour, to reflect their ability to have a fixed material form, whilst also being mobile and portable. On a semantic level, theorists have argued for objects to be seen as animate and mobile, rather than “pure tools of representation” (Appadurai, 2016). His landmark collection The Social Life of Things calls for a focus on this mobility and mutability of possible meanings, by analysing objects’ – used here to refer to the breadth of material culture and artworks - entanglement in wider social and economic systems, showing that they can usefully be viewed as having a ‘social life’ and a ‘cultural biography’ (Kopytoff, 1986, pp.64-94). Appadurai argues that, although from a theoretical point of view human actors encode things with significance, from a methodological point of view it is the things-in-motion that illuminate their human and social context (2016). These tenets will be appropriate for studying how objects can reflect the encounters – moments of transition – that they were often a part of on Cook’s voyages. Equally they are useful for understanding the change in an object’s use value and generic category when it moves from Indigenous to European worlds, and further to become a part of a museum collection. A focus on the instability of objects’ meanings, alongside their constant material properties, led Tony Bennett to adapt Latour’s definition to look at museum objects as ‘mutable immobiles’ (2012, p.148) or ‘mutable immutable mobiles’ (2016). A key issue of the ‘new museology’ is the “situated and contextual rather than inherent” (Macdonald, 2011, p.3) meaning of museum objects. The ordering and shaping force of an exhibition can thus highlight or confer new meanings upon an object through inclusion in its structure (Vergo, 1989, p.46). Bennett’s conception of ‘mutable immutable mobiles’, acts as a framework within which one can analyse and compare the constant material properties of an object and the changing, functions and effects afforded it through inscription in a museum setting28. This setting can range from the interpretation directly framing the object, to the layers of meaning inscribed by its location in a specific institution, as well as the wider discursive environment of museology, “the circulation of concepts across museums and affiliated disciplinary networks of the wider forms of political agency that are brought to bear upon them.” (Bennett, 2016). Nicholas Thomas describes this re-inscription as “[c]reative recontextualization and indeed reauthorship” through which objects “become and are becoming different” (Thomas, 1991, p.5), as they are moved, reframed or drawn into new discourses. A focus on the social transformations of an object enables the disruption of an essentialist idea that the identity of an object is held within its material form, rather than its conceptual configuration (Thomas, 1991, p.28). Rather, “[a]s socially and culturally salient entities, objects change in defiance of their material stability. The category to which a thing belongs, the emotion and judgment it prompts, and the narrative it recalls, are all historically reconfigured.” (Thomas, 1991, p.125). It is the tension between the signification of the object and the museological techniques and frameworks brought to bear upon it through an exhibitionary structure; and the

28 Both Bennett’s case studies and Latour’s original example of a mutable mobile interestingly relate to the Pacific region: Latour uses the example of explorers’ desire to bring back a physical record of their new knowledge of the Pacific, as the motivation for a mutable mobile – a map – to be created. (see Latour, 1981, pp.5-6) Emma Yandle Chapter One Page 21 tension between museological discourse and the affiliated disciplinary networks of anthropology and history, that make this a fruitful mode of analysis for my study of encounters. The situational meanings of objects are thus brought to the fore by the structure or context within which they are placed in an exhibition. The exhibitionary structure, rather than any “pure representation” inherent in an object itself, is the crucial element in controlling how visitors respond to and perceive them, for “[t]he same material can be made to tell quite different stories not just by means of captions or information panels or explanatory texts but by the sequence in which works are displayed, the very way the material itself is divided up, above all the physical and associative context.” (Vergo, 1989, p.54). The implications of multiple objects brought together that is occasioned by exhibitions, has led to them being described through the language of literary theory as “elements of a narrative” (Vergo, 1989, p.46). History museums conventionally offer a narrative directly to visitors, however from this theoretical standpoint, narratives are present regardless, precisely when objects are placed within an interpretative structure. This has led to a focus on the ways in which an exhibition’s framework can “construct and convey meaning” through its ability to “feature and focus” objects and ideas, whether aiming for synthesis or for rupture (Greenberg, Ferguson, Nairne, 1996, p.1, p.2). Exhibitions can consequently be viewed as texts – another system in which elements are arranged in relation to a whole structure. Mieke Bal has expanded on how the terminology of literary theory can be useful for analysing museums. She describes the syntax of exhibitions as their “orderly or systematic arrangement of parts or elements” in which the placement of objects in relation to each other creates meaning as do lines of a text: “[c]onnections between things are syntactical; they produce, so to speak, sentences conveying propositions” (Bal, 1996, p.87). Bal describes works as ‘collocating’ when they are thoughtfully placed together on a wall, which “breaks the autonomy of each and states their connections for the viewer” (1996, p.87). Within museum spaces, the role played by the visitor in bringing narratives to life, combines the temporal nature of reading a text, with the spatial element of moving through the physical location of the exhibition, which Bal terms the ‘walking tour’, arguing that it “must be taken seriously as a meaning-making event” (1996, p.96). This highlights the tension between the “reading attitude” (1996, p.95) that an exhibition seeks to promote to its visitors, and the degree to which this is or isn’t engaged with by them: visitors are understood to play an active role in the meaning-making process. In lieu of an ‘ideal visitor’, the design and layout of an exhibition can be used to exert influence and guide how the exhibition is read by a visitor, or in turn purposefully use these techniques to undermine a specific route through its narrative, and space.

Emma Yandle Chapter One Page 22

iv.) Structure of the work

My analysis will go on to explore the ways in which specific objects with strong links to encounters in the four exhibitions in question are narrativized. This will explore the extent to which the encounter is highlighted as a salient feature of the object, the techniques used to do so and how these engage with or overlook anthropological thinking around encounters. Together I will analyze how the overall effect contributes to or diminishes the extent to which the exhibitions and museums act as contact zones. It will question the extent of the gap between anthropological scholarship, curatorial thinking and museological practice. The discourse of ‘encounters’ - “engagements across [emphasis added] difference” (Faier & Rofel, 2014, p.364) allows for agency, motivations and influence from both European and Indigenous groups, and fragments authoritative narratives of history into multiple, interacting viewpoints, where outcomes are relational. Approaching Cook’s voyages through the idea of ‘encounter’ is thus both a theoretical approach, and one that places a renewed focus on material evidence, seeking to supplement it where it is lacking. The rise in reference to ‘encounter’ in museum interpretation, implies a symbiotic relationship between anthropological thinking and museological practice29. This work will explore the extent to which the linguistic deployment of ‘encounter’ is borne out as a perspective in these exhibitions, towards a specific subset of objects related to Cook’s voyages: artworks both historic and contemporary that purport to visualize first contact and early meetings between the European crew and different Indigenous Pacific Islanders. It will analyse how these objects are used to narrativize encounters on Cook’s voyages, and the role that encounters are afforded within the exhibitions’ wider narratives, by comparing their material content and interpretative strategies. Is the linguistic trend of ‘encounter’ also used as a structuring principle or discursive strategy for looking at Cook’s voyages? Is it borne out in the interpretation, the exhibition’s structure and the point of view it present? This work will begin by establishing the stake and influence that museums have in the public representation of Cook’s voyages, by establishing the organic link between the voyages, the collections they brought forth, and museum collections. From here it will expand on the link between anthropological and museological thinking, showing how the idea of encounters has been borne out by recent museum practice relating to Cook (Chapter One). It will then analyse the visual representations of European-Indigenous encounters during Cook’s voyages, comparing the narrative use of eighteenth-century depictions of these events (Chapter Two), followed by the exhibitions’ response to the redeployment of European iconography of encounter by contemporary Indigenous artists (Chapter Three). The role of contemporary art within these exhibitions will be compared, to reflect on its inclusion as an interpretative technique to compensate for a lack of material evidence, by representing historic encounters from Indigenous points of view. Together, this will allow for conclusions to be drawn on the extent to which exhibitions on Cook’s voyages in 2018 afford a role to the specific encounters between European and Pacific Islanders; and the ways in which encounters are used by British museums as part of a wider perspective for framing Pacific history. At the outset, it is interesting to note the words of Nicholas Thomas, co-organizer of the three year-long Artefacts of Encounter project, in which the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of

29 The word ‘encounter’ is now commonly used in the titles of exhibition that discuss European voyaging and the early cultural meetings. The V&A’s 2004 exhibition entitled Encounters: the Meeting of Asia and Europe 1500-1800, displayed in London from 23rd September – 5th December, is a landmark example. (See Jackson & Jaffer, 2004) Emma Yandle Chapter One Page 23

Cambridge sought to thoroughly research and establish the provenance of its ‘Cook collection’ (Thomas eds., 2016, pp.17-28). In the subsequent publication, that revealed the results of this provenance and historical research, Thomas turns to considering the ways in which the details of the encounters that surround these artefacts, could be represented by their interpretation in exhibitions. Thomas describes in detail what could be termed an ‘encounter perspective’, setting the precepts of uncertainty, multiplicity, history and presence for exhibiting cross-cultural encounters (full quotation included in the footnote).30 The opinions of Thomas, an eminent figure within both Pacific anthropology and museology, are of particular note for the role he played within the exhibitions I will go on to discuss. Himself at the forefront of both anthropological and museological theory, are his precepts for exhibiting encounters borne out both in the practice with which he is involved and wider curatorial treatments of this period in history?

30 “One precept might therefore be that we should exhibit uncertainty. We should also always make it clear that the great and singular things we display have meant different things to different people. So a second precept might be that we exhibit multiplicity. A third should reflect the vital and formative character of the encounters through which these objects passed into the hands of mariners, scientists and other Europeans: they are representative, not of cultures, but of emerging, evolving, chronically contested relationships. In other words, we exhibit history. Finally, these are things that remain potent and alive, in different ways, for people today. Above all, they remain alive for the Islanders, from whom we have learned so much through our intersecting interests and varied collaborations – some short-term in nature, others considerably more sustained. Most vitally, we exhibit presence.” (Thomas, 2016, p.261)

Emma Yandle Chapter One Page 24

I. The rise of encounters in contemporary museum practice

i.) The material legacy of Cook’s voyages and their entry into museum collections

Cook’s voyages are specific a concern for museums because of the sheer quantity of material heritage collected during them that has made its way into public collections. These objects, and museums in turn are thus influential sites for the public representation of Pacific history.31 This encompasses both objects that originated from Pacific countries that were collected during the voyages, and European artworks and written accounts produced during or after the voyages. The extraordinary nature of Cook’s travels within the field of so-called voyages of discovery, is due to the wealth of information and knowledge that they brought back to Europe. From the outset the voyages and their reception have been intimately linked to – and accessed through – objects. The extent of the output in material culture is in part a result of the overlapping interests of the stakeholders of the voyages, which included the British Admiralty, Royal Geographic Society, accompanying naturalists, scientists and artists. Charts, surveys, geographic and astronomical observations were recorded in journals, logs, maps and later in printed publications. With the inclusion of the wealthy amateur naturalist Joseph Banks on the first voyage, a precedent was set of meticulously documenting all forms of natural life encountered in the Pacific, that was continued through all three. The first voyage alone returned with over a thousand zoological specimens and 30,000 botanical specimens, including 1,400 species that had never been previously recorded (Chambers, 2016, pp.6-7). Alongside these were detailed landscape scenes; drawings of animals and plants; anthropological drawings, paintings of social groups and specific Indigenous people encountered; objects gained through trade, as gifts or purposefully collected; and documentary records, both textual and visual, of moments deemed important during the voyages including landings and meetings. Objects created during the voyage were subject to repurposing back in Britain for wider public presentation. The paintings of William Hodges, artist for the second voyage, were sent back to Britain to be exhibited at the Free Society of Artists Exhibition in 1774, over a year before Cook’s second voyage returned. Both Hodges and the third voyage artist John Webber, had paintings they created during the voyages exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts, which was itself established the same year that Cook first departed onboard the Endeavour (McAleer, 2018, pp.153). From the return of the first voyage, drawings and paintings were engraved as illustrations for both official and unofficial publications about Cook’s voyages; these depictions became the over-riding visuals of the Pacific in Britain, due to their wide dispersal and ease of access by the general public.32 The variety, wide generic mix and scale of the objects collected from Cook’s first voyage onwards, created a new template for expeditions to return with material evidence and detailed accounts of everything they encountered (Chambers etc., 2016, p.6). Objects resulting from Cook’s voyages range across many different ‘genres’ of collection and institutions today - natural history, artistic, archival and the previously termed ‘ethnographic’, now more frequently as ‘world culture’ collection. Their dispersal into national collections across Europe was in many cases a contemporary process, and organically linked with the development of national museums in Britain.

31 See Thomas, 1991; Hetherington & Morphy, 2010; Chambers, 2016; Thomas, Adams, Lythberg, Nuku & Salmond, 2016; McAleer & Rigby, 2018) 32 For a full account of the visual and textual output of the three voyages see McAleer & Rigby, 2018, pp.146-160. Emma Yandle Chapter One Page 25

Whilst it was common for travellers, particularly within the so-called Enlightenment era, to collect and create documentation, the voyages led by Cook are notable for how they fed into the collection of national galleries and museums, that were at the time only decades old and not yet firmly demarcated, rather than having long histories in private collections.33 After their collection, many Pacific objects were immediately seen not merely as personal trophies, but as objects specifically for public display, as part of early museum presentations. Museums were set up specifically to display Pacific material culture, such as a “Museum of the South Seas” in the London residence of Joseph Banks on his return from the first voyage in 1771. The series of donations of voyage material to the British Museum (founded in 1753) by Banks and others throughout the 1770s, led to the opening of the South Seas Room in 1780, the first gallery dedicated to a specific geographic area, rather than the ‘cabinet of curiosities’ display style that was used elsewhere in the museum (See Bolton, 2010, p.134).34 The room remained hugely popular with the public well into the 19th century. The other major, although short-lived, museum of the late 18th century, the Leverian Museum, transferred to London in 1775, similarly laid out its collection by geographical or cultural grouping. Its founder’s acquisition of artefacts collected on Cook’s voyages has been credited with playing a great part in the museum’s popularity (McAleer, 2017, pp.166-67). The mobility of collections and the development and codification of national museums and galleries, has resulted in collections relating to Cook and the Pacific, across different ‘genres’ of museum and gallery in Britain. 35 These so-called Cook collections played an important role in the foundation of early museum collections, and objects relating to him and his voyages continue to be acquired by museums in Britain and beyond. Consequently, they have a long history of being displayed and interpreted as museum objects. As outlined, European art of the Pacific and Pacific material culture has had a long history of public presentation. Alongside books and popular culture, museums and galleries have mediated the reality of Pacific cultures and societies to the British public since the eighteenth century. Objects and artworks were used to create a romanticized vision of Cook’s voyages and the Pacific environment and peoples he met, acting as a foundation for pervasive cultural myths - of both paradise and savagery - that still influence the presentation of this vast region in Europe today.36 A shift in museological presentation of the voyage collections demonstrates how the mutability of their meaning is linked to wider social transformations. In eighteenth century Britain they were valued as material evidence of the cultures of a previously unknown-region. Cook as a personality, and in particular ideas of the martyrdom of his death, were also given an important position in museum displays: the Leverian museum and the South Seas Room both described their displays as dedicated to his memory (McAleer, 2017, p.164, p.167). However, as veneration of Cook increased throughout the nineteenth and the first half of twentieth century, alongside the rampant expansion of the British empire, Pacific objects were often re-

33 For a summary of how collections were dispersed into British and international museum collections see Hooper, 2006, pp. 69-70; Bolton, 2010, pp.131-135; McAleer & Rigby, 2018, pp.162-167. 34 The British Museum describes the return of Cook’s third voyage in 1780 and the subsequent creation of the South Seas Room as affecting a change in the museum’s display style. The prior displays of ethnographic and antique objects across their collections, in a Cabinet of Curiosities style, was for the first time exchanged for a purely ethnographic display, in which only the material culture of the Pacific was presented together. (“History of the Collection and Department”, n.d, paragraph two) 35 An expansive accounts of the movement of collection items into different institutions and private hands is offered by McAleer, 2018, pp.162-167. Today, significant collections of Pacific material culture believed to originate for Cook’s voyages are also displayed in the Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology, University of Cambridge; Pitt River’s Museum, University of Oxford; Christchurch College, University of Oxford; Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, University of Glasgow. The documentary, print and artistic records associated with Cooks’ voyages are held in the collection of the British Library; and the National Maritime Museum also holds voyage records, alongside a collection of Pacific material culture, and artworks previously in the collection of the Royal Admiralty. 36 For the origin of Pacific mythology see Smith, 1992; Kahn, 2003 takes Tahiti as a case study for tracing the entanglement of mythology and reality in today’s presentation of the Pacific Emma Yandle Chapter One Page 26 contextualised by museum displays as evidence that could reveal Cook and his voyages, as much or more than they could the Pacific itself. As empire became a defining feature of British society and source of national pride, accounts show objects being presented to stimulate inward reflection on the historic successes of Britain on the world stage, rather than opening up and presenting the history of the Pacific. McAleer describes the early displays of Cook material at the National Maritime Museum, when it opened in 1937, as “more closely connected with [Cook’s] personal story than with the wider geographical, political and social contexts in which his travels were taking place.” (2017, pp.218-219): objects were typically labelled in relation to Cook, as his possessions, or loosely tied to specific voyages. This national museum of maritime history itself has its origins in the collection and exhibition of paintings in the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich, whose sumptuous Painted Hall was used as a gallery space, chronologically offering a visual narrative of British maritime prowess through paintings of great naval heroes. Objects and museums’ have thus long played a significant role in how Cook’s voyages are presented to the British public and been afforded a role within a wider narrative of national history and identity. Such transformations in the ‘social life’ of Cook voyage collections, as they have been redeployed by museum presentations across the centuries, demonstrates the entanglement of their meaning with the wider preoccupations of society. In the 21st century, with national conversations around diversity and inclusion central to British politics, the mutable meanings of these collections, enables the same objects to be used to discuss different topics. Increasingly, they are presented in relation to the encounters from which they were collected.

