Hawke’s Bay Museum and Art Gallery – Douglas Lloyd Jenkins

[Start not recorded – Speaker: Douglas Lloyd Jenkins, Director of the Hawke’s Bay Museum & Art Gallery]

Rose Chapman: In … well, world-wide really, but especially in New Zealand, his book called ‘At Home: A Centre of Design in New Zealand’ [‘At Home: A Century of New Zealand Design’] won the Montana Book Award; and his latest book, which is called ‘Dress Circle’ [‘Dress Circle: New Zealand Fashion Design Since 1940’] is in the running for the 2011 New Zealand Post Book Award – Montana have passed it on to New Zealand Post. And with Douglas today is the Marketing Director of the Museum, who is Pam Joyce, and between them they will be able to tell us what we need to know and answer any questions that we might have. Thank you.

Douglas Lloyd Jenkins: Thank you, Rose. I seem to have developed an uncontrollable fit of coughing in the last few minutes; I’m not quite sure why, because I’m not normally a nervous speaker – you don’t terrify me that much.

Thank you very much for that introduction. I’d love to come back sometime if this one works, and do something scholarly, but we are today going to be wantonly self-promotional. But I hope in what I say today you get some sense of the scholarship that really leads the Hawke’s Bay Museum and Art Gallery; and if I can make a slight correction, Rose, given that I’m on this side of the Bay, we are the Hawke’s Bay Museum and Art Gallery, Napier.

Rose: Oh, yes, of course.

Douglas: Yes. And one of the things that I can do is to disavow people of the notion that we are the Napier Museum, and realise [cough] that we are the Hawke’s Bay Museum and Art Gallery, [and] … a historical accident from the 1850s … are based in Napier. So I do want to talk a little bit today about the collection and the way the collection’s grown, and I think you’ll see that it’s very much more than a Napier collection.

We’re going to start with a short video that was made eighteen months ago when we first launched the fundraising for the Art Gallery project, which is an eighteen-million-dollar project. And then I’m going to give a little bit of a talk about the collection. One of the reasons that the government has partially funded the extensions to the Hawke’s Bay Museum and Art Gallery is a recognition that the collection there is of national importance; so I’m going to give you a little précis of what we took to the government to argue why our collection’s important. Then we’re going to have some questions and answers, and then Pam’s going to come in with the hard sell and tell you how can make a contribution – anywhere from $10 to $1 million. If you’ve really got $1 million, perhaps come and see me. [Chuckles] Pam will handle anything under $20 million.

This is quite a good week for me to be talking about the gallery because last week we signed the contract, and we have a builder, which is Gemco Construction, which is a Havelock North firm. To me that’s another significant step forward, and in the back of my mind I think, ‘Well they can’t say, “ha ha, it’s all a joke, we were just teasing you”’, if they’ve actually signed up the builder. So from … really the week after next you’ll start to see activity on the site. And that’s a big thing really, because this institution has been talking about this development for twenty years now, and to actually have the spade go into the soil is a very big moment for all of us, and we are all very, very excited and we are really looking forward to our reopening in 2013. One of the things I will be touching on in my talk is … well, I think it will become apparent in the talk … why it is that we need to be closed. By the seats is our latest Hawke’s Bay Museum and Art Gallery Friends brochure, and many of you probably belong to Friends and get this.

[Shows video]

Video Narration: “What-ho. I’m Clarence Bertram St John Fitz Montague, Napier’s Ambassador, and I’m here to tell you about an exciting project and to ask for your help. The project is the redevelopment of the Hawke’s Bay Museum and Art Gallery. Let’s take a look at the present situation.

The museum was founded in 1865, but the current building dates from 1936, part of the rebuild of the city after the devastating 1931 earthquake. In the 1950s two further galleries were added. In the 1970s a new foyer and a large auditorium, called the Century Theatre, were developed, and two existing older buildings were incorporated into the site. Unfortunately this development reduced the original entrance to a loading bay, and permanently scarred the 1936 building. All these buildings and the 1874 Court House, now the Department of Conservation offices, form an island in the world-class Art Deco quarter of Napier. So, a somewhat mixed bag of buildings that house a remarkable collection held in trust for the people of Hawke’s Bay by the Hawke’s Bay Cultural Trust.

