Museum objects bring alive stories of New Zealand’s social history

• Published date: 03 December 2022
• Publication title: Mix, The

Jock Phillips

Penguin Random House

Neil MacGregor, a former director of the National Gallery in London, published The History of the World in 100 Objects in 2012. It became a best seller and developed a wider following through radio and podcasts.

It was MacGregor’s precedent that inspired Jock Phillips, the general editor of Te Ara: The Encyclopedia of New Zealand, to explore the possibility of creating a social history of New Zealand along similar lines.

He planned to divide the history of New Zealand into 11 periods — before 1800, 1800-1839, and then nine 20-year blocks thereafter — and set out to find at least eight suitable objects for each period, with the remaining dozen slots available as seemed appropriate.

The objects had to be available to the general public in museums within New Zealand and have the possibility of spinning stories not only about themselves, but also wider aspects of our social history. They were also chosen to cover many ethnic and gender aspects of our history, as well as economic, industrial, legal and commercial topics.

Phillips is skilled in anchoring the object to the personal lives of individuals, at least initially, but such that the spin-offs cover a wider canvas of our social history.

Each object is illustrated, and the specific story and more general context is developed in an essay of about three pages, often covering a social topic in remarkable depth.

The book concludes with further ready suggestions for each entry.

Phillips eschews the grand, preferring — with admirable New Zealand egalitarian instincts — the seemingly prosaic, that often turns out to have a richer...