The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa is New Zealand's national museum and is located in Wellington. Usually known as Te Papa (Māori for 'the treasure box'), it opened in 1998 after the merging of the National Museum of New Zealand and the National Art Gallery. An average of more than 1.1 million people visit every year, making it the 58th-most-visited art gallery in the world in 2023. Te Papa operates under a bicultural philosophy and emphasises the living stories behind its cultural treasures. Te Papa charges an entrance fee of $35 for international visitors (as of September 2024) but has free entry for all New Zealanders. Some temporary exhibitions are ticketed, but may have occasional free days.
History
Colonial Museum The first predecessor to Te Papa was the Colonial Museum, founded in 1865 with Sir James Hector as founding director. The museum was built on Museum Street, roughly in the location of the present day Defence House office building. The museum prioritised scientific collections but also acquired a range of other items, often by donation, including prints and paintings, ethnographic curiosities, and items of antiquity. In 1907, the Colonial Museum was renamed the Dominion Museum and took on a broader focus. The idea of developing a public art gallery in Wellington was gathering support, and the Science and Art Act of 1913 paved the way for a national art gallery in the same building.
Co-location with National Art Gallery Following the passing of the National Art Gallery and Dominion Museum Act in 1930, the two institutions shared a single board of trustees. In 1934, the National Art Gallery moved into the Dominion Museum building at Museum Street and incorporated the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts, which sold its land and donated the proceeds to the new organisation together with an initial collection. The early holdings consisted largely of donations and bequests, including those from Harold Beauchamp, T. Lindsay Buick, Archdeacon Smythe, N. Chevalier, J. C. Richmond, William Swainson, Bishop Monrad, John Ilott and Rex Nan Kivell. In 1936, a new Dominion Museum building to house both collections opened in Buckle Street as a part of the newly built National War Memorial.
In 1985 a temporary exhibition space venue was added to the National Art Gallery. Shed 11 the Temporary/Contemporary was situated on the Wellington waterfront in a converted industrial warehouse built in 1905 and until 1992 exhibited local and international contemporary art.
Eru D. Gore was secretary-manager from 1936 until his death in 1948 when Stewart Maclennan was appointed the first director. This was the first appointment in New Zealand of a full-time art gallery director. Other past directors of the gallery include: Stewart Maclennan (1948–68) Melvin Day (1968–78) Luit Bieringa (1979–89) Jenny Harper (1990–92)
Te Papa Te Papa was established in 1992 by the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa Act 1992. Part of the remit for Te Papa was to explore the national identity of New Zealand. The museum uses the tag line 'Our Place' to reflect its mission to be "relevant and accessible to as many people as possible".
translates literally to 'container of treasures' or in full 'container of treasured things and people that spring from mother Earth here in New Zealand'. The shortened and more commonly used 'Te Papa' refers to "foundations, a place to stand, or earth mother". The Māori name of the museum was controversial. In 1989 the Māori iwi Te Āti Awa requested that the Ngāti Whakaue iwi grant a name to the museum, which resulted in Ngāti Whakaue bestowing the name Kuru Tongarerewa, an ancient ceremonial name important to the iwi evoking spiritual, historical, and cultural importance. However, the name eventually adopted by the museum caused offense by being a modification in the form of Te Papa Tongarewa. Meetings between the museum's board and Ngāti Whakaue led to promises that the name would be changed to Te Papa Kuru Tongererewa, but the change did not occur.
The museum's logo, a stylised thumbprint designed by Saatchi & Saatchi, was also controversial when it was introduced due to its $200,000 cost and its similarity to existing logos.
The official opening took place on 14 February 1998, in a ceremony led by Prime Minister Jenny Shipley, Sir Peter Blake, and two children. Māori traditional instrumentalist Richard Nunns co-led musicians at a dawn ceremony on opening day. The museum had one million visitors in the first five months of operation, and between 1 and 1.3 million visits have been made in each subsequent year. Filmmakers Gaylene Preston and Anna Cottrell documented the development of Te Papa in their 2011 film Getting to Our Place.
Current building
The main Te Papa building is built on reclaimed land on Cable Street which formerly belonged to the Wellington Harbour Board. The site was previously occupied by the Museum Hotel, a modern five-storey building. Over a five-month period in 1993, the hotel was jacked off its foundations onto numerous rail bogies and transported down and across the road to a new site, where it is now known as the QT Wellington Hotel. Once the site was clear, the soft reclaimed land was compacted to a depth of 16 metres by dropping weights of up to 30 tonnes from a height of up to 30 metres in a criss-cross pattern on the site. Over 50,000 weights were dropped, causing noise and vibration problems for those in surrounding buildings. The siting of significant collections at the water's edge on reclaimed land next to one of the world's most active faults concerned some people including Michael Trotter, then-director of the Canterbury Museum. Earthquake strengthening of the Cable Street building was achieved through the New Zealand-developed technology of base isolation. Visitors to the museum can enter an underground area called 'Quake Braker' to view some of the base isolators.