Emma Yandle Chapter One Page 27

ii.) From discovery to encounter, shifts in anthropology

Since the 1970s there have been meaningful changes in the anthropological treatment of early cultural interaction in the Pacific. Prior interpretations of contact as ‘fatal impact’ “have often been criticized for a tendency to postulate a dynamic European culture in contact with a vulnerable and unadaptive Indigenous one.” (Calder, Lamb & Orr, 1999, p.16). Critiques of this representation have consequently returned to specific historical moments of contact to analyse the source material available from both European and Indigenous points of view, and supplement this with contemporary understandings of, and input from, the Indigenous social groups in question. This return to specificity and an examination of contact within its spatial environment and historical context, has led anthropologists to draw very different conclusions on the dynamics at play, and the motivations and agency of both sides. An observable trend has emerged for discussing this new framing of Indigenous/voyager interaction, described through language that emphasizes its relational, rather than oppositional, dynamics: as contact (Pratt, 1991), entanglement (Thomas, 1991) and most frequently, and within the Pacific region, as encounters.37 Approaching these moments as an encounter, rather than impact, has drawn a number of broadly observable conclusions. These may be summarised as the following: the outcomes of an encounter are not predetermined; Indigenous peoples also display agency and distinct motivations within moments of encounter; and that encounters should be understood within the context of the specific environment - the place or ‘zone’ -in which they take place. Arguments for the unpredictable nature of an encounter’s outcomes are a direct retort to the assumptions of Indigenous peoples as passive recipients of contact, which would cause an inevitable process of cultural erosion, that was proposed by the fatal impact theory. Whilst disease, violence and eradication of traditional ways of life are all too common consequences of contact that should be highlighted within historical narratives, it has been argued these afterlives were not inherent in the moment of encounter itself (see Campbell, 2003)38. The unpredictability of these specific social situations is due to the mix of accessibility and inaccessibility of the two groups to each other, where cultural assumptions may or may not be borne out, “without guarantee – due to the unrehearsed nature of the event” (Regard, 2009, pp.3-4). Adjectives commonly used in anthropological texts to describe encounters range across ‘uncertain’, ‘contingent’, ‘ambivalent’, ‘complex’ and ‘unpredictable’. Within Pacific history, reassessment of early encounters was a result of a return to European source materials, that actually show record voyagers grappling with how to understand the actions and meanings of the people they met. As such, they are filled with inconsistencies of response and accounts of encounters that were deemed both successful and unsuccessful for the explorers. Contact on Cook’s voyages ranged from extended stays and relationships with communities – such as on Tahiti during the first voyage - to Indigenous peoples withdrawing from an interaction or violently opposing it – as with the Gweagal people in Australia. In these confusing situations that did not conform to European experiences, “knowledge systems must have been challenged, frames of meaning-making disrupted…postures undermined, positions reversed, and identities transformed” (Regard, 2009, p.4). In Discovering Cook’s Collections, Morphy & Hetherington argue that it is a logical misunderstanding to treat the colonial legacies of these Pacific encounters as an inherent part of the meetings

37 Notable works include Salmond, 1991; Campbell, 2003; Regard, 2009; Patel, 2013. 38 An important exception to this statement is the spread of airborne diseases such as measles and typhoid, that were transmitted to Islanders during their first and subsequent meetings with Europeans. These had devastating effects on local populations that lacked immunity to them. The infection of Indigenous peoples through encounters with voyagers is discussed in Chapter Three of this work. Emma Yandle Chapter One Page 28 themselves, as if a future inheritance was conceived in these moments, for “[w]hen they first met, they were both in the same time-world and they may have imagined futures in which they would continue to interact with each other in such a space.” (2016, p.vi). Subsequent colonisation is seen as a “breach in time”, that has been over-emphasized in the analysis of the specific encounters themselves. As Thomas has argued, “Cultural differences must thus be acknowledged and interpreted, but should not occasion a kind of writing in which tribal people inhabit a domain completely separate from our own.” (1991, p.8) Scholarly analysis of the dynamics of encounters in the Pacific has demonstrated their transformative nature as experienced by both sides, providing clear evidence that Indigenous peoples “followed agendas as complex and various as the voyagers who encountered them” (Calder, Lamb & Orr, 1999, p.17). The work of Greg Dening (1980), Nicholas Thomas and Anne Salmond in narrating this period of history, has taken the experimental approach of combining European and Indigenous accounts of meeting. For European/Māori meetings on Cook’s voyages, Salmond has collected evidence ranging from written texts to oral histories from both perspectives, to be viewed side by side, with an aim “to respect the perspectives of both sides, while taking the narratives of neither side for granted” (1992, p.12). By holding in tension the multiplicity of subjective experiences, Salmond’s approach acts as a counter to the binaries of ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ that have been pivotal to the development of post-colonial theory. Her work can be read as proposing that parties can shift between these categories, inhabiting them at different moments, undermining any essentialist readings in favour of viewing these categories, as Clifford has expressed, as “matters of power and rhetoric, rather than as essence” (1988, p.14). A focus on encounters is thus demonstrated both in the content of recent anthropological work and as a theoretical lens through which to view history. In their analysis of cultural encounters, Hallam & Street describe this as proposing “genuinely dialogic, multidirectional and polyphonic perspectives” (2000, p.1) in the narrativizing of history. How then have museums used the consistent material legacy – the collections of objects – of these encounters with Indigenous peoples on Cook’s voyages, to reflect the features of encounter defined by anthropological thinking: polyphony, contingency, partiality and shared agency? One approach has been to liken the museum space, with its authority and representative weight, to the spaces where these early encounters played out and to use the flux of their dynamics to structure and devise museum interpretation.

Emma Yandle Chapter One Page 29

iii.) Museums and the contact zone

Anthropology has paid close attention to the spatial environments in which encounters such as those on Cook’s Pacific voyages took place. This spatial aspect was influentially termed ‘the contact zone’ by Mary Louise Pratt, used to “refer to social spaces where cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power” (1991, p.34). Her terminology sought to replace the older term ‘colonial frontier’, which she highlights as “grounded within a European expansionist perspective” for “the frontier is a frontier only with respect to Europe.” (Pratt, 2008/1992, p.8). In contrast, she argued that the concept of a contact zone highlighted the co-existence in a moment in time and physical space, of peoples who previously were separated by great geographic distances and historical circumstances. A ‘contact perspective’ would consequently “emphasize[s] how subjects are constituted in and by their relations [emphasis added] to each other” (Pratt, 2008/1992, p.8), treating meetings of European travelers and Indigenous peoples “not in terms of separateness or apartheid, but in terms of copresence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices” (Pratt, 2008/1992, p.8). Anthropology has long exerted an influence over museology39, but a purposeful cross-over of ideas concerning museum displays and representation is demonstrated by James Clifford’s configuration of the museum – another sort of social space – itself as a contact zone (1997). Clifford contrasts the border and transitional spaces where early Indigenous/European voyager encounters took place – such as the beaches and the shallow waters of Pacific islands and landmasses – with the traditional configuration of the museum as a cultural centre and seat of authority. He however argues for bringing these cultural experiences that literally occur on the margins, into this museal centre, as a political act that serves to undermine any central presentation of authority (Clifford, 1997, p.213). Clifford justifies conceiving of the museum space as a contact zone, through the diversity of museum collections and the potential histories they can narrate: they too “increasingly work the borderlands between different worlds, histories and cosmologies” (1997, p.212). For museums to act as contact zones they must become “places of hybrid possibility and political negotiation, sites of exclusion and struggle” (1997, p.213), through the content they present and their interpretative frameworks. By such an approach they may exhibit the complexity of encounter and contact itself. Clifford questioned what effect this shift in thinking regarding museological authority would have for museum displays, asking “[w]hat would be different if major regional or national museums loosened their sense of centrality and saw themselves as specific places of transit, intercultural borders, contexts of struggle and communication between discrepant communities? What does it mean to work within the entanglements [emphasis added] rather than striving to transcend them?” (1997, p.213) Having first posed these questions in 1997, the ‘contact zone’ has long been used by museums to describe post-colonially-engaged practice, that collaborates with Indigenous source communities to include or promote

39 Objects collected during voyages of exploration enabled anthropological theories to develop around the categorization of peoples and the features of their societies. Anthropological fieldwork in turn led to the collection of many objects that fed into museum collections. In the nineteenth century museums were founded to specifically display collections that originated from areas now largely under European colonial governance. Many are the direct predecessors of institutions who have now sought to transform themselves into museums promoting ‘world cultures’ (See Herle, 2016). Anthropological theories of the hierarchies of culture exerted direct influence on their categorization and display in museums, such as dioramas in which Indigenous cultures were displayed alongside evidence of European pre- history. The most controversial aspect of the collaboration between the disciplines is the exhibition of living Indigenous peoples in fairs, spectacles, and museum spaces (See Qureshi, 2011).

Emma Yandle Chapter One Page 30 their voices in the presentation of material culture. Few museums with anthropological collections would today justify an exhibition that did not include consultation or collaboration to at least some degree (Boast, 2011, p.56). Whilst being embraced by many museum academics, who see Clifford’s ideas borne out in recent museum practice (See Macdonald, 2003, pp.10-11), the reality of how museums try to act as contact zones has also been criticized. Whilst dialogic interpretation and presentations have been used too good effect in exhibitions, overall in its object selection and curation, “the intellectual control has largely remained in the hands of the museum” (Boast, 2011, p.58). Boast argues that applications of the contact zone to museums have overlooked a key element of Pratt’s definition – also highlighted by Clifford: that of the “highly asymmetrical relations of power” (1991, p.34). A central example in Clifford’s essay on the contact zone - an object consultation between the Portland Art Museum and the Tlingit Elders - clearly demonstrates the incompatibility between the desires and motivations of the objects’ source community and the museum: what the museum saw as a consultation in the traditional sense of acquiring more information about their collection, the Elders saw as an opportunity to respond to historic objects in the present tense, emotionally, triggering stories and connecting to their present-day culture in a much broader way than could be captured in a catalogue entry (1997, pp.188- 194). Boast concludes that museums as contact zones in current practice remain spaces of appropriation: for “[n]o matter how much we try to make the spaces accommodating, they remain sites where the Others come to perform for us, not with us.” (Boast, 2011, p.63). This is due to museums’ fundamental need to reinforce their own need to exist. Contact and collaboration are always to further the museum, whether in its desire to conduct ethical practice, or in response to the existential threat facing colonial-era institutions, such as so-called ethnographic museums, in a supposedly post-colonial world. Thus, although dialogue and collaboration are highlighted within museum interpretation “the ultimate suppression of oppositional discourse is always effected. A pragmatic agonism is provided for all, but only to the degree that it returns to, and reinforces, the academy.” (Boast, 2011, p.64). The possibilities for Clifford’s museum-as-contact-zone, alongside Boast’s critique of its limitations, can be demonstrated through a unique museological case study, in which two museums took different curatorial approaches to exhibiting early Pacific encounters, using a large proportion of the same objects. In 2015 a joint exhibition project was launched between the British Museum and the National Museum of Australia, with the opening of Indigenous Australia. Enduring Civilisation (23rd April – 2nd August 2015) at the British Museum in London. The exhibition was the result of a four years-long research project into the British Museum’s collection, between the museum, the National Museum of Australia, the Australian National University and Aboriginal communities (Sculthorpe, Bolton & Coates, 2015, p.14). This involved research trips by the National Museum of Australia’s curatorial staff and members of Aboriginal communities to the British museum’s stores. Indigenous Australia was followed by another exhibition at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra, entitled Encounters: Revealing Stories of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Objects from the British Museum (27th November 2015 – 28th March 2016)40. The exhibitions had significant crossover in objects, with the 149 Indigenous objects that travelled from the British Museum’s collection to Canberra, constituting around 70% of those that were on display in Indigenous Australia (“International loans”, 2015).

40 The National Museum of Australia also chose to hold a companion exhibition to Encounters entitled Unsettled: Stories Within, in which Indigenous artists Elma Kris, Jonathan Jones, Judy Watson, Julie Gough and Wukun Wanambi created new pieces that “interrogated the circumstances in which these objects [on display in Encounters] were originally collected.” (Cole, 2015).

Emma Yandle Chapter One Page 31

The placing of these objects in two very different curatorial environments allows for a unique opportunity to compare ideas of museological practice towards cultural interaction. Due to the high-profile nature of this joint project, ranging from extensive press coverage to new publications and conferences, it undoubtedly forms the background against which the 2018 exhibitions that I will go on to analyze, were conceived. Importantly for this research, the encounters that took place on Cook’s voyages are afforded an important narrative role and employed as structural elements in both exhibitions. Whilst each exhibition engaged with the idea of encounters in their interpretation and as wider themes, their titles clearly demonstrate the extent to which encounters play a prominent role in the thrust of their narratives. Indigenous Australia sought to demonstrate the length and sophistication of Aboriginal culture and its endurance despite hardship into the present-day. It combined historic objects, collected during encounters from Cook’s voyages onwards, with artworks made by contemporary Aboriginal artists and craftsmen that respond to the iconography of British colonialism, or continue and reinterpret the traditional artistic practices and craftmanship demonstrated by the historic objects. An Aboriginal world view is given a central role in the narration of history through the use of the concept of ‘country’ as the structuring theme of the exhibition, with its specific community meaning of connection to land and place. The exhibition unfolded chronologically and loosely narrated the history of Aboriginal peoples in Australia since first contact was made (Sculthorpe, Bolton & Coates, 2015, pp.14-15). The curator Gaye Sculthorpe, herself a Tasmanian woman with a long history of working with Aboriginal communities,41 thus brought an Aboriginal conception of the world into the centre, a clear act of retort to the conventional Western narration of Australia’s history as narrated in Alan Moorehead’s The Fatal Impact (1966), to which the title Enduring Civilisation could be read as a direct retort. However, beyond this important shift in historical authority, does the exhibition act as a contact zone? Due to high profile and wide press coverage in which issues of repatriation of the British Museum’s Indigenous objects were central, the exhibition space was unavoidably politicised and became a site of contested ideas about ownership and existential questions about whether these objects should be conceived as museum objects at all. The primary curatorial strategy used to stimulate visitors to question contact, its ramifications, and the role of objects within it, was trans-historicism, with the placement of historic and contemporary objects and artworks side by side. This strategy, of activating visitors through unexpected encounters with the collocation of radically different objects, could itself view seen as gesturing towards creating a “social space[s] where cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other” (Pratt, 1991, p.34) In the National Museum of Australia’s exhibition, Encounters, however, as the title suggests, the idea of contact and encounter was given a central and structuring position, pushing the exhibition much further towards Clifford’s conception of a museum as a contact zone. Encounters, as demonstrated by its subtitle: ‘Revealing Stories of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Objects from the British Museum’, explored specific objects through the stories of the encounters during which they changed hands and moved into the British Museum’s collection. This ranged from Cook’s early encounters, to encounters with missionaries, anthropologists and colonial governors in the centuries that followed. Objects were displayed geographically, tied to their source communities and presented alongside contemporary responses and stories from their traditional owners, the result of extensive interviews and consultation with the 27 Aboriginal communities who had cultural ties to the

41 From 2000-2013, Sculthorpe was a member of the National Native Tribunal in Australia, which mediated native title agreements.

Emma Yandle Chapter One Page 32 collection selected for display. This was part of a curatorial strategy to compensate for a lack of records concerning Indigenous sides of the encounter, such as the object’s maker and social life prior to collection, in contrast to the often extensive European records. Oral history was used to overcome these gaps in material evidence, “by privileging the views of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who speak for these objects today, in the exhibition text, in the catalogue and in filmed interviews.” (Coates, 2015, p.18) The encounters of the exhibition’s title were conceived as working on three levels, as laid out by curator Ian Coates in the exhibition’s catalogue. Firstly, there were the narration of historical encounters between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, in which the objects on display changed hands, and relate to the personal histories of their Indigenous makers and European collectors. Secondly, the interpretation reflected on the encounters enabled by the exhibition - which brought these objects to Australia for the first time since their collection - between contemporary Indigenous peoples and the work of their ancestors. These were expressed through responses via oral testimony and contemporary art and craftwork, drawing on the techniques and details of the historic objects (2015, p.18). Finally, the curatorial team highlighted the encounters with these objects and interventions, by visitors to the exhibition who did not share their histories. Coates writes of the exhibition’s structure as encouraging visitors to consider the legacy of the foundational encounters in which these objects changed hands. He places this within the context of contemporary Australian society, politicizing the objects on the display – such as the Gweagal shield, believed to have been collected during the moment of first European contact - as representations of current social and cultural issues, writing “[w]e are all connected to that moment when the Gweagal shield and spears were collected on the shores of Botany Bay in April 1770, and the legacy of that moment is still being resolved.” (2015, p.18) Personal testimony from members of contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander groups, via written quotes on labels and walls, and audio-visual testimony, made up the primary interpretation of the exhibition. Whilst some testimony did reflect on the circumstances of the historical encounter in which the objects changed hands, most frequently community members focused on their individual encounter with this object, through the emotional and moral responses it brought forth for them, or for how it was valuable material evidence of their on-going traditional practices of object-making. This affected a pointed and radical reversal in museum authority: not only by giving Indigenous peoples the authority to animate these objects, but also through the tone of the responses, which were often personally reflective and idiosyncratically expressed. This was part of a distinct curatorial strategy to “bring[ing] the community voice back into the narrative” (Arthur & Withycombe, 2015, p.36), instead of interpreting objects through the third person authority of the museum (See Bennett, 2016, for a discussion on the authority given to Indigenous voices in this exhibition). The exhibition thus pointedly presented itself as a contact zone: by acknowledging the significance of the mobility of these objects in their return to Australia; in undertaking extensive research and collaboration with source communities and inviting their voices into the museum space. As each object was foregrounded with the story of the encounter within which it transitioned from Indigenous object to collection item, alongside contemporary responses from its traditional owners, the curators could be seen to successfully apply Clifford’s contact perspective, to demonstrate how “claims to both universalism and to specificity are related to concrete social locations” (Clifford, 1997, p.213). Emma Yandle Chapter One Page 33

iv.) The Gweagal shield, a mobile artefact of encounter

The extent of the difference in curatorial approach between the exhibitions is evidenced by their spatial and interpretative framing of the same object: the so-named Gweagal shield. In both exhibitions this is the most contentious and politically charged object, but the degree to which its mutable shades of meaning are activated differs in each setting. The shield is believed to have been taken by Cook without consent during the first encounter of his crew and the Aboriginal Gweagal people on the south-east coast of Australia. Today, almost everything about Figure 11. Installation view of Indigenous Australia. The Gweagal shield is shown on the left; Vincent Namatjira’s ‘James Cook - With the Declaration’, 2014, on the right © the shield contested: from Rachael Murphy the violence of its collection, the legality of this, even its relationship to the moment of first European contact.42 It has been subject to calls for repatriation via a years-long campaign led by Aboriginal activist, and descendant of its first owner, Rodney Kelly.43 In Indigenous Australia, the shield is displayed in the ‘Encounters in country’ section, with multiple other objects from the eighteenth century to the present-day, displayed together to present a continuum of responses to contact, across art, photography, craft and science (see Figure 11). The visitor is left to contemplate the relationship between these objects, their labels displayed on the white shelving below encouraging aesthetic interaction before interpretative framing. At the time of publication, it has not been possible to view the object label, nor the text of the audio tour stop for the shield during its display in this exhibition. However, the label used in its permanent

Figure 32. Object label for the Gweagal Shield, in the display case in the ‘Enlightenment Gallery’ of the Enlightenment Gallery of the British Museum, 2017. Photo British Museum, as recorded in 2017, is a likely courtesy of To BP or Not BP.

