Forgotten harakeke taonga reveals global Māori trade history

A large collection of harakeke taonga and muka samples held at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, has been researched in depth for the first time, revealing a little-known history of Māori enterprise, international trade and the global movement of harakeke.

The collection, held in Kew’s Economic Botany Collection in London, includes muka, harakeke samples and experimental textiles. It once also included kākahu and kete, which were transferred in the mid-twentieth century to the British Museum and Oxford University’s Pitt Rivers Museum.

It began 173 years ago and, until now, had not been visited or studied in depth.

Professor Deidre Brown, from the Faculty of Engineering and Design and co-director of MĀPIHI, first saw the collection in 2017 and began researching it seriously about three years later. Her new open-access article, Me Tōngai Harakeke: Indigenous, Colonial and Imperial Histories of Harakeke (Phormium tenax) in the Economic Botany Collection of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, traces the history of harakeke as an Indigenous taonga, colonial commodity and world traveller.

For Brown, who is Ngāpuhi and Ngāti Kahu, the research also carries a personal connection.

Her ancestor, Te Pahi, worked with the Governor of New South Wales in 1805 and 1806 to conceive of a trading station for potatoes, timber and harakeke at his pā in the Bay of Islands.

While Te Pahi is not represented in the Kew collection, Brown says his story sits within the wider history the collection helps illuminate: Māori leaders actively shaping trade relationships well before and throughout the nineteenth century.

Brown says the collection tells a much bigger story than plants and fibres.

“This collection shows harakeke not only as a taonga species, but as part of a global story of Māori innovation, trade and adaptation. It reveals how Māori knowledge and enterprise were present on the world stage much earlier than many people might realise.”  

One of the strongest threads in the research is the story of Makoare Te Taonui, a Te Popoto rangatira from Te Tai Tokerau, who had his own London-based trading agent, Edward Gillman of Twickenham.

Te Taonui was involved in several commercial enterprises on behalf of his people, including timber cutting, milling, a general store and harakeke trade.

His harakeke samples, timber and kauri gum, were exhibited in the United Kingdom section of the 1851 Great Exhibition in London. Shortly afterwards, Gillman deposited Te Taonui’s harakeke samples into Kew’s Economic Botany Collection.

Brown says it is remarkable that Te Taonui’s harakeke was displayed in the central court of the Great Exhibition because he had established his own British trading relationship.

The samples show different stages in the transformation of harakeke leaf into dressed and dyed muka, including partially dressed harakeke with a kūkū, or mussel shell, attached for scraping, muka in its first stage of preparation, and muka dyed with hīnau bark.  

Brown says this history challenges narrow ideas about nineteenth-century Māori economies.

“Māori were not passive participants in this story. Rangatira Māori, like Te Taonui, were entrepreneurs establishing their own trading relationships on the world stage as late as the mid-nineteenth century.”

The research shows Māori were actively involved in harakeke trade with Australia from the early nineteenth century and were well engaged by the 1820s.  

In the decades following the Musket Wars, Māori economies continued to grow through the supply of harakeke and food to European settlers, the establishment of flour mills, the purchase of trading vessels and the formalisation of international trading relationships.

At the same time, Brown says that Māori agency was increasingly disrupted by colonisation, war, land alienation and industrial competition.

The article also records how European and colonial entrepreneurs tried to industrialise harakeke production.

By 1870, nearly 2,000 workers were employed in the harakeke industry and more than 160 mills were operating across Aotearoa. Muka made up almost five percent of the country’s exports by the early twentieth century.

But Brown’s research shows that machines repeatedly failed to match the quality of Māori hand-dressed muka, which was cleaner, more supple and more suitable for fine textiles.

The Kew collection includes rare experimental textiles made in factories in Scotland and Ireland from Māori and machine-dressed muka, including stair covering, towelling, sheeting, napkins and a damask tablecloth.

Some of these textiles were produced only once and never commercially realised, making their survival in the Kew collection especially significant.

Among them is a damask tablecloth made of muka, a rare example of the experimental textiles produced from harakeke fibre.

Brown says the collection reveals not only Māori trade histories, but the global distribution of harakeke as a commercial fibre crop intended to support small and large colonial economies.

Kew itself played a role in redistributing harakeke around the British Empire to create new industries for colonial economies. The collection includes harakeke grown commercially outside Aotearoa, including in Argentina and the South Atlantic Islands.

Brown says the collection is a reminder that harakeke cannot be understood only as a commodity.

“Harakeke is a taonga species. This collection shows how it was carried across the world as a commercial fibre crop, but also how its strongest and finest potential remained grounded in Māori knowledge.”

Dr Mark Nesbitt, Senior Research Leader at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, supported Brown’s access to the collection over several years.

Brown says Kew’s Economic Botany Collection holds many vast and understudied collections that may be of interest to Indigenous researchers.

The scale of Kew’s Economic Botany Collection helps explain how material of such significance could remain comparatively overlooked. It holds more than 100,000 objects documenting relationships between people and plants around the world.

Within a collection of that size, groups of material can remain unstudied until researchers bring the cultural and historical knowledge needed to recognise and reconnect their stories.

Brown says the research shows how the histories of Aotearoa’s harakeke industries are represented in one collection, forgotten until now, on the other side of the world.

“The history of Aotearoa’s harakeke industries is represented in one forgotten collection on the other side of the world. It holds stories of Māori enterprise, colonial ambition and the global movement of a taonga species.”