Te Papa was designed by Pete Bossley of Jasmax Architects and built by Fletcher Construction. The design process of the building followed bicultural principles based on the Treaty of Waitangi. This process was led by Cliff Whiting working alongside Cheryll Sotheran and Ken Gorbey. The building won New Zealand Institute of Architects regional awards in 1999 and was voted New Zealand's 'Building of the Decade' in an Architecture NZ readers' poll in 2000.
The building had cost NZ$300 million by its opening in 1998. The building contains six floors of exhibitions, cafés and gift shops dedicated to New Zealand's culture, history and environment. When it opened in 1998, the museum had a fine-dining restaurant called Icon, but this later closed. The museum also incorporates outdoor areas with artificial caves, native bushes and wetlands. 'Bush City', an outdoor exhibition area featuring native plants in various habitats, was designed by environmental consulatants Boffa Miskell.
From 2004 to 2012, more space was devoted to exhibiting works from the New Zealand art collection in a long-term exhibition called Toi Te Papa: Art of the Nation. This was replaced in 2018 by Toi Art, new galleries for art on levels 4 and 5 that enable the display of more artworks from the collection.
A second building on Tory Street is a scientific research facility and storage area, and is not open to the public.
Governance and leadership The museum is run by a board appointed by the Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage. Board members have included: Wira Gardiner, Fiona Campbell, Sue Piper, Judith Tizard, John Judge, Miria Pomare, Michael Bassett, Christopher Parkin, Sandra Lee, Ngātata Love, Ron Trotter, Glenys Coughlan, Judith Binney, Philip Carter, Wendy Lai and Api Mahuika.
Directors of the museum include: James Hector (1865–1903) Augustus Hamilton (1903–1913) James Allan Thomson (1914–1928) Walter Oliver (1928–1947) Robert Falla (1947–1966) John Yaldwyn (1980–1989)
CEOs of Te Papa include:
Cheryll Sotheran (1992–2002) Cliff Whiting (1995–1999) – joint CEO or Kaihautū Seddon Bennington (2003 – July 2009) Michael Houlihan (Aug 2010 – May 2014) Rick Ellis (Nov 2014 – May 2017) Geraint Martin (May 2017 – 2019) Courtney Johnston (2019–present) and Arapata Hakiwai (Kaihautū, Māori co-leader) (2014–present).
Staffing issues Staff restructuring at Te Papa since 2012 has generated significant controversy. In February 2019, the Collection Manager of Fishes Andrew Stewart and the Collection Manager of Molluscs Bruce Marshall were made redundant, though Stewart was later reinstated. Numerous museum experts and scientists in New Zealand and worldwide criticised the move, with researchers advocating a boycott. Te Papa's handling of the situation prompted moa expert Trevor Worthy to end his 30-year research association with the museum in protest.
Collections
The History Collection includes many dresses and textiles, the oldest of which date back to the sixteenth century. The History Collection also includes the New Zealand Post Archive with around 20,000 stamps and related objects, and the Pacific Collection has about 13,000 historic and contemporary items from the Pacific Islands.
The history of Te Papa's foreign ethnology collections (excluding those from the Pacific) mirrors, in broad terms, the developmental patterns seen in New Zealand's other major metropolitan museums—Otago Museum, Canterbury Museum, and Auckland Museum. However, each institution has followed a distinct historical trajectory. Due to its early policies and collecting practices, Te Papa holds smaller and more fragmented foreign ethnology collections than the other three. Unlike them, Te Papa acquired most of its material through passive means rather than proactive collection efforts.
There are significant collections of fossils and archaeozoology; a herbarium of about 250,000 dried specimens (Index Herbariorum code WELT); a collection of about 70,000 specimens of New Zealand birds; significant amphibians, reptiles and mammals.
Molluscan holotypes, neotypes, lectotypes and syntypes are held by the Museum of New Zealand.
The museum has the world's largest specimen of the rare colossal squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni). It weighs and is long. The squid arrived at the museum in March 2007 after being captured by New Zealand fishers in the Ross Sea off Antarctica. The cultural collections include collections on photography, Māori taonga (cultural treasures), and Pacific cultures.
The Museum of New Zealand is also home to the Elgar Collection, a valuable collection of English and French furniture and paintings, the oldest of which date back to the seventeenth century. In 1946 the Dominion Museum received a bequest of some of Fernside Homestead's finest antiques from Ella Elgar's will. Until 1992 these antiques were displayed in period rooms at the Dominion Museum, and objects from the Elgar Collection are currently exhibited throughout Te Papa.
Exhibitions