Quest to record Pitcairn’s cultural treasures

PITCAIRN ISLAND – A search is underway for treasures from Pitcairn Island which have been disseminated abroad along with Pitcairn’s diaspora.

The Norfolk Island museum is undertaking the project to act as a repository for information and artefacts – and to connect Pitcairn Island with the places its people have moved to.

The museum’s Janelle Blucher says the museum doesn’t need to keep the items, many of which are prized possessions passed down through families.

She says instead they are documented and photographed along with oral histories which are being recorded as well.

“Norfolk Island Museum is acting as the repository for this body of information that is then accessible to the communities of Norfolk Island and New Zealand and Pitcairn Islanders across the world in fact, researchers, that sort of thing.

“The majority of the pieces are things that have been given to people as gifts and then handed down throughout the years, through families, which is a nice connection back to Pitcairn Island. One piece, originally it was a rock, it’s called a yollo stone. It’s one of the most prized family possessions.

“The ones here on the island were actually brought to Norfolk Island when the Pitcairners came here to establish their new life on Norfolk Island in 1866 so there’s a few of them left on the island and the families hold them. It’s basically a food preparation tool.

“When they packed up and left Pitcairn they knew that they needed this to prepare their food and brought them to Norfolk Island with them and they are still used today to prepare food. “There are also beautiful wooden carvings, functional items but also decorative items, lots of woven baskets and then also other functional pieces.

“The functional items, even as far as the tapa cloth they identify – that when they were on Pitcairn Island, isolated for all that time – the Polynesian influence, the women were the mothers teaching their children.”

Blucher says that with the depopulation of Pitcairn and people migrating away, it’s important to preserve this material, or document it because it’s all leaving the island.

“On Pitcairn Island now there’s less than 50 people and so with all this diaspora population, movement of people, people leave things behind, people lose their connections to their heritage – and so it’s just one way of encouraging interest and value in our heritage. It’s just encouraging cultural connections and awareness for successive generations.

“You can see that there’s certainly a distinct Pitcairner culture that was created through the historical circumstances of that 18th century establishment by the Polynesian and European forebears, and that’s also continued here on Norfolk Island. It’s interesting to see some of the cultures, with the separation of the peoples, have diversified and some of it has stayed the same as well.”

Blucher is asking people to take a photographs of their objects and email the images via a Norfolk Island Museum Facebook page. - RNZI