42 In 2018, Nugent & Sculthorpe published new research on behalf of the British Museum into the provenance of the Gweagal shield and the circumstances of its collection. This casted doubt on the shield’s traditional attribution as the shield recorded by Banks as having been collected during the moment of first contact at Botany Bay in 1770. This research has been criticised by Aboriginal activists as evidence of the Museum’s desire to shore up its claim to ownership, at a time when calls for repatriation of the shield are receiving consistent press coverage. (See Keenan, 2018). 43 Much media coverage of Indigenous Australia focused on requests by Rodney Kelly, ancestor of its claimed original owner the Gweagal warrior Cooman, for the shield to be repatriated by the British Museum (See Daley, 2016). Emma Yandle Chapter One Page 34 barometer for its interpretation within Indigenous Australia (see Figure 12). This ties the shield to the moment of first contact between the British and Aboriginal Australians. Whilst some of the circumstances of this violent first encounter are included, the link between this event and the collection of the shield is obfuscated, hanging as an assumption between the passive, “the shield was dropped on the beach” (The British Museum, 2017) and its appearance here in the museum’s display. Its actual role in the encounter, to which the contestation of its rightful ownership directly relates, is consequently sidestepped. The text concludes by moving from the specifics of the encounter to deploying it as an emblem of European-Pacific encounters at the time: which “were often tense and violent” (The British Museum, 2017).44 In Indigenous Australia, an interpretative strategy employed throughout was to display historic and contemporary quotations alongside objects. On the wall next to the shield’s display case are two quotations: ““All they seem’d to want was for us to be gone”, James Cook, Endeavour Journal, 30 April 1770” and below “it was the beginning of our shared history, everything after Cook was between all of us.”, Vincent Namatjira, James Cook - With the Declaration ”45 (The British Museum, 2015). The syntax between them - the first historic, taken from Cook’s Journal and written the day after first contact was made and the shield most likely collected; the latter contemporary, by an Aboriginal artist whose painting of Cook is also displayed in this section – acknowledges the enforced nature of first contact upon Aboriginal people, but offers a hopeful take that it marked the start a relationship, “our shared history” (Namatjira, 2015). Like the shield’s display, alongside a number of objects that reflect first British-Aboriginal contacts, the juxtaposing quotes do not draw any conclusion, the interpretation avoiding taking a critical stance on the history it presents. In a review of the exhibition, Maria Nugent, who contributed a chapter to its catalogue, close reads this section, analysing the syntax and collocations of the objects above to describe the “various clever and subtle ways, [that] each of these “objects” works to destabilise the meanings embedded in other pieces and to enrich and multiply the possibilities for the interpretation of this history”, before concluding, “[i]t is not possible to convey all of these potential interpretations in the space [emphasis added] of the exhibition, but nonetheless the exhibition provides the resources for interpretative work of this kind.” (Nugent, 2015, paragraph 16). Although the connections she describes are certainly readable within the exhibition as a text, they are not, as she acknowledges, drawn out by the interpretation and made explicit within its narrative and thus conceivably might not be comprehended by visitors. This poses the question of how successfully such a curatorial strategy has presented encounters as dialogic events and how effectively the idea behind polyphony within its displays have been communicated to visitors. The gap between curatorial aims and ideas explicit in the exhibition space has questioned by Lonetree, who considers if “by producing a museum that features exhibits that only curators or those from the academy engaged in postmodern theory can readily appreciate, have we created a new institution of elitism?” (2006, p.642).

44 It is interesting to note that this object label was updated in 2018, following the publication of the British Museum’s new research into the shield (as discussed in footnote no.27), by curator of Indigenous Australia Dr. Gaye Sculthorpe and exhibition contributor Dr. Maria Nugent, that challenged the pervading view that its provenance dates back to this moment of first contact (“Hundreds join unofficial tour”, Note 1 paragraph 2, 2018). The label as of December 2018 describes the shield not as a representation of first contact, but as “the earliest shield from New South Wales in the Museum”. The circumstances of the encounter at Botany Bay in 1770 remain included, however concerning the link between this moment and the object, the updated interpretation states: “It has been suggested, but not confirmed, that this is that shield.” (The British Museum, 2018) 45 Shown in Figure 11 on the far right. Emma Yandle Chapter One Page 35

However, in Encounters, the exhibition design separated objects out for individual contemplation. The Gweagal shield is one of the first objects visitors are directed towards by the exhibition’s layout, isolated in a central position (“Designing Encounters”, 2015). This is one of many interpretative strategies used to present the object as a symbol of pre-contact life, rather than the beginning of life after contact, or Namatjira’s “shared history” (2015). Whilst the shield is tied to the moment of first encounter between Cook and the Gweagal people, the design presents visitors not with a European view of the encounter, but the “tangata whenua view” (Reihana, 2012, p.17): the Indigenous view of the encounter, looking outwards from the beach towards the water. This is achieved by a video projected behind the display case, of the shoreline of Botany Bay today, the site of the first contact and where the shield was collected. It frames the shield spatially within the Figure 13. The Gweagal shield and gararra (fishing spears) collected by Joseph context of this original European-Aboriginal encounter (in Banks in April 1770, as displayed in Encounters, stark contrast to the plain green background used in Indigenous 2015-2016. © Jason McCarthy. National Museum of Australia. Australia, see Figure 11). It is displayed at the height it would have been held by a Gweagal warrior for protection, alongside two fishing spears that were collected at the same time by Cook’s crew. It employs the tropes of a museum diorama – a display style that has been criticised for its stereotyping of Indigenous societies into a static ahistorical display for Western audiences (see Moser, 1999, pp.65-116; Onciul, 2015, pp.54-75) – only to subvert them, with its moving contemporary backdrop and a view of Gweagal pre-contact life firmly within history, on the cusp of an historic first encounter. It offers a view of the past that has clearly been reimagined within the present, eighteenth-century material culture juxtaposed with contemporary video technology, but fills in a gap in the material record of the Indigenous side of this much discussed encounter. The shield’s object label, entitled ‘A first encounter’ (See Figure 14), describes what is known of the interaction between Cook’s crew and the Gweagal people, and the circumstances of the shield’s collection. However, this confident historical account is framed by two personal reflections on the encounter and the shield itself, which serve to destabilise the neutrality of historic facts. These present an emotional response to the shield by a present-day community Elder, and the indecision concerning the encounter expressed by Cook at the time, as quoted in Indigenous Australia.

Figure 14. Object label for the Gweagal Shield The presentation of these quotations here within the object label in Encounters, 2015-2016. Photo by Mark itself – rather than isolated on the wall - and the order in which Burgess. Emma Yandle Chapter One Page 36 they frame the rest of the interpretation, creates a very different impression. The label begins with excerpts from an interview with Shayne Williams, a Dharawal Elder, his words echoing much of the oral testimony within the exhibition, that questions or challenges the location of these objects collected on early voyages in museum collections. This is not simply a case of geographical location in Europe rather than Australia, but a specific existential challenge to their status as museum objects. Williams is quoted as say “In a spiritual sense, it would be good to hold them again, just the way our ancestors held them, even in 1770” (Williams as cited by the British Museum, 2014).46 The exhibition’s interpretation reinforces the impression created by its display, by positioning the shield not as significant for how it “represents the moment of first contact between the British and Aboriginal Australians” as in the British Museum’s object label (2017; see Figure 12), but for the physical link it creates to a pre-contact society (Bennett, 2016). Williams’ quotation introduces the shield as evidence of a rupture in Aboriginal history, rather than a foundational moment in British history. Pre-contact, stemming from an older, uncontaminated narrative of history, has become of political importance to Aboriginal Australians, with its possibility of an alternate future, unfulfilled47. This view of contact is reinforced by the closing quote on the label from Cook, reflecting “All they seem’d to want was for us to be gone” (The National Museum of Australia, 2015). Ending the label on Cook’s reflection, having already introduced a contemporary voice contesting the status of its museum objecthood, conveys a much clearer message than in Indigenous Australia. Here it serves to demonstrate a long history of European awareness of Indigenous resistance to contact, and returns agency to the Indigenous peoples encountered, where mainstream accounts of this history have tended towards their inevitable and willing submission. The shield’s meaning is altered by the different interpretative framing within this exhibition.

46 In the catalogue, more oral testimony is included in relation to the shield, with Dharawal Michael Ingrey highlighting the power for young people today in being able “to say that they’ve actually held something that was held by our mob prior to contact.” (Ingrey as cited by Coates, 2015, p.49). 47 Tony Bennett highlights the new resonance given to Aboriginal museum objects since archaeological excavations and carbon dating techniques in 1961 “established the ‘deep time’ for Indigenous Australians. Indeed, not just a deep time, but the deepest time for any population with a continuous connection to a particular territory. A time, which now assessed at well over 60,000 years, has, in the eyes of Indigenous critique, shallowed out those times of Stone Henge, the Pharaohs, the Pyramids, that had previously been markers of Australia's lack of antiquities.” He notes that “[t]his past prior to contact has acquired a new political valence within Australia”, presenting Aboriginal protests against the 1988 ‘bicentenary’ of Australia’s founding as a clear example. He explains how “scientific validation of Indigenous Australians as heirs to the world's longest continuing culture, has shaped a new politics of Indigenous time that has played a key role in the resocialization of museum artefacts via Indigenous curatorial practices”, such as contesting the use of Cook as a foundational marker in Australian national history (2016). Emma Yandle Chapter One Page 37

vi.) An encounter perspective and the limitations of the contact zone

In Encounters we see the Gweagal shield surrounded by interpretation that fuses the contemporary and the past, the artistic and the political, offering the object up as a site of contested history and ownership. In Indigenous Australia, for all the thoughtful and critical intentions of its curator, museal authority is upheld and the Indigenous voice introduced alongside the shield serves to uphold the coherence of history – “our shared history…between all of us.”, (Vincent Namatjira as cited by The British Museum, 2015), rather than looking “to work within the entanglements” (Clifford, 1997, p.213). Whilst Encounters brings the marginal experiences of the contact zone into the centre, as per Clifford’s theorising, the design and interpretative strategies of Indigenous Australia retain the feel and authority of a museum space. The contrast in technique and focus demonstrated by the comparison of Indigenous Australia and Encounters provides an important framework and discourse against which analysis of the Cook exhibitions in 2018 will be conducted. Encounters was heralded by the museum community as a radical overhaul of museum practice, and its collocation of European and Indigenous perspectives offered the polyphony and discordance that I have demonstrated to be a feature of the very encounters it sought to represent. In the accompanying catalogue, the curatorial team distance themselves from “the voice of the museum” preferring that of “the appropriate knowledge custodians”, highlighting the desire to reconnect objects with their source communities, making them ‘familial’ or ‘community’ objects, rather than museum objects and “giving them life in a way that traditional museum research cannot” (Arthur & Withycombe, 2015, p.37). They state that by framing objects with personal Indigenous testimony they were able to highlight the mutable meanings of each work: “which are seen simultaneously as precious museum objects, spoils of Empire, lost cultural items, the tangible presence of a living culture, or personal objects from a family's history.” (Arthur & Withycombe, 2015, p.38). By including testimony such as Shayne Williams’, who wishes to hold these artefacts and take them out of the museum sphere, the exhibition legitimizes this desire. This is clearly a radical departure from the treatment and assumptions codified within museum practices of conservation and custodianship. In manifold ways, the exhibition appears as an exemplar of the museum acting as a contact zone. However, in light of Boast’s critique of how museums embrace Clifford’s concept, it is important to keep in mind the limitations of this approach. Even an exhibition with as clearly a radical and disruptive an agenda as Encounters, still serves to benefit the academy, reinforcing the status of these objects as museum collection items, even while questioning this. For all their inclusion of interpretation musing on the power for Indigenous peoples in being able to hold objects such as the Gweagal shield, or house them within their communities, the objects on display are in no danger of having their status as museum objects actually challenged. Following the seizure of three bark cloths loaned by the British Museum to the Melbourne Museum by Dja Dja Wurrung activists in 2004 (returned only after lengthy court proceedings), in 2013 the Australian government passed the ‘Protection of Cultural Objects on Loan Act’, “ amid little publicity or debate” (Daly, 2015, paragraph 4), to protect international museum loans from traditional ownership claims48. Without such legal protection it is certain that the objects on display in Encounters would not have travelled to Canberra from the British Museum. Thus, despite the curatorial work in Encounters, no status-quo is actually in danger of being disrupted: the

48 For analysis of the circumstances surrounding the adoption of this statute and its specific wording, see Forrest, 2014. Emma Yandle Chapter One Page 38 museum can pose these questions precisely because the objects are not in danger of being returned to their source communities. Even the interventions of community testimony still serve to reinforce the museum, showing it as a space where representation and joint-ownership appear possible, even if not beyond its walls. As Tony Bennett concludes, it cannot be overlooked that “[t]his is a staging of an Indigenous voice” in the museum (2016). The following chapters will look in depth at a specific subset of encounters that occurred on these voyages: the first encounters of landings, arrivals and meetings. They will compare the visualizations of these encounters had by Cook with Indigenous Pacific Islanders, within the exhibitions and draw conclusions on their different interpretative framing and narrative roles.

Emma Yandle Chapter Three Page 39

II. Exhibiting Visualizations of Cook’s Encounters

i.) Visualizations of first contact: the paintings of William Hodges

The artistic presentation of the Pacific world generated through the voyages of Captain Cook was influentially described by Bernard Smith as inhabiting the space between ‘imaging’ and ‘imagining’.49 Both are crucial elements in the imaginative recreation of the Pacific through eighteenth-century art, which as Smith stresses was “imagined from a reality [emphasis added]” (1992, p.ix) that had been experienced by the artists that joined Cook’s crew. The voyage artists were tasked with creating visual records that documented the entire experience of Cook’s travels. Amongst the images they created are scenes in which Europeans and Indigenous peoples are depicted together, such as in trade, or partaking in rituals and religious ceremonies. Another subset of these visualizations of encounter was introduced on the second voyage, when artist William Hodges began to focus on the landings of Cook and his crew on the beaches of Pacific islands, and visually record their first meetings with Indigenous Pacific peoples. This focus was continued onto the third voyage by subsequent voyage artist John Webber. The moment of first contact between two distinct and previously separate cultures has long been a fascinating concept for anthropologists, writers and artists, across European and Indigenous arenas. It is an event that can be identified, whether at the time or retrospectively, as initiating a seismic change and can act as a foundational moment within national or imperial narratives. Contact and encounter have frequently been a focus within academic analysis of Cook’s voyages (as outlined in the Introduction to this work) and visualizations of early European-Indigenous encounters are utilised by all four of the exhibitions under discussion here. Visualizations of landing and first meetings have been ubiquitous since the earliest illustrated travel accounts, establishing a visual-discursive narrative of European-Indigenous encounters. Despite this, there has been minimal analysis of how visualizations of landing and first contact employ a distinct iconography.50 Applicable ideas are however found within works that more broadly analyse European visual records of early encounters around the globe. In her discussion of early visualizations of Native Americans, Pratt highlights that “what is laid bare is a process of visual imagining, rather than eyewitness record” (2009, p.38). In their work on cultural encounters from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, Birchwood and Dimmock highlight the need to differentiate between the “tangible encounter” of an historical event, and its textual records that necessarily

49 “First there is imaging, in which a person constructs an image in the presence of an object from which the image is fashioned; and then there is imagining, in which a person constructs an image while not in direct sensory contact with the object or objects from which the imagery or the imagining is constructed.” (Smith, 1992, p.ix) 50 Notable exceptions are Van Groesen’s analysis of the engravings of Christopher Columbus landing in the so-called ‘New World’, 2012, 2014; within the Pacific, Simmonds, 2017 close reads the visual structure of John Webber’s depiction of Cook’s meeting with the Nuonenne people Tasmania, in 1777. In his analysis of prints in the influential travel accounts published by De Bry, Michiel van Groesen uses the engraving of Christopher Columbus landing in South America to highlight the visual tropes that became synonymous with visualizations of contact. These can be summarised as: the encounter occurring on the border of land and sea; a visual point of view which emphasizes two opposing sides; erect, controlled posture for travellers, particularly the lead explorer, versus malleable or disordered posture of Indigenous inhabitants; and clothing as a marker of sophistication. (See Van Groesen, 2012). Laurence Simmons expands of the division into ‘European’ and ‘Indigenous’ sides of drawings, noting frequent symmetry in the hierarchies of figures shown. He further identifies a frequent inclusion of “the spectatorial stand-in”, a figure who as an onlooker adjacent to the main action, mirrors the viewpoint inhabited by the reader or viewer. (2017, p.418) Emma Yandle Chapter Three Page 40 constitute “unmistakable constructs [emphasis added] of that encounter” (2005, p.3). The depictions of landing and contact created by Hodges and Webber were presented to the British public across a range of artistic forms: as drawings within official voyage records, illustrations for published voyage accounts, engravings and watercolour or oil paintings. The artists took different stylistic approaches to visualizing Cook’s encounters. Hodges produced a series of four oil paintings visualizing specific instances of Cook landing on islands within the archipelago of Vanuatu / The

Figure 15. The Landing at Erramanga [Eromanga], one of the New Hebrides, by New Hebrides. Although titled William Hodges, 1776. One of four paintings by Hodges showing Cook’s landings in in reference to individual the Vanuatu archipelago during his second voyage. © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London. landings, three of which are also believed to be instances of first contact, the four paintings clearly form a series, repeating the same visual language. Within them the meeting of the European voyagers and Indigenous groups are tightly framed and dominate the canvas, presented from an artificial side on point of view through which the voyagers and the Islanders are visually separated by the border of land and sea. As such they are distinct from the later works of John Webber, that tend to frame encounters within wider landscape scenes, for focussing specifically on the dynamics of the meeting itself. Hodges’ paintings combine a documentary function with artistic techniques that clearly reference the established tradition of history painting, in which a notable event is recorded through symbolic iconography that communicates wider moral or intellectual concepts. For Smith, they “stand[s] on the threshold of recording contact at the time of contact, by visual means – the ancestor of the photographic, film and television documentary of cultural contact.” (1992, pp.56-57). Yet with their mixture of first-hand recollection and artistic presentation he also views them as “constitut[ing] a new kind of historical genre…a new visual source for the study of history” ( pp.73-74) For Nicholas Thomas, their proximity to history painting is demonstrated by the iconography: “[t]he topographic sites of these encounters on the edges of land and sea, civility and barbarity; the inclusion of the ship, expressive of the voyage and British naval power”. He describes them consequently as “saturated with human purpose, with human difference” (1997, p.101). Whilst Hodges was present on Cook’s second voyage, he was not a part of the initial landing crafts that he depicts, rather composing his paintings from first-hand notes and accounts in the subsequent journal entries. He was also an established artist with his own ambitions, going on to exhibit these landing paintings alongside his many Pacific landscape scenes, at the Royal Academy. These artworks brought some of the earliest glimpses of a mysterious region to the British elite and were hugely influential in crafting a cultural view of the Pacific in Europe. It was through their wide dissemination in publications and as engravings that Hodges’ visualizations of contact were accessed by a wider public, and has also resulted in their presence across museum, gallery, library and archive collections. His depictions of contact are exhibited within James Cook: The Voyages at the British Library; Pacific Encounters at the National Maritime Museum; and Reimagining Captain Cook: Pacific Perspectives at Emma Yandle Chapter Three Page 41 the British Museum, in the form of oil paintings and engravings, once again enabling comparative analysis of their different interpretative framing. Drawing from both documentary and artistic traditions, Hodges’ visualizations of contact are complex, liminal objects, purporting to reveal an historical reality, but through highly constructed artistic figuration that serves to fix a moment of encounter into a symbolic scene. The resultant image – of an encounter held in stasis – is in contrast to the complexity, polyphony and unrehearsed nature of voyage encounters as identified by anthropological thinking. Consequently, their interpretative framing within exhibitions is of central importance if they are to reflect the discipline’s understanding of the reality of Cook’s encounters with Indigenous Pacific Islanders. Surprisingly, there is minimal critical reflection on how to exhibit these artistic depictions of encounters, within the context of history exhibitions. As I will go on to explore, museum displays tend to embrace their documentary function at the expense, or suppression, of their artistic features. Such a categorization of the artistic records of Cook’s voyages as documentary evidence has a long structural history. Laura Walker, curator of James Cook: The Voyages at the British Library, highlighted how the artworks bequeathed by Joseph Banks to the British Museum were transferred to the British Library along with the textual voyage records, when it was established as separate organisation in 1973, as they were “deemed to be more of historic interest than artistic merit.” (L. Walker, personal communication, 7th December 2018). Yet today, such an approach is particularly surprising given the political salience of the iconography of landing and contact: as evidenced by the frequency with which it is employed by contemporary Indigenous artists to explore ideas such as imperialism, nationhood, legacy and identity, as I will go on to discuss in Chapter Three. The four exhibitions analysed here all employ depictions of landing and first contact, varying across contemporary interpretations, historic depictions, or a joint presentation of both. As I will go on to demonstrate through analysis of their interpretative framing, there is frequently a gap between how eighteenth-century visualizations of encounters are narrativized within exhibitions and the anthropological treatment of these encounters: as contingent, inhabiting multiple perspectives, and tied to the specific dynamics of concrete social locations rather than totalizing ideas of how cultures behave. The degree to which these encounter objects are used as transparent documentary records – Appadurai’s “sheer icons of representation” (2016) - at the expense of their mutability, will be explored.

