EUGENE BINGHAM finds that the Auckland Museum has a cultural fortune but no money to display it.
Ignore the spray-painted tagging on the metal door and mind the rat poison on the floor.
This is the bazaar of the bizarre and the beautiful that Auckland Museum can't afford to let you see.
Stacked up like Grandma's garage, tenfold, this suburban warehouse contains the millions of artefacts the museum does not have the space to store.
Pile after pile, row after row of old things sitting around getting whiffier. Things Grandma wouldn't want in the house any more, but couldn't bring herself to throw out because they are, after all, family heirlooms.
Except that Grandma is unlikely to have a slightly smelly stuffed polar bear and a musk ox.
Or the world's most highly developed collection of ancient stone tools from around the Pacific.
In one corner of this antique dealers' treasure trove are cardboard boxes, stamped fragile, containing the country's pre-eminent applied arts collection. Statues such as a Graeco-Buddhist figure from Pakistan dating back to 300AD are swathed in wrapping paper away from the public eye.
There's enough military equipment to mount a small-scale invasion. Spears, arrows, bows, Japanese machine guns from the war in the Pacific. A big old bomb. Military uniforms by the cupboard-full. The Anzac Day wreath from 1939.
Oh, and don't mind the dripping sound, either - there's a leak in the roof, right over the bound volumes of newspapers dating back to the 1900s. But the staff have flung a plastic sheet over them. They'll be right.
Downstairs, through another steel door and past yet another burglar alarm pad, it gets dingier. Just when you thought it couldn't.
Right there on the shelves by the door, hundreds of preserved fish stare out from jars. It's called the wet fish collection. A school of creatures plucked from the seas around New Zealand over the past 100 years. The proverbial fish out of water. Pickled in a solution of alcohol.
Back upstairs, the biggest cultural shame is in store.
Packed away on the mezzanine floor are belts of human hair from Kiribati, shark tooth weapons from Tuvalu, Tongan fibre skirts and other extraordinary pieces of Pacific culture. Together with the fleet of traditional canoes strapped to the concrete walls, these should be taking pride of place somewhere.
"For a city like Auckland, the biggest Polynesian city in the world, not to have this material accessible is a real shame," says the Auckland Museum's head of collections, Oliver Stead.
"People should be able to consult all this stuff for research and affirmation of their identity."
Stead is standing in the middle of the 14,000 sq m warehouse in an industrial park on the edge of an Auckland suburb. As a measure of how sure the museum management feels about the security of this set-up, they have asked for the Herald to keep its location secret.
Not that your average burglar would quite know what he'd stumbled across if one ever jemmied his way in.
"By and large, it's the least spectacular material that is held out here, but it's really important primary material for New Zealand and Pacific history," says Stead.
"It's really like a reference library of materials of the human world and natural history specimens."
Which is why it seems odd that it's stacked away in a backstreet, oversized iron shed 20 minutes' drive from Newmarket.
The problem is space. As the Auckland Museum stands, there is not enough room to have adequate storage facilities on-site or in a better equipped nearby building.
The collections have outgrown the 1920s jewel of the Domain. Now the Museum Trust Board wants to accommodate the museum's middle-age spread and find a proper home for the hidden treasures.
It plans to construct a five-storey "infill" of the southern courtyard and expand the basement as the second stage of a development project begun in 1994.
Stage one, which was completed in December 1999, restored the museum's interior, improved the power, plumbing, drainage and heating, and left it with new natural history, cultural history and war memorial exhibits. But it did not add one square centimetre of space.
Stage two would include six additional 1800 sq m floors, which would give the museum space to allow public access to all of its artefacts, even if they are not on permanent display.
The on-site, secure, environmentally appropriate storage facilities would be a curator's heaven.
Simple. Except that it doesn't just end there.
The plans represent the most major spruce-up of the museum since it was built. Also included are new learning centres for school groups, a Maori craft workshop, a 150-seat theatre for cultural performances and lectures, and a revamped entrance area with bus arrival space and shops.
The spend-up goes on. Topping off the new and improved version of the museum would be a roof-level events centre for public programmes and a restaurant affording panoramic views of Auckland and the Waitemata Harbour.
All this for a cool $52 million of taxpayers' money. And that's the catch.
While the board has secured a commitment from Auckland's local authorities to contribute $3 million a year in operational costs and additional depreciation (on top of the $11.7 million they already contribute), it wants the Government to stump up for the construction bill.
Three easy annual payments of $15.5 million plus GST from the Crown bank accounts would cover the planning, construction and furnishing of the new building.
As one senior Government MP says: "People in the South Island could well ask why they should be contributing towards a roof-top restaurant in Auckland. Why shouldn't we be paying for their museum?"
