Fifty years of history preservation will be celebrated this week, as Thames Museum Te Whare Taonga o te Kauaeranga approaches its anniversary.
And of course, the people of Thames are invited along, with free entry to the museum from 10am – 12.30pm on August 17.
The museum was opened by the Thames Museum Society on August 17, 1974. It was initially housed in the old Methodist Church on the corner of Sealey and Mackay Sts, but a lack of space and concerns about potential fire risks saw the society raise funds for a new building on its current site on the corner of Pollen and Cochrane Sts.
The museum has always been run entirely by volunteers – there are currently around 30 people involved – and every effort has been made over the years to grow and preserve the collections. A lot has changed in museum management practices over 50 years, society chair Carolyn McKenzie said.
“In the olden days, the idea of a museum was maybe just to put some things in a cabinet… there wasn’t very much connection with the donor or the use of the object,” Carolyn said.
“Over the years, museum practice has evolved and we have evolved with it.”
These days, some of the volunteers have certificates in museum practice, and the society regularly liaises with Te Papa’s small town museum branch National Services te Paerangi. The museum uses specialist preservation materials like acid-free paper and boxes, museum-grade cabinets, and has recently installed an HRV system and heat pumps to better control humidity and temperature within the building.
“We know now how to better care for the artefacts and how to better display them. There’s very much this idea now of ‘less is more’ in a cabinet,” Carolyn said.
“Often the people who are involved with doing the displays will spend quite a lot of time researching an item and its use, and then the family, and maybe get in touch with any descendants of the donor… sometimes they have a photo.”
The improvements have been especially valuable for some of the collection’s more fragile items, Carolyn said.
“We have textiles that are over 100 years old. In fact, we have Mrs Cobley’s dress – she’s the wife of one of the four men who discovered the gold in the Shotover [Mine, at Kuranui Creek] – so that dates right back to the very beginning of the goldfield,” Carolyn said.
“We have some very old wedding dresses as well. To preserve and protect, it’s a responsibility. [People] entrust their treasures to us because they believe that we will look after them, and that’s what we strive to do.”
The society’s members will spend the anniversary celebrating all their successes over the years, as well as looking ahead to future plans.
“This is a celebration not only of the museum but of all the volunteers that allowed it to happen, that enabled it,” Carolyn said.
“We’ve got a dream idea of what we would like… we need to increase our footprint because we need to upgrade our storage facilities, and we would like to have a learning room where we could have groups of children.
“And since we started doing our talks on the last Wednesday of the month, it’s been really neat because different people come to all the talks and so we’re really widening our contact with the community, and that’s important for us as a museum. We should be a community service, that’s what we try to be.”
Thames Museum 50th anniversary celebration: Free entry, 10am-12.30pm on August 17. Followed by the society AGM and member celebration: 1.30pm at St James Union Church Hall on Pahau St.
