Waitaki Museum Blog
Featuring thoughts and ideas from the Waitaki Museum.
A selection of fantastic shoes from the collection of the North Otago Museum is currently on display at the Oamaru Opera House.
June 7th this year will be the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Messines. While overall the capture of Messines Ridge was a success, around 700 New Zealanders died during this action. Another 3,700 people were wounded.
Every year museums around the world celebrate International Museum Day on the 18th of May. The theme for 2017 is "Museums and contested histories: Saying the unspeakable in museums".
Behind the scenes at the museum work continues on our collections. This work supports the Cultural Facility Development Project. Currently I am working on the museum’s collection of agricultural equipment. Before I saw the light and became a museum worker I had dreams of being a veterinarian.
I blogged about the Weston-Ardgowan Red Cross quilt when it was on display in 2015 as part of our World War One exhibition.
You are invited to hear Professor Richard Walter discuss current thinking about the prehistoric colonisation of Aotearoa at the North Otago Museum on Wednesday 5 April starting at 6pm.
One of the projects we are working on behind the scenes at the North Otago Museum is processing items that have been offered to the museum to include in our collection. Recently we accepted this jacket (North Otago Museum 2017/108) as well as a bonnet (not pictured).
The Forrester Gallery is currently showing Regroup Reflect Regenerate: Medal Artists of New Zealand 25th Anniversary Exhibition.
As the North Otago Museum, Forrester Gallery and Waitaki District Archive prepare for the Cultural Facility Redevelopment the front part of the museum building is being used as a working space.
This year the theme of Oamaru’s Victorian Heritage Celebrations is medicine in the Victorian era. So we are sharing the story of Lane’s Emulsion.
Ted Lane had an idea.
Behind the scenes we are doing a lot of work on our collections. This is to support the Cultural Facility Development Project. Most recently I have been researching our equine collection. This collection includes saddles, snaffle bits, horse collars, hames, blinkers and more.
Behind the scenes. This is the final blog in a series of three focused on the North Otago Museum’s geology collection.
There might not be much to see in our gallery spaces right now. That is because we are working hard on the Cultural Facilities Development Project. We are doing a lot of work behind the scenes on our Collections and developing our top Themes and Stories.
Our records show that this ‘primitive’ school chair was used in the first school in Oamaru. It is made of Kauri and though in original condition, it is clear that is has been stored outside for some time.
Bentwood chairs were first made in the early 1850s by the Austrian Michael Thonet. Manufacture of these chairs soon spread to other countries. They were incredibly popular over the next century as they were cheap and easy to import.
This chair was made by Walter John Yardley in Palmerston in 1866. Yardley was born in 1842 and so would have been 24 when he made the chair. Walter worked as a haulage carrier, driving a team of horses around the district, delivering goods and supplies.
The Albion Press is an early cast-iron hand-printing press. It was first designed in 1820 by Richard Whittaker Cope and later manufactured by Hopkinson Cope and other licensees until the 1930s.
The North Otago Museum has a small collection of printers and printing-related objects from the era of movable type. These range from the large and heavy cast iron Albion Press invented in 1820 right through to early typewriters like the Remington 12 invented a century later in 1922.
