Northland's award-winning Kauri Museum is just an hour south of Whangārei in the picturesque community of Matakohe. File photo
Northland’s Kauri Museum is listed by tourism agencies as one of New Zealand’s 101 Must-Do attractions, visited by 68,000 people in the past two years.
But only a fraction of those visitors – fewer than 3000 – were from Northland.
While the museum’s director Dr Jason Smith is obviously proud of the overall high numbers, he’s also baffled as to why the region’s own residents from Kaipara, Whangārei and Far North aren’t visiting the award-winning museum in their own backyard – especially since the museum’s been undergoing an exciting evolution that widens its scope and appeal even more.
Set in the picturesque rural community of Matakohe, the museum is just an hour’s drive south of Whangārei along a scenic stretch of SH12.
The building houses 4500sq m of exhibition halls, galleries, and internationally significant collections to be explored, including centuries-old kauri wood items, and the structures, the world’s largest collection of precious kauri gum, dazzling displays of ceramics, glass, textiles and natural taonga, a wealth of photographs and archival documents, rare and exquisite handcrafted objects, and numerous examples of early tools and machinery.
If it’s coffee Northlanders might be worried they’ll miss out on, the museum’s Gumdiggers Cafe is directly opposite the main complex. Visitors can take time out from the museum to recharge in the cafe, stroll around the nearby historic Coates Memorial Church, a heritage rose collection, and the Kauri Bushmen’s Memorial Scenic Reserve.
Smith is excited about new developments happening at the museum.
Since 1962, the museum has told a story “wonderfully well” of how Northland’s ancient kauri forests shaped colonial New Zealand.
However, the museum’s message has been mostly from that pioneering perspective starting with the arrival of European settlers and ending with the great kauri forests being chopped down, Smith says.
“Many descendants of the original Albertlanders helped create this museum, and we’re very glad they did but the stories we tell have shifted over the years,” Smith said.
Kickstarted by a $3 million Provincial Development grant three years ago the museum has been evolving to ensure visitors leave with a fuller, more hopeful, narrative - one that begins with the forests before humans arrived and focuses on the future of kauri – not just that era when all the forests were being cut down, Smith says.
The new-look museum embraces Te ao Māori (the relationships between nature and people) and gives more presence to Māori history and the roles of women in New Zealand’s development.
Feedback from visitors had been that they wanted to know what has happened since the demise of those 50 million-year-old forests, Smith says.
Visitors made comments such as, “Wow, we loved this, it was amazing, but (what happened) was (also) terrible”.
They were left wondering where the situation stood now for kauri. It became clear that visitors needed to leave with a more positive experience, Smith said.
“So this (evolution) is about crafting and moulding existing resources of the museum into a way that’s creating an elegant narrative arc so that they (visitors) go, ‘Aha! We get it now – you destroyed this huge forest and that’s deplorable, but there are amazing things that you New Zealanders are doing such as the Kaipara Moana remediation programme, Otamatea Harbourcare, the kauri 2000 initiative in the Coromandel, and all of the work that’s going on for kauri dieback and so on.’
“We want the visitors to leave with a bit of a song in their hearts, these Kiwis wrecked it but they’re doing something about it.”
Smith says the museum also needed to shift to a more contemporary way of telling its stories with more interactive experiences rather than only “talking about things in glass cases”.
The museum will continue to tell “the amazing story of kauri” but will aim to do so from a wider range of perspectives, with new “hero” experiences, and a more coherent narrative and flow, Smith says.
Changes were already happening. Last year, a new entranceway project enabled by the $3 million Regional Development grant and additional lotteries funds, was opened as a first phase of new developments.
Visitors enter the museum via a newly built space housing a boardwalk through a forest of tall kauri ‘trees’ – represented by light boxes created using cutting-edge technology, by New Zealand company Story Inc. The experience in dimmed lighting is accompanied by sounds of nature and is intended to evoke a sense of what the great kauri forests must once have been like.
The walkway was a journey from darkness to light with kauri starring in the Māori creation legend Te Waonui o Tāne, Smith says.
Plans to “bookend” that project with a similar but even more ambitious exit experience, can be viewed by the public via a short visual presentation on the museum’s website.
Under the $4m proposal, the museum experience will culminate with visitors reaching a future-focused room featuring an interactive Tree of Hope, its roots extending down into a lower gallery space that would house a multimedia-rich Kauri Lab education space.
New hero features along the way will include upgrades to lighting and displays in three of the museum’s key areas: the Sterling Wing, which houses room-sized dioramas showing snippets from past business and household life; the Tudor Collins Room, which showcases kauri furniture; and the Gum Room, where 3000 pieces of gum would all be backlit and bequeathed collections displayed together.
Smith says the museum has begun a fundraising campaign with a view to the new developments being completed by October/November 2025.
Meanwhile, the museum is hosting an additional drawcard event this summer – a virtual reality kauri forest experience. The special exhibition, for which there is no extra charge, will be on from December 20 to January 31.
Developed by Waikato Regional Council, the exhibition includes information about Kauri Dieback disease.
Smith says, “For Kauri Museum to be hosting it at our busiest time of the year is a wonderful opportunity to share the messages about kauri conservation with a wider audience and also to remind people in places like Whangārei and Auckland that the Kauri Museum tells stories about their place.”
Museum admission prices are: $25 for adults, $8 for children (aged 5-15) with children under 5 free. The museum also offers a variety of concession prices as detailed on its website.
Sarah Curtis is a news reporter for the Northern Advocate, focusing on a wide range of issues. She has nearly 20 years’ experience in journalism, much of which she spent court reporting. She is passionate about covering stories that make a difference
Initial construction work on the next section is set to begin by the end of next year.