For the last few months, Master’s student Manon Verdello has been working with the Mātauranga Māori team on the Acknowledging our Colonial Past project. A part of her internship at Te Papa was to work on reconciling the original collection records from the 1860s to the current collection database. Here,Read more
Nancy Adams was a key player in the early decades of the Dominion Museum (predecessor to Te Papa), making substantial curatorial contributions to collections spanning from colonial history to botany and producing illustrations, now a valuable part of the Te Papa Art collection. As Lucia Adams and Margo Montes de Oca discovered during their summer research this year, traces of her influence and curatorial eye can be found not only in Te Papa’s archives but also in the outside world, specifically in the gardens by the old Dominion Museum building in Buckle Street.Read more
Te Aka Matua Research Library at Te Papa currently has a collection of over 60,000 books and supports the work of Te Papa kaimahi with its wide-ranging books and resources about Aotearoa New Zealand history, Pacific cultures, mātauranga Māori, art, natural history, and museum studies. The library was first mentionedRead more
When we think about New Zealand’s national museum, we often think about Te Papa, with its enormous building on the waterfront and bicultural philosophy. ‘Our Place’. Or we might imagine the National Museum at Buckle Street with the National War Memorial or the carillon standing tall in front – a place you might remember visiting as a child. But our national museum’s history begins over 100 years before that, in 1865, to be exact. Curator Mātauranga Māori Amber Aranui takes us back to this creatively documented time. Read more
Melanie Ioane-Warren, one of our Natural History interns, talks about the important collection of bird bones gathered by the late Augustus Hamilton. Melanie is working on this bone collection together with Curators Alan Tennyson and Rodrigo Salvador, and GNS scientist Karyne Rogers. In 1875, the clipper ship Collingwood departed EnglandRead more
Amongst the many events happening this weekend during Wellington’s 150th birthday is the official unveiling of a plaque (below). The plaque commemorates 150 years since the founding of Te Papa’s predecessor, the Colonial Museum, and the role of James Hector in setting up and running the museum, amongst many other things.Read more
“For thousands of years man has gazed up at the moon and wondered.” That’s roughly how those worthy documentary commentaries begin, isn’t it? Well, Te Papa’s forerunner museums responded to this curiosity in two acquisitions almost 100 years apart. The first was an 1873 photograph of the moon made by the Great MelbourneRead more
