Icons Nga Taonga from the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa

Forest and Bird, Issue 313, 1 August 2004, Page 48

Icons Nga Taonga from the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa

— 306pp limpbound, Te Papa Press, Wellington 2004, RRP$79.99. Selected treasures of Te Papa are displayed here in fine colour printing and extended captions. A team of staff has put together this sampler of their departments, dividing it into sections on Maori taonga, art, natural history, history, and Pacific pieces. It

is beautifully displayed but provides tantalisingly light reading: while presenting fascinating snippets they are really little more than an invitation to find out more and the opportunity to do so in Te Papa is sometimes limited by the nature of its displays. Icons Nga Taonga has the scope of the great Victorian collections of curiosities from which the modern museum evolved. It follows a similar volume marking 150 years of Auckland War Memorial Museum. Both books are tributes not only to historical museology but to the art of contemporary designers and photographers. Both visually display the wonderful complexity of our heritage — the natural and the cultural — and often the way the two streams can fuse, as when native materials produce native objects. As an alternative to visiting the museum on a wet day, Icons Nga Taonga offers a fascinating browse. This is a physically large book (326x245mm) and can most comfortably be read at a table. The lack of a hard binding means it is floppy and hard to shelve.