The items in the collection reflect the wide range of interest in collecting since the mid-nineteenth century. There is a comprehensive collection of Māori taonga, a fine collection of paintings, as well as a superb applied arts collection. The total value of the collection is approximately $39,000,000.

So why are we planning to redevelop? Well, previous development has seriously impacted on the integrity of the original building; this will be addressed. The current facility is seriously inadequate, especially in terms of space. The collection is important both regionally and nationally, and is stored in cramped conditions that barely meet required standards. The current galleries do not meet the accepted New Zealand standards of lighting and temperature control, and the two buildings incorporated in the 1970s alterations are in poor condition. Quite a list. So what are we going to do about it? Firstly, restore and reveal the original J Louis Hay designed museum, with its reinstated doorway. This building will then house the Hawke’s Bay Archives, with a reading room and specialist gallery dedicated to regional history. The Century Theatre will be retained and enhanced, and we intend to take this seriously. Although not yet heritage, the Century Theatre is a fine example of late 1970s architecture. We intend to preserve tomorrow’s heritage. The two windows at the southern end of the site will be removed; the Lilliput building will be demolished; but the old borough council offices, which date from 1874 but have been heavily modified in the ensuing years, will be relocated. In their place a new wing will be constructed, containing galleries, public spaces, staff facilities, and workshops. Designed by Richard Daniels of Opus, it’s a contemporary work, sympathetic to Napier’s Art Deco heritage. Artworks by New Zealand artist, Sarah Hughes, have been commissioned for interior and exterior spaces in the gallery. [Background sound on video] This way we’ll connect back to the older building by a linking gallery running around the side of the existing auditorium and exiting in the old foyer, where a café will enhance the attractiveness of the facility to the community. The concept is to increase gallery and storage space, enhance the visitor experience, and expand the research and educational capabilities – and, of course, improve staff working conditions.

I’m going to accommodate all that in time zones – let me show you. Let’s take a walk in time … here we are in the 1870s. [Music in background] This is the old Court House, built in 1874; now occupied by the Department of Conversation. Although not in the present proposal, it could easily be incorporated into future developments. So, the first time zone; let’s set the time machine, walk around the corner, and go forward sixty years. It’s 1936, and here we are in the Art Deco era. This is J Louis Hay, Napier’s most famous architect’s Art Gallery and Museum with its restored entrance way, galleries and archive facilities.

And it’s the 1970s … a quality, purpose-built, three hundred seat auditorium that can cater for cinema or music, and it also fills a gap in Hawke’s Bay that no other facility can.

Right, back to the time machine. 2012 … the new wing; two floors and a basement – modern, functional, Deco-friendly, with big galleries large enough to take the exhibitions that we can’t at the moment; and staff facilities, classrooms and workshops. Not only does this proposal look to the shortcomings of the present, it looks to the future, to enhance our heritage. And not just Art Deco, it gives some exciting possibilities [harsh background sound] for the future.

Although perhaps not; with your help we could start this journey right now. Estimated total cost of the project is $17,000,000 at 2009 prices. Napier City Council have allocated $6,000,000 over the next three years in the long-term council community plan. We’re looking for your help, both in terms of support and finance, and we’d like you to join us and help us preserve what is ultimately the home of Hawke’s Bay heritage, and show it to the world. Please give us some money; the whole place is falling down.”

Douglas: Right, well that’s Bertie’s overview, and it was really made for the Ministry of Culture and Heritage, and actually particularly for John Key. That final scene used to say ‘John Key, please give us some money; the whole place is falling down’. And that kind of worked, or it did work. The government has a scheme for the Regional Museums Fund, and it was invented when the government paid an enormous amount of money to build Te Papa, and a lot of museums around the country said, “Well, actually we have very, very good collections that local councils that run museums and art galleries don’t really have the funds to look after.” And Puke Ariki in New Plymouth was the first off the list to get some money. And you can apply to the government to get money, but you’ve got to prove that your collection is important to the nation. And the nice thing about the application is they don’t give you any guidelines about how to prove it, they just say prove it; so it’s quite a test.

