Muff, kiwi feather

A little spotted kiwi muff

 

This muff is made from the skin of a little spotted kiwi, and was gifted to the museum by Majorie Hector, the daughter of James Hector, former director of the Colonial Museum, and his wife Georgiana. It is thought that the muff belonged to Georgiana.

 

Throughout his career, James Hector had contact with a number of taxidermists including Jane Yandle, who ran a taxidermy business in Auckland, and Elizabeth and Hector Liardet who ran a 'feather furriery' in Wellington. Both made a range of fashion accessories from feathers and furs. Correspondance and a receipt in the museum's archives, reveals that in 1872 James Hector sent five kiwi skins to Auckland to be made into a tippet and matching muff by Jane Yandle.

Ten days later, Thomas Kirk, Hector's colleague at the Auckland Institute, advised him that the accessories were on their way, and that while the job came to £1.19.9, he had paid Mrs Yandle £2 to cover postage. Of the results Kirk wrote:

 

She had some trouble getting the trimmings to match and appears to have made a fair job as far as my judgement goes, but the muff is rather too stiff.

 

Alternatively, the muff could be the work of  the Liardets who specilaised in making 'Muffs, Tippets, Cuffs, Ladies’ Headdresses &c' from indigenous sea and land birds. (1) James Hector invited the Liardet's to exhibit at the 1876 Philadelphia International Exhibition, for which he had been appointed commissioner.

 

Save our birds

In the early 1870s, Thomas Potts, a Canterbury runholder and naturalist began to lobby for legislative protection for New Zealand’s indigenous birds from ‘that deformed thief fashion', after a South Island bird hunter told him that he had killed over 2200 kiwi to in Potts' words 'furnish material for muffs for frivolous women’. (2)

In 1896, kiwi came under partial protection, meaning that they could still be taken as ‘native game’ during the three month long hunting season. They did not receive full protection until 1906. The latter was extended to most of New Zealand’s indigenous birds in 1910, by which time feathers were falling out of fashion. In 1921 the British government passed the Plumage Act of 1921 which banned the importation of plumage if not its sale or its wearing.

 

References

1. Evening Post, 31 May 1875.

2. T H Potts, ‘On the Birds of New Zealand’, Transactions and Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute 1872., Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand, Volume 5, 1872, 1 January 1872, p. 193.