Story and photos Catherine Field-Dodgson and Michele Leggott

In October 2024, we travelled to Ōtautahi Christchurch to deliver a keynote presentation for Opening the Archives: access, engagement, innovation. The conference was organised by the Australian Society of Archivists (ASA), Archives & Records Association of NZ Te Huinga Mahara (ARANZ) and the Pacific Regional Branch of the International Council of Archives (PARBICA). As might be expected, the gathering of over 200 participants brought together a wide range of views on what it means to ‘open’ and engage with archives.

Physical and digital access to newspapers, libraries, galleries and museum repositories has played a vital role in our research into Emily Harris and her family, so we were excited to be sharing our findings with such a knowledgeable audience. Archivists are the kaitiaki (guardians) of innumerable and often interconnected houses of memory, social, political, cultural and spiritual. We felt privileged to be in their wise company.

Staying in the Garden City meant we could undertake some more Emily-related research. At the top of our list was the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū. We were keen to visit the surviving fragment of Walter Crane’s imperial frieze that once wrapped around the top of the art gallery walls in the 1906 International Exhibition in Christchurch. Emily’s two large oil paintings of subantarctic flowers bumped into the frieze in the exhibition’s colonial art gallery, and we wanted to get a sense of the materials and colours Crane used in the creation of his showpiece.

Tim Jones, the Christchurch Art Gallery librarian and archivist, assisted with our request to view the fragment in the gallery’s collection and when we arrived we were met by Rebekkah Pickrill, Lead Registrar, and photographer John Collie. The 6-metre segment of frieze had been carefully rolled out across the floor of the gallery’s photography studio and John was busy taking high-resolution photographs using a rig suspended from the ceiling. Rebekkah let us touch the edge of the fragment so we could feel the scrim material. We were surprised at how thin and light it was.

While admiring the vibrant blue, red, green and gold colours, we realised why William Baverstock, first director of the Robert McDougall Art Gallery, preserved this particular section when the frieze was rediscovered in 1972. It contains Crane’s signature at lower right: a little golden crane painted inside a capital ‘C’, and with the date ‘04’. A few weeks earlier PhD researcher Victoria Adams had explained to us that the frieze was in fact repurposed for the 1906 exhibition. It was designed and executed for the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St Louis, Missouri, and later shipped from England for a second and final appearance to accompany British artworks on display in Christchurch. Since there was enough frieze to wrap around the tops of all 12 rooms in the art gallery, Australian and New Zealand works were also decorated with the imperial banner.

We were able to incorporate photos of the frieze into our keynote presentation the following morning. Thanks Tim, Rebecca and John.

Our talk was titled: ‘”She is the female speck in the history of texts. And she is the scout of its presence”: The art and writing of Emily Cumming Harris’. Archivist Katherine Pawley from the University of Auckland warmly introduced us. As well as being part of the conference organising committee, she found some fantastic letters by Emily Harris in the university’s collection, and has been an important part of our project.

Michele began with text from the Harris family archive, reading Emily’s account of how she narrowly prevented her father from burning a big cache of family letters from England. Then it was onto a spectacularly compromised passage from a letter written by Emily’s mother and deciphered with difficulty by no fewer than five researchers. Heavenly material for archivist eyes familiar with the vagaries of nineteenth-century cross-writing.

We went on to present some of our favourite research discoveries relating to public collections and thanked a number of people who have helped us over the years. It would not have been possible to compile such a detailed account of Emily’s life story, her poems and paintings without the assistance of the many gallery, museum and archive experts who have helped us along the way.

During the keynote, we also laid out our various coloured sets of Emily’s three 1890 books New Zealand Flowers, Berries and Ferns on a table so that conference attendees could admire them. We touched on the deliberate differences in hand-colouring across Emily’s editions. These colour variations have become more noticeable now that we have purchased coloured sets at auction and can take our books to compare with sets in public collections. There was still one hand-coloured set of books we hadn’t seen in person, and after the talk we walked over to Tūranga, the central city library.

A set of Emily’s hand-coloured books awaited our inspection on the top floor of Tūranga. We brought three copies of New Zealand Berries with us to visit their companions at the library and set about comparing the differences in colour between them all: the first time we’ve been able to examine four books side-by-side. Once again the astelia plates showed the greatest variation in colouring, ranging from sunny yellow, to a mixture of yellow and orange, and much darker orange tones.

We finished the conference talk by saying that we are happy to hear from anyone who might be able to tell us more about Emily’s long career, studded with archival surprises.  We hope that the engaged eyes and ears of the archivist, gallery and museum audience will help bring more of Emily Harris’s works into the light again.