item details
Jacob Heberley; carver; 1899
Overview
This carved board lists the presidents ('Chief Savages') and patrons ('Ariki Nui') of the Wellington Savage Club from its founding in 1905 to 1985. A second board continues the list. Included among the patrons are prominent figures in New Zealand’s history including Lord Bledisloe, Sir Bernard Freyberg, Rt Hon. Sir Keith Holyoake, and Hon Sir David Beattie.
The first Savage Club was established in London in 1857, named after the English poet Richard Savage. Affiliated clubs flourished in Australia and New Zealand from the 1880s, and the Wellington Club was established in 1905. Similar to other men’s clubs in New Zealand the Savage Clubs claimed to be non-political and free of religious prejudice. Whereas Gentlemen’s Clubs were aimed at the elite and Workingmen’s Clubs catered for working men, the members of the Savage Clubs were primarily middle-class.
Combining fraternity and ceremony, the clubs ‘were a distinctive world of their own, exhibiting a love of ritual and formal procedure, of humour and alcohol, doggerel verse and caricature drawing, song and dance’ (Thomas 1998, 43). For most of their history they were open only to men, although towards the end of the twentieth century most did eventually admit women as members.
Like other Savage Clubs in New Zealand, the Wellington club appropriated aspects of Māori culture to develop club ceremonies and rituals. The leader wore a necklace adorned with hei tiki, the club rooms were decorated with figurines of Māori warriors and panels carved with Māori patterns, and members used wooden wahaika, presumably during evening entertainments (called kōrero).
In the early years the Savage Clubs did have some Māori members, and Thomas Allen suggests in his study of the Wellington and Hawera clubs that many of the club’s activities were ‘in genuine homage to Māori’. He argues that we must consider Savage Club material in the context of other romantic depictions of Māori culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when ‘the elements of “Maoriland” gave character to many New Zealand enterprises’ (Thomas 1998, 59).
However, if the romantic Enlightenment notion of Māori as ‘noble savages’ gave character to some of the club’s activities and ornaments, other aspects of club life reflected a negative view of Māori as treacherous ‘ignoble savages’. James Belich discusses these European ideas about Māori in his article for Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand. This is particularly evident in the ephemera produced by the Savage Clubs, which ‘included the caricatures that portrayed stone-age primitives in a grotesque and offensive way as “cartoon-cannibals”’ (Thomas 1998, 60). Hampered by the institutionalised norms of their peers the clubs were also slow to respond to changing expectations around cultural property rights, and continued to use aspects of Māori culture outside of their original cultural context despite growing resistance to cultural appropriation as New Zealand society progressively decolonised.
Some Savage Clubs are still operating, but have changed their rituals and structure. The Wellington Savage Club continued to meet until the 2000s, but due to dwindling numbers the club was dissolved in 2010.
Further reading
-
Belich, James. 2011. 'European ideas about Māori'. Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/european-ideas-about-maori
- Diamond, Paul. 2018. Savaged to Suit: Māori and Cartooning in New Zealand. Wellington: New Zealand Cartoon Archive.