A century ago, the foundation stone was laid for the Auckland War Memorial Museum, an ambitious civic project largely funded and built by the citizens of Auckland themselves. Collection manager Pia Gahagan went digging through the archives to piece together its origin story.
Even 100 years ago, Aucklanders had passionate opinions about their city.
Spoiling the Domain by building a new museum in the “primest spot of all” was nothing short of vandalism, wrote an incensed J.A. James of Devonport in a letter to the New Zealand Herald in 1927.
Viewed from the harbour, the uninteresting square block looked “ominously like a gaol”.
Perspectives change with time – Parisians once viewed the Eiffel Tower as a blight on their city’s aesthetic, too – and the Auckland War Memorial Museum has long since been embraced as one of Tāmaki Makaurau’s most iconic structures. (The jury is still out on the Sky Tower.)
Next week marks the centenary of a public ceremony held at the museum’s construction site on August 1, 1925, to mark the laying of its foundation stone. The polished block of blue pearl granite sits on the northwest corner of the building, with flecks of crystal that still sparkle when they catch the sun.
It would be a further four years before the doors opened, but for Pia Gahagan, collection manager for the museum archives (documentary heritage), marking that early milestone was the equivalent of throwing a roof shout.
“When my partner and I built our house, the builders were like, ‘You have to put on a roof shout’. I didn’t know what that was,” she says.
“Then I thought, ‘Yeah, I get it. You know, the roof’s up and we’re rocking now.’ I see the laying of the foundation stone as kind of similar to that. It’s really happening, so let’s get this thing done.”
For the past two years, Gahagan has been trawling through the archives, gathering material in preparation for the museum’s official centenary in 1929.
Items she’s uncovered include the original design drawings by Auckland architectural firm Grierson, Aimer and Draffin, and a working set of plans – dirt-stained and scuffed from being handled on the building site.
Minutes from meetings held by the Auckland Provincial War Memorial Fund Committee also provided a rich source of information – the citizens of Auckland provided much of the project’s financial backing – and a scrapbook was kept of newspaper articles from the time.
Recognising the significance of the foundation stone, Gahagan dug a little deeper into that side of the story, which began to take on a life of its own.
“Piecing it together, I realised this was quite a significant moment in the museum’s history, acknowledging the masses of work that had gone into getting to this point.”
Founded in 1852 in a local farmhouse, the Auckland Museum had rapidly expanded and was bursting at the seams. Thomas Cheeseman, its first professional curator, lobbied for the construction of a new building to “serve for the recreation, instruction and intellectual advancement of the people of Auckland”.
It was eventually decided to erect a combined museum and war memorial, commemorating those who had lost their lives in World War I.
An international design competition was held, attracting 74 entries from as far afield as the United States, Japan and India. The proposals, responding to a detailed brief, were put on public display in a shed down at the wharf.
Construction of the neoclassical monument that stands on the hilltop today, with its towering Greek Doric columns, began in mid-1924. By then, a public fundraising campaign had reached its target of £200,000, after an initial Government investment of £25,000.
It’s almost impossible to imagine what the Auckland Domain (Pukekawa) would have looked like back then. Before construction began on Observatory Hill, the bare grassy slopes were carpeted in daisies, with a clear view across to the University of Auckland, which is now obscured by mature trees.
By 1925, the flattened hilltop was a working construction site with a service road, a huge stoneyard and a collection of workers’ sheds. Excavation work required the removal of more than 13,000 cubic tonnes of earth, and 8000 tonnes of concrete were used in the foundations.
A provision of the contract required all the stonework to be done on site, a deliberate strategy to generate employment opportunities for Aucklanders as the post-war boom began to stutter.
“They wanted to make sure it was safeguarded for local people to do that work,” says Gahagan.
“There are some descriptions in the papers about different machinery they had on site, including a machine with diamond teeth that cut the stone. I think a lot of it was quite new and hadn’t really been seen or used in New Zealand before.”
From the base of the structure itself, reinforced steel girders rose from a slab of Coromandel granite – “sufficiently advanced to enable one to realise what a very noble building it would be”, according to a newspaper report of the foundation stone ceremony that Gahagan found in the digital archive Papers Past.
The superstructure was later constructed from Portland stone, imported from England after problems with the initial supplier in Australia caused delays.
Black and white photographs taken on the day of the ceremony show Prime Minister Gordon Coates, resplendent in a dress suit and top hat, inspecting a guard of honour formed by cadets.
A dais overlooking the Waitematā Harbour had been erected for the dignitaries, decorated with bunting that ran all the way down to the Robbie Burns statue so the gathering crowds could see where to go.
Among the ephemera Gahagan has collated is a formal invitation to the museum’s director, Gilbert Archey, tickets to the ceremony and copies of the official programme.
A wooden gavel and silver trowel, presented to Coates in an ornately carved box, were later gifted to the museum by the Prime Minister’s family and are kept on display.
Intriguingly, a time capsule was placed into a cavity cut into the foundation stone, sealed inside a bronze casket. Its contents, however, are disappointingly dour: a copy of the Archdeacon’s prayer, a list of subscribers to the museum’s building fund, a history of Auckland and the daily newspapers.
Auckland Museum’s chief executive, David Reeves, has been fascinated by the stories that have emerged from the archives. He sees the foundation stone ceremony as a symbolic moment when the city came of age.
“The fervour around it was part of Auckland’s civic pride, that we could build something of this stature. So it was an expression of confidence in ourselves,” he says.
“Thinking back to that era and the enormous grief in the community after World War I, there wouldn’t have been a family that wasn’t affected in some way, having either lost somebody or having a damaged soldier come back to them.
“The laying of the foundation stone would have been that moment of saying, yes, we’re acknowledging that. We’re getting on with our lives, but we’re not going to forget. So it was literally a concrete way to make a permanent mark that the Great War, as it was then known, would not be forgotten.”
The museum faces a challenging four years before marking its official centenary in 2029. The recent detection of asbestos at the site of previous remediation work in the 80s – and the wider spread of asbestos dust – has led to the indefinite closure of the Te Marae Atea Māori Court and the Pacific galleries.
Two-thirds of the original 1929 building is now open and operating safely, while the northern galleries will need a further eight to 10 weeks of work.
Reopening the Māori and Pacific galleries will take “much, much longer”, says Reeves, because of the complicated process required to dismantle parts of the building and properly address the source of the asbestos. The closure of the museum’s most popular drawcard has also led to a significant loss of income after a downturn in tourists.
“Aside from the asbestos, we’ve got some urgent building upgrade needs in that 1929 part of the building. The air conditioning system is on its last legs. We’re redoing the lighting so it’s energy efficient and in the right place, and trunking fibre optics through.
“Our curatorial team are also looking at what we will do to refresh all of those narratives and displays. The interpretation and the overall thread of it is getting up to 30 years old.”
A budget shortfall means fundraising will be required for the upgrade, an issue the trust board will consider when it meets in December.
However, Reeves says the museum’s programme of touring exhibitions is intact through to 2028. Diva, its current blockbuster from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, opened this month and runs through to October.
Joanna Wane is an award-winning senior lifestyle writer with a special interest in social issues and the arts.