Emma Yandle Chapter Three Page 42

ii.) Visualizations of encounter: as documentary records

The display of an engraving by J.K. Sherwin after Hodges’ The Landing at Tanna one of the New Hebrides in James Cook: The Voyages, demonstrates what is omitted when his visualizations of encounter are treated as purely documentary records of moments on Cook’s voyage. Hodges’ oil painting of the same scene is displayed in Pacific Encounters, enabling a direct comparison of their narrative roles. The interpretation in both exhibitions presents the dynamics attributed to this specific encounter as emblematic of first contact made by Cook (and other travellers) within the Pacific. The narrative of James Cook: The Voyages at the British Library Figure 16. ‘The Landing at Tanna one of the New Hebrides’. By J.K Sherwin after William unfolds Hodges, c. 1777. chronologically, presenting events that happened on each voyage, with material and print culture primarily employed as documentary evidence. The Landing at Tanna is displayed at the end of the space that presents the second voyage, spanning 1772-1775. See the footnote for the full object label.51 The label begins with a general conclusion on the nature of first contact (untethered from any specific historical example or geographical area), that the engraving is presented as ‘capturing’. It is following this universal statement, that it introduces the specific historical moment, geographic location and dynamics of the landing shown in Sherwin’s engraving of Hodges’ work: at the island of Tanna in the Vanuatu archipelago in 1774. The label text intertwines the specific details and emblematic readings of this encounter, concluding with an extract from Cook’s journal in reference the landing, but selectively quoted so as to offer a wider point on how his arrivals were perceived by Indigenous Islanders across the region. Specific details are however included in the label and there are methods through which the interpretation embeds a more detailed critical approach to European-Indigenous encounters. Beyond simply choosing to display an object that has an encounter as its central feature, the text highlights the simultaneity of peace and violence in Cook’s approach to this landing, expressed by Hodges through the iconography of peace – the “green branch in his hand” and of violence – “ship’s cannons are firing over the

51 Landing at Tanna This famous engraving captures the often double-edged nature of first contact between visitors and visited. In the foreground Cook is shown attempting to land peacefully at Tanna, now an island of Vanuatu, with a green branch in his hand, while at his order the ship’s cannons are firing over the heads of the people on the shore. Cook wrote at Tanna: ‘We enter their Ports without their daring to make opposition, we attempt to land in a peaceable manner, if this succeeds its well, if not we land nevertheless and mentain (sic) the footing we thus got by the Superiority of our fire arms, in what other light can they than at first look upon as but as invaders of their Country.’ (The British Library, 2018)

Emma Yandle Chapter Three Page 43 heads of the people on the shore.” (The British Library, 2018). This alludes to some of the disorder and confusion of encounter, highlighted by anthropological analysis due to their “unrehearsed nature” (Regard, 2009, p.4). It is this visual depiction of Cook’s simultaneous approach from which the interpretation uses the engraving as an emblematic example of the dynamics of encounter within the exhibition. This can be seen as demonstrating a tenet of Clifford’s contact perspective: in which “claims to both universalism and to specificity are related to concrete social locations” (1997, p.213). Such an approach to contact can also be discerned through the layering here of different records of the encounter: combining the engraving with the quotation from Cook’s journal, and so eschewing one authoritative narrative in favour of two (albeit both European) musings on the event. This combination of voyage artwork with quotations from the voyage records is a frequent curatorial strategy employed in the exhibition, in which the documentary records produced during Cook’s voyages, both visual and textual, are the primary collection items on display. Curator Laura Walker described a desire to highlight the Library’s collection of voyage records, little known and yet “the most significant in the world” – as a primary motivation for holding the exhibition, along with the opportunity to undertake advanced cataloguing and restoration of the collection and a hope that it would stimulate further research and scholarship. (L. Walker, personal communication, 7th December 2018). As such, the narrative’s chronological unfolding and the design of the exhibition space immerses visitors in the experience of being on the voyages. Each voyage is clearly demarcated through the space, introduced by a different wash of colour on the walls ranging across shades of blue and purple, mirroring the ocean. A globe, on which the plot of the specific voyage is marked, and a fact sheet of the duration, ship(s) and important figures onboard, begins each section (see Figure 17). Whilst the included quotation from Cook discussed above bolsters, rather than scrutinises, what is shown by Hodges’ visual evidence, it is notable as an example of self-reflection on how contact was received by Pacific Islanders, contemporary to the time of the voyages. It embeds an imagined Indigenous perspective, concluding that “in what other light can they than at first look upon as but as invaders of their Country” Figure 17. Globe with voyage route marked, and factsheet introducing Cook’s first voyage in James (Cook, 1774 as cited by The British Library, 2018) and so Cook: The Voyages. Courtesy of the British Library. Photo by Emma Yandle. cues visitors to reflect critically upon the fairness of these early encounters, enforced by Europeans. The quotation also introduces the agency and rights of the people of Tanna, shown by Hodges on the shore, to defend and have dominion over “their Country” (Cook, 1774, as cited by the British Library, 2018), a remark of particular salience for a time when an Indigenous presence was not enough to prevent Cook from taking formal possession of lands, as he did of the East coast of Australia in 1770, following specific encounters with its Aboriginal inhabitants, as explored in Chapter One. The engraving’s interpretation can be read as presenting this encounter – and by its emblematic deployment by the interpretation, all first encounters - as dynamic processes, with ethical dimensions and differing opinions held by both sides. However, by swiftly moving from the specifics of this engraving of the landing at Tanna to a general point on Pacific contact, the interpretation overlooks more detailed analysis of how Hodges’ visual construction of the Emma Yandle Chapter Three Page 44 encounter actually relates to the tangible events that took place in 1774. If the approach of anthropologists such as Greg Dening (1980), Nicholas Thomas and Anne Salmond had been applied, in which multiple layers of evidence are scrutinised alongside each other, or greater attempt to represent the Indigenous reception of this encounter, the striking extent of Hodges’ artistic licence would have been revealed. Returning to the textual voyage records reveals that what the engraving shows is not actually the first landing Cook and his crew on Tanna, or their first contact with the people of Vanuatu, but the second52. Cook’s official voyage account actually describes the first landing at Tanna as occurring on 5th August 1774 and being a peaceful one.53 In his original painting Hodges, has seemingly chosen to expunge this from the visual record, in favour of the more dramatic second landing. This is subsequently copied by all later engravers. This choice is likely due to the second landing fitting better with his preconceived ideas and iconography of what first contact should look like. In many ways the events of the first contact at Tanna undermine the visual tropes and iconography of encounter drawings, as previously outlined. Contrary to the central depiction of Cook as the figure crossing the boundary of waters and the beach, the journals reveal that the Islanders of Tanna actually initiated first contact, by swimming or canoeing out to Cook’s ship offshore. This was a practice observed across the Pacific region that pointedly undermines encounter iconography with its symbolic border of the beach between solid land and sea; as Edmond notes: “Tahitians and Marquesans often swam out to meet the ships, clambering aboard before they had anchored and breaching that solemn encounter of first meeting on the beach so frequently represented by writers and painters as pregnant with beginnings.” (1997, p.13). Reading the engraving alongside other voyage records thus allows for the artistic construction of the visualization to be highlighted, but also for conclusions to be drawn on why it is constructed in this manner: the binary opposition of its visual layout, a way of visualizing otherness and difference, employed for a moment deemed by Europeans as historically important. This is one of many details that elucidate the visual construction of encounters that can be drawn out by reading the engraving alongside the voyage records. This approach offers information that serves to represent more accurately the Indigenous role in the encounter, as detailed above, but also important context that humanizes the European response. In contrast to Hodges’ steadfast figure of Cook, leading with peace but violence not far behind, voyage accounts show that he and his crew struggled to interpret the response of the Islanders, which they read as a confusing mixture of friendly and defensive gestures. Their actions ranged from gifts of coconuts and exchanges of goods, to attempts to take possession of items from the ships’ such as their buoys. It was this act that led to shots being fired during the second landing that Hodges’ shows, positioning European violence as a specific response to defence of property, rather than as a blanket colonial approach, (the manner in which it is often popularly interpreted). Cook also narrates here the difficulty of making his own

52 This is evidenced by the clear parallels between the account of the second landing in Cook’s journal, and its visualization by Hodges. He recounts: “Since, therefore, they would not give us the room we required, I thought it was better to frighten them into it, than to oblige them by the deadly effect of our fire-arms… I ordered three or four more musquets to be fired. This was the signal for the ship to fire a few great guns, which presently disposed them; and then we landed, and marked out the limits, on the right and left, by a line. Our old friend stood his ground, though deferred by his two companions, and I rewarded his confidence with a present. The natives came gradually to us, seemingly in a more friendly manner; some even without their weapons, but by far the greatest part brought them; and when we made signs to lay them down, they gave us to understand that we must lay down ours first. Thus all parties stood armed.” (Cook, 1777/2015, p.262). 53 In the published voyage account Cook describes the first landing at Tanna in the following terms: “a friendly old man in a small canoe made several trips between us and the shore, bringing off each time a few cocoa-nuts, or a yam, and taking in exchange whatever we gave him…Towards the evening, after the ship was moored, I landed at the head of the harbour, in the S.E. corner, with a strong party of men, without any opposition being made by a great number of the natives who were assembled in two parties, the one on our right, the other on our left, armed with clubs, darts, spears, slings and stones, bows and arrows, &c. I ordered two cans to be filled with water out of pond about twenty paces behind the landing-place; giving the natives to understand, that this was one of the articles we wanted.” (Cook, 1777/2015, p.260). Emma Yandle Chapter Three Page 45 intentions known. Without the specific dynamics of an individual moment of encounter included within the exhibition, the discussion of violence in the interpretation of The Landing at Tanna is decontextualized. Hodges has made choices about what first contact should look like that do not reflect the reality of this historical event, 54 but this is not highlighted to visitors of the exhibition, where visual analysis is used as if it explains what ‘actually happened’. Overlooking the artistry of the work, within the interpretation, overlooks an opportunity to represent anthropological ideas of encounter in this exhibition. Although the point of view of the text is clearly critical of contact and encourages reflection upon it, by employing the engraving as documentary evidence at the expense of the artistic techniques used to mediate and present this encounter, it serves to reinforce an idea of encounter – as controlled by Europeans, consistent across the region rather than related specific social locations and dynamics – at the expense of a more nuanced narration of what actually happened on this specific island in 1774.

54 Even when compared to the second landing that Hodges’ clearly, artistic licence is taken that changes the presentation of the encounter’s dynamics. For example, there is no record that Cook held aloft a green branch as he disembarked from the landing craft. Emma Yandle Chapter Three Page 46

iii.) Painting first meetings: encounters as emblematic events

In Pacific Encounters at the National Maritime Museum, the specificity of Hodges’ visualizations of first encounters are afforded even less importance within the narrative55. Hodges’ oil painting of The Landing at Tanna (see Figure 18) is displayed alongside his three other paintings of landings in Vanuatu / The New Hebrides in 1774, as part of a wider display of the artist’s paintings of Pacific scenery (see Figure 18). Within this they are grouped under the emblematic label of ‘Encounter paintings’, interpreted collectively, their individual object titles then given. The title for this grouping differs from their traditional description as ‘Landing paintings’ (with titles of ‘The Landing at’ included on some of their frames). It serves as Figure 18. The Landing at Tanna [Tana], one of the New Hebrides, by William Hodges, 1775- 1776. © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London. an instant reframing, with the one-sided ‘landing’ recalling Pratt’s criticism of the term frontier as “grounded within a European expansionist perspective” (Pratt, 2008/1992, p.8). Its replacement with ‘encounter’ allows for the involvement of both the Indigenous and European sides, encouraging visitors to adopt this dual point of view.56 However, the collective display, positioned within the Exploration section of the exhibition, prioritizes creating an impression of how the wider Pacific was artistically presented to a British public, at the expense of scrutinising how Hodges artistically records these four specific encounters and examining the implications of his representation. Sophie Richards, curator of the exhibition, elucidated the curatorial strategy behind this display (see Figure 19): Hodges’ paintings were hung in a pattern that mirrored the style of early exhibitions Figure 19. Display of William Hodges’ paintings in Pacific Encounters. The four Encounter paintings’ are displayed in the bottom right. Photo by at the Royal Academy, where many of the Emma Yandle.

55 Curator Sophie Richards highlighted an initial plan to include audio points within this section of the exhibition, where visitors could hear the perspectives of Pacific Islanders commenting on their own region of the world. Examples mentioned included commentary on landscapes that people recognized, or what they, as a local inhabitant are drawn to when they look at the painting. It was concluded that such an intervention would constitute a distinct change from the interpretative style of other exhibitions and thus the museum would be better served if a holistic approach were taken, with audio points throughout its exhibitions (S. Richards, personal communication, 15th March 2019). 56 Richards noted that this was an internal term for the group of paintings (S. Richards, personal communication, 15th March 2019).

Emma Yandle Chapter Three Page 47 works were originally displayed.57 As the tight chronological narrative of James Cook: The Voyages is reinforced by the exhibition design, the loosely chronological but thematically structured Pacific Encounters uses sub-divisions within an open exhibition space to create a freer association between ideas. Within this, Cook’s voyages play an important role, but do not predominate, the exhibition ranging through to the later missionary presence in the Pacific, and beyond to the thriving culture of the region today. The display of Hodges ‘Encounter paintings’ on the room’s back wall, is consequently visible from many different thematic sections and chronological moments in the exhibition. This furthers the impression that visitors should view these encounters as emblematic of eighteenth-century Pacific contact, rather than encouraging their engagement with their artistic construction, or the historical events they purport to record. Although their titling places encounters in a central role, their interpretation applies little of the nuances of an encounter or contact perspective. By presenting Hodges’ scenes as emblematic of Pacific encounters in general, they avoid a need to embrace this complexity. See the footnote for the full label text.58 With all four of Hodges’ visualizations of encounter held in their collection, the National Maritime Museum has the opportunity to display them together, placing different visualizations of contact and depictions of Vanuatuan Islanders alongside each other, and draw out the connections stimulated by their syntax. Encounters are afforded the variety of being friendly or violent and the interpretation recounts how the dynamics of a specific encounter, recorded in Hodges’ The Landing at Erramanga (see Figure 15), formed the basis for universalizing assumptions about the character of its inhabitants. However, despite opting for a display style that mimics how Pacific art was presented to an elite British public,59 the interpretation does not explain how such an impression is actually communicated through Hodges’ artworks. This lack of visual analysis leaves Hodges’ record of events unchallenged, offering the ‘Encounter paintings’ as “sheer icons of representation” (Appadurai, 2016), rather than highlighting the mutability of Figure 20. The Landing at Mallicolo [Malakula], one of the New Hebrides. By their possible meanings. William Hodges, c. 1776. © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London. Richard’s intention that the display style would highlight the imagined construction, rather than reality, of the works, is unlikely to be communicated to visitors without a pre-existing knowledge of museum display-styles: the reason for this presentation is not discussed in any on-site interpretation. Thus, displayed alongside each other, Hodges’ paintings offer a clearly uniform presentation of Indigenous peoples across different geographic locations and

