George French Angas and the Creation of Colonial Knowledge in New Zealand

<p>In 1844, George French Angas, the English traveller, artist, natural historian and ethnographer spent four months travelling in New Zealand. He sought out and met many of the most influential Maori leaders of the time, sketching and recording his observations as he went. His stated intention was to provide a ‘more correct idea’ of New Zealand and the New Zealanders. In Australia and then Britain he held exhibitions of his work and in 1847 he published two works based on this time in New Zealand: a large volume of full-colour lithographs, The New Zealanders Illustrated and a travel narrative based on his journal, Savage Life and Scenes in Australia and New Zealand. These exhibitions and publications comprised the nineteenth century’s largest collection of works about Maori and Maori culture. This thesis is a study of the ‘more correct idea’ that Angas sought to provide: his creation of colonial knowledge about Maori. Angas is most commonly described in New Zealand as being an unremarkable artist but as providing a window onto New Zealand in the 1840s. This thesis opens the window wider by looking at Angas’s works as a record of a cultural encounter and the formation of a colonial identity. The works were shaped by numerous ideological and intellectual currents from Britain and the empire, including humanitarianism and the aesthetic of the picturesque. Ideas about gender and the body form a central part of the colonial knowledge created in Angas’s work. Particularly notable is what this thesis terms ‘sartorial colonisation’ – a process of colonisation through discourse and expectations around clothes. Angas also travelled and worked in a dynamic middle ground in New Zealand and Maori played a vital role in the creation of his works. Angas represented Maori in a sympathetic light in many ways. Ultimately however, he believed in the superiority of the British culture, to the detriment of creating colonial knowledge that placed Maori as equal partners in the recently signed Treaty of Waitangi. This thesis also examines the ways in which Angas’s body of work has been engaged with by the New Zealand public through to the present. As a study of the products of a British traveller who spent time in other parts of the empire as well as in New Zealand, this thesis contributes to histories of New Zealand, and British imperial and transcolonial history.</p>

George French Angas and the Creation of Colonial Knowledge in New Zealand

<p>In 1844, George French Angas, the English traveller, artist, natural historian and ethnographer spent four months travelling in New Zealand. He sought out and met many of the most influential Maori leaders of the time, sketching and recording his observations as he went. His stated intention was to provide a ‘more correct idea’ of New Zealand and the New Zealanders. In Australia and then Britain he held exhibitions of his work and in 1847 he published two works based on this time in New Zealand: a large volume of full-colour lithographs, The New Zealanders Illustrated and a travel narrative based on his journal, Savage Life and Scenes in Australia and New Zealand. These exhibitions and publications comprised the nineteenth century’s largest collection of works about Maori and Maori culture. This thesis is a study of the ‘more correct idea’ that Angas sought to provide: his creation of colonial knowledge about Maori. Angas is most commonly described in New Zealand as being an unremarkable artist but as providing a window onto New Zealand in the 1840s. This thesis opens the window wider by looking at Angas’s works as a record of a cultural encounter and the formation of a colonial identity. The works were shaped by numerous ideological and intellectual currents from Britain and the empire, including humanitarianism and the aesthetic of the picturesque. Ideas about gender and the body form a central part of the colonial knowledge created in Angas’s work. Particularly notable is what this thesis terms ‘sartorial colonisation’ – a process of colonisation through discourse and expectations around clothes. Angas also travelled and worked in a dynamic middle ground in New Zealand and Maori played a vital role in the creation of his works. Angas represented Maori in a sympathetic light in many ways. Ultimately however, he believed in the superiority of the British culture, to the detriment of creating colonial knowledge that placed Maori as equal partners in the recently signed Treaty of Waitangi. This thesis also examines the ways in which Angas’s body of work has been engaged with by the New Zealand public through to the present. As a study of the products of a British traveller who spent time in other parts of the empire as well as in New Zealand, this thesis contributes to histories of New Zealand, and British imperial and transcolonial history.</p>

