Alexander Turnbull at home, 1890

Alexander Turnbull at home, 1890

This photograph shows Alexander Turnbull, his brother and a friend sitting in one of the rooms of Elibank, the Turnbull residence in Wellington. It demonstrates the original context of Turnbull’s collection, and the way in which his accumulated treasures were a personal statement, constructing his identity and mediating his relationship to the society in which he lived. Elibank was the family home, and Turnbull later built a new house on Bowen Street to provide a more appropriate venue for his growing collection.

The particular power and uniqueness of Alexander Turnbull’s collecting activity is found in the way Turnbull used his collection to mediate his experience and relationship with New Zealand. Turnbull hated living in Wellington and New Zealand, and missed London and its many attractions. His vocation as a collector was confirmed by his alienation from the society that he found himself part of – collecting was a means to deal with the separation he felt to colonial Wellington. His decision to collect Milton, made a year after he arrived in Aotearoa, was one side of his response to his personal situation, and a gesture that spoke of his desire to remain connected to Europe and the society he had left behind.

Yet, 10 months later, he also decided to make his New Zealand collections as complete as he could. This gesture to his adopted country reveals the ambivalence of Turnbull’s personal response – at once engaged and disconnected. As Rachel Barrowman has suggested, ‘For Turnbull, his library expressed both his obsession with and his alienation from the country of his birth.’

Permission of the National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Mātauranga O Aotearoa, must be obtained before any reuse of this image

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