A few months ago we received a rather unusual loan request, on the surface the request looked quite straight forward however on closer inspection it was going to be rather challenging.
First of all the Community Mafutaga Tupulaga Tokelau Porirua had asked if they could borrow some of the Tokelauan taoga in the Te Papa Pacific Collection for a big Easter Festival held every two years, this year organised by the local Tokelau community in Wellington. As the community isn’t an institution (which we usually lend to) and because they only wanted the objects for a few hours on Easter Sunday we needed to treat this request a bit differently.
With an estimated quarter of a million negatives, the Spencer Digby / Ronald D. Woolf Collection is a treasure trove of images of faces and moments from Wellington’s past. The collection ranges from the 1930s to the 1980s and includes studio portraits, wedding photographs, and shots from community events like wrestling tournaments and cat shows among many other things.
An emotional immersive storytelling experience using live electronic music, song and poetry performance to share the history of the Girmit people who were taken from India to Fiji for indentured servitude.
