Post #569014 by bigbrotiki on Thu, Dec 16, 2010 1:26 PM

Absolutely FAN-TASTIC! That clubhouse stage, the whole place, amazing! Reminds me a little bit of early Shriners and Masons lodges, except they were decorated with oriental imagery. How wonderful that this place has remained intact and un-renovated. Thank you for those pictures. Great research!

I appreciate your sensitive comments about some of the material's un-p.c.-ness too. To me, questions of racism cannot be judged from today's standpoint only, but have to be regarded from the perspective of what the reality was in their own time: Even though some Westerners had a fascination and love for the native arts and cultures, most of them could not divest themselves from the sense of superiority over indigenous people that they had been brought up with for centuries. It took the better part of the 20th century for the realization to sink in that that kind of thinking was not necessarily based on facts.

Luckily, we know better now (well most of us do), but to censor and hide proof of earlier, un-educated attitudes is a mistake in my view (obviously :) ). Examples of such should be seen as what they were in their own time. (..and I am not saying this suggesting YOU are not doing that, C.N.!)

And here's my take on this part of your post:

On 2010-12-05 04:50, Club Nouméa wrote:
"Readers of books such as "Tiki Modern" will be forgiven for thinking that Polynesian style was first appropriated by Europeans for dining, drinking and social venues by Trader Vic and Don the Beachcomber in California in the 1930s. Actually, the idea seems to have originated four decades earlier, in the 1890s, in this unassuming Victorian-era corrugated iron hall in Wanganui."

Forgive me if I aim to clarify: "Tiki style" and "Polynesian pop" are a uniquely American pop culture phenomenon. They form their own cohesive world, with its own history, customs, style, icons and language. Of course they were not isolated, but inspired by many ideas and sources which existed ever since the discovery of the Polynesian islands (as I related in the Book of Tiki and in Tiki Modern) all over the Western world. I mention Goethe and Utopian societies in Germany and Russia that had the goal to escape to a South Seas paradise in his time. If I would have had the space to go into it, I would have gone further into the history of the Tahitian murals that King Friedrich Wilhelm had painted in his pleasure palace in 1794 (Tiki Modern page 72) But these were NOT the origin of what I call Polynesian pop. They are all examples of a long history of the fascination of the Western world with Polynesia.

One key point for the definition of Polynesian pop is that it is a recreation of the culture AWAY from its source, in another country. Yes there were Tikis in Hawaii, and in Tahiti and so on, but they mingled general tourist culture with native culture, and as such did not have the same degree of aesthetic separation from the source (not to say that SOME did not, but not in a cohesive quantity and style that formed its own genre).
As wonderful and amazing as the Wanganui Savage Club House is, it is part of a very specific history in New Zealand of how Maori art was appropriated by the European immigrants in its own country, how they sponsored native Maori carvers, and by doing so influenced their carving style, and so on. But I cannot see any direct relation to American Polynesian pop here. The unique genre of American Tiki style/Poly pop was pervasive in all walks of life in the United States, and even spread to Great Britain, Spain, and Mexico*. OTHER pop versions of Polynesian style certainly existed in other places of the world, but they did not form one unifiable pop genre that had as large of an influence.

*Dang, I forgot Canada, sorry Dan :D

[ Edited by: bigbrotiki 2010-12-16 16:16 ]