Call for Papers: ‘A difficult and intricate history’: Reckoning with the legacies of colonial material collections in Aotearoa New Zealand

Waipapa Taumata Rau University of Auckland

June 25-26, 2026

Recent years have seen growing scholarly and public interest in the role of colonial conflict (e.g. ‘the New Zealand Wars’) in defining New Zealand settler society and underpinning the social and economic disenfranchisement of iwi Māori. As part of this shift, collecting institutions have initiated projects that have begun to reckon with their colonial inheritance, notably A Different Light: Early Colonial Photography in Aotearoa New Zealand based on the collections of the Auckland Museum, Alexander Turnbull Library, and Hocken Collections, and Te Ata o Tū: The New Zealand Wars collections of Te Papa – both published in 2024. In the same year, Auckland Museum launched the refresh of the New Zealand Wars gallery, as Atarau: Stories of the New Zealand Wars. Recurring questions of these various projects revolve around how ‘the New Zealand Wars’ have been remembered and commemorated since the putative end of military events in 1881, and the role played by materials and visual cultures, taonga and objects. This is not a new discussion: Dominion Museum ethnologist Augustus Hamilton, speaking in 1903, admitted that he was reluctant to acquire materials relating to colonial conflict; ‘as a rule, very undesirable to the curator of a museum, being “documents” bearing upon a very difficult and intricate history’. Today, we recognise such collections not as neutral spaces of dead artefacts sequestered from public life but active in how individuals, groups, and societies create, legitimise, negotiate, and challenge colonial legacies.

In light of these different investigations, and a decade after the publication of the ground-breaking The Lives of Colonial Objects (Dunedin, 2015) edited by Annabel Cooper, Lachy Paterson, and Angela Wanhalla, it is now timely to bring into conversation expert perspectives from a range of disciplines, institutions, and practices on the histories of material collections and the role of these collections in remembering and understanding colonial legacies. We invite researchers, curators, and artists working with different forms of ‘material culture’ (especially held in library, museum, and gallery collections and archives) created, collected, distributed, reimagined, and displayed in response to or as part of practices of colonial power and in Aotearoa since the nineteenth century, to a workshop on June 25-26 at the University of Auckland Waipapa Taumata Rau.