47the message Oreo’s sampler might
have delivered to the recipient in
London. Maureen Lander’s sampler
features an exquisitely woven
muka ground upon which she has
embroidered an imagined portrait of
Oreo in simple stem stitch beneath a
Maori alphabet and a line of Arabic
numerals. Underneath the portrait is
the question Ko wai ra ahau? (Please
tell me who I am?). The combination
of craft techniques and the dual Maori
and English text appears to speak
to the subject of the dissolution of
a person’s distinct identity through
cross-cultural exchange. By contrast,
the sampler Maahu-Tonga by Lander’s
daughter Kerry, a writer and novice
embroiderer, which has stitches
that are pulled too tightly in places,
and a delightfully wonky blanket-
stitched border in mismatched thread,
represents the joy she experienced
imagining herself as Oreo learning to
embroider.
The other sections of this
remarkable social history exhibition
expand outwards from the story of
Oreo, and invent narratives about
other women of the same era,
extrapolating from the scant historical
details available. These provide a
broader account of the nature of the
creative exchange between Maori
and Pakeha women, the extent of
women’s agency within the domestic
sphere in the early decades of the
nineteenth century, and consider
the ways in which women’s sewing
practices provided them with a voice.
In Michelle Mayn’s Unfoldment,
viewers are invited to walk through
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woven and stitched elements that
record the unwritten history of another
missionary wife, Jane Kendall, and
speculate about the craft techniques
that she might have acquired from her
interactions with Maori women.
The extent of Vivien Caughley’s
accomplishment in needlecraft is
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that make up the section ‘Samplers:
X-marked statements’; imaginative
reconstructions of samplers produced
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the daughters of John and Hannah
King, objects that Caughley regards as
letters to their father. Caughley is also
responsible for making all the stitched
pieces in the section ‘X-marked
domesticity’: 32 monogrammed
nappies representing each of the
Pakeha babies born at the Rangihoua
Mission settlement between 1814–32;
a tea towel memorialising each of the
13 missionary wives, with the span of
her life and the years of her arrival and
departure from New Zealand cross-
stitched on each towel; seven aprons,
one for each of the Pakeha women
who were not missionary wives; and a
pall cloth for a Pakeha child who died
en route to the settlement.
Maureen Lander, Dude Beaton
and Jo Torr imaginatively reconstruct
a complex family story in three
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rua nga kakahu whero: Two red gowns,features a dress of red linen made by
Torr, and another incomplete garment
of woven muka, which bring to life
the story of Ewhora, another Maori
girl who was taught to sew by Hannah
King when she entered her employ
after the death of her father, the chief
Ruatara, and the subsequent suicide
of her mother, Rahu, an accomplished
weaver. An incomplete korowai, Toi
Te Rito Maihi, by Dude Beaton pays
tribute to Rahu’s weaving skills, and
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‘fact-based timeline’ about the sewing
skills acquired by Ruatara on board
a ship bound for Australia, and
the powerful symbolic elements he
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Although there is no historical
record of the conversations that took
place among the many women who
populate this exhibition, the works
created in their memory for X-Marks
converse with one another in the
present and allow us to remember the
lives of Oreo, Ewhora, Rahu, and all
the missionary wives and children
who have gone before us.