OPINION

Joe Bennett is a Lyttelton-based writer and columnist. He has been writing a column since 2017.

The winning bid was $46,521. The auction room burst into applause. And I have questions, which are what
and who and, in particular, why.

What is easy. The item sold was a huia tail feather. These feathers had always been popular with Maori chieftains, but then, in Rotorua in 1901, a Maori guide tucked one into the hatband of the Duke of York, soon to become King George V. The result was that huia feathers became popular throughout the British Empire and their price rose to a pound a piece. Six years later the huia was extinct.

To be fair, however, the huia had already been doomed. They’d been in decline since human beings arrived on these shores. And the vast deforestation of the North Island in the nineteenth century sealed their fate.

Though over 100 years old, this feather is in splendid condition. Silverfish haven’t chewed it, sunlight hasn’t faded it. But it’s still just a feather, and an average medium-sized bird has 3000 feathers. Who’d pay $46,521 for just one of them? The answer is, we don’t know.

All that we do know, for sure, is that the buyer is a registered collector of taonga and resident in New Zealand. But I think we can guess a little more than that. I’d wager a pound to a penny that the buyer is a bloke. Collecting feels such a male thing to do.

Most boys collect stuff. I have quoted before a passage from Coventry Patmore, the Victorian poet, who wrote of punishing his son and sending him to bed early, then feeling guilty and going up to see him as he slept and finding on the bedside table.

A box of counters and a red-vein’d stone,

A piece of glass abraded by the beach

And six or seven shells,

A bottle with bluebells

And two French copper coins, ranged there with careful art,

To comfort his sad heart.

That boy is every boy, an embryonic collector. Our early collections are aesthetic – we just gather the stuff we’re drawn to – but many of us go on to specialise. My own speciality was cricket books. In the years before puberty I collected maybe a couple of hundred, got cheaply from dim little second-hand bookshops and brought together in my bedroom, shelved, arranged alphabetically, catalogued, cherished.

Why? Well, I loved cricket and liked reading about it. But also I liked the amassment, the ownership. In a messy and random world here was a little patch of it that was orderly and under my control. It was an exercise of power and ownership.

But also it was a way of capturing and crystallising one aspect of the past, the history of cricket. The present is a mess, the future unknown, but the past can be selected and collected and made tidy.

I sold my cricket books for beer money when I was at university, sold them en bloc to a serious adult collector with a library thousands strong, and I have collected nothing since. But many men carry on collecting throughout their lives. They collect stamps, beer cans, rugby jerseys, motorbikes – with the object itself mattering less than the business of collecting it, and their reasons for doing so would be the same reasons as I had for collecting cricket books. But does that quite explain $46,000 for a feather?

The books I most cherished were not the ones I most enjoyed reading, but rather the oldest books and especially the oldest autographed ones. Their age and their signature made them rarer, so other people were less likely to have them. In other words, the rarity conferred value on them and that value conferred virtue on to me.

Consider the billionaire who spends $100 million on a Picasso. Does anyone imagine his reasons are aesthetic? No. His prime motive is vanity. Lots of people are rich. But no one else owns that Picasso. Unconsciously, the billionaire feels that some of the painting’s uniqueness has rubbed off on him. And just as they aren’t making any more Picassos so they aren’t making any more huia.

In summary, then, our unknown collector shelled out $46,512 for a feather because it contributed to a sense of order, and of control, and of marshalling and tidying the past, but also because it made him feel good about himself. Which is all fair enough.

But I still don’t understand why the people in the auction room applauded.