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This kahu ngore was given to the Paymaster of the 58th Regiment, then stationed in Auckland, sometime during the late 1840’s or early 1850, when a detachment of officers from the 58th and members of Bishop Selwyn’s household were invited to attend Christmas dinner by a ‘friendly tribe’.
Kahu ngore were once a relatively common cloak and regularly feature in early European paintings, and later photographs, of Maori; especially during the period 1840-1870. The term ngore refers to the pompom that is attached to the kaupapa, or foundation, of the cloak.
Kahu ngore in this condition are surprisingly uncommon, with many of the examples in museums collections today in poor condition. This particular cloak is an excellent example of a kahu ngore from this period.
This extract originally appeared in Te Ata o Tū The Shadow of Tūmatauenga: The New Zealand Wars Collections of Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2024).
This extract was authored by Matiu Baker.
This ngore was presented to the paymaster of the 58th Regiment during a visit by members of the regiment and Bishop Selwyn’s household to a special Christmas Day dinner hosted by local Māori ‘late in the forties or early in 1850’. A note accompanying the cloak reads:
My brother paymaster in 58th was asked to join the party – the chief and the tribe were delighted to receive them and honoured them in their native fashion – my brother stood more than 6 feet high and the chief selected him as the most important of the party and unpegged his royal robe from his shoulders placing it round my brother who gave it to me on the regiments return to England in 1854 or 55.
The letter may refer to Lieutenant Thomas Richardson Timbrell (1799–1866), who served as paymaster in the 58th from 1842, joining his regiment in Sydney in 1845. Timbrell arrived in New Zealand with the regiment in 1847 and most probably served in it at Wellington, the Hutt Valley and Whanganui (1846–48) and at Britomart Barracks in Auckland. The regiment left New Zealand in November 1858.
This is an exceptional example of a ngore cloak, characterised by the woollen pompoms on its body. Ngore and their variants, like the korowai-ngore, were fashionable and extremely popular during the mid-nineteenth century, and they very often feature in early artistic depictions of Māori in the 1840s and 1850s, and carte-de-visite photography of the 1860s.