Review: The Collector, by Andrew McKay and Richard Wolfe

Ah, those Victorian collectors. Especially those indefatigable, near-obsessive, scientifically-focused, overwhelmingly-male Victorian collectors. During the last century, they've gone from being respected to being criticised, even vilified for their rapacity, cultural condescension, colonialist arrogance. Now some are being revalued, and rising in reputation again.

One of them is the subject of this satisfying study by art historian and cultural heritage specialist Andrew McKay, along with Richard Wolfe, artist in his own right and one of our most productive chroniclers of popular culture.

The Collector has its roots in McKay's PhD thesis, so you hope for an authoritative coverage. You get that, in a biography which is also a social-cum-scientific history and engaging narrative. It's published by MUP, so you expect a quality production. You get that as well.

Who was the bloke behind the chest-length beard which features in several of the illustrations?

Thomas Cheeseman was born prematurely in the UK in 1845, suffered from 'convulsions' as a child, sailed with his family to Aotearoa aged eight, and was credited with saving the migrant ship when it rammed a reef. His family settled in 'the scruffy, makeshift little town' of Auckland, where his father lectured to the Mechanics' Institute (a splendidly aspirational title), while young Thomas worked on the family farm and began collecting native plants.

He had no formal scientific training, but he was observant and industrious. And intrepid: he wrote to the then-controversial Charles Darwin, asking for help in identifying a native orchid. You might also call him obsessive: his honeymoon with wife Rose was partly a study trip, collecting botanical specimens.

As the years slid past, he and his family lived pleasantly on their Remuera property, with its three-acre garden in which Cheeseman fostered indigenous and exotic plants. His self-directed studies developed him into an expert taxonomist, and a correspondent with leading botanists across the globe.

He was soon involved with the Auckland Institute, a plastered property in the present CBD's Princes Street, and the forerunner of Auckland's present museum. And he quickly began promoting the acquisition of objects, specimens, artefacts of all sorts.

These included Pūkākī, the grand, carved waharoa/gateway from near Ohinemutu, and the great waka, Te Toki a Tāpiri – 'The Battleaxe of Tāpiri': has there ever been such a majestic name?

The 21st century might see some of Cheeseman's collecting as culturally crass. To him, taonga Māori were items to be acquired, classified, displayed within the Victorian concept of a museum. One of the book's illustrations shows Te Oha, a richly carved pātaka/storehouse from the 1820s, incongruously surrounded by Greek and Roman statuary.

I have to mention those illustrations. There must be nearly 200 of them: photos, drawings, minute books, manuscripts in Cheeseman's leanly elegant copperplate script. Many are double-page spreads.

There's the 1890s main hall of the old museum, with more classical statuary bracketed by a giraffe skeleton and a selection of mammals from Borneo. Taxidermist Louis Griffin, a decade later, sits surrounded by scores of stuffed life-forms. Another couple of decades bring the architectural drawings for what became the present museum. Many, many more, relevant as well as visually dramatic.

Cheeseman himself collected hundreds-plus of botanical specimens, from across New Zealand and as far away as the Kermadecs. As his reputation and that of the museum rose, he became 'a trustworthy and reliable exchange partner' with Kew Gardens. McKay and Wolfe discuss his local contemporaries or forerunners as well. William Colenso, Hochstetter, von Haast, Andreas Reischek, 'notorious robber of graves', all feature.

Cheeseman was curator of the Auckland Museum for half a century. Remarkable. I'm talking of the old museum, but he was inevitably and enthusiastically involved in plans for the present building, 'Auckland's Undying Memorial To Her Glorious Dead', as a contemporary pamphlet modestly proclaimed.

He didn't live to see it completed. He died suddenly in 1923, after a morning's work in his Market Road garden, on the day he was supposed to deliver a lantern slide lecture on 'Colour in Nature'. Sounds a good death for the man with 'the twinkle in his eye'.

He gets a good acknowledgement in this book, too. Make that good-double-plus. Those Victorian collectors had their luminaries, and Thomas Cheeseman emphatically qualifies as one.