On 29 May 2018 our civic leaders voted down a motion to proceed with their own $55,000,000 museum project.
We already have a significant dusty collection of 30,000 objects and materials of cultural, religious and historical significance to Tauranga held in quite poor storage conditions in a tin shed inaccessible to the public and ongoing cost.
The proposal was to present these to the public for education and enjoyment. What went wrong? Two things went wrong, maybe more.
Firstly, the public had lost confidence in the Council as project manager who appeared to be somewhat disengaged from the heart of the idea and lacking inspiration or vision for the project, as is needed to create space to display our collections. The idea was simply not managed by a Collections Manager. Secondly, Council, for whatever reason, thought that to succeed as a museum, it must be housed in a superficially ‘iconic’ building. Not a historic building, not a building readily accessible to patrons like Dive Crescent Cargo Shed, but an ‘iconic building’ so out of the way, even its ‘iconic’ stature could not be widely appreciated above the railway tracks. I recently visited the Bulls Museum in the main street of this small Manawatu township. The floor was not flash, but the quality of the items on display and the stories told however, were ‘Remark-a-Bull’.
These all demonstrate that a new iconic building is quite unnecessary for a successful museum. Surely, we could have our own remarkable museum displaying our collections in Tauranga at a much lower cost than Council has suggested. After all, The Elms Mission House from the 1840’s and the 1880’s Brain Watkins House, are both small but well maintained by volunteer groups and offer a truly amazing, quality insight into the history of Tauranga. It’s time to dust off some more of our collections!
