A few sheds yet to go through, the chosen pieces will somehow be squeezed into Te Mama. Photo / Lindy Laird
If a picture tells a thousand words, the murals cloaking an old Totara North joinery factory would fill a few history books.
But even the murals depicting the life and times of the little old settlement on Whangaroa Harbour tell only a fraction of the stories held inside.
We're visiting the private museum cheekily named Te Mama by avid relics and junk collector, and keeper of local history, Bruce Sanderson.
The murals speak of whanau and whakapapa, Whangaroa and fishing, and were painted by Northland artist and art teacher Chris Talbot Wilkie.
Some scenes are copied from Sanderson family photos, like the one of Bruce, who's now 70, as a boy with his dad on the family's old commercial fishing and haulage launch, Matiri, built in 1924.
Then there's a painting of his great-great-great grandmother, Moewaka Hira Keepa, of Ngati Wai, who married a Stephenson. Among their children was a daughter who married a Sanderson.
On the Maori woman's chin is a ta moko repeating the whakairo, the carving, on a taiaha painted on the wall next to her portrait.
She gave the taiaha to her first grandson, Bruce's grandfather Eric Sanderson, and now Bruce has it.
The murals include Bruce's wife Pauline's forebears, and kauri timber fellers and millers, standing stoically before giant logs.
Central to that story is the historic Lane and Brown Shipyard and Sawmill, which started in the Bay of Islands in the 1850s and moved to Totara North in 1872.
After losing the shipbuilding role in the early 1900s, it remained the Lanes sawmill and timber yard before closing for good in 2004. The derelict premises are now owned by Te Runanga o Whaingaroa.
Another mural copied from a painting by Augustus Earle, called War Speech, shows several waka at a beachside gathering, and a Maori rangatira making an address.
Earle was the first English painter to spend time in New Zealand, in Northland from October 1827 to May 1828.
While we're taking in the murals, a couple of cars pull up, people take photos and carry on their way.
The museum is open, of course, but Bruce keeps a sign on the door with his phone number, asking people to call him if they want to look through. Admission $15.
These people, though, look like they're headed back half a kilometre down the road to the Gum Store pub which Bruce and Pauline own.
Bruce has not long ago given up the commercial crayfishing he did for 50 years, but the couple have had the low slung, old pub since the 1980s.
That's when they first met the muralist. They'd seen Chris Wilkie painting the mural on the old A&P buildings in downtown Whangarei, and asked him up to decorate the pub.
In the belly of Te Mama are a thousand or more relics - and to be honest (even Bruce agrees), a lot of junk - passed down or simply left behind by people who were part of Totara North's heritage of timber, ship building and the sea.
"The Kauri Museum at Matakohe, the Maritime Museum in Auckland and other museums, they put their hands up for a lot of this stuff when Lane and Browns closed, but I got most of it. They'd probably still want it," Bruce says.
The iconic business he refers to features large inside and out Te Mama, in machinery, handtools, parts of a breakdown saw, engine casings, boiler parts, wheels, workshop fittings and even the company's original first aid cupboard.
Local ship building is honoured in posters and photos stuck on walls, and a surprisingly long list of the ships built in Totara North between 1870 and 1909.
A wall is given over to wooden patterns and templates for ships' fittings, an art installation in itself.
"They reckon a pattern maker is the best carpenter there is."
Benches and cabinets are full of old tools, saws, native wood burrs, bottles, containers, food mincers, kitchen utensils, old electric appliances, office equipment, truck parts.
Good grief, there's even a collection of elephant ornaments.
Among the museum's zoo of stuffed animals of the toy, domestic and wild kind is a taxidermied lamb with a normal head, six legs and two backsides. A cobra sits on the floor, coiled menacingly in strike mode.
"I found that in the Kaeo tip. You'd be surprised what I've got from there over the years," Bruce says.
Clinker dinghies float in the rafters, anchors rest on a sandless floor, lifebuoys stake their claim on long gone ships. The Titanic, says one.
Fishing nets hang off beams, heavy marine ropes make aisles and piles and encircle collections of maritime memorabilia.
Uniforms, helmets, weapons and other reminders of World Wars I and II take their honourable place. So do Maori carvings, portraits, piu piu, ancient hooks and sinkers, and a display of covers from old Maori music LPs.
Master waka builder and navigator Hekenukumai (Hec) Busby, from Aurere in Doubtless Bay, led the blessing ceremony a month ago at Te Mama's official opening.
For many people, it was the first time they'd seen the extent of Bruce's collection of treasure and trivia.
There is so much to take in, almost too much - it's busy and bizarre, whimsical, endearing, unique.
Down the road, Bruce has sheds and yards yet to go through, the chosen pieces will somehow be squeezed into Te Mama. It's a daunting, and for a hoarder like Bruce, probably a never-ending, task.
He doesn't mind, of course.
It's only taken him a lifetime of collecting and a couple of years working on the building itself so far.
"I don't really know why I did it," he says.
"But if this stuff didn't stay in Totara North, what would happen to it?"