So first of all we sat down and we said, “Well, Hawke’s Bay is important, therefore it’s important to the nation.” Well that didn’t cut much mustard, so we had to go a level further down. So what I’m going to show to you is a series of images that were part of the very long, very extensive application to the government; but what they do is they show the variety of our collection. And if you like, what we did is we showed them one or two images; and then we said this is the peak of the iceberg in each of these different areas. And then we provide them documentation that showed that we had, you know, hundreds and sometimes literally thousands of objects in that same category. [Shows slides throughout]

And one of the things, I think, that you’ve really got to remember about the Hawke’s Bay Museum and Art Gallery, is that it’s the biggest museum and art gallery collection outside the four main centres. So it’s the largest museum collection in the country outside Auckland, Wellington, Dunedin and Christchurch, so it’s a very significant collection in a lot of ways. We’re also one of the oldest museums in the country. We were founded as the Mechanics Institute in the 1850s, so we’ve been on that site ever since. The complex that you see now is the third building on that site since ‘31; it’s the third building on that site, so it’s always been there. And in essence we’re not going anywhere, you know – we feel very connected to that site, and we made the decision to stay on that site when we went for this redevelopment.

This is Roland Hipkins’ painting, ‘Renaissance’, painted immediately after the earthquake, and this is considered to be an important painting in terms of New Zealand and the introduction of modern art to New Zealand. Hipkins had lived in Napier and he’d actually disappeared … moved to Wellington a couple of months before the earthquake; and he came back almost immediately with his wife, to paint this painting. And it’s considered an essential painting, not only in the history of [coughing] Hawke’s Bay, but in the history of art in New Zealand; often tours the country. I was really amused a couple of years ago when we put this in the gallery, and one of the people that came to the gallery, I thought quite often, said to me, “Where did you borrow that from?” And I said, “Well it’s ours.” And he said, “Oh no, it can’t be – it’s famous!” [Chuckles] So we do have some things that are famous. Both Roland Hipkins, who died in 1952, and his wife, Jenny Campbell, who died in the seventies, left us their art collection, so we have sort of, probably thirty Roland Hipkins, and about twenty-five Jenny Campbells; she’s a wonderful, wonderful painter who I’m dying to do a project on, ‘cause she’s one of those very dynamic women painters of the twenties and thirties that has kind of been a bit forgotten.

This is Rita Angus’ ‘Churches Hawke’s Bay’. We have a surprisingly small collection of Rita Angus’ paintings; we only have four, but this is a very significant one. It’s very important, and this was borrowed by Te Papa a couple of years ago for their exhibition; so we often work with those main institutions – they borrow from us and we borrow from them.

And this is something perhaps a little bit more unexpected – this is called ‘Maungaturoto Remembered’, and it’s by Felix Kelly. Now some of you will’ve seen our Felix Kelly exhibition a couple of years ago. Felix Kelly is a New Zealand painter, who spent most of his life in London, and this is a painting from the 1930s. And this is a really interesting indication of the reputation that the Hawke’s Bay Museum and Art Gallery has achieved, only in the last few years, really … I got a letter one day from a woman in London, who was Felix Kelly’s partner’s sister. And she said, “I hear you run an art gallery that takes paintings from the thirties seriously – would you like my Felix Kelly collection? ‘Cause I feel they need to go back to New Zealand.” So that was lovely, and we got about nine works; and that was the nucleus for our Felix Kelly exhibition that many of you would’ve seen. That exhibition toured the country; it went to Auckland and Wellington. So it’s a nice combination of an unexpected art collection – you might expect us to have a Rita Angus, or you might expect us to have Ronald Hipkins, but you wouldn’t expect us to have the most significant holdings of this artist’s work.