Early History of Archaeology Graphs

The earliest archaeological spindle graph was published in 1883 by natural historian and avocational archaeologist Charles C. Abbott. Evidence that he obtained the idea from paleontology, which first published spindle graphs in the 1830s and 1840s, is circumstantial at best, and differences in graph styles weigh against such borrowing. Several spindle graphs published in the 1890s and early 1900s by archaeologist William Henry Holmes either depict his views on inevitable progressive evolution—a theory rapidly falling from anthropological favor—or were so speculative as to likely have had little influence on the discipline. During the first couple decades of the twentieth century, physicist/geographer/anthropologist Franz Boas (often referred to as the father of anthropology) published numerous line graphs of quantitative data. He influenced archaeologists Leslie Spier and Manual Gamio who used line graphs to display temporally varying frequencies of artifacts. About the same time, the wife and husband team of Madeleine Kidder and Alfred V. Kidder published several line graphs of relative frequencies of pottery types against stratigraphic provenience, seemingly largely as a result of Madeleine’s influence because Alfred never again published such a graph and instead favored phyletic seriation graphs of a type reminiscent of Sir William Flinders Petrie’s sequence dating graphs from the turn of the century.

Rodney Phillips Dales: influential annelid researcher, natural historian, editor, artist, gardener and architectural enthusiast (1927–2020)

Rodney Phillips Dales was born in Hornchurch, Essex on 15 January 1927. His father Sidney Phillips Dales was a Chartered Architect, his mother Muriel Emily (née Tattersall) kept the family home in the Squirrel’s Heath district, and frequently worked in her husband’s practice. Rodney and his brother Gordon (b. 1922) were raised in a strict Methodist family. They led a modest life, but one full of interest and diversion. Frequent trips to the seaside, and visits to buildings and artist friends of his father, helped shape Rodney’s interests and future career. He became fascinated by the diversity of the natural world and the wonderful architecture he encountered on his frequent bike rides into the Essex countryside.

Early photographers encounter Tongans

Four early photographers are examined here in relation to their encounters with Tongans and Tonga. These photographers are Andrew Garrett, Gustav Adolph Riemer, Clarence Gordon Campbell and Walter Stanhope Sherwill. Garrett, an American natural historian who specialized in shells and fish, took two ambrotypes of Tongans in Fiji in 1868, which are two of the earliest Tongan photographs known. Riemer, born in Saarlouis, Germany, was a marine photographer on S.M.S. Hertha on an official diplomatic visit and took at least 28 photographs in Tonga in 1876. Campbell, a tourist from New York, took 25 culturally important photographs in 1902. Sherwill, a British subject born in India, moved to Tonga about the time of the First World War. He probably took many photographs with more modern equipment, but only two have been identified with certainty. This article presents information about the photographers and those depicted, where the original photographs can be found and the research that made it possible to glean cultural information from them. These early photographers are placed in the context of other more well-known early photographers whose works can be found in archives and libraries in New Zealand, Australia, Hawai‘i and Germany. In addition, summary information about two Tongan-born photographers is presented, as well as where their photographs/negatives can be found.

Maximum Entropy

A major goal of ecology is to predict patterns and changes in the abundance, distribution, and energetics of individuals and species in ecosystems. The maximum entropy theory of ecology (METE) predicts the functional forms and parameter values describing the central metrics of macroecology, including the distribution of abundances over all the species, metabolic rates over all individuals, spatial aggregation of individuals within species, and the dependence of species diversity on areas of habitat. In METE, the maximum entropy inference procedure is implemented using the constraints imposed by a few macroscopic state variables, including the number of species, total abundance, and total metabolic rate in an ecological community. Although the theory adequately predicts pervasive empirical patterns in relatively static ecosystems, there is mounting evidence that in ecosystems in which the state variables are changing rapidly, many of the predictions of METE systematically fail. Here we discuss the underlying logic and predictions of the static theory and then describe progress toward achieving a dynamic theory (DynaMETE) of macroecology capable of describing ecosystems undergoing rapid change as a result of disturbance. An emphasis throughout is on the tension between, and reconciliation of, two legitimate perspectives on ecology: that of the natural historian who studies the uniqueness of every ecosystem and the theorist seeking unification and generality.