Opinion: Let's give the Tauranga Museum another crack

Despite being New Zealand's fifth-largest city, Tauranga has no museum designed to showcase a wide array of history and treasures. Photo / Getty Images

It's another rainy weekend in the Bay of Plenty, and you've already sent your out-of-town guests to the Art Gallery, The Elms and the Historic Village. The deluge continues on Day Two, and thankfully, you have another ace up your sleeve: the new Tauranga Museum. It opened in 2021, just in time for Anzac Day.

This fantasy could still happen. Stay with me…

Despite being New Zealand's fifth-largest city, Tauranga has no museum designed to showcase a wide array of history and treasures. Napier has a combined museum, theatre and gallery; Nelson has a provincial museum; even Cambridge and Matamata have small museums.

The word "museum" seems to be Tauranga's Kryptonite. Calling it something else like Cultural Cafe, Joe's Bar and Stuff to See or the Taonga Room might make the concept palatable to a wider audience. So would removing the influence of the City Council. I'm not impugning councillors who championed the project. They voted in December to contribute $20 million towards a $55m museum on Cliff Road. But the council's timing was lousy, coinciding with a November proposed rates rise of 13.6 per cent in 2018/19. The increase has since been scaled back to (a possible) 3.8 per cent.

Also, running the facility was projected to cost ratepayers another $4.7m each year. I can almost see Mr Grumpypants down the road shaking his head and wagging his finger in a universal symbol of "I won't use it, and I'm not paying for it."

Late last month, the mayor and council voted to scrap the museum plan following a referendum where only 30 per cent of voters decided our fate: about 60/40 "no". After spending a cool million studying the issue, it's dead (again). Just like the Waterfront Museum Failure of 2007.

For the record, I voted for the museum, despite its price tag. I hedged my bets the initial 13.6 per cent rates rise wouldn't happen. But apathy is a heavyweight. It kept 70 per cent of voters from the drudgery of ticking a box. Maybe they had to wash their hair.

Cultural Cafe, anyone? I hear the long blacks are divine. There's stuff to look at, too.

Our region's artefacts are stored in a large, soulless warehouse in an industrial area of Mount Maunganui. They're climate-controlled, protected from thieves and safely tucked away from anyone who might want to examine the Bay's history. I toured the facility (after taking a blood oath not to reveal its location) last December.

For anyone who believes the Bay has nothing of value to display, you're mistaken – about 28,000 times. That's how many items are tucked away in the collection. There's a carved wooden waka bailer around 700 years old said to be priceless, furniture wrapped in plastic and the 18-tonne anchor from the Rena, the ship that ran aground off the coast in 2011. I wish my kids could see it. They can't. No one can – yet.

Co-chairman of the Tauranga Moana Museum Trust said work to capture stories of Tauranga's history would continue in spite of the council's decision to dump the latest plan. Councillors on both sides of the vote agreed the issue wasn't going away.

Instead of studying, voting and running referenda several more decades, let's put the museum (I mean, the Taonga Room) in the hands of people who get things done – the business and non-profit community. They can raise money without rates rises and make decisions without referendums. They could commission a non-traditional museum, one that looks less like Te Papa and more like Te Papa's mini-me. Business people excel at raising capital and non-profits are proficient at operating on shoestrings. We could showcase some of those 28,000 treasures in a series of tiny houses or a building made from straw bales; find junior architects and apprentice builders to design and build the compound and harness the power of the Bay's growing community of senior volunteers to serve as greeters, docents, gift shop workers and bar and cafe staff. Use a private fundraising campaign to leverage central government's Regional Culture and Heritage Fund. The fund awarded $1.5m in late 2016 to Whakatāne to redevelop its Museum and Research Centre. I should take my children there.

Despite the Tauranga referendum result, many of us are still hungry for a cultural facility we can bring our families and guests. We need a museum, or whatever we decide to call the place. It doesn't have to cost $55m. It won't take nearly $5m per year to operate. It's time for a new museum driver – one who makes his/her own decisions and raises his/her own money – to lay the foundation for our new cultural convergence spot.