CITY MEMORIES: Museums bring cash to a city

How many museums and art galleries would you have thought there were in New Zealand? Over 400? That's about right.
And they come in all shapes and varieties. Pip Harrison wrote about historic house museums in this column a fortnight ago but there are all sorts of others.
Art museums (that's what the Americans call art galleries), technology museums, local history museums, pioneer museums, coal museums, tribal museums, timber museums, fire brigade, police, army, navy and air force museums, agriculture museums, anatomy museums and railway museums.
There are also tram museums, maritime museums, toy museums, hospital museums, animal museums (zoos, aquariums, aviaries), plant museums (herbariums, arboretums), car museums, rugby museums, geology museums, science museums, general museums, national museums, provincial museums and local museums are all to be found in New Zealand. And there's a kauri museum, a clock museum, a fashion museum, a scouting museum, a cricket museum and a cave museum as well.
Some museums are privately owned but most are public. They come in all sizes too. Some occupy a single room in an old cottage, perhaps 20 or 30sq m.
The Auckland War Memorial Museum has over 9000sq m of exhibition space alone, Te Papa has over 10,000. (And that's just exhibitions - the building itself occupies 25,000sq m of ground or roughly three rugby fields and has a total floor area of well over 35,000sq m.)
Tauranga's proposed museum will have only a tenth of that - perhaps 3000sq m. Southland Museum, serving a population about the same as Tauranga's, has a floor area of 5000sq m. The first New Zealand museum was founded in Nelson in the 1840s, the next was the Auckland Museum, in 1852.
Te Papa started as the Colonial Museum in 1865, then was renamed the Dominion Museum, after that the "National Gallery and Dominion Museum", the National Museum and finally the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. Christchurch and Dunedin had museums by 1868. Te Awamutu has had one since 1935, when there were only 27 in the whole country.
But by 1969 there were over a hundred, and through the 1970s and Eighties the number shot up to the present level. For most of the last 150 years New Zealand museums were dominated by the "big four" - in Auckland, Wellington, Dunedin and Christchurch.
Now, there are about 40 medium-sized museums, funded by city and district councils, employing professionally-trained staff and focussed more on the local community, in places like Invercargill, Oamaru, Timaru, Nelson, Lower Hutt, Wanganui, Palmerston North, Hamilton, Napier, Gisborne and Whangarei.
The other 350 or so of the 400 are usually smaller museums, receiving no, or inadequate, funding from public sources, usually with no paid staff and dependent on a few volunteers to survive.
They are found throughout the country, in small communities like Kaeo, Piopio, Matamata, Paeroa, Te Aroha and Putaruru. A very few, like the Kauri Museum in Northland, the Museum of Caves at Waitomo, or the privately-owned "Buried Village" at Te Wairoa, are commercially viable, bringing in most of their income through door takings but they are exceptions - dependent on tourism operators for most of their customers.
In the Bay of Plenty, there are 11 museums - at Waihi, Katikati, Tauranga (2), Rotorua (4), Whakatane, Opotiki and Tokoroa. They all stem from the dedication of volunteer enthusiasts, often members of a local historical society, though the Rotorua and Whakatane museums are now funded by their district councils and have employed professional staff for some years.
Tauranga's two are both house museums - The Elms and Brain Watkins House.
Part of the reason for the large number of smaller museums is the New Zealand Federation of Historical Societies, founded in the late 1970s.
The federation, catering mainly for local historians, developed branches all over the country (including Tauranga) and their standardised constitutions generally included the aim of collecting historical material and founding a museum.
One of the things about museums is that they are always growing, partly because they keep on collecting things, partly because of constantly improving standards. In the six years since Te Papa was opened, there have been over 40 proposals for new museums or extensions to existing ones.
Thirty or so are completed, underway or likely to go ahead within the next 10 years. The total capital cost, including $50 million refurbishments of Auckland and Canterbury museums, will be about $250 millions (substantially less than the $350 million cost of Te Papa).
Almost all of this money will come from local authorities, central government, the Lottery Grants Board and regional charitable trusts.
The Dowse, Lower Hutt's decorative and applied arts museum, will be one of the next to undergo a major facelift, starting next year, with new galleries, theatre and cafe. Museum buildings are often historic or iconic (or both), designed to be a feature of their community.
The Auckland War Memorial Museum building, built nearly 75 years ago, has been described as "the finest Greek revival building in the southern hemisphere". But museum buildings do not need to be grandiose.
The quaintly-named "House of Memories" in Waipu was built in 1953 of local limestone, by community volunteers, as a memorial to the townsfolk's Scottish ancestors who arrived in New Zealand from Nova Scotia in 1853.
The building forms a centrepiece of the town but is modest in size and design. Puke Ariki, in New Plymouth, is the latest example of museum as architectural statement, and Aratoi, in Masterton, a town of only 20,000 people, occupies a purpose-built building, opened two years ago.
Canterbury Museum (1870) Waikato Museum (1978) and Te Papa are other examples of museums built to enhance their town. Many museums occupy notable historic buildings for which no other use presents itself. The Auckland Art gallery, in the former public library, and Rotorua Museum, in the old Government spa building, are notable examples.
Museums and galleries are more than just places to keep old stuff and pictures that no one else wants, more than just the mathom-house described in JRR Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings Admittedly, some of them are still like that - the last stop on the way to the dump - but modern museums often restrict the things they collect to particular themes and geographical areas.
In doing so, they preserve the histories and development of individual communities, activities and people, that might otherwise be lost.
They may serve more than one function too. Puke Ariki, in New Plymouth, and Pataka in Porirua are combined with the local public library. Some house the local visitor information centre and many are art galleries as well as local history museums.
The Petone Settlers Museum is also a genealogy centre. Te Manawa, in Palmerston North, is a combined science centre, history museum and art gallery.
Museums also cater to people's obsessions. Many of those who run them, both curators and volunteers, are enthusiasts, knowledgeable about aspects of the world that many of us don't think about too often.
Historians, genealogists, collectors, experts of all sorts, spend time in museums pursuing their interests, in much the same way that others of us are focussed on our gardens, house renovations, boat or hot-rod.
But, you might say, that's not enough - what else are museums good for? Why do communities pay for them? Part of the answer is economic. Museums attract visitors, extending the time (and money) that tourists spend in a town, and providing jobs catering for those visitors.
They provide a place for the family to go on wet days, somewhere to nip into in your lunch hour, to see what's on, somewhere to stop off on a journey, somewhere to go to an evening lecture, or new exhibition.
Sometimes, they provide the same sort of fascination that people experience browsing in junk-shops - looking at things we might like to own or that we remember from our childhoods. But they can be far more than that.
Museums and galleries provide an educational resource for teachers, students and researchers of all ages. Most importantly, they are places where real objects provide a link to realms of experience outside our daily lives.
They can be places of fun, excitement and stimulation but also places of quiet contemplation, a space to briefly withdraw from the world and gather our resources. As public facilities, open to all, museums and galleries complement libraries, theatres, sports fields, walkways, swimming pools and parks.
Most towns in New Zealand have one.