Article by Helen Harvey, published on stuff.co.nz, 23 Sep 2023
One Kiwi family had an unusual dilemma. Their parrot had attacked great-grandma’s self-portrait and damaged the treasured heirloom.
The picture was done in pokerwork – the art of decorating wood by burning a design with a heated metal point – and dated from the early 1900s. They did not know where to turn. It had to be saved. Not just for them, but for the generations to come.
Enter Susanne Rawson, a New Plymouth conservator, whose business is Taranaki’s answer to British TV favourite The Repair Shop.
Her work deals with everything from christening gowns, to modern art damaged in a flood, to a 150-year-old shoe recovered from a ship wreck. There’s a school rugby cap damaged by mould. A trophy from 1958 that is looking worse for wear. And parrot pecked pokerwork.
And there are much larger objects. Four cannons are due to arrive from Nelson. And an ancient waka, found in the Patea River, lies in a tank of Patea River water waiting for work to commence.
Rawson, who is from the USA, and a colleague who works in Cambridge, are the Aotearoa specialists on water-logged materials, Rawson says.
Her business, Heritage Preservation: Field Support (HPFS) Solutions was the first conservation studio in Taranaki and is the biggest in New Zealand.
They work with the Ministry of Culture and Heritage, museums, cultural organisations, iwi and hapu, and private people with their precious family taonga.
“We have about 30 projects at the moment. When I first started this business I underestimated how historical this region is. And I underestimated how passionate people are about their past.”
People come in and say, “I don’t know if it’s worth anything”, she says.
“I have no idea of financial value. We treat all cultural materials as if they’re equally financially valuable. I don’t want to know.”
Rawson, who has just got her PHD, thinks it’s critical Kiwis have discussions on what heritage is.
“People in New Zealand don’t have the mentality towards heritage. Everyone says we’re such a young country, and we don’t have a history, but we do and it’s worth preserving.”
An objects conservator Rawson doesn’t work with paper.
“But because we’re a regional studio we try and accommodate everything. We don’t want to send objects out of the region.”
If something comes in that is not in her area of expertise, she has experts she can call on. She already has all the necessary equipment in her studio. As a result Rawson is the go-to person for the “too-hard basket” stuff.
Her studio has a temperature-controlled room where the 105-year-old parrot damaged self-portrait is kept with other artwork.
There is a woodworking room and an open studio, which houses a couple of interesting looking tanks.
One, bright blue, contains an engine order telegraph – it gave signals to the engine room – from the SS Ventnor that sank off Auckland in 1902.
“It’s very romantic. It looks like a movie prop. But it’s a grave site object so has to be treated with respect.”
The Ventnor had been commissioned to carry the remains of 499 Chinese miners who had died in Otago, Rawson says.
“Their remains were repatriated back to China because they believed in order for your soul to be released into the next realm you have to be on your own soil. So, it was common to commission ships that would take the remains of the miners back to China.”
But the Ventnor hit a reef off Taranaki and limped its way to Auckland before sinking in about 150 metres of water, Rawson says.
“The bones of the miners washed up on shore, so local iwi buried them in their urupa.”
Under New Zealand heritage legislation, sites from before 1900 are protected from modification or change, but this sank in 1902, so just missed the cut-off. In 2014 the Project Ventnor Group dived to the wreck, filmed it, and discovered some artefacts.
The Chinese community were outraged, because it was a grave site, so the Government stepped in and gave it some protection, she says.
The engine order telegraph, that instantly reminds people of one shown in the Titanic movie, was one of the larger items taken off the wreck.
“The Project Ventnor Group, Government, Chinese community – everybody wants it. And they all have different opinions on how it should be cared for. We try to listen to all the voices.”
The engine order telegraph is lying in a chemical solution that keeps it from corroding until it is restored, she says.
“We make a lot of our own chemicals, and we don’t use commercial formulations for things because we don’t know what’s in those chemicals.”
Artefacts from another shipwreck are submerged in containers on a shelf. The Daring, a schooner, was shipwrecked onto the beach at Murawai, in Auckland, in 1865 while sailing from Taranaki to Manukau with a cargo of grass seed.
It was uncovered by eroding sands in 2018.
“People camping on the beach sawed pieces off for camp fires and so on, but it is protected. As it became more exposed it was going to be washed out to sea. A passionate community group stepped up and said they would recover the Daring, put up the money and pulled it off the beach.”
Rawson has been consulting on the Daring, which is now in Mangawhai Museum, since it was found. She works on the project pro bono, and gets interns, one coming from as far away as France, to help.
The remains of a hessian grass seed sack was found on the Daring. As was a shoe.
“Both are being kept wet to preserve them until we can take them through the conservation process.”
Along the wall on the other side of the studio, also keeping wet, is the Kuranui Waka that was pulled from the Patea River in June.
The 7.5 metre waka, which is estimated to be about half of the original waka, is submerged in Patea River water in a customised black tank.
“We were notified on a Friday it was coming and had until Wednesday to get ready,” Rawson says.
“The tank was made by Chooks Pumping and Engineering Ltd in Egmont Village. I think he welded for, like, 48 hours straight. I said ‘it has to be moveable by three women with a waka in it’.”
Ngāti Ruanui has been leading this project and she is supporting them, she says.
“We start the process now of engagement, working with the iwi and saying this is our Western scientific-led perspective of how we know to care for wet wood cultural materials. And then try and marry that with the ambitions of the iwi. There are traditional ways they have cared for these materials, but every iwi and hapu is different.”
The project, which is expected to take five years, is fascinating, she says.
“We all dream in our careers to work with a signifiant piece of history.”
Rawson grew up in a piece of history – an 1851 house in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the USA. Her mother used to hold re-enactments, wearing period clothes, in the antique-filled house.
She was working down on the ice, for the Antarctic Heritage Trust, responsible for the preservation of the historic expedition bases in Antarctica, when she met a mechanic from Hāwera called Jeff Rawson.
The rest, as they say, is history.
HERITAGE TARANAKI 