57 Richards explained, “I didn’t want to them be just used illustratively – by showing them in a Royal Academy-style gallery hang, it gives a sense of how pervasive these images were and how misleading they might be.” (S. Richards, personal communication, 15th March 2019). 58 Encounter paintings by William Hodges, 1775-76 Three of these paintings show Pacific peoples meeting British explorers for the first time. Using Cook’s descriptions of the meetings, Hodges produced them for the official voyage account. First encounters could vary from friendly to violent but were crucial to establishing longer-term relationships. The most violent first meeting took place at Eromango, initiating a European view of the island as ‘uncivilized’, in contrast to Tahiti, which was seen as a friendly paradise. (The National Maritime Museum, 2018) 59 As discussed in Chapter One was a key means in propagating assumptions about the region. Emma Yandle Chapter Three Page 48 cultural groups. A visitor looking closely for connections between the paintings will see this uniformity, and without specialist knowledge of the ethnic groups of the Pacific or interpretation highlighting how this is an artistic construction, are positioned to view these encounters as they were seen and displayed to the British public in the eighteenth-century. The recontextualization of these paintings through their inclusion in this new exhibition, afforded the opportunity to highlight how Hodges’ artistic representations of encounter shaped the reception of the works and ideas of Pacific peoples. For example, Hodges’ uses classical mannerist poses for all his Islanders, even when variation in their appearance is pointedly recorded by voyage records. Such is the case with the Malekulans he depicts in The Landing at Mallicolo (see Figure 20), who the voyage accounts highlight as speaking a very different language to the Islanders of Tanna,60 as well as describing their different visual appearance, in derogatory terms, from which they also drew assumptions on their civility.61 Their framing in this exhibition avoids consideration of how these visualizations offer a biased and partial record, by not analysing the omissions, visual tropes and power dynamics that they include. The constructed nature of these representations could also have been used to explain anthropological ideas about the dynamics of encounter, upon which prejudiced assumptions about Pacific life were made. For example, close reading of the paintings together, alongside textual records, reveals why the encounters displayed did in fact here “vary from friendly to violent”. The encounters Hodges depicts are in fact intimately connected. Located within the same archipelago, they were visited by Cook in succession, each experience contributing to his ongoing acquisition of knowledge of the norms of these societies, from which relationships could be established. These relationships were crucial to Cook and his crew who at the very least needed to acquire fresh food and water. Cook records how his experience at Erromanga, where the Islanders appeared to be cooperative, before then attempting to drag his landing craft ashore, influenced his decision to pre-emptively fire cannons during the second landing at Tanna. As discussed above, this is violent approach is described in the British Library’s interpretation of the engraving made after Hodges painting; the original oil painting is displayed in Pacific Encounters. Weaving a narrative between the works reveals how confident European mastery of these first meetings, as depicted by Hodges steadfast figure of Cook in The Landing at Tanna, does not match up with the reality of the events. Cook was frequently cautious of being trapped by Islanders, and his accounts in the journals reveal control of the situation to be an ongoing tussle of power between both sides, in which the Pacific Islanders were an unpredictable force that Cook sought to control, rather than submissive and in awe of the arriving Europeans.62 Violence, at least in his own mediated account of events, is used as a final attempt to control a situation, largely to scare and with no certainty of working. Cook reflected on his use of gunfire during the landing at Tanna that Hodges has painted, on the 6th August 1774. He wrote in his journal that “[t]his transaction seemed to make little or no impression on the people there. On the contrary, they began to halloo, and to make sport of it.” (Cook, 1777/2015, p.262). Whilst colonial acts of violence are not to be condoned, the inclusion of such information within the interpretation would go some way to more accurately contextualizing them. As with the framing of the encounter at Tanna in James Cook: The Voyages, there are

60 By contrast, in an entry written during his stay at Tanna, Cook remarks “These islanders seemed to be a different race from Mallicollo, and spoke a different language.” (Cook, 1777/2015, p.259). 61 Cook describes the Malekulans in derogatory terms, that distinguish them visually from his descriptions of other Islanders in the Vanuatuan archipelago. 62 As Thomas has noted, “[t]he character of early contact was often such that foreigners were in no position to enforce their demands; consequently, local terms of trade often had to be acceded to” (1991, p.84). Emma Yandle Chapter Three Page 49 further ways in which visual analysis could have been used to give more of a presence to the Indigenous side of these encounters in the exhibition. For example, close reading shows an interesting visual link between The Landing at Tanna and The Landing at Mallicolo. In the former, Cook is erroneously (for there is no record in his journal entries during either landing at Tanna) shown as holding a green branch aloft in his hands, as a sign of peaceful intentions. In The Landing at Mallicolo on 23rd July 1774, which preceded that at Tanna by two weeks, an Indigenous person on the shore is shown holding such a branch. Cook describes learning that the green branch was the Islander’s sign for peace, writing “their signs of Friendship is a green branch and sprinkling water with the hand over the head” (Cook, 1777/2015, p.251). Of his landing at Mallekula (as it correctly termed) he writes “they made not the least opposition, on the contrary one Man gave his Arms to another and Met us in the water with a green branch in his hand, which [he] exchanged for the one I held in my hand” (Cook, 1777/2015, p.248). In his artwork, Hodges has chosen to present the symbolic exchange of branches – the reality as recorded by Cook – but rather Cook stretching out his hand to receive the branch from the Islander and passing its visual antonym - his musket with its threat of violence - back to the officer behind him. Hodges’ altered visualization presents a view of European hard power being exchanged for a soft approach, only when the Islanders’ have signalled their submission. It is an interesting symbolic presentation, but at the expense of clearly highlighting the Indigenous control of the dynamics of this specific encounter. Cook’s journal accounts present an ongoing process of learning to read non-verbal Indigenous signs, and his use of a green branch to communicate his intentions, demonstrates European adaptation based on prior experience elsewhere in the region. Although the curatorial framing introduces Hodges’ paintings as showing different types of encounter, and explains that these moments were used to calcify a specific opinion about one of the islands, Hodges’ work is again employed within the exhibition’s narrative as documentary records emblematic of Pacific encounters, rather than artistic products that are complicit in this presentation; in other words “saturated with human purpose” (Thomas, 1997, p.101). This approach overlooks an opportunity to show how analysis of Hodges’ artistic construction can actually reintroduce the complexity of the specific dynamics of meetings in this region. Together, the artistry and the textual voyage records, can offer the counter to the simplistic deduction that a violent reception from Islanders indicated a lack of civilization. Although such eighteenth-century reasoning is not upheld by the interpretation (curatorial criticism clearly implied), in the absence of framing that introduces counter-analysis, such prejudiced assumptions are re-presented intact to present-day visitors.

Emma Yandle Chapter Three Page 50

iv.) Embracing encounters’ specificity

A print of Hodges painting of The Landing at Mallicolo, is displayed within the British Museum’s Reimagining Captain Cook: Pacific Perspective. This exhibition differs from the primarily historical and chronological presentations of European-Indigenous interactions at the British Library and the National Maritime Museum. It positions itself not as focusing on the events of Cook’s voyages, but as exploring their imaginative appeal, or symbolic weight, through how they are referenced and responded to by contemporary Indigenous artists working across the Pacific region. The exhibition is introduced with the statement: “Understandings of history are rarely agreed and always shifting”, concluding that the transhistorical mix of eighteenth-century and contemporary works brought together by the exhibition “reimagine Cook and the impact of his voyages as complex, contentious and unresolved.” (The British Museum, 2018). The exhibition is located in Gallery 91, a small space for exhibitions from different departments rather than one of the museum’s larger, temporary exhibition spaces. Curator Dr. Julie Adams, whose talk in 2016 quoted in the Introduction to this work implied that the British Museum would not programme an exhibition for the Cook anniversary, explained that the museum “had no plans to do a ‘Cook’ show until relatively late.” The exhibition came about due to a gap in the gallery’s programming and as Adams explains, “Lissant Bolton, Keeper of Africa, Oceania and the Americas, had long had a wish to do a Cook show which focused on Indigenous representations of Cook so she suggested that we might attempt to do that.” (J. Adams, personal communication, 18th July 2019). As an exhibition on reimagining, as per curator Lissant Bolton’s conception, a central narrative role is given to contemporary art that explores the meaning of Cook’s voyages and their legacy in the Pacific. These works are displayed alongside eighteenth- century objects, in display cases around the walls, organised by geography and thus Figure 41. Contemporary artworks are displayed on the walls, with loosely narrating moments from Cook’s quotations from the artists above. The costume of the Chief Mourner is displayed centrally. Installation view of Reimaging Captain Cook: voyages. Certain contemporary works are Pacific Perspectives Photo by Emma Yandle, 2018. presented isolated on the walls at intervals throughout the exhibition. This creates a visual hierarchy of key works in the exhibition, emphasized by the inclusion of quotations from the artists on the walls above the works, musing on the relationship between their practice and Cook’s voyages. This pattern is disrupted only by the exhibition’s star eighteenth-century piece: the costume of the Chief Mourner from the Society Islands, which is displayed highlighting extensive new research and conservation (see Figure 21). Adams describes the eighteenth-century works as “really crucial to the story of the exhibition, not least because they are really the surviving primary sources, the evidence, of these early encounters.” (J. Adams, personal communication, 22nd July 2019). Whilst acknowledging that the historic works were used in different ways within the exhibition: “some as visual backups, prompts, reinforcements, some with more sophistication”, she describes them as “instantiations of Islander agency” which the exhibition employs to compensate for the voices of eighteenth-century Pacific Islanders that have not been recorded. On the Emma Yandle Chapter Three Page 51 interpretative framing of the objects in this exhibition, she states: “we hoped that people would engage with the objects and that they could help to tell the story for an Islander perspective.” (J. Adams, personal communication, 22nd July 2019). The eighteenth-century objects are indeed employed not only as reference points for the contemporary works, but their interpretative framing undertakes ‘reimaginings’ of its own, with new “Understandings of history” (The British Museum, 2008) introduced by framing the encounters they originated from in reference to current anthropological ideas. Objects are grouped together thematically with general interpretation followed by further object-specific texts. The themes, although briefly expressed, serve to highlight how scholars today have reconceived early voyager-Indigenous encounters by comparing their material records with more sophisticated understandings of individual Pacific cultures. For example, in the Australia case, a grouping is entitled ‘Misperceptions’. The thematic text explains how voyage records produced by two explorers who made meaningful contact with Aboriginal Australians – first contact made by William Dampier and subsequently on by Cook – actually show that: “[b]oth failed to understand the people or the culture they briefly witnessed.” (The British Museum, 2018). Adams describes how the Pacific objects displayed here to subtly reinforce the message in the interpretation and present a challenge to visitors by encouraging them to look closely at the craftmanship on display: “they couldn’t see what was in front of their eyes, can you see that sophistication, now that they’re in front of your eyes?” (J. Adams, personal communication, 22nd July 2019). Had such a provocation been included within the interpretation, visitors would have been encouraged to take a more active role in linking past assumptions to our own biases in the present. Another example of an encounter perspective is found in the Hawai’i case. Entitled ‘Mistaken Identity’, it describes how Cook’s reception as the God Lono was likely due to how his arrival happened to fall at a specific moment in their religious cycle (as first put forward by Sahlins in 1985). The Vanuatu Archipelago case opens with a section entitled ‘Not the only ship’ which disrupts the idea that European contact was necessarily a seismic foundational moment for Islanders, by noting that as Cook’s were not the first ships to pass through the archipelago and that “[t]o the Islanders, the Resolution, Cook's ship, was perhaps just another sailing vessel.” (The British Museum, 2018). It goes on to highlight that Pacific societies were themselves voyaging nations that were used to making contact and trading with other communities across the region. By reaching towards Islanders’ perspectives on Cook’s landings in the Vanuatuan archipelago, Indigenous experiences of history are brought from the margins to the centre. These same landings that were deemed important enough by Hodges to be the subject of oil paintings and included as illustrations in Cook’s official account of the second voyage, may in fact not have been deemed important at all, it suggests, by the other side of the encounter. The deflationary tone towards these landings, rather than treating them as definitive European achievements, shows curatorial reflection on how to represent Pacific-European history and a desire to balance whose experiences are privileged. The example within the exhibition that most clearly responds to Pratt’s definition of the conditions of the contact zone is found in the interpretation for ‘Depending on the Day’ (within the section New Caledonia). Countering Cook’s perception in 1774 of the Islanders of Grand Terre as hospitable, with those of French explorer D’Entrecasteaux in 1783 who noted their surliness, it concludes, that outcomes of the Emma Yandle Chapter Three Page 52 encounters were contingent and borne out within “concrete social situations” (Clifford,1997, p.213).63 Such a point of view is clearly in line with anthropological treatment of these encounters: grounded in the specific dynamics of each individual event, before this is linked to any wider theme. The conclusion that Cook’s visits “were but a momentary interval” is led from the specifics of the two different meetings discussed, allowing them to act as individual examples of moments of contact, rather than positioning them as emblematic of all Pacific encounters. In the object label for a contemporary work included in the exhibition, Figure 22. Vanuatu Archipelago case, sub-section entitled ‘A Brief Encounter’, ‘Lono – Taking Possession’, by Lisa including print of The Landing at Mallicolo shown against a blue backdrop on the right. Photo by Emma Yandle. Reihana, 2017, the curatorial voice states that “encounters between Islanders and Europeans - and the confusion, misunderstanding and mutual fascination at their core - are key issues addressed in this exhibition.” (The British Museum, 2018). Such an approach is evidenced by a thematic sub-section entitled ‘Brief Encounter’,64 which includes an engraving by James Basire after Hodges’ The Landing at Mallicolo. It is displayed alongside other objects of different forms that date from Cook’s visit to the island. As with the cases previously mentioned, this recounts the specific historical events of Cook’s landing on this island to demonstrate one sort of encounter with Indigenous peoples (see the footnote for the full object label).65 The text presents an overview of a swift, uneventful and ultimately not very profitable encounter (in European terms) experienced by Cook and his crew. It explains their motivation for landing, records the Islanders’ reception, and shows that agency and control were held by both sides. The lack of significance attributed to Cook’s arrival within the Islanders’ history is further emphasized by the labels for object displayed alongside it - a club and armband – that are both also depicted in the engraving. These are interpreted for what they reveal about pre-contact Vanuatuan society, standing as evidence of the pre- existing trading networks between Pacific Islands, rather than in reference to the moment of contact itself. However, in keeping with the treatment of Hodges’ works in James Cook: The Voyages and Pacific Encounters, there is no visual analysis of The Landing at Mallicolo. Placed alongside the thematic text above which describes the main events of the contact, and with material evidence of objects collected alongside it, appears only as a transparent documentary record of Cook’s arrival. The engraving is the only object within this grouping to receive no further interpretation beyond its name, title and author. The constructed nature of the

63 It is clear that Cook’s visits were but a momentary interval in a long history for the communities he visited. The reaction of Islanders to him was dependent on what was happening at the time in their communities. Such different experiences are sometimes reflected in the objects collected on different exhibitions. (The British Museum, 2018) 64 This is marked by the blue background on the right-hand-side of the case in Figure 22. 65 Brief encounter Cook named the first place he anchored in Vanuatu at Port Sandwich. Discouraged by the Islanders from getting supplies of wood, food or water, they stayed for two days only. Cook recorded that there were many people in the area, a few of whom came on board. (The British Museum, 2018)

Emma Yandle Chapter Three Page 53 work and the artistic licence in its depiction of a conciliatory first encounter, as analysed above, is overlooked without further visual analysis. Adams’ acknowledges that perhaps the engraving was “uncritically placed there”, along with the inclusion of blown-up graphics of Hodges’ oil paintings of different Pacific Islands on the back of smaller cases in the centre of the room (See Figure 23), that she describes as “just there as evocations of place.” (J. Adams, personal communication, 22nd July 2019). The inclusion of a contemporary photograph above the engraving (see Figure 22) serves a similar purpose to the Hodges graphics. It shows the nearby island of Ambae, with the explanation: “Cook sailed Figure 23. Blown-up graphic of William Hodges’ ‘A View taken in past the island of Ambae as he entered the the bay of Oaite Peha [Vaitepiha] Otaheite [Tahiti]’ (‘Tahiti Revisited’) in Reimaging Captain Cook: Pacific Perspectives © The Vanuatu archipelago, but didn't land there.” Trustees of the British Museum (The British Museum, 2018). This has the effect of displaying the photographic record, with its closer ties to transparent documentation, and the highly constructed artwork by Hodges, as are presented as if they are on a par. That the iconography of first encounter that is employed in the engraving of The Landing at Mallicolo is not analysed is of particular surprise, in light of the exhibition’s aim to show how Cook’s voyages were reimagined from a Pacific perspective. As I will go on to analyse in the following Chapter, many of the works by contemporary Indigenous artists included in this exhibition, directly refer to and employ the iconography that is also found within Hodges’ visualizations of landing and encounter. The original European ‘imagining’ of Pacific encounters in works of art, would seem to be a highly relevant backdrop for the contemporary works to be placed in dialogue with. The disparity between the interpretation of contemporary art that depicts Cook’s encounters and their historic depictions, can be observed particularly through examples found in James Cook: The Voyages at the British Library, Reimagining Captain Cook at the British Museum, and the Royal Academy’s Oceania, as I will go on to discuss.

Emma Yandle Chapter Three Page 54

III. Encounter iconography in contemporary Pacific art

i.) The appeal of encounters for contemporary Pacific artists

In the ‘New Caledonia’ section of Reimagining Cook: Pacific Perspectives, the label for Cook (1981) by Aloi Pilioko, Wallis and Futuna states: “In the Pacific, stories of Cook’s visits have rarely been passed down through the generations, so contemporary reflections tend to focus on the imagined moment of arrival.” (The British Museum, 2018). The deployment of Cook by Pacific activists as a metonym for the imperialism that followed his voyages (as discussed in the Introduction to this work) is reflected by a strong recurrence of Cook and first contact visualized within the work of Indigenous artists from across the Pacific. As part of its aim to show how Cook has been reimagined from a Pacific perspective, pieces by a number of prominent artists are displayed in Reimagining Captain Cook at the British Museum.66 Papau New Guinean artist Mathias Kauage, is quoted in the exhibition, addressing why Cook and his voyages feature so frequently in his work, stating: “James Cook was important not just for Australia but also for the whole Pacific: that's why I, as a Papua New Guinean, paint him again and again.” (Kauage as quoted by The British Museum, 2018). Contemporary Indigenous art depicting moments of arrival and encounter on Cook’s voyages is employed to different extents across all four of the exhibitions under discussion here. In Oceania at the Royal Academy of Arts an entire room is devoted to what marketing materials, and curator Dr. Adrian Locke,67 highlight as one of its star pieces: Lisa Reihana’s panoramic video installation in Pursuit of Venus [infected] (See Figure 24). The work takes the form of a 64-minute video and sound installation, slowly scrolling from the right to the left of the room on a

Figure 24. Detail from in Pursuit of Venus [infected], by Lisa Reihana, 2015–17. Courtesy of the artist and New Zealand at Venice. With support of Creative New Zealand and NZ at Venice Patrons and Partners. Image provided courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco continuous loop, displayed on a 23-metres long, 4-metres high screen, at a pixel count that represents a distinct feat of technical engineering (See Reihana, 2012, pp.9-30). In Pursuit of Venus [infected], was inspired by the nineteenth-century panoramic wallpaper Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique (The native peoples of the Pacific Ocean), designed by French painter Jean-Gabriel Charvet in 1804-1805 (see Figure 25) and measuring 10.5- metres long by 2.5-metres high, itself a considerable feat of construction from the turn of the nineteenth- Figure 25. Detail from Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique, showing the scenes 1. (Native hut), 2. (3 dancers), 3. (Sailing boat) & 4. (Natives & goat). By Joseph century (Looser, 2017, p.451). The Dufour (manufacturer) Jean-Gabriel Charvet (artist), 1804-1805. Image courtesy of Art Gallery of New South Wales, Australia. wallpaper presented in almost life-

66 These include, Michael Tuffey whose heritage ranges across Samoa, Tahiti and Aotearoa New Zealand; Australians, photographer Michael Cook of Bidjara heritage and artist Vincent Namatjira of the Western Arrente people. (In May 2019, Namatjira won the prestigious Ramsey Art Prize for his work Close Contact, a free-standing double-sided portrait depicting Cook and Namatjira on either side, its title referring to the contact made by Cook with the Gweagal people in 1770.) Māori artists Steve Gibbs and Lisa Reihana; Niuean artist John Pule; and Papau New Guinean artists Simon Gende and Mathias Kauage. 67 Locke describes Reihana’s work as “central from the start”, when selecting the contemporary Pacific art for display in the exhibition. (A. Locke, personal communication, 6th December 2018).

