Tuhinga 20

EAN: 11734337

The 2009 edition of Tuhinga opens with an article on the 20th century Wellington jewellery designer and silversmith Edith Morris. The next contribution suggests that  pre-European Maori fish hooks, porotaka hei matau, represent artefacts in their own right, kept and worn as hei kaki (pendants worn around the neck) when no longer used after their function was replaced by European metal tools.

A new subfamily, new genus and new species of terrestrial flatworm (Platyhelminthes: Tricladida: Geoplanidae) from Stewart Island, New Zealand are described and the results of 35 bottom trawls of waters around New Zealand (part of the Conservation Services Programme Observer Project,) are recorded. These included sponges, crustaceans and corals.

Te Papa’s historical photography collection is reviewed. The collections include works by photographers like the Burton Brothers, Thomas Andrew, Leslie Adkin, Gordon H. Burt, Spencer Digby, Eric Lee-Johnson and Brian Brake.

This article is followed by a discussion of the 19th century English photographer Daniel Louis Mundy and his work ‘Photographic experiences in New Zealand’.

A discussion of the 310 bird specimens purchased by the Colonial Museum, Wellington, from the important nineteenth-century New Zealand ornithologist Walter Lawry Buller and the management of this collection. Most of this collection (77%) was lost or destroyed in the nineteenth century, and today only 70 of the specimens have been located.

New Zealand spiders also feature, the genus Nomaua (Araneae: Synotaxidae: Pahorinae), endemic to New Zealand, is revised, including description of five new species.