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Overview
This shield was acquired by members of the Wellington Savage Club during a raid of the Manawatu Savage Club in 1983. Painted on the front of the shield is a naïve version of a koruru (Māori carved mask) and a banner reading 'M.S.C.' On the reverse is painted 'MANAWATU 75TH JUBILEE 1983 WELLINGTON RAID' and it has been signed by members of the club.
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. For most of their history Savage Clubs were open only to men, although towards the end of the twentieth century most did eventually admit women as members.
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). One important aspect of this distinctive world was performing raids – visits to neighbouring clubs – to participate in challenges and various other entertainments.
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.
Savage Clubs were popular throughout the twentieth century and the Wellington club continued to meet until the 2000s. Their numbers dwindled, however, and the club was dissolved in 2010.
Further reading
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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.