Emma Yandle Chapter Three Page 55 like scale, a vision of the Pacific to a European audience, drawing heavily on accounts of Cook’s three voyages. Each of its 20 panels purported to present specific events and meetings that took place on Cook’s travels across the Pacific region, ranging from Aotearoa New Zealand, Rapa Nui (Easter Island) to Alaska. The encounters that Cook describes are reinterpreted by Charvet into a highly romanticized, entirely imagined, view of the Pacific, inhabited by people who resemble classical figures from Ancient Greek or Roman art. Reihana was inspired to create her own imagined Pacific, by combining a painted background with live action performances, to introduce actual Pacific Islanders into the material record. She accurately showcases traditions from across the Pacific, thanks to re-enactments by performers by Polynesians, Māori people and those of Aboriginal First Nations descent. As a consequence, the piece shows eighteenth-century material culture and costumes in their original use. Like the wallpaper itself, she too was inspired by moments from Cook’s voyages, as recorded in illustrations, prints and artworks, describing the work as “redeploying the illustrations as dramas” (Reihana, 2012, p.16). Whilst imaginary, her animation of early encounters and first meetings, as

Figure 26. ‘The Splendid Land’, by John Pule, 2009. © well as other forms of contact that took place on John Pule. Image Courtesy of Gow Langsford Gallery, Cook’s voyages, is grounded in how these events Aotearoa New Zealand. might have unfolded in reality. In James Cook: The Voyages the sole work of contemporary art on display68 is located opposite the Introductory text, in the entranceway to the exhibition: John Pule’s The Splendid Land (see Figure 26). Like Reihana, in his practice Pule responds to visualizations of contact created during Cook’s voyages. Interpretation for this artwork in the exhibition highlights how Pule’s work responds to Cook’s renaming of his native island of Niue as ‘Savage Island’, following a violent confrontation on its rocky shores with the Indigenous inhabitants in 1774. The moment of encounter is relegated to a space in the bottom left-hand corner of the artwork, a visual rupture within the grid system of symbols and signs Pule uses (inspired by ‘hiapo’ - 19th century barkcloth tapestries), showing figures meeting on the border between inky sea and white land (Thomas, 2010, pp.38-39). The curators of James Cook: The Voyages explicitly link Pule’s work to the historic visualizations of encounter that they go on to display in the exhibition, writing: “Pule draws on the work of Cook’s artists Sydney Parkinson and William Hodges to reflect on the violence that often accompanied exploration.” (The British Library, 2018). In a survey of the artist’s work, Nicholas Thomas equally likens Pule’s work to specific scenes of encounter recorded by William Hodges.69 The object label in the exhibition concludes by quoting Pule himself, who connects the visuals of early encounters in his own work with the places of meeting and contact in

68 Curator Laura Walker explained that Pule’s work was specifically included because of the direct references it makes to the eighteenth- century works displayed in the exhibition. It was displayed at the start so that the modern voice it introduces framed the historical content of the exhibition, rather than being placed in direct dialogue with it. (L. Walker, personal communication, 7th December 2018). 69 Thomas describes Pule’s works such as The Splendid Land as reminiscent of “Hodges’ representations of landings at Erramanga and Tanna - scenes of excitement, confusion, hubbub, and violent resistance.” (2010, p.42). Emma Yandle Chapter Three Page 56 border zones today, remarking that: “the time of meeting on beaches has shifted to airport lounges and electronic security surveillance.” (Pule quoted by The British Library, 2018). The framing of The Splendid Land by the British Library is an example of the different way that contemporary depictions of voyage encounters tend to be interpreted by these exhibitions, in contrast to their treatment of eighteenth-century visualizations of encounter.70 Curatorial framing of these contemporary works by Pacific artists, use visual analysis to highlight their construction and draw conclusions on the artists’ intentions when deploying the iconography of landing and meeting. In the exhibitions under discussion, such conclusions are frequently used by the curators to explain anthropological or post-colonial ideas concerning early voyager-Indigenous encounters. This has the effect of privileging the voices of practising artists within exhibitions that are primarily historical in content, giving them the authority to speak on anthropological issues and the historical legacy of Cook’s voyages, over the curatorial voice of the museum. However, approaching contemporary artworks for what they can reveal about the legacies of Pacific encounters, comes at the expense of presenting a continuum of how contact has been visualized by different artists from different graphic traditions. This would be possible if the contemporary and eighteenth-century works were displayed alongside each other and pointedly drawn into a relationship. Comparative analysis of these four exhibitions reveals that contemporary artworks are usually interpreted to discuss the legacies of Cook’s encounters and their afterlives for Indigenous Pacific Islanders, at the expense of demonstrating how they relate to either tangible encounters that took place on the voyages, or their eighteenth-century visualizations. Whilst the legacy of contact is a prominent feature in the works of Pacific artists introduced above, many of their pieces also directly engage with specific moments of contact that took place on Cook’s voyages, and the ways they were recorded in European material culture. Despite this, in these exhibitions contemporary representations of encounter are not placed in direct proximity to their eighteenth-century predecessors or interpreted to demonstrate the links between them, even within those that adopt a transhistorical approach to display. Works by contemporary Indigenous artists that respond to Cook’s voyages and early encounters are offered a dual function within their narratives: as artistic works communicating ideas, brought to the fore by visual analysis, and as political or anthropological statements on encounter and contact. This is in stark contrast to the predominant treatment of eighteenth-century visualizations of contact as documentary records, as discussed in the preceding chapter. Focusing on examples from the Royal Academy of Art’s Oceania and the British Museum’s Reimagining Captain Cook - two exhibition that embrace a transhistorical presentation throughout – can highlight this treatment of contemporary visualizations of encounters within the exhibitions’ narratives.

70 It is notable that Thomas’ close reading of The Landing at Erromanga and The Landing at Tanna in reference to Pule’s work above, in which visual analysis is related to anthropological thinking on the dynamics of such encounters, clearly differs from the treatment of the works themselves in these exhibitions, as discussed in Chapter Two. Emma Yandle Chapter Three Page 57

ii.) Unexplored relationships: contemporary & eighteenth-century encounters in exhibitions

Simon Gende’s Captn Cook in Australia (see Figure 27), displayed in the Australia section of Reimagining Captain Cook: Pacific Perspectives, is an example of a contemporary redeployment of the encounter iconography that is familiar from the work of Hodges. This is analysed and highlighted by the interpretation, which describes how Gende depicts the hostile reaction to Cook’s arrival by Aboriginal Australians in Botany Bay (as discussed in Chapter One), through figures “defending their lands with shields and spears”. It goes on to identify the figure of Captain Cook in the composition - holding a gun in one hand and planting the Union Jack in another - concluding that “Gende's depiction of this historical encounter pinpoints the moment when Indigenous Australians lost their autonomy to British law, a source of continuing debate.” (The British Museum, 2018). This visual analysis is used to introduce concepts of discovery and ownership that Figure 27. Captn Cook in Australia by Simon Gende, 2018. Reproduced by permission of the artist Image: © are at the centre of post-colonial contestations of The Trustees of the British Museum Australia’s imperial foundational narrative. Cook undertakes his symbolic act of possession on the beach, despite the multitude of Aboriginal Australians rushing to stop him, their presence and defence of their territory literally and visually contesting the legitimacy of this act. Unlike the print of The Landing at Mallicolo which is positioned as a documentary record in a subsequent case, Gende’s artwork is used to highlight the different ways that encounters during Cook’s voyages can be visualized, and by extension, conceptualised. However, by using Gende’s work to introduce wider post-colonial concepts such as the possession of lands, the interpretation overlooks the opportunity to show how Captn Cook in Australia relates to the circumstances and dynamics of the tangible encounter that it reinterprets, and so explain exactly how Gende “pinpoints the moment when Indigenous Australians lost their autonomy” (The British Museum, 2018). The artwork notably does not depict an actual moment from Cook’s landing in Botany Bay in 1770: there is no record that Cook planted a flag on Australian soil. Gende is conflating two historical moments: Cook’s landing and first contact with the Gweagal people on 29th April 1770 and Cook formally taking possession of the East Coast of Australia on 22nd August 1770, by raising a flag on Bedanug, an island in the Torres Strait, that he ceremonially renamed as Possession Island. It is precisely because Gende does not depict an historical reality that his visualization of encounter is so interesting. The work plays on the idea of point of view: both what one literally sees and how one interprets a situation. Gende presents a point of view that pinpoints the loss of Aboriginal autonomy to the moment of first contact with Cook, by visualizing the British act of possession - the raising of the Union Jack - as occurring in the same temporal and spatial moment as the first encounter. Gende introduces the outcome that followed Cook’s contact – physical possession of Australian land through the establishment of a British penal colony on its territories eighteen years later – as implicit in the moment of contact itself. This runs contrary to anthropological arguments that subsequent outcomes of encounters ought not to be viewed as inherent in the moment of meeting itself. Yet Gende is re-visualizing the encounter as it is Emma Yandle Chapter Three Page 58

experienced today by many Aboriginal peoples,71 as the legacy of the contact rather than the contact itself, and by looking back on a moment in history with the hindsight of knowing the changes to Aboriginal ways of life it set in motion. If his contemporary, Pacific work had been displayed in contrast with European historical records of events, it would have been able to explain why the actual moment of British possession of Australia is “a source of continuing debate”. Without the historical context, a visitor is not activated to closely look at Gende’s artwork and consider the nuanced points contained towards encounters in its composition. Consequently, much of his reimagining, from a Pacific perspective, is not highlighted by the exhibition’s narrative. A similar approach is found in the Royal Academy of Arts’ Oceania, wherein Lisa Reihana’s contemporary depiction of Pacific encounters (See Figure 28), is interpreted to address the legacy of contact, rather than brought into relation with the tangible encounters, or their eighteenth-century depictions, that it specifically draws upon. In Pursuit of Venus [infected], 2015-2017, is a complex multivalent work, by Reihana.72 It is presented in the exhibition with a long introductory label, in which the primary interpretation of the work focuses on its subtitle “infected” (for the full object label text see Appendix E). This recounts the decimation Figure 28. Installation view showing scenes of in Pursuit Venus [infected] at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2018. Artwork by Lisa Reihana, 2015-2017. Photo by Emma of Indigenous populations in Yandle. the Pacific in the years following contact, due to the spread of sexually-transmitted diseases and airborne viruses. It concludes with a more general reading of “infected”: that it “also points to the manifold ways in which these encounters affected the bodies, lives, experiences and cultures of the peoples of both the Pacific and Europe.” (The Royal Academy, 2018). Whilst this aspect of history is a relevant and important part of narrating contact, it is unusual that it forms the primary insight offered to visitors poised to view Reihana’s continually rolling installation, as it does little to illuminate exactly what they are about to see. In interviews concerning the work and accompanying publications, Reihana detailed the extent of the archival and historical research that she undertook when creating in Pursuit of Venus [infected], to ensure that, like the wallpaper that served as her inspiration, she reimagined actual historical moments from Cook’s voyages (Reihana 2012, 2017). Curator of Oceania Dr. Adrian Locke, stated that such an approach was grounded in the institutional approach taken by the Royal Academy of Arts to the works they display: “[t]he Academy always tends to show things as art objects – the story is subsidiary to the aesthetic appeal.” (A. Locke, personal communication, 6th December 2018). Oceania pointedly positions

71 Curator Julie Adams (in a discussion of Māori artist Steve Gibbs' work Name Changer, 2016) describes contemporary Māori reactions to Cook’s assessment of Aotearoa New Zealand: “They feel it like an insult, like a wound” (J. Adams, personal communication, 22nd July 2019). 72 Reihana is an artist from Aotearoa New Zealand of mixed English, Welsh and Māori heritage. She represented New Zealand in their Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2017. Emma Yandle Chapter Three Page 59 itself as an art, rather than an historical exhibition, and its narrative focuses on thematic groupings of Pacific art in relation to wider themes such as ‘Navigation’ and ‘Ritual’. The relationship between the work and the specific moments of encounter, is acknowledged in Oceania, but only in general terms as an “unfolding anthology of stories of science, encounter, ritual and violence drawn from first-hand accounts”, showing Islander-European encounters to have been “a theatre of many different dramas” (The Royal Academy, 2018). One such drama does indeed relate directly to infection: a scene in which a member of Cook’s crew is flogged, the red marks on his chest evidence of syphilis. However, for visitors without specialist knowledge, such iconography, and the attendant implication that his punishment is due to the spread of this disease,73 is unlikely to be understood. The deep interrelation between the work’s “aesthetic appeal” and the “story” it presents (A. Locke, personal communication, 6th December 2018) is arguably overlooked by the Royal Academy’s approach. Visitors are consequently not introduced to the specific relationship between Reihana’s work of art and individual moments of encounter on Cook’s voyages. References to Cook and other expeditions to the Pacific are included only tangentially: Cook himself is mentioned in the Introduction to the exhibition, but subsequently only as part of the provenance of specific Pacific artefacts. Locke describes him as “a natural anchoring, start point” of the exhibition, for “he’s really the first interlocutor between both worlds.” (A. Locke, personal communication, 6th December 2018). In her analysis of in Pursuit of Venus [infected], Looser outlines the piece’s complex relationship to actual historical events: Reihana’s “Historical “truth”…does not adhere to Western standards of documentary fidelity, but emerges through and alongside fictional inserts, speculative twists, conscious anachronisms, and symbolic compressions.” (Looser, 2017, p.463).74 Scenes play out in live action, but their framing from a flat fixed point of view stems from the iconography of eighteenth-century visualizations of encounter, their artificiality amplified and extended across the wall of the exhibition space. Thomas’ description of eighteenth-century encounter drawings as “saturated with human purpose” (1997, p.101), could easily be applied to Reihana’s work. Furthermore, within the 70 live-action vignettes that make up the piece, Reihana includes eleven “dramas” that are specifically drawn from the records of Cook’s voyages (Reihana, 2012, p.45). Within them, Reihana explains how Cook and notable figures from his crew are represented: artists Sydney Parkinson and William Hodges; collector Joseph Banks; and Pacific Islanders who joined the voyages, such as Tupaia (“Dramatis Personae, 2017). With these historically-inspired encounters playing out in real time, visitors are shown the confusion, shifting power dynamics, and ongoing negotiation between European and Indigenous figures. By bringing to life anthropological ideas of how contact would have progressed, Reihana quite literally animates and brings Pratt’s archetypical contact zone into the museum space, as proposed by Clifford, 1997. In so doing, she redresses historical inequities or inaccuracies, in the European records of Cook’s voyages, as already

73 Cook’s growing awareness of the devastation caused to Indigenous populations by the introduction of sexually transmitted diseases is evidenced by his behaviour during the voyages. On arriving in Hawai’i on the third voyage he records in his journal “As there were some venereal complaints on board both the ships in order to prevent its being communicated to the people, I gave orders that no women on any account whatever were to be admitted on board the ships, I also forbid all manner of connection with them, and ordered that none who had the venereal upon them should go out of the ships. But whether these regulations had the desired effect or no time can only discover. It is no more than what I did when I first visited the Friendly Islands yet I afterwards found it did not succeed.” (Beaglehole, 1967, I, pp. 265-6, as cited by Pirie, 1978, p.83) 74 Reihana’s take on “historical truth” is also demonstrated through the sound design by James Pinker that accompanies the video work. Sounds are woven together from both Pacific and European ways of life: dialogue in several Pacific languages, the noise of rituals - Hawaiian drumming, the tapping of Māori tattoo tools; and eighteenth-century European music – Bach, church organs, even the ticking of the clock used by Cook during the first voyage Emma Yandle Chapter Three Page 60 introduced through her accurate presentation Pacific culture. The moment of first contact between Cook and Māori was not recorded by the voyage artist, but it is imagined by Reihana here with Tupaia (who is discussed in detail in the Preface to this work), playing the central role in mediating between the two groups (see Figure 29). Reversing the point of view found in European iconography, viewers of Reihana’s encounters see the action unfolding in Reihana’s own description, from “a tangata whenua view” (Reihana, 2012, p.17). This Māori term describes adopting an Indigenous perspective by Figure 29. First meeting between Tupaia, Cook and Māori chief. Tupaia is the figure looking out from the land in the left, wearing a white cloak. Detail from in Pursuit of Venus [infected], by Lisa Reihana, 2015–17. Courtesy of the artist and New Zealand at Venice. Image provided toward the arriving foreign courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco visitors. The viewer looks out at the action, which occurs from the land to beach, rather than originating on the boat as in Hodges’ visualizations. As Reihana explains “I want viewers…to feel as if they are watching the foreshore action from behind the flora.” (2012, p.17). From this point of view, the symmetry and binary opposition of two distinct sides meeting, is disrupted by the central position of Tupaia, the figure in the foreground shown in profile wearing a white cloak. He is positioned as the visual counterpart of the Māori chief facing him, Cook relegated to the background, deferentially waiting for Tupaia to take the lead. The importance of Tupaia as a go-between with Islanders of other Pacific nations, highlighted by scholarship since the 1990s,75 is visually present in the exhibition space. Like Gende’s dual approach to point of view, Reihana visualizes, and so brings historical authority to an Indigenous perspective on this encounter.76 The complexity and richness of in Pursuit of Venus [infected] extends far beyond the limited scope for analysis here77, yet it is not the framing chosen within Oceania. The work’s nuanced and thoughtful engagement with both eighteenth-century European iconography of Pacific encounters, and anthropological research into their actuality,78 is not highlighted by the exhibition’s interpretation, or brought to the fore through a presentation alongside eighteenth-century images of encounter, that in turn have their own mixture of artistic licence and historical facts.79 Rather than highlighting the mutability of meaning contained within Reihana’s work, its tight framing with Oceania serves to limit the ways in which visitors are encouraged to engage with it.

