The Vance Archive: Theo Schoon's Cave Art Project

The William Vance Archive of Correspondence, Publications, Articles and Photographs relating to the Theo Schoon Cave Art Project. William Vance was born in Lyttelton in 1900 and during his secondary school years began collecting New Zealand books and artefacts. His enthusiasm for this nation's story led to his graduation from Canterbury College (now university) with a degree in history, and after a decade as a journalist, to his appointment in the mid 1940s as historical research officer with the Department of Internal Affairs. Vance's allotted territory, South Canterbury, was appropriate as he had spent his holidays at Pleasant Point on his uncle's farm in the limestone country that contains one of the main concentrations of Maori rock art. The nearby Mackenzie Country was a focus of Vance's interests as a mountaineer and collector of the pioneers' stories. Once employed by the department, Vance was able to implement his boyhood dream of protecting the rock drawings. The arrival of Theo Schoon with the same vision, began that fraught but ultimately successful process. Much of the detail of the project - one of the most extraordinary in the narrative of New Zealand art and ethnology - has not been made public and is recorded in great detail with assiduous documentation of original material in the Vance archive. It records not just the administrative problems that arose between the free-wheeling Dutch artist and the pernickety New Zealand bureaucracy but also the friendship that arose between Schoon and Vance. The latter enjoyed dealing with difficult people and the former needed a buffer between his visionary drive and a slow moving officialdom. Vance and Schoon complemented each other perfectly. Schoon went on to diverse artistic pursuits but never lost his grounding in Maori culture. Vance went on to write the standard history of the Mackenzie, dozens of articles and half a dozen books on Canterbury.