INTRODUCTION
Museums and art museums are complex symbols of evolving relationships with their communities over time. Those relationships recognise particular values and identities, seeking to protect, reflect and revitalise them in ways which are mutually beneficial. The Christchurch Art Gallery not only projects values associated with the city and the geographic region, but also evinces those values in its own practices and policies. For example, by choosing to focus on collecting, displaying and interpreting the art of Canterbury, the Gallery legitimates the belief that Christchurch and its wider region is distinctive. Moreover, the Gallery's relationships with various communities is dependent not only on the art that it collects and displays, but also on inherent values and the representation of those values in response to the histories of place over time.
This chapter sets out to recover the history of the Christchurch Art Gallery – and its predecessor, the Robert McDougall Art Gallery - to explain the development of art museum education. While this chapter mirrors the structure of Chapter Four, this does not suggest that the conclusions are similar. The narrative firstly considers aspects of the City’s history and the contributions of the Gallery’s earliest directors to art museum education. Part Two documents the views of staff responsible for the management and delivery of education and public programmes between 2003 and 2005. Finally, I reflect on the policy role of the Christchurch City Council in relationship to the Gallery.
I
CHRISTCHURCH ART GALLERY – AN INSTITUTIONAL
HISTORY
This section on the history of the Christchurch Art Gallery begins with a brief reflection on the identity of the city. The earthquakes that rocked the city during 2010 and 2011 have changed the landscape irrevocably and it is still too soon to assess how the city’s citizens, architecture and fabric will heal after such
Policies. Practices. Public Pedagogy.
major disruption. However, it is reasonable to assume that pride in its civic buildings remains as a reminder of the city’s architectural heritage and links to the English Gothic revival.
Benjamin Mountford, influenced by Augustus Pugin and trained by leading exponents of the Gothic Revival, contributed public buildings to 19th century
Christchurch which quickly transplanted the latest in English architectural expression but redolent with local hybrid virtuosity and vigour. Mountford's designs for the Provincial Council buildings, Canterbury Museum, Canterbury College, and the Christchurch Club, among others, quickly identified Christchurch as a prosperous city.
Initially, the ordering and greening of Christchurch were consistent with confidence in Victorian teleology and progress. For the majority of citizens, the creation of the city and its cultural amenities depended on subjugation of the indigenous landscape, the eradication of Māori place names and transplanting familiar species, values, ideals and virtues in order to propagate a cultivated society.
Thus the 1868 Native Land Court decision to decline applications by Ngāi
Tahu for reserves within Christchurch city boundaries can be seen as a deliberate uprooting of iwi Māori. Artificially induced Māori participation blossomed in the hot-house of civic celebrations from time to time, the model
pā at the Christchurch International Exhibition 1906-07 being one example; the ‘Venetian river carnival’ on the Avon near Park Terrace arranged for the visit of the Duke of Gloucester in 1935, another.1 Following the latter, The Press
observed: “it was a pity that these entertaining natives had not been placed on a more elevated platform, where they could have been visible to thousands more, further along the river” (quoted in Tau, 2000: 234).
The City Council has maintained the English character of parks and gardens. The major public green spaces i n t h e c i t y , including the 161 hectare Hagley Park, the Botanic Gardens and Mona Vale, the willow-lined banks of the river, and many suburban gardens, contributed to the sobriquet of ‘the garden city’. However, despite customary use by Ngāi Tahu of parts of Little
Hagley Park, an option to site Nga Hau E Wha, the National marae there, or at another inner city site, was rejected by the City Council in the late 1970s in favour of a site at Pages Road, Aranui - near the Bexley Sewerage and
Treatment Plant lest it interrupt the established character of the gardens (Tau, 2000: 236-241).
The creation of a Christchurch identity is more complex and nuanced than any single trope allows: pilgrim and pioneer; Anglican elitism and Christian radicalism; tradition and reform; conservatism and liberalism are all characteristics of this city. When John Cookson and Geoffrey Rice wrote that the city's identity is a construction - contestable, adaptable and even disposable (Cookson, 2000: 13-40; Rice, 1999), they could not have imagined that these words would describe the city’s future as much as the past. Once, original swamps were reclaimed to fashion the English Christchurch. Now, as the garden city attempts to recover its indigenous roots and its place in the South Pacific, that transformation offers distance from one myth, uncertainty as to the next (Cookson, 2000: 13-14; Mané-Wheoki, 2000).
Christchurch is the largest city in the South Island, the second largest in New Zealand and the third most populous urban area in New Zealand. The 2006 Census shows that the majority of the city’s population of 345,435 people identify as European (75%) and in higher proportion than New Zealand as a whole. However, the city is experiencing a gradual demographic transformation. The Māori population has grown since the 1970s and, more
recently, rising immigration, particularly from South-East Asia and China, point to the evolution of a more culturally diverse city (Census, 2006).