75 See Salmond, 1991, 1997. 76 As the text in a section on Tupaia’s death in Reimagining Captain Cook recounts: “When Cook returned to New Zealand, Māori asked after Tupaia and wept when they learned of his death. Today, when Māori remember these first encounters, they remember the Endeavour as Tupaia’s ship.” (The British Museum, 2018). 77 Looser, 2017, undertakes an in-depth close-reading of this work. 78 Much of Reihana’s commentary on the artwork highlights her desire to bring complexity and multiple perspectives into her visualization of European-Indigenous encounters in the Pacific. For example, she states: “I wanted to show different perspectives on exactly the same thing; I wanted to make the story more complicated, rather than simple or didactic” 79 Interestingly, such an approach is to be taken by a forthcoming exhibition of in Pursuit of Venus [infected] at the De Young Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco (opening 10th August 2019), who have recently acquired the work. In this exhibition it will be displayed alongside both an original copy of Charvet’s wallpaper and engravings from Cook’s published voyage accounts. Emma Yandle Conclusion Page 61

Conclusion

Museological responses to the 250th anniversary of Cook’s departure onboard the Endeavour, have afforded the opportunity to reflect more broadly on the issues at play in exhibiting cross-cultural contact: whether in the eighteenth-century, the prior global explorations of the Early modern period, or the increased colonial relationships from the nineteenth century onwards. Due to the breadth of material culture collected on his voyages and his legacy in museum presentations, what is at stake in exhibiting Cook is much of what is at stake in exhibiting exploration and colonial history in general. Despite occurring towards the end of European exploration of the globe, and in many instances not representing first contact in the region, Cook’s voyages still continue to receive significant attention in Britain and beyond. These four exhibitions demonstrate that Cook remains, in Lissant Bolton’s words, the ‘familiar stranger’ through which Pacific history continues to be presented to the British public (2010, p.123). Over time, museological treatment of Cook has moved away from valorising his personality or highlighting the breadth of knowledge brought back by his voyages. In recent decades, following post-colonial reassessments of history, it has turned towards describing the voyages in terms of cultural contact and including Indigenous accounts of events and their legacies. Such a shift begins to undermine the need for Cook to be afforded so central a position when presenting the Pacific in exhibitions. It is through his deployment in contemporary Indigenous art that Cook’s presence as a singular figure within European-Pacific is most strongly justified. However, the question remains as to whether in 2068, on the 300th anniversary of Cook’s first voyage, it will still be deemed a moment with sufficient cultural saliency to receive widespread commemoration. Approaching these four exhibitions through their presentation of visualizations of encounters, as this work has done, necessarily takes a partial view of their scope: the objects under discussion here form only a small proportion of the collections on display. However, the centrality of encounters to the wider thematic and narrative concerns of these exhibitions, justifies such an approach. How then have these objects been employed to demonstrate the contingency, the shared agency, the uncertainty, multiplicity, history and presence (Thomas,

2016, p.261) of cross-cultural encounters? To what extent does their curatorial framing show the influence of scholarship from other disciplines? Anthropological thinking, analysis shows, has had a clear influence over the narrative role afforded to encounters within these exhibitions. The recurrence of the same academic figures – in particular Nicholas Thomas and Anne Salmond – across the exhibitions; and the consultation with diaspora community groups by the curatorial teams,80 demonstrate their desire to be inclusive of Indigenous voices. However, within the exhibitions’ interpretation, old simplications are often replaced by new ones. Encounters are frequently referred to as ‘contested’, ‘peaceful’ or ‘violent’, at the expense of offering details that would show how individual moments of contact were entangled with specific “concrete social locations” (Clifford, 1997, p.213). In their simplicity, statements that appear at first to be in-line with anthropological ideas of encounters, do not deliver on this promise: stating that encounters were varied in nature, does little to actually further a visitor’s understanding of the dynamics of contact, in this particular historical, Pacific, setting.

80 To take only one example, the involvement of Jo Walsh of In*ter*is*land Collective and Ngāti Rānana London Māori Club was highlighted as crucially important both Laura Walker, curator of James Cook: The Voyages and Sophie Richards, curator of Pacific Encounters.

Emma Yandle Conclusion Page 62

Frequently, discussion of the legacy of encounters is privileged over exploring their actuality. The desire to make specific encounters emblematic of contact, appears in contrast to the ways in which the exhibitions break down a hegemonic concept of the ‘Pacific’ into individual islands and exchange the term ‘Indigenous’ for specific cultural and ethnic groups. Whilst presenting encounters as locally-situated and particular is certainly challenge for exhibitions that seek to narrativize multiple complicated events within an exhibition spaces, endeavouring to do so would go a long way towards encouraging visitors to empathise with the decisions made, in the heat of the moment, by both sides. This is not to claim that the ‘encounter perspective’ I had argued for is entirely absent from these exhibitions. However, the interpretative approach to objects does not tend to overtly encourage reflection on the inherent complexity of the relationship between visualizations of encounters and tangible encounters: fixity and simplicity tend to be upheld. It is particularly in the deployment of eighteenth-century visualizations of encounter, that a disparity between anthropological ideas and the treatment of objects is shown. Across all of the three exhibitions that include Hodges’ depictions of landings, these works are presented as documentary evidence, rather than highly constructed artistic presentations. This overlooks the opportunity they present to explore precisely how the way in which encounters were represented to the British public, which played so important a role in the cultural mythology of the Pacific in the centuries to come. Introduced first to visualize a specific social location, the interpretation swiftly shifts towards a totalizing, emblematic view of contact across the Pacific. As I have discussed, the layering of multiple, and perhaps contradictory, evidence of encounters, could be used activate visitors to consider the frenetic nature of contact, simultaneously from European and Indigenous points of view. In contrast, contemporary art that utilises the iconography of encounters, is afforded much more detailed visual analysis and frequently brought into direct relation with anthropological thinking. However, privileging the personal opinions of Indigenous artists, or contemporary members of Pacific Islander communities, within exhibitions that also recount specific historical events, raises another level of questions. What is elevated to the authority of ‘truth’ by museum interpretation in these exhibitions, ranges across the artistic responses of Indigenous artists to Cook’s Pacific voyages; the personal experiences of present-day community members; to a combination of the historical record of Cook’s voyages, the material culture they collected, and the reflective intervention of a curatorial voice. How to balance an historical narrative of history, with contemporary, moral, emotional and artistic responses to its events is the challenge facing museums today, that seek to exhibit European and Indigenous histories together. It forms part of the re-negotiation required of museum authority, if exhibitions are to take into account the rights of Indigenous communities to represent themselves and invite their voices into the museum space – the cultural centre – without attempting to maintain control over the outcome. Emma Yandle Appendices Page 63

Appendices

Appendix A: Excerpt from the press release for James Cook: The Voyages

James Cook: The Voyages opens at the British Library

Wednesday 25th April 2018

New major exhibition marks 250 years since James Cook’s ship Endeavour set sail from Plymouth. Featuring original maps, artworks and journals alongside contemporary films, the exhibition allows visitors to follow the course of his voyages and consider their legacy. Accompanying website [http://www.bl.uk/the-voyages-of-captain-james-cook] and events programme [https://www.bl.uk/events/james- cook-the-voyages] further explore the different perspectives and competing narratives surrounding the voyages.

Marking 250 years since James Cook’s ship Endeavour set sail from Plymouth, James Cook: The Voyages [https://www.bl.uk/events/james-cook-the-voyages] (27 April to 28 August 2018) explores Cook’s three world- changing voyages through stunning artworks, original maps and handwritten journals. From iconic depictions of people and landscapes by expedition artists Sydney Parkinson, John Webber and William Hodges to an evocative collection of drawings by Polynesian high priest and navigator Tupaia, which are going on display together for the first time, James Cook: The Voyages will take visitors on a journey of discovery, from the Pacific Ocean to the Antarctic. The exhibition will chart Cook’s three voyages, from the Endeavour setting sail from Plymouth in 1768 to the Resolution and Discovery returning to Britain in 1780 after Cook’s death in Hawaii. It will explore different perspectives on the voyages, from those on board the ships to those who saw them arrive on their shores, and will consider their legacy and relevance today.

Exhibition highlights include: Paintings depicting Tahiti, New Zealand and Australia by the Polynesian high priest and navigator Tupaia, which are going on display as a group for the first time. The first chart of New Zealand by James Cook. The first artworks depicting the Antarctic by William Hodges on loan from the State Library of New South Wales, which will be reunited with James Cook’s handwritten journal entry describing the first crossing of the Antarctic Circle, for the first time in 100 years. Specimens from the first voyage, including the mouth parts of a squid, on loan from the Royal College of Surgeons. Expedition artist John Webber’s watercolour landscapes, including the first European illustrations of Hawai’i. Jewellery and musical instruments, including a necklace from Tierra del Fuego, ceremonial rattle from Nootka Sound (Vancouver Island) and bamboo flute from Tahiti, on loan from Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge. Natural history drawings, including the first European depiction of a kangaroo by Sydney Parkinson on loan from the Natural History Museum.

The British Library holds pre-eminent collections from the voyages, including many original maps, artwork and journals produced on board ship, which will be displayed alongside films exploring contemporary views on Emma Yandle Appendices Page 64

Cook’s legacy in Australia, New Zealand and other places visited by the expeditions. Contemporary perspectives on the voyages, including people from the Pacific communities Cook visited, will also be explored through the Library’s accompanying web space [http://www.bl.uk/the-voyages-of-captain-james-cook]) and public events programme [https://www.bl.uk/events/james-cook-the-voyages].

William Frame, co-curator of James Cook: The Voyages at the British Library, said: “The British Library holds many iconic artworks, charts and handwritten journals from James Cook’s voyages and the exhibition displays the most famous of these together, alongside key loans, for the first time in a generation. Through the exhibition and accompanying public programme visitors will be able to consider different perspectives on the voyages and to reflect on their meaning today.”

Laura Walker, co-curator of James Cook: The Voyages at the British Library, said: “In the exhibition, visitors will be able to follow the course of each voyage through eyewitness accounts, hand- drawn charts and stunning artwork created on board ship. Alongside these sources, recently commissioned films allow visitors to consider contemporary perspectives on the voyages and to examine their legacy, much of which remains highly contested today.”

The accompanying web space [https://www.bl.uk/the-voyages-of-captain-james-cook/], which will be added to throughout the exhibition run, hosts a range of newly digitized collection items, audio-visual content and articles by academics, artists, journalists and community historians who present their views and responses to the Library’s exhibition and collections. The British Library will also be hosting a series of photographs by Crystal Te Moananui- Squares, which present a contemporary encounter with Pacific communities in the United Kingdom as a creative response to the exhibition. The free display, entitled Tūhuratanga – Voyages of Discovery, will be located in the Library’s Second Floor Gallery from 6 July to 23 September 2018.

There will be a full programme of events, including talks, discussions and film screenings, inspired by the exhibition. April to June events can be found on the British Library’s What’s On pages [https://www.bl.uk/whats-on], with a full programme of events available on request.

Highlights include: Keynote lectures by Professor Nicholas Thomas, Director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, and Dame Anne Salmond, Distinguished Professor of Māori Studies and Anthropology at the University of Auckland. New Zealand Poet Laureate and Pasifika poet-scholar Selina Tusitala Marsh, curator, writer and artist Ahilapalapa Rands and Dame Anne Salmond discussing James Cook: Legacies and Controversies. Digital Conversation: Empowering Technologies, a discussion on how Indigenous communities use new technologies to preserve and promote their way of life.

James Cook: The Voyages is supported by PONANT Yacht Cruises & Expeditions [https://en.ponant.com/] and the UK Antarctic Heritage Trust [http://www.ukaht.org/].

Emma Yandle Appendices Page 65

Alice Carter The British Library t: +44 (0)20 7412 7126 e: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] Evenings and weekends: +44 (0) 20 7412 7150

Carter, A. (2018, 25th April). James Cook: The Voyages opens at the British Library [Press release]. Retrieved from https://www.bl.uk/press-releases/2018/april/james-cook-the-voyages-opens-at-the-british-library Emma Yandle Appendices Page 66

Appendix B: Excerpts from press release from the National Maritime Museum, announcing Pacific Encounters

Royal Museums Greenwich Opens Four New Galleries Covering 500 Years Of Human Endeavour And Exploration

20 September 2018

On 20 September 2018, Royal Museums Greenwich (RMG) will open four new permanent galleries following a major £12.6M redevelopment project, supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) through The National Lottery (4.6M). With over 1,100 objects going on display, the galleries based in the National Maritime Museum (NMM) will bring the theme of exploration alive, giving visitors unprecedented access to its world-class collections and responding to the public’s growing fascination with Britain’s maritime heritage. The four new galleries – Tudor and Stuart Seafarers, Pacific Encounters, Polar Worlds and Sea Things – cover British and European exploration from the late-fifteenth century through to the present day. Through recurring themes of encounter, legacy, science, trade, exploitation and power, visitors will delve into the complex story of Britain’s exploration of the world, examining how men and women ventured beyond the nation’s shores to explore the ends of the Earth in a quest for knowledge, riches and adventure. Furthermore, the galleries will highlight how Britain’s relationship with the sea and its growing maritime power and ambitions shaped the country and impacted the world we live in today.

Designed by Casson Mann, the visually enticing and object-rich galleries offer a welcoming environment for both new and existing visitors to engage with and contemplate significant moments of Britain’s maritime past. The redevelopment project sees 1,000m2 of space in the Museum’s East Wing, previously closed to visitors, converted to public use. The transformation has provided the NMM with an additional 40 per cent of gallery space, allowing the Museum to substantially expand the breadth of its public offering.

Working in consultation with the Museum’s wide network of community groups, each gallery presents multiple perspectives on Britain’s maritime legacy, connecting past events with the contemporary world and adding a deeper insight into the Museum’s collection. Visitors of all ages will be inspired to question and reflect on what they have learned, whilst going on their own personal voyage of exploration and discovery.

Pacific Encounters

Pacific Encounters tells the story of exploration and exploitation, as European travelers turned their attention to the Pacific in the 17th century, venturing into the world’s largest ocean in search of greater knowledge. The gallery examines the far-reaching consequences this had on the people and cultures they encountered, who had lived in the Pacific for more than 50,000 years. Emma Yandle Appendices Page 67

Using the stories of Pacific voyages, including the HMS Endeavour, the first of three expeditions lead by Captain James Cook in 1768, visitors will see how navigational advancements and the desire for knowledge and enlightenment was a key motivation for Pacific exploration. Through the stories of Pacific islanders, such as Tupaia, whose knowledge of his surroundings was of great assistance to Cook, the gallery demonstrates that communication, collection and exchange with the islanders, which could vary from friendly to violent, was vital to the success of these expeditions.

Artistic representations of the Pacific islands and their occupants by artists, such as William Hodges and George Stubbs, will be displayed. They show how the westernized depiction of the ‘exotic’ lands and inhabitants of the Pacific fascinated the population back home, whilst relics from the infamous story of the mutiny of the Bounty, a vessel that was tasked with cultivating Breadfruit as food for enslaved people in the Caribbean, will provide visitors with the earliest examples of the exploitation of Pacific land and resources. Furthermore, the accounts from missionaries who introduced, and in some cases imposed Christianity on the islanders, whose practices and beliefs they tried to outlaw, will indicate that British interest in the land and the people living there was both state-sponsored and privately organized, both helping pave the way for later British colonization of the Pacific.

With a focus on Pacific histories, identities and the legacies, the gallery touches upon the plentiful practices, beliefs and traditions of Pacific people and how these communities were impacted by European exploration and exploitation. A drua, a life-size Fijian open ocean canoe will take pride of place in the gallery highlighting how boat-building, navigation and performance continue to be celebrated across the Pacific. The gallery will leave visitors reflecting on the complex legacy of European exploration and how this has shaped the Pacific as we know it today.

Exhibition information for visitors: Venue: National Maritime Museum Dates: From 20 September, 2018 Opening times: every day, 10.00 – 17.00 Visitor enquiries: 020 8858 4422 Admission: Free Website: www.rmg.co.uk/PacificEncounters Twitter: @RMGreenwich #NewGalleries Instagram: @royalmuseumsgreenwich #NewGalleries Facebook: Royal Museums Greenwich Sarah Sandall, Royal Museums Greenwich Press Office Tel: 020 8312 6789 | 07960 509 802 or Email [email protected] or [email protected]

Sandall, S. (2018, 20th September). Royal Museums Greenwich Opens Four New Galleries [Press release]. Retrieved from https://www.rmg.co.uk/work-services/news-press/press-release/royal-museums-greenwich-four- new-galleries

Emma Yandle Appendices Page 68

Appendix C: Press release for Oceania Emma Yandle Appendices Page 69

Emma Yandle Appendices Page 70

Emma Yandle Appendices Page 71

Bennett, J. (2018, 25th September). Oceania [Press release]. Emma Yandle Appendices Page 72

Appendix D: Press release Reimagining Captain Cook: Pacific Perspectives Emma Yandle Appendices Page 73

The British Museum (2018). Reimagining Captain Cook: Pacific Perspectives [Press release]. Retrieved from https://www.britishmuseum.org/docs/Pressrelease_ReimaginingCaptainCook_Pacific%20Perspectives.docx Emma Yandle Appendices Page 74

Appendix E: Label text for in Pursuit of Venus [infected] in Oceania, the Royal Academy of Arts in Pursuit of Venus [infected]

One of the most spectacular expressions of the European imagining of Oceania was Les sauvages de la mer Pacifique, a 20-panel luxurious wallpaper inspired in some aspects by accounts of Captain Cook’s voyages. Designed by Jean Gabriel Charvet and printed from woodblocks by Joseph Dufour in Mâcon, it was first shown in Paris in 1806 at the ‘Exposition des produits de l’industrie française’. The resulting panoramic vision of the peoples, costumes, customs and environments of the Pacific was highly romanticised.

The New Zealand artist Lisa Reihana has reappropriated this idealised view of the Oceania in order to create the multi-layered video work in Pursuit of Venus [infected]. Part re-enacment, part animation and part enlargement of the original panorama, it exemplifies the continuing vitality of Indigenous performance in the present. Through an unfolding anthology of stories of science, encounter, ritual and violence drawn from first-hand accounts, the work reveals the early contact between Islanders and Europeans as a theatre of many different dramas.

One of the most destructive aspects of the European 'discovery' of Oceania that impacted directly on Islander populations was the rapid spread of sexually transmitted diseases. These caused extensive infertility and contributed, along with other diseases to which the Islander population had no immunity such as measles and tuberculosis, to the catastrophic depopulation that many islands and archipelagos suffered over the course of the nineteenth century. Reihana's use of the term ‘infected’ in the title of her work highlights that harm, but also points to the manifold ways in which these encounters affected the bodies, lives, experiences and cultures of the peoples of both the Pacific and Europe.

(The Royal Academy of Arts, 2018). Emma Yandle Bibliography Page 75

Bibliography

Adams, J. (2016, June 29). Artefacts of Encounter talk by Dr Julie Adams, Curator Oceania Collections British Museum [YouTube]. Retrieved 28th July, 2019, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKtegus7tj4

Appadurai, A. (Ed.) (1986). The Social Life of Things. Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.

Appadurai, A. (2016, October 10). Sharon Macdonald, Tony Bennett & Arjun Appadurai – THING [Video]. Retrieved July 28, 2019, from https://www.hkw.de/en/app/mediathek/video/54230

Armstrong, W. (1995). In Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G. and Tiffin, H., eds (1995) The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. New York: Routledge.

