Te Papa to Berlin. The Making of Two Museums: by Ken Gorbey, Dunedin, Otago University Press, 2020, 280 pp., NZ$39.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-98-859237-4.

Both institutions opened in 2001, although the JMB's building had been attracting international interest since 1989 when the Jewish American architect Daniel Libeskind's dramatic extension to the eighteenth-century baroque palace, the Collegienhaus, earned him the museum design commission. Gorbey is not the first person to draw on the JMB to make sense of colonial histories in the southern hemisphere; several times he refers to a controversial connection between the JMB and the National Museum of Australia (NMA), another exemplar of the new museology built in the late 1990s. Here Gorbey explores how museums, traditionally associated with the display of objects, can successfully exhibit the story of peoples and communities whose material traces have been subject to deliberate, systematic eradication. [Extracted from the article]