Maoritanga Picture Postcards of New Zealand

By Lindsay | October 27, 2023 | Comments 0 Comment

I have always had a close association with the Māori people. When I went to primary school at at Wakaretu where my parents farmed, this was a small district on the coast between Port Waikato and Raglan, west of Huntly and Ngaruawahia, New Zealand. The day I started school there were three Europeans at that school, and the day before I started, there was one. So, I grew up being very aware of Māori culture and their ways of life.

This exhibit shows through Picture Postcards, Maoritanga, or the culture of the Māori people. I have enjoyed putting this exhibit together, and look forward to extending it to 8 frames. I have a collection of approximately 1800 different Māori postcards, and am currently n the process of creating a database of Māori postcards with scans of both sides and an accurate description of the postcards with as much information that I can glean.

One potential future project is to use facial recognition technology to put names to more of the people depicted in postcards.

Any viewer with a collection of Māori postcards, I would like to make contact to see if any additional items can be added to the database.