• The Britten V1000 on display with its bodywork removed. Photo by Katie Cooper, 2021. Britten V1000 motorcycle, 1992, by Britten Motorcycle Company Ltd. Purchased 1995 with New Zealand Lottery Grants Board funds. Te Papa (T000649)

    A motorbike stripped bare – the Britten V1000 gets a new coat of paint

  • Mānawatia a Matariki

    There are nine stars in the Matariki star cluster. Learn about each of the stars and their connections in our Collections.

A woman in a bright pink and orange dress stands on stage, smiling, addressing a crowd

On March 18, 2023, people from across Aotearoa and further afield came together to reimagine Asian mental health. Presented by Te Papa as part of its Asian Mental Health project, and spearheaded by Mehwish Mughal and Grace Gassin, the Reimagining Asian Mental Health hui brought together mental health professionals, advocates, activists, and academics to speak on the issues and ways forward, surrounded by a room full of passionate individuals.Read more

Between November 2022 and February 2023, Natural History interns Tobia Dale and Ben Carson assisted with the curation of three major donations of New Zealand frogs and lizards. Following their first blog on processing pickled pepeketua (native frogs), this second blog describes their processing of a large collection of native lizards from the 1980s, and an opportunity to see several of these species in the wild on Mana Island.Read more

I recently spent a week on Norfolk Island collecting ferns. One non-fern plant I was particularly keen to see was harakeke (Phormium tenax), on which I’ve done recent genetic work. On Norfolk Island it is known as flax, so I’ll use that name here. What I hadn’t appreciated before the trip was the significance of flax to the settlement of Norfolk Island.Read more

Three Te Papa botanists recently visited Norfolk Island together with colleagues from the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria. Their purpose was to collect ferns for research. Curator of Botany Leon Perrie introduces the significance of Norfolk Island’s ferns. Our research programme investigating the relationships and naming of Aotearoa New Zealand’s fernsRead more

Three of our botanists recently spent a week on Norfolk Island collecting ferns with colleagues from the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria. Our fern findings will be detailed in a future blog post but here we discuss interesting flowering plants that we saw – some of which were very familiar to us as New Zealanders but others were completely new!Read more

A mockup of the zine, showing its front cover and two inside pages

It’s been three years since Covid-19 triggered lockdowns around the world, including here in Aotearoa New Zealand. We’ve just published a collection of online comics, highlighting a multitude of experiences faced by members of the Chinese New Zealand community during this time. Here, curator Grace Gassin introduces The Pandemic Chronicles.Read more

Speargrasses, with their sharp leaves and flower spikes, may look like a plant you want to avoid at all costs but a number of critters call them home, including the charismatic speargrass weevils. Science researcher Lara Shepherd introduces these weevils, plus some other critters that utilise speargrass plants. When IRead more