96 | COMMUNITY The Kauri Museum Guardians of the mighty Kauri Virginia Wright The Kauri Museum is situated in Matakohe, Kaipara Harbour, Northland. Below, an exquisite piece of kauri gum. We are proud to support The Kauri Museum With its 60th anniversary on the horizon in October this year, Northland’s Kauri Museum is one of several museums founded around the country at about the same time, including the Museum of Transport and Technology (MOTAT) in Auckland’s Western Springs. It began as a museum of early pioneer experiences in the Kaipara with many of the families represented in its collections still living in the region today. The museum grew and changed over the years, becoming a significant tourist attraction in the last two decades of the 20th century, according to the interim director Pablo Garcia. “One of the reasons is because we became well known for having the best collection of kauri logging and gum artefacts in the country. We have a full-scale working mill here in the museum, a lot of working machinery and a lot of milled logs that are quite astonishing when you realise the size and scale of what kauri trees were. “The biggest kauri tree still standing, Tane Mahuta has a girth of 13.7m around its trunk: still relatively small compared to the 26.8m girth of the largest kauri tree on record.” Around the turn of the century the museum formally recognised its purpose as being the guardian of the Kauri story past, present and future, and changed its name to suit. They’ve become closely involved with the scientific research community looking into all things kauri, and they’re clear that they’re about the experience of all peoples from the region as they relate to kauri. “In the last couple of years we’ve started extending our remit all the way back to Gondwanaland and to what kauri forests were like in pre-human days in New Zealand,” says Pablo. “We’re also working with the iwi with view to eventually being able to tell the story of how Maori interacted with kauri before the Europeans arrived.” The Kauri Heritage Festival on October 15 this year is designed to be a family fun day celebrating the whole community, from the first people to live there to the most recent arrivals. The festival provides an opportunity for the museum to present progress on the four projects for which it received funding through the Provincial Growth Fund, the largest of which is to create a forest walkway with the idea of emulating that early Gondwana Land experience. “The purpose of that project is to redesign the visitor experience so that they enter the museum through a walkway representing the ancient kauri forests which will make it a lot easier for us to explain what the reality of those forests was like,” explains Pablo. ‘ “Then we want to introduce them to the story of the first human interaction with those forests. All four of the projects represent a substantial step forward for the museum.” A new research centre due to be opened at the festival will provide an area for the community and the various research partners to interact with the museum’s exhibits, artefacts and other research materials. A series of science and discovery activities delivered through learning stations around the museum are designed to help the museum to work more closely with schools visiting from around the country. “The idea is to provide a range of curricular products that are especially exciting to schools, looking at contemporary issues such as the environment and obviously kauri’s role in those issues,” explains Pablo. Last but not least as far as many visitors will be concerned is the extension and improvements to the museum’s café, an important part of this broader initiative to prepare the museum for its next 60 years.
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