From the MTG: Enchanted by the unknown

Sacred Heart students Teuila Apineru and Clare MacDonald. Photo / Supplied

By Teuila Apineru and Clare MacDonald

It all started with an email. Our school, Sacred Heart College, organised for all Year 10 students to go out on work experience. Everyone wanted hospitality for a free feed, but the museum gave us CookieTime cookies, so we were the lucky ones.

We write to you now from our placement at MTG Hawke's Bay, Tai Ahuriri. One of us was late. Wonder who? *cough cough* (but with our masks on) it was Teuila.

With our minds open to cleaning all day and interacting with humans, not just on a screen, we were surprised to see no mop was in a 20-metre radius. At the end of the day, we didn't clean, we didn't touch a broom — not once.

We earned our place by putting up the orange "museum open" flags: we were now open for business.

Unaware that our placement would turn us into social media influencers, we took over the MTG Instagram page for the day, with a decent amount of views on our first post, which dropped by 75 per cent as we made our final post. That was fun and embarrassing at the same time.

Note to self: don't listen back to your voice on a recording. It's traumatising.

Who knew that the hardest part of working at MTG is finding a car park at BAT, the offsite storage facility in Ahuriri? Don't ask us what BAT stands for, we don't know.

Side note, what does MTG stand for? We don't know that either. Hold up, wait a minute, just checked: it means "Museum. Theatre. Gallery." Period.

The BAT entrance gave us vibes that it was some weird door to a building that never gets opened, just for decoration, like if someone were to "Google Maps" it, they would be so confused. But once we were in there, it was a whole new world.

The museum collection is something that was unknown to us, we didn't know that it existed.

We both liked the vintage coach. It would take three days to travel in it from Napier to Taupō. The korowai collection featured kuri fur, and the kahu kiwi, full of feathers, was the closest we'll ever get to a kiwi. The korowai had no size categories, they were made to fit the person.

We had the opportunity to learn from Toni MacKinnon, the art curator, who took us around the design department, including showing us the scale model of the upcoming Moana Currents exhibition. All of the exhibitions come down to the tiny details, such as the door handles in the freezing works exhibition, shaped like a meat cleaver.

Nicole Wall from the Collections Team had a vision of what she wanted to do for her career. She didn't know that working in collections management was even a thing. We've learned that there are a wide range of career paths you can take, that we didn't even know about.

We'll always remember our day at MTG and the Taylor Swift sing-alongs we had. It all started with an email, but it ended with us realising that "it was rare, I was there, I remember it - all too well".