Natty in his trade-mark bow tie, museum director Rodney Wilson calmly rests his elbows on his desk and sighs the sigh of someone who has heard that one before.
Nothing ruffles him. He has rehearsed the arguments over and over again since the project was floated late last year.
He has taken the case to the Government, to the Ministry of Culture and Heritage, and, dauntingly, Treasury.
Most recently he has been courting Auckland MPs of every political persuasion. It is a campaign he is determined to win.
"We are not really wishing to compete with Te Papa or, for that matter, the colleagues we have in Christchurch, Dunedin or anywhere else," says Wilson.
"We are simply saying, 'hang on a minute, what does national mean?"'
It is the first hint of the way in which Wilson wants the argument to go. His pitch is that Auckland is a national museum, just as Te Papa is, and therefore, it is only fair that the country pays for this redevelopment.
"Nationally important collections don't mean that they are owned by the Government. Or that they happen to be in an institution that is funded by Government. They are the things that make us who we are. They are going to be found around the country."
Apart from the fact that about one-third of the population lives within an easy drive of the Auckland Museum, Wilson's case for Government funding is based on the strength of its collections.
A document presented to the Government entitled The National Status of Auckland War Memorial Museum says this: "The collections of Auckland War Memorial Museum are broad in range, dense in example and in connection, and rich in quality. The collections are supported by a density of adjunct catalogue information and documentation which is unrivalled in New Zealand, and which is supported by a sophistication in contemporary data management which is not found in any other museum in New Zealand.
"Auckland War Memorial Museum's clear superiority over others in several key collection areas should not detract from the very important role it has to play as part of a distributed national asset of publicly owned, nationally and internationally significant collections within New Zealand.
"It is clearly disadvantageous to a nation to hold all its cultural and material heritage assets in a single location."
Wilson says there are plenty of international precedents for having more than one national museum.
"Britain has its London museums and galleries, but also has national museums and galleries in Merseyside, Cardiff and Edinburgh. It's the same in the Netherlands and Belgium. "
He believes the development should be funded by central, not local, government. "Auckland does a very great deal for its museums already."
Figures gathered by the museum show that Auckland's territorial authorities spend $18 million a year on the Auckland Museum, the Auckland Art Gallery, Motat, and the National Maritime Museum.
"We have heard quite positive noises [from the Government]," says Wilson. "Our interpretation is that the Government understands our needs. They are wrestling with a range of priorities and we believe that they are probably trying to find a way to make it happen."
Judith Tizard, the associate Minister of Arts and Culture, remembers solemnly walking around the Auckland Museum as a child with her grandfather.
"I take the young people of my family there now myself," she says. "I get a deep sense of peace and fulfilment there."
But personal feelings do not enter into the expenditure of public money.
"I will put it forward, but given that the Minister of Finance has warned everyone that there is very little discretionary funding, I can imagine it would be a long, hard struggle," she says.
Tizard is convinced by Wilson's argument that the Auckland Museum should assume a national status. She is less convinced the Government should pay for the expansion plans.
"What I have been working on is a regional museums policy. I'm attempting to argue that what we need to do is recognise collections of national importance throughout New Zealand.
"The Auckland collection is vital to our understanding of ourselves as New Zealanders. As an Auckland MP I have great sympathy with the case but ... the argument against it is that Auckland has more opportunity to fund major developments that any other place in New Zealand."
While she no longer pushes the idea that Auckland's councils should pay, Tizard believes there are other ways of paying for the development, such as private sector support or organisations such as the ASB Trusts.
"I think they will have to investigate other sources of funding," she says.
But she hints that if the museum could find a significant chunk of the money elsewhere, the Government might be more sympathetic to chipping in itself.
"The project may not be able to be funded in the time that Rodney and the board would like to see it funded," she says.
Wilson, however, is keen to tie up support within the next few months and have the building finished by next year.
At the moment he has one eye on the bank account being drained of nearly $200,000 a year for the leased warehouse in a secret location. All that for something which is not good for the artefacts and presents a significant security risk to a museum already sensitive over the theft of the replica pre-Columbian golden frog this month.
"We are at a greater risk by far, that is absolutely true ... It's safe, but barely," says Wilson.
Anyway, what the burglars don't get, the mould might, says collections manager Stead, who dreads the days his staff ring to say there's an outbreak in the warehouse.
"Outbreaks are really labour intensive to deal with because it spreads in here where the humidity is often above 70 per cent," he says.
"Before you know it, you need a team to clean it out because the spores spread through the air."
It would be enough to make Grandma cry and reach for the bleach.
Treasure in search of a trove
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