Curator Fiona Kean talks through one of the most recent donations to the collection.
In a nondescript warehouse in Mount Maunganui, a 28,400-item heritage collection is waiting.
Two people work in the warehouse: Dean Flavell, the Tauranga City Council's manager of cultural heritage, and curator Fiona Kean who are the collection's custodians.
On Tuesdays and Wednesdays, they are joined by a cluster ofvolunteers who are helping catalogue the collection - at least 10,000 items of which have yet to be properly recorded.
Those numbers do not include the thousands of printed photos and postcards - never mind the digital collection.
The most precious physical pieces have layers of protection Flavell likens to a Russian doll.
Take the collection's oldest item of taonga: a carved wooden waka bailer that carbon-dating has shown to be 700 years old. Dean said it was a "priceless" piece.
The bailer was found in a drain in Tauriko in 1982 and sent to Auckland for conservation.
This 700-year-old waka bailer is the oldest item in the collection. Photo/Andrew Warner
Today it lives packed in a foam mould with its own monitoring gauges in an archival box on a sturdy shelf, the entirety of which is covered in a plastic tent for protection if the sprinklers are set off.
The clean, brightly lit room has environmental monitoring with humidity and temperature levels kept within an optimum zone at all times.
There are security measures too, including secrecy over the precise location of the warehouse.
Further into the facility: a cavernous warehouse with rows of tall shelving on which sit plastic-wrapped collections with labels such as "furniture", "Maketu house" and "Rena".
A second storage location houses the collection's biggest items, among them the Rena vessel's 18-tonne anchor, one of the "newest" items in the collection.
Soon after the ship ran aground on Astrolabe Reef in 2011 Kean and Flavell realised a historical event had occurred.
With the support of then-mayor Stuart Crosby, they put in a claim for significant items. After years of needling salvagers, they secured the anchor and - more poignantly - the wayward ship's compass and steering wheel.
The Rena relics were among the newer items in the collection and have never been exhibited.
Kean says the environmental disaster is still too raw for many and it was probably too soon to display them - even if there was somewhere to do so.
There is much more in the two warehouses, of course. Items of significance, both locally and that connect the city to national and international events - and those that speak to how life was lived in this place.
At the moment, few can see these items. But that may change on Tuesday as a council committee decides a direction for the future of a decades-long project to create a museum in Tauranga.
- 28400 items - Thousands more photos and postcards - At least 10,000 items uncatalogued - Stored across two secret warehouse locations - Oldest item: 700 years old - Biggest items include the 18-ton Rena anchor and a steam engine - Ratepayers contribute $199,688 a year for Mount warehouse.
A window into a retail icon
Hartley's was a fixture of The Strand for most of the 1900s. Photo supplied/Tauranga Heritage Collection
Curator Fiona Kean is rather chuffed with some of the most recent donations to the Tauranga Heritage Collection relating to a one-time institution of The Strand: Hartley's Drapery.
The store was a fixture downtown for more than eighty years before it finally closed in 1987.
Kean said many locals "of a certain age" would remember the store, notable for its nifty "cash railway" that zipped customer payments upstairs where change was counted and a receipt written then sent back down via the railway.
Virginia Kiddey has donated a portrait of store founder Charles Hartley that used to hang above the counter.
Hartley died young, leaving his wife Mabel Hartley a widow at 33 with four children and a store to manage. She remarried eight years later and became Mabel Lamport.
A superb buyer with a talent for knowing what Tauranga women wanted to wear, Lamport ran the store well for decades.
A former employee has gifted to the collection one of the store's mannequins - a head-and-neck of a woman with a short blonde 1920s hairstyle - once used to model hats, scarves and wraps.
The carefully restored mannequin that once modelled hats and scarves in Hartley's. Photo/Andrew Warner
The mannequin arrived completely covered in gold paint, Kean said. "She" has since been carefully restored by a speciality store, Purfex, in Auckland.
Kean has been examining the store's records and has found the passage of a law enshrining women's right to equal pay was likely the "beginning of the end" for Hartley's.
With a staff of mostly women, its wage bill ballooned after the law was enacted and, no longer able to afford the level of service its customers expected, it soon shut its doors.
