Aratoi has scored a real coup as the national launching pad for renowned rugby photojournalist Peter Bush's hugely anticipated exhibition Hard on the Heels _ Capturing the All Blacks.
The show begins on May 14 and Aratoi director Marcus Boroughs is calling on the Wairarapa community to pitch in with local
rugby memorabilia for a sideshow complementing the main event in the museum's Windows Gallery.
''Hopefully, we can unearth a real gem from the Wairarapa community, like Wairarapa's oldest rugby jersey. It's what you don't know that's out there that's interesting,'' Mr Boroughs said.
Memorabilia from local rugby luminaries like IRB referee selector Bob Francis and winning All Black coach and former player BJ Lochore have already been secured for the local portion of the show.
Mr Boroughs, himself a former Rangitikei College First IV prop/lock, says the person who lends the exhibition the oldest Wairarapa jersey can expect a couple of crates of beer from a certain Mangatainoka brewery as reward.
Meanwhile, former Wairarapa Bush president and selector Roddy McKenzie has made a more specific request _ hoping someone will come forward with an original jersey from the notorious 1927 Battle of Solway Ranfurly Shield Challenge where Wairarapa lost the Log o' Wood to South Canterbury.
Peter Bush's Hard on the Heels exhibition will travel around the country to 12 other provincial and city galleries. The show is slated to tour throughout the 2011 Rugby World Cup before its final showing in Bush's hometown, Greymouth, in 2012.
Bush has had unprecedented access to the All Blacks since he began running the sidelines photographing the team in the 1950s. Promoters said the exhibition also acted as a Kiwi social history.
''His photographs capture the All Blacks in apartheid South Africa, in Belfast during the 'Troubles' of the early 1970s, and during the Springbok tour in 1981. Bush's career spans a period of growing professionalism in rugby and changing technology in the media. Before satellite television, however, his wired images were some of the first images of far-off matches to be seen by local fans.''
