History is man-made; as essayist Maria Popova writes, “history is not what happened, but what survives the shipwreck of judgement and chance,”1 an apt metaphor for discussing the histories and stories housed at the New Zealand Maritime Museum Hui Te Ananui a Tangaroa. Over the summer, I was privileged enough to be part of Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland Museum’s Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland Local Histories Wikipedia Project at a placement in the Maritime Museum. Popova’s writing stuck out to me, and throughout the internship I found myself considering how the various decisions that we make as writers and researchers can potentially impact the story being told, from the smallest editorial moments to writing under the pressure of larger systemic constraints.
SS Puke represents Popova’s sentiment quite literally. Puke is Aotearoa New Zealand’s oldest steamboat, built sometime in the 1870s. It was abandoned in the 1970s and left at the bottom of a river until steam enthusiast Alan Brimblecombe dredged it up and restored it. Through this random chance, Puke’s story survives.
One instance where I felt that my own small decisions whilst writing and researching may cause an effect was when editing the article for the steam crane Rapaki. Rapaki formerly acted as a breakwater for the Maritime Museum before being decommissioned in 2018. Rapaki was built in Scotland and sailed to New Zealand in 1926, captained by H. Liddell Mack. Although I can verify that that Mack was the captain of this journey, I was unable to verify the spelling of his name (Lionel Mack, Liddel Mack, and Liddell Mack were the variations I came across). The result is that his name is recorded on the Wikipedia article as Captain H. L. Mack. The small choices made in the recording of his name in the 1920s impacts this research exactly 100 years later, which makes me then consider what the impacts my research will have further down the line.
When I studied archaeology, the idea that archaeological assemblages are not wholly representative imprinted on me. What remains is what survives the years of erosion and deposition. This concept carries through to museum spaces, where collections are assembled by collectors and researchers, all carrying with them their own set of biases. These objects now removed from their original contexts are recontextualised by categorisation and arrangements through a museum lens. Although museums do undertake decolonial practices, they were formed by anthropologists to carry out colonial violence, and this legacy still pervades.
Coming into this internship I had a background doing volunteer digitisation for the Maritime Museum, with the aim to make their collections more accessible and visible to the public. The images I digitised were then published onto the New Zealand Maritime Museum Online Collections2 with varying copyright restrictions. Whilst writing the articles for the internship, my primary focus was on two of the four working vessels, Breeze and SS Puke. Although there were plenty of photographs online, there was a lack of non-copyrighted works that I could include in the article. Copyright is also a restriction that can impact the stories that we tell. A priority was to get my own high-quality images of the fleet to upload to Wikimedia Commons under a CC BY 4.0 license, so that they could not only be included in my articles but also be available for others to use however they wish, reducing this barrier.
Although we all write neutrally under Wikipedia’s guidelines, our choice in what we choose to research and write about is not neutral at all — it is guided by our own interests, perspectives, and biases. Despite these biases, writing is a way of learning. We have been able to use Wikipedia to examine, to explore, to confront. To make a difference. Marine biologist and author Rachel Carson writes “Once you have entered such a world, its fascination grows and somehow you find your mind has gained a new dimension, a new perspective — and always thereafter you find yourself remembering the beauty and strangeness and wonder of that world — a world that is real, as much a part of the universe, as our own.”3
- Figuring, Maria Popova (2019), Pantheon ↩︎
- https://collection.maritimemuseum.co.nz/explore ↩︎
- The Ocean and the Meaning of Life, Maria Popova, The Marginalian ↩︎
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