B.

The title of this work means ‘to bring to light, to claim again’. The seven heitiki (greenstone pendants) Fiona Pardington has photographed came originally from her iwi, Kāi Tahu, in Te Waipounamu. All are now held in the collection of Auckland Museum. Traditionally worn close to the heart, heitiki are sacred fertility symbols in te ao Māori, strongly associated with whakapapa (family connections across time). Fiona not only wanted to record the physical attributes of these old and precious objects, but also to capture their more intangible qualities, such as how they speak of the past and this place, despite being stored so far away.

(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- )

Fiona Pardington photographed this treasured glass model at Canterbury Museum, where it is currently on display. It was made by local glass blower John Rowe in 1950 to commemorate a century of European settlement in the Waitaha Canterbury region. The Charlotte Jane was one of the ‘first four ships’ that carried the European settlers to Christchurch, and its depiction here raises issues of colonisation for Ngāi Tahu Māori. Pardington depicts the Charlotte Jane as a ‘ghost ship’ – a fragile and ethereal phantom of the past whose image persists in the present.

(Now, Then, Next: Time and the Contemporary, 15 June 2019 – 8 March 2020)

History often only tells one side of the story. This photograph by Fiona Pardington was inspired by visiting the archive of Dr A. C. Barker at Canterbury Museum. He was the ship’s surgeon on the Charlotte Jane, the first colonial ship to reach Canterbury, and made photographs of early Christchurch. The letters his children wrote to their uncle in the 1860s provide a view of early Canterbury childhood from the perspective of colonising settlers.

Fiona has said: “I was drawn in by the delicate fine paper, iron gall inks, smudged and blotched marks, spelling mistakes and a smeared fingerprint – a tantalising forensic touch. I immediately had an aching feeling in my bones, for the land, the birds impacted by the Pākehā kids and their guns, gulls and adventures. I could feel their father standing there with his camera, and marvelled at the wobbly copperplate words giving a rare and earnest view into a child’s world in the Christchurch bush teeming with a luxuriance of native wildlife I could only mourn today.”

(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- )