One of only seven warrior cloaks of its type known to survive anywhere in the world has come home, after spending decades in storage on the other side of the planet. The eighteenth century pauku, a tightly twined harakeke war cloak once worn by a Māori fighter, is now in the care of Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial Museum, on a five year exhibition and research loan from the Oriental Museum at Durham University in England.
For Dr Kahutoi Te Kanawa, curator of Māori at Auckland Museum, the arrival carries weight that runs deeper than any catalogue entry. Speaking to RNZ, she described the moment plainly. “The importance for me is that the taonga is home. It’s home.” Her sister Dr Rangi Te Kanawa, a textile conservator who has spent twenty five years working with woven taonga, called it the oldest cloak she has seen in Aotearoa in her career.
The pauku is a different beast from the kahu kiwi and kākahu most people picture when they think of Māori cloaks. There are no feathers, no decorative trim, no soft drape across the shoulders. It is a working garment, woven from harakeke using a close twining technique so dense that the finished fabric was effectively armour. The weave is tight enough to turn a wooden spear, and would have hung heavy on the shoulders of a warrior heading into combat. One section of the cloak was originally dyed black using paru, the iron rich mud that gives so many older Māori textiles their distinctive deep tone. Some of those dyed fibres have rotted over the centuries, but that loss is in some ways a gift to researchers, because it exposes the underlying structure of the weave and lets weavers see exactly how the ancestors built the garment thread by thread.
How the cloak ended up in northern England is a question nobody can yet answer with certainty. The Oriental Museum at Durham University received it in the mid 1960s from the Trevelyan family estate in Northumberland, where it had been kept for generations. Rachel Barclay, senior curator at the Oriental Museum, has acknowledged that how it came into the family’s hands remains unclear. The strongest current theory is that the pauku travelled to Britain on one of the earliest contacts between Māori and European voyagers, possibly returning home with Joseph Banks aboard the Endeavour after Captain Cook’s first voyage in 1769 and 1770. If that lineage is confirmed, the cloak would be one of the very oldest Māori textiles in existence anywhere, and certainly the oldest of its kind back on home soil.
The pauku is now housed at Te Aho Mutunga Kore, Auckland Museum’s Māori and Pacific textile and fibre research centre, where it sits within reach of a community of weavers, conservators and tohunga who have been waiting their whole working lives for an object like this to come within touching distance. The museum’s expert weavers’ advisory group, Taumata Māreikura, will lead the technical analysis. Their work goes beyond the usual conservation tasks of cleaning, measuring and recording. They intend to read the cloak the way a musician reads a score, decoding the order in which the weaver added fibres, the tension applied at each stitch, the dye choices, the joins and the finishing techniques. Once that knowledge is mapped, the goal is to revive the skill itself. Pauku weaving is not a tradition that has been practised continuously in Aotearoa for the past two centuries, and many of its specifics had effectively gone silent.
The Te Kanawa sisters bring something to that process that no formal training programme could replicate. They grew up immersed in traditional weaving knowledge passed down from their own mother and grandmother, surrounded by harakeke, dyeing pits and the rhythm of a weaving frame in regular use. That lineage of practical knowledge, combined with decades of museum experience, puts them in a rare position to translate what their hands and eyes are reading into instructions that the next generation of weavers can actually follow. The five year loan window is, in effect, a window for that translation work to happen.
Repatriation of Māori and Moriori taonga has been a slow and patient project over many decades, led principally by Te Papa’s Karanga Aotearoa Repatriation Programme and supported by museums, universities and private collections across Britain, Europe, North America and beyond. Most of the highest profile returns over the years have been kōiwi tangata, ancestral remains, rather than woven or carved taonga, and a working warrior cloak of this age and condition is a genuinely unusual addition to the list. Archaeology Magazine reports that only seven pauku are known to exist worldwide, with the remainder spread across museums in Britain, Europe and North America, none of which have yet come home.
For visitors, the cloak is expected to feature in research focused displays at Auckland Museum during its loan period, alongside the contemporary weaving work it inspires. For weavers, conservators and tohunga, the pauku is something more useful than an exhibit. It is a teacher. It carries in its fibres the practical answers to questions that have been asked in classrooms and wānanga for years, and once those answers are recorded, the technique can move from the past tense into the present.
What do you make of the return of the pauku, and the wider effort to bring Māori taonga home? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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