Maka-Maka The Tiki Experience Tiki Bar

22/10/2026

The Māori through the eyes of a Victorian traveller

The Boy Travellers in Australasia by Thomas W. Knox, published in 1889, offers a fascinating glimpse into how the Māori of Aotearoa New Zealand were presented to readers in the late 19th century.

Chapters VIII–XII take us into the world of Māori culture, traditional weapons, warriors, and Indigenous life as understood and illustrated by a Western author of the Victorian era. Its engravings are intriguing historical documents, revealing not only the material culture of the Māori but also the perspectives and occasional misconceptions of the period in which the book was produced.

These pages are worth exploring both for what they preserve and for what they tell us about the history of representing Oceanic peoples in Western literature.

A fascinating source for anyone interested in Māori material culture, historical illustrations, and the collecting history of Oceania.

📖 Thomas W. Knox, The Boy Travellers in Australasia, 1889.

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16/10/2026

🌺 THE BOY TRAVELLERS: AUSTRALASIA (1889) — Chapters IV–VII 🌴📖

Our journey through Thomas W. Knox’s The Boy Travellers: Australasia continues into the enchanting islands of the South Pacific!

Chapters IV–VII take us across the Society Islands, Samoa, and the “Feejee Islands” (Fiji), offering a fascinating glimpse into the peoples, customs, landscapes, and traditions encountered by 19th-century travellers.

Published in 1889, this illustrated travel book captures the Victorian fascination with distant lands, presenting Oceania through the eyes of its era. Today, these pages are equally intriguing as historical documents — preserving period illustrations, descriptions, and European perspectives on Pacific Island societies.

🌊 From the lush islands of Polynesia to the cultural richness of Samoa and Fiji, these chapters offer another glimpse into the world of the Pacific as imagined and documented in the late 19th century.

📚 A wonderful piece of travel literature for anyone interested in Oceania, Pacific history, ethnography, and the history of exploration.

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13/10/2026

🌺 The Boy Travellers: Australasia (1889) — Chapter III: The Marquesas & Easter Island 🗿📚

In this 1889 volume, American travel writer Thomas W. Knox takes young readers on a journey across the Pacific, exploring the remote Marquesas Islands and the mysterious Easter Island, or Rapa Nui.

Beyond its monumental moai statues, Easter Island holds another extraordinary cultural treasure: rongorongo, the enigmatic system of glyphs found on wooden tablets. When European visitors first encountered these inscriptions in the 19th century, they opened a fascinating chapter in the island’s history. Their meaning remains undeciphered to this day.

Knox’s account offers a glimpse into how these far-flung islands were presented to Victorian readers, at a time when Western explorers and scholars were only beginning to document the remarkable cultural heritage of Polynesia.

📖 A fascinating piece of 19th-century travel literature — and a historical window into the world’s enduring fascination with Rapa Nui and its unsolved mysteries.

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12/10/2026

📚🌺 The Boy Travellers: Australasia (1889)
By Thomas W. Knox (Part I)

A fascinating glimpse into the world of 19th-century travel literature! Published in 1889, The Boy Travellers: Australasia opens with its first two chapters devoted to the Sandwich Islands — present-day Hawaiʻi. 🌴🌊

Through the eyes of a Victorian-era travel writer, we encounter Hawaiʻi as it was presented to readers of the late 19th century, when distant islands of the Pacific captured the imagination of travellers, collectors and armchair explorers alike.

Beyond its literary value, this beautifully aged volume offers a window into the historical representation of the Pacific and the way its islands and cultures were described to Western audiences.

Another fascinating piece of the history of Pacific exploration and collecting. 🌺📖

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03/10/2026

📖🇳🇿 New Zealand: Romance of Empire — 1908

A glimpse inside Reginald Horsley’s New Zealand: Romance of Empire, published in London in 1908.

The book is illustrated with striking colour reproductions after drawings by A. D. McCormick, depicting the landscapes, people and history of New Zealand at the beginning of the 20th century.

I particularly like these plates for the way they reflect the visual imagination of the period — part travel literature, part colonial history, and part romanticised vision of Aotearoa and its Māori heritage.

A fascinating window into how New Zealand was presented to European readers more than a century ago. 🇳🇿📚

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30/09/2026

📖 Rapa Nui, 1883 — Wilhelm Geiseler

A remarkable first-hand glimpse of Rapa Nui from the 19th century.

In 1883, German naval officer Wilhelm Geiseler published his account of the island following the expedition of the German corvette SMS Hyäne. His Die Oster-Insel documents the island, its monuments, traditions, inhabitants and archaeological remains at a time when much of this material was still being recorded for the first time by European visitors.

Among the most fascinating details are the rongorongo glyphs reproduced in the text — some of the earliest published attempts to document the mysterious script of Rapa Nui. These drawings provide a small but important window into the study of a writing system that remains undeciphered to this day.

Nearly 150 years later, these pages still have an extraordinary presence: not just as an early historical record, but as a snapshot of Rapa Nui and its cultural heritage at a particular moment in time. 🌴🗿

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21/09/2026

21/09/2026

📖 ISLANDS FAR AWAY — Agnes Gardner King, 1921

Published in 1921, Islands Far Away by Agnes Gardner King is a fascinating glimpse into the Pacific as it was imagined and experienced by Western travellers in the early 20th century.

King takes the reader on a journey through the islands of the Pacific, combining travel observations, descriptions of local life and culture, and illustrations that capture the places she encountered. Today, books like this are valuable not only as historical travel literature, but also as documents of the way Oceania was represented to Western audiences at the time.

What makes these older publications particularly interesting to me is the combination of text, photography and illustration. They preserve a visual record of landscapes, people, architecture and objects that can sometimes be difficult to find elsewhere.

Of course, these books also need to be read within their historical context. The language and perspectives can reflect the colonial attitudes of their era, so they tell us not only about the Pacific itself, but also about how Europeans and Americans viewed and documented it.

A small window into a very different Pacific — more than a century ago. 🌴📚

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12/09/2026

⚒️ Gi Okono — the ceremonial axe of New Caledonia

This striking object is a hache ostensoir, also known as a gi okono, from New Caledonia (Kanak).

Far more than a simple axe, these spectacular objects combined a stone blade with an elaborately decorated shaft and served as prestigious objects in Kanak society. Their impressive form and craftsmanship made them symbols of status, power and authority.

European collectors were fascinated by these axes from the 19th century onwards, and examples found their way into museums and private collections around the world.

What makes the gi okono particularly fascinating is the contrast between the practical origins of the axe and the extraordinary care invested in its decoration. It is a great example of how an everyday tool could become an object of ceremony, prestige and exchange.

Another piece of Oceanic material culture with a story that goes far beyond its appearance.

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05/09/2026

A powerful object from Ambrym Island, Vanuatu 🇻🇺

This beautifully carved club was made for the ceremonial killing of pigs — an act that was far more than simply the slaughter of an animal. On Ambrym, pigs traditionally represented enormous wealth, status and social power, and the sacrifice of pigs played an important role in ceremonies and the complex system of social rank.

Unlike an everyday fighting weapon, a club such as this belonged to a world of ritual, prestige and exchange. Its form is both functional and deeply symbolic, reflecting the extraordinary artistic traditions of Vanuatu.

Objects like this offer a fascinating glimpse into the social and ceremonial life of Ambrym before the profound changes brought by the modern era.

🌋 Ambrym Island, Vanuatu
🪵 Ceremonial pig-killing club
🇻🇺 Vanuatu, Melanesia

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