A tapa sampler

The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Aotearoa’s national museum, has a unique taonga: a book of tapa samples.

This book, rather grandly entitled “A Catalogue of the different specimens of cloth collected in the three voyages of Captain Cook, to the Southern hemisphere : with a particular account of the manner of the manufacturing the same in the various islands of the South Seas : partly extracted from Mr. Anderson and Reinhold Forster’s Observations, and the verbal account of some of the most knowing of the navigators : with some anecdotes that happened to them among the natives.” (Now. THAT’S a mouthful!), came into the collection via the Te Papa Foundation in 2019 and is a set of cloths that were acquired, some by fair means and some foul, during Captain Cook’s voyages.

Alexander Shaw, a London bookseller, saw the marketing potential in creating these books from small snippets of tapa with an introduction and catalogue, and the book that is now in the collection is one of only 60 remaining.

This article from the Te Papa blog explains how such treasures are now being used to broaden the understanding of how these things were made, and what their relevance to artists, craftspeople and communities is today.