Conserving delicate Sāmoan land records
Conservator Anna Whitehead on the challenge of treating century-old records affected by the Pacific region’s high humidity.
Taumolia versus John Schwenke regarding land known as Tauavavasa [contains map], R25718182, former Archive ref. Samoa-BM04
Recently, the Conservation Lab was asked to help preserve some fragile Sāmoan land records, in the file R25718182. Made up of around 150 documents in different shapes and sizes, the file was created as part of a land dispute around the turn of the 20th century.
The documents were due to be digitised – but upon opening the file, our digitisation team Te Maeatanga found some of the papers were too degraded to handle. This is quite common with documents from Sāmoa – high humidity in the region can cause inks to oxidise and suffer from acid hydrolysis, and make paper brittle. In some cases, this can even cause the writing to break through the paper.
Nine of the documents in R25718182 had been folded in half and broken along the fold, fragmenting in the process so that the central sections were in bits.
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![Two pages from an early-twentieth century document laid out on a table. The pages are degraded, with pieces missing from their centres. Small fragments of paper and a pair of tweezers sit between them.]()
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![A page from an early-20th century document, handwritten in brown ink. Creases and tears are visible, and form a hole at the centre of the page. Matching fragments of paper have been placed in the hole, completing the words on the page.]()
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The next delicate stage was to use wet treatments to wash out harmful degradation products, like Fe(II) ions from the iron gall ink, so they don’t cause future damage to the paper.
Then began the work to join the pieces back together again with wheat starch paste. We used our light table to line up the fragments exactly on a lining sheet of thin Japanese tissue.
The image shows three of the documents during conservation work.
Finally, we treated the pages with gelatine, to strengthen the paper and stabilise the inks further.
In the end, only a few pieces were left behind, as we were able to return almost every fragment we had to its original home.
But nevertheless, some pieces are gone for good – probably because they were lost before they came to Archives New Zealand.
Though the files have been treated, they’re still delicate. They’ll need to be stored flat rather than folded, and in their own acid-free folder. But our treatment did make them strong enough to be digitised.
If you want to see the outcome of our mahi, you can view the digital copy of R25718182 online.