Arthur, J., Withycombe, L. (2015). Talking about objects and ancestors in the first person. In I. Coates, J. Arthur (Ed.), Encounters: Revealing Stories of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Objects from the British Museum (pp. 36-39). Canberra: National Museum of Australia.

Bal, M., & Janssen, E. (1996). Double Exposures: The Subject of Cultural Analysis. Hove: Psychology Press.

Banner, S. (2007). Possessing the Pacific: Land, Settlers, and Indigenous People from Australia to Alaska. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

Bennett, J. (2018, 25th September). Oceania [Press release].

Bennett, T. (2012). Machineries of Modernity. Museums, Theories, Histories. The Journal of the Social History Society, 9 (1) https://doi.org/10.2752/147800412X13191165983150

Bennett, T. (2013). The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. Abingdon-on-Thomas: Routledge.

Bennett, T. (2016, October 10). Sharon Macdonald, Tony Bennett & Arjun Appadurai – THING [Video]. Retrieved July 28, 2019, from https://www.hkw.de/en/app/mediathek/video/54230

Bindman, D. (2002). Ape to Apollo, Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the 18th Century. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Birchwood, M., & Dimmock, M. (eds.) (2005). Cultural encounters between East and West, 1453-1699. Amersham: Cambridge Scholars Press.

Boast, R. (2011). Neocolonial Collaboration: Museum as Contact Zone Revisited. Museum Anthropology, 34(1), (pp.56–70). https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1379.2010.01107.x

Bolton, L. (2010). Brushed with fame: museological investments in the Cook voyage collections. In H. Morphy & M. Hetherington, Discovering Cook’s Collections. (Canberra: The National Museum of Australia, Large Print Version via ReadHowYouWant).

Borofsky, B. (1997). Cook, Lono, Obeyesekere, and Sahlins. Current Anthropology, 38 (2), pp. 255-282. https://doi.org/10.1086/204608

Emma Yandle Bibliography Page 76

To BP or not BP. (n.d.) Hundreds join unofficial tour to challenge British Museum stolen items and BP sponsorship. (2018, December 10). Retrieved 28th July 2019, from https://bp-or-not- bp.org/2018/12/10/hundreds-join-unofficial-tour-to-challenge-british-museum-stolen-items-and-bp-sponsorship/

The British Library. (2018, June 11). Tūhuratanga – Voyage of Discovery: Photographs by Crystal Te Moananui-Squares [Press release]. Retrieved 28th July, 2019, from https://www.bl.uk/news/2018/july/tuhuratanga-voyage-of-discovery

The British Museum. (n.d.) History of the collection. (n.d.). Retrieved 28th July 2019, from https://www.britishmuseum.org/about_us/departments/africa,_oceania,_americas/history_of_the_collection.aspx

The British Museum (2018). Reimagining Captain Cook: Pacific Perspectives [Press release]. Retrieved from https://www.britishmuseum.org/docs/Pressrelease_ReimaginingCaptainCook_Pacific%20Perspectives.docx

Burgess, M. (n.d.). The National Museum. Retrieved 28th July, 2019, from https://mark-aka- daddyo.smugmug.com/Photos-of-Australia/ACT-Canberra-and-Environs/National-Museum/

Calder, A., Lamb, J., & Orr, B. (Eds.). (1999). Voyages and beaches: Pacific encounters, 1769-1840. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

Campbell, I. C. (2003). The Culture of Culture Contact: Refractions from Polynesia. Journal of World History, 14(1), 63–86. https://doi.org/10.1353/jwh.2003.0004

Carter, A. (2018, 25th April). James Cook: The Voyages opens at the British Library [Press release]. Retrieved from https://www.bl.uk/press-releases/2018/april/james-cook-the-voyages-opens-at-the-british-library

Chambers, N. (Ed.) (2016). Endeavouring Banks: Exploring Collections from the Endeavour Voyage 1768- 1771. London: Paul Holberton Publishing.

Clifford, J. (1988). The Predicament of Culture. Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

Clifford, J. (1997). Museums as contact zones. In J. Clifford, Routes: travel and translation in the late twentieth century, (pp. 188-219). Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

Cole, K. (2015). About the exhibition | National Museum of Australia. Retrieved 28th July, 2019, from https://www.nma.gov.au/exhibitions/unsettled/unsettled/about

Cook, J. (2015). A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World. Retrieved from https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=845KCwAAQBAJ

Daley, P. (2016, September 25). The Gweagal shield and the fight to change the British Museum’s attitude to seized artefacts. The Guardian. Retrieved 28th July, 2019, from https://www.theguardian.com/australia- news/2016/sep/25/the-gweagal-shield-and-the-fight-to-change-the-british-museums-attitude-to-seized-artefacts

Daley, P. (2015, November 27). Encounters exhibition: a stunning but troubling collection of colonial plunder. The Guardian. (n.d.). Retrieved 28th July 2019, from https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/nov/27/encounters-exhibition-a-stunning-but-troubling- collection-of-colonial-plunder

Dening, G. (1980). Islands and Beaches: discourse on a silent land, Marquesas, 1774-1880. Carlton: Melbourne University Press. Emma Yandle Bibliography Page 77

Douglas, B. (1994). Art as Ethnohistorical Text: Science, Representation and Indigenous Presence in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Oceanic Voyage Literature. In Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government (pp.65-99).

Dubin, S.C. (2011). In S. Macdonald (Ed). A Companion to Museum Studies (pp.477-492). New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons.

Edmond, R. (1997). Representing the South Pacific: Colonial Discourse from Cook to Gauguin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Faier, L., & Rofel, L. (2014). Ethnographies of Encounter. Annual Review of Anthropology, 43(1), 363–377. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-102313-030210

Forrest, C. (2013). Immunity from Seizure and Suit in Australia: The Protection of Cultural Objects on Loan Act 2013. International Journal of Cultural Property, 21 (pp.143-172). doi:10.1017/S0940739114000046

Frame, W., & Walker, L. (2018). James Cook: The Voyages. London: The British Library Publishing Division.

Gaudio, M. (2008). Engraving the Savage: The New World and Techniques of Civilization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

The Gow Langsford Gallery. (n.d.) Exhibitions: Nothing Must Remain, John Pule. (n.d.). Retrieved 28th July, 2019, from https://www.gowlangsfordgallery.co.nz/exhibitions/nothing-must-remain?id=6078

Greenberg, R., Ferguson, B., Nairne, S. (1996). Thinking about Exhibitions. Hove: Psychology Press.

Griffiths, G., Ashcroft, F. (1995). The Post-colonial Studies Reader. Hove: Psychology Press.

Groesen, M. van. (2008). The Representations of the Overseas World in the De Bry Collection of Voyages (1590-1634). Leiden: Brill.

Groesen, M. van. (2014). 1592: Coining Columbus, The Public Domain Review. Retrieved July 28, 2019, from https://publicdomainreview.org/2014/04/16/1592-coining-columbus/

Hansen, C. (2015). Exhibition review: Indigenous Australia: Enduring Civilisation. ReCollections, 10(2). Retrieved from https://recollections.nma.gov.au/issues/volume_10_number_2/exhibition_reviews/indigenous_australia

Henare, A. J. M. (2005). Museums, Anthropology and Imperial Exchange. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Herle, A. (2016). Anthropology Museums and Museum Anthropology. In F. Stein, S. Lazar, M. Candea, H. Diemberger, J. Robbins, A. Sanchez & R. Stasch (Eds.) The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology. http://doi.org/10.29164/16museums

Historisches Museum Bern, & Thüring, M. (2010, October 6). MEDIA RELEASE: James Cook and the Exploration of the Pacific [Press release]. Retrieved 28th July, 2019, from https://www.bhm.ch/fileadmin/user_upload/documents/Medien/2010/Opening_Cook_E.pdf

Hooper, S. (2006). Pacific Encounters: Art & Divinity in Polynesia, 1760–1860. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Emma Yandle Bibliography Page 78

Jackson, A., Jaffer, A. (2004). Encounters: the Meeting of Asia and Europe 1500-1800. London: Victoria & Albert Museum.

Jefferson, D. (2018, January 31). A monumental, immersive new artwork reanimates the story of Captain Cook and first contact [Blog post]. Retrieved 28th July, 2019, from https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-01-31/lisa- reihana-in-pursuit-of-venus-reimagines-australian-history/9376114

Jones, P. (2016). Exhibition review: Encounters: Revealing stories of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander objects from the British Museum. ReCollections, 11(1). Retrieved from https://recollections.nma.gov.au/issues/volume_11_number_1/exhibition_reviews/encounters

Kahn. M. (2003). Tahiti: the ripples of a myth on the shores of the imagination. History and Anthropology, 14 (4). https://doi.org/10.1080/0275720032000156479

Keenan, S. (2018, May 18). How the British Museum Changed its Story About the Gweagal Shield. Retrieved 28th July 2019, from https://acrawsa.org.au/2018/05/18/how-the-british-museum-changed-its-story-about-the- gweagal-shield/

Kopytoff, I. (1986). The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process. In A. Appadurai (Ed.), The Social Life of Things. Commodities in Cultural Perspective (pp.64-94). Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.

Latour, B. (1986.). Visualisation and Cognition: Drawing Things Together. In H. Kuklick (Ed.), Knowledge and Society Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present (pp.1-40). Bingley: Jai Press.

Lonetree, A. (2006). Missed Opportunities: Reflections on the NMAI. American Indian Quarterly 30 (3–4) (pp. 632–645).

Looser, D. (2017). Viewing Time and the Other: Visualizing Cross-Cultural and Trans-Temporal Encounters in Lisa Reihana’s in Pursuit of Venus [infected]. Theatre Journal, 69(4), 449–475. https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2017.0065

Macdonald, S. (2003). Museums, National, Postnational and Transcultural Identities. Museum & Society, 1 (1), (pp. 1-16).

Macdonald, S. (Ed.) 2011. A Companion to Museum Studies. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons.

McAleer, J., Rigby, N. (2017). Captain Cook and The Pacific - Art, Exploration and Empire. New Haven: Yale University Press.

McCarthy, C. (2018). Te Papa: Reinventing New Zealand's national museum 1998–2018. Wellington: Te Papa Press.

McKnight, D. (1990). The Australian Aborigines in Anthropology. In R. Fardon (Ed.), Localising strategies. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press.

Megaw, J. (1994). ‘There's a Hole in My Shield ...’: A Textual Footnote. Australian Archaeology, (38), 35-37. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/40287158

Mitchell, C. (2016, March 7). Designing Encounters. Retrieved 28th July, 2019, from https://www.nma.gov.au/exhibitions/encounters/blog/designing-encounters

Emma Yandle Bibliography Page 79

Moorehead, A. (1966). The fatal impact: An account of the invasion of the South Pacific, 1767-1840. Manhattan: Harper & Row.

Morphy, H., Hetherington, M. (2010). Discovering Cook’s Collections. Canberra: The National Museum of Australia, Large Print Version via ReadHowYouWant.

Moser, S. (1998). Ancestral Images: the Iconography of Human Origins. Ithaca: Cornella University Press. In N. Merriman, N, Making Early Histories in Museums, (pp.95-115). Leicester: Leicester University Press.

Moser, S. (1999). The Dilemma of Didactic Displays: Habitat Dioramas, Life-groups and Reconstructions of the Past. In N. Merriman, Making Early Histories in Museums (pp. 65-116). London: Frances Pinter.

The National Maritime Museum. (n.d.). ‘The Landing at Erramanga [Eromanga], one of the New Hebrides.’ Retrieved July 28, 2019, from https://collections.rmg.co.uk/collections/objects/13381.html

The National Maritime Museum. (n.d.). ‘The Landing at Mallicolo [Malakula], one of the New Hebrides’ - Retrieved 28th July, 2019, from https://collections.rmg.co.uk/collections/objects/13382.html

The National Museum of Australia. (n.d.) Encounters Exhibition: International Loans. (2015, September 20). [Press release]. Retrieved 28th July, 2019, from https://www.nma.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/592881/Encounters-exhibition-international-loans-web.pdf Nugent, M. (2015). Forty millennia of Indigenous history at the British Museum. Inside Story. Retrieved 28th July, 2019, from https://insidestory.org.au/forty-millennia-of-indigenous-history-at-the-british-museum/

Nugent, M., & Sculthorpe, G. (2018). A Shield Loaded with History: Encounters, Objects and Exhibitions. Australian Historical Studies, 49(1), (pp.28–43). https://doi.org/10.1080/1031461X.2017.1408663

Onciul, B. (2015). Museums, Heritage and Indigenous Voice: Decolonizing Engagement. Abingdon-on- Thomas: Routledge.

Patel, S. (2013). Presentations and Representations of Contact. James Cook and Joseph Banks at Tahiti. The Endeavour Voyage 1768-1771, Journal de la Société des Océanistes, (pp.136–137). https://doi.org/10.4000/jso.6845

Pirie, P. (1978). The Consequences of Cook's Hawaiian Contacts on the Local Population. In J. N. Hurd, Captain Cook and the Pacific Islands. Honolulu: Pacific Islands Studies Program, University of Hawaii.

Pratt, M. L. (1991). Arts of the Contact Zone. Profession, (pp.33–40).

Pratt, M. L. (2008). Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge.

Pratt, S. (2009). Truth and Artifice in the Visualization of Native Peoples: From the time of John White to the Beginning of the 18th Century. In K. Sloan (Ed.), European Visions. American Voices (pp.33-40). London: The British Museum Research Publication.

Qureshi, S. (2011). Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire, and Anthropology in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Regard, F. (2009). British Narratives of Exploration: Case Studies on the Self and Other. New York: Routledge.

Reihana, L. (2012). Re-staging Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique: theoretical and practical issues. Unpublished. https://hdl.handle.net/10652/2544 Emma Yandle Bibliography Page 80

Reihana, L. (2017). Lisa Reihana: Emissaries. Auckland: Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki.

Rolls, L. (Director). (2017). Tupaia’s Endeavour [Television Series]. New Zealand: Māori Television.

The Royal Academy of Arts. Artists of Oceania: Lisa Reihana in conversation. (2018, November 27). [Blog post]. Retrieved July 28, 2019, from https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/article/oceania-video-lisa-reihana-tim- marlow

Sandall, S. (2018, 20th September). Royal Museums Greenwich Opens Four New Galleries [Press release]. Retrieved from https://www.rmg.co.uk/work-services/news-press/press-release/royal-museums-greenwich-four- new-galleries

Sahlins, M. (1985). Islands of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Salmond, Anne. (1991). Two worlds: First meetings between Māori and Europeans, 1642-1772. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

Salmond, Anne. (1997). Between worlds: Early exchanges between Māori and Europeans, 1773-1815. New York: Viking.

Salmond, A. (2003). The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: The Remarkable Story of Captain Cook’s Encounters in the South Seas. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Salmond, A. & Salmond, A. (2010). Artefacts of Encounter. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 35(3–4), 302– 317. https://doi.org/10.1179/030801810X12772143410205

Salmond, A. (2017). Tears of Rangi: Experiments Across Worlds. Auckland: Auckland University Press.

Sanjek, R. (2014). Ethnography in Today's World: Color Full Before Color Blind. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Sculthorpe, G., Bolton, L. & Coates, I. (2015). In I. Coates, J. Arthur (Ed.), Encounters: Revealing Stories of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Objects from the British Museum. Canberra: National Museum of Australia.

Sculthorpe, G.; Carty, J. (Eds.) (2015). Indigenous Australia: Enduring Civilisation. London: British Museum Press.

Simmons, L. (2017). A first meeting place: John Webber’s An Interview Between Captain Cook and the Natives (January 1777). Postcolonial Studies, 20(4), (pp. 411–430). https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2017.1408175

Sitzia, E. (2016). Narrative Theories and Learning in Contemporary Art Museums: A Theoretical Exploration. Stedelijk Studies, 4. Retrieved 28th July 2019, from https://stedelijkstudies.com/wp- content/uploads/2016/06/Stedelijk-Studies_Narrative-Theories_Sitzia.pdf

Sivasundaram, S. (2004). Redeeming memory: the martyrdoms of Captain James Cook and Reverend John Williams. In G. Williams (Ed.) Captain Cook: Explorations and Reassessments, (pp. 201-229). Suffolk: The Boydell Press.

Sloan, K. (2007). A New World: England's First View of America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Emma Yandle Bibliography Page 81

Smith. B. Imagining the Pacific. In the Wake of the Cook Voyages (1992). New Haven: Yale University Press.

Street, B., Hallam, E. (2013). Cultural Encounters: Representing Otherness. Milton Park: Taylor & Francis.

Tapsell, P. (2010). Footprints in the Sand: Banks's Maori Collection, Cook's First Voyage 1768-71. In H. Morphy & M. Hetherington, Discovering Cook’s Collections (pp. 92-111). Canberra: The National Museum of Australia, Large Print Version via ReadHowYouWant).

Te Papa Museum of New Zealand. (2017, June 15). Dramatis Personae, ‘in Pursuit of Venus [infected]’ [Blog post]. Retrieved 28th July, 2019, from https://www.tepapa.govt.nz/learn/for-educators/teaching- resources/venice-biennale/lisa-reihana-emissaries/pursuit-venus-detail

Thomas, N. (1991). Entangled Objects. Exchange, Material Culture and Colonialism in the Pacific. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Thomas, N. (1997). In Oceania: Visions, Artifacts, Histories. Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books.

Thomas, N. (2003). Discoveries: The Voyages of Captain Cook. London: Penguin Books.

Thomas, N. (2010). Wherever it is that we want to go: John Pule’s painting 1990-2010. Art Monthly Australia, 232. Retrieved 28th July 2019, from https://www.academia.edu/17238553/Wherever_it_is_that_we_want_to_go_John_Pules_painting_1990-2010

Thomas, N. (2012). Islanders: The Pacific in the Age of Empire. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Thomas, N., Adams, J., Lythberg, B., Nuku M., Salmond A. M. (Eds.) (2016). Artefacts of Encounter: Cook's Voyages, Colonial Collecting and Museum Histories. Dunedin: Otago University Press.

Trofanenko, B. (2006). Displayed Objects, Indigenous Identities, and Public Pedagogy. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 37(4), (pp. 309–327). Retrieved from JSTOR.

Vergo, P. (Ed.) (1989). The New Museology. London: Reaktion Books.

Williams, G. (Ed.) (2004). Captain Cook: Explorations and Reassessments. Suffolk: The Boydell Press.

Wood, J., Tunks, B. (2015). Hard yards and ‘collective genius’. A tale of developing the Encounters exhibition for the National Museum of Australia. Museums Australia Magazine 24 (1) (pp.12-18). Retrieved from https://issuu.com/museumsaustralia/docs/mam_24_1_web

Worden, N. (1998). Cape Town: The Making of a City: an Illustrated Social History. The Netherlands: Verloren Publishers.