This is another surprise, and you may’ve seen these works exhibited a couple of years ago. This is Wenceslaus Hollar; he is a Bohemian engraver from the Jacobean/Carolinian period, English Civil War, and this is one of his engravings from a series called ‘The [Several] Habits of English Women’, of town and country … habits meaning clothes, not bizarre behaviour. [Chuckles] There are four thousand Hollers in New Zealand collections, split between Te Papa and Auckland, so he’s a very important engraver. But we’re the only institution that has the full set of ‘The Several Habits of English Women’, which is considered his master work; so really, if Te Papa or Auckland want to look at this art seriously, they need to be involved in a conversation with us. And this is a really, really lovely example of the age of our collection; these came into the collection in 1936 from a local donor. It is a full set, and this is one of the works that we’ve recently put a lot of attention into conservation; and I don’t think I need to explain to Duart House how expensive conservation is.

The taonga Māori collection is considered to be the largest collection, again, outside the main centres. It was put together starting really early in the later part of the nineteenth century. The founding fathers of our organisation are William Colenso and Augustus Hamilton. These were men of some considerable influence, and although Rose will roll her eyes when I say Augustus Hamilton’s name, he … whatever the politics of the situation was … he did put together an incredibly impressive collection of taonga Māori that we’re very, very proud of, not all of which comes from Hawke’s Bay; comes from all round the country. And this is one of the [?] that always stood at our front entrance way; you’ll be familiar with them. They became close friends of gallery staff; we constantly had conversations with them. But this particular figure was one of a number of works from our collection that was sent over to Te Māori, and to New York; so again, considered one of the great collections.

But perhaps the surprise in the taonga Māori collection is our collection of cloaks. There are a hundred and twenty-three Māori cloaks in the collection, and this one which probably isn’t the most glamorous looking, is one of the rarest. This is a dogskin cloak, and is considered to be one of the most significant. And really, scholars of Māori textiles are constantly coming to our collection to study it, because we have this very, very extensive range of works.

Similarly, the Pacific collection is extremely strong, and this comes from our founding patron of the modern gallery; this is Lady Florence McLean. Florence McLean gave her and her husband’s collection to the Hawke’s Bay Museum and Art Gallery in 1935 I think, on the understanding that they would build a fireproof building to house them in. The specs of the word ‘fireproof’ is really quite interesting, because although we think of Napier as falling down in an earthquake in 1931, it really burned down in the fire that followed. That’s why the devastation in Napier was much more significant. Ironically the fire, as many of you know, started in a chemist shop, and that was on the block next to us. But the wind blew in the opposite direction, and it was only that in fact that saved the Athenaeum collection. I always think that it’s an interesting fact that the Athenaeum building came through the earthquake just fine in 1931, and by 1936 they had demolished it and built a new museum and art gallery, while they were rebuilding the whole city. So that shows you how central they saw the museum and art gallery to their thinking.

So Lady Florence McLean had a very, very large collection of Pacific ethnology, really, and she donated that to the museum. And again, one of the focuses of the museum is in textiles and we have, again, an extremely large and significant collection of tapa cloth that came from the McLean collection but has built on historically. And I think if you’ve noticed in the last few years, there’s a range of shows we do; we quite often have our textile collection out because it really is one of our points of difference. One of the problems that regional museums have, is that they can start feeling a lot the same, because the stories are quite similar. So our point of difference has been some of this textile specialisation.

Lady Florence McLean … or we call her Flo … Flo was also responsible for our Robley collection. Robley is an important nineteenth century artist and illustrator. He was a close friend of the McLeans; they were basically his patron. We have eighty-three Robleys; that’s the largest collection of his work in the country, and it’s generally … well, there’s one very, very prominent scholar in the Robley area who says we’ve got the worst Robley collection in the country because they’re the least accurate ones; and then there’s another very prominent Robley scholar who says we’ve got the best Robley collection in the country ’cause they’re the least accurate ones. And there’s one way of looking at that – from an ethnological point of view, Robley wasn’t a very good recorder of things; from an art point of view he opens up the possibility of contemporary art by almost getting control by moving the conversation. And you know, that’s why I’m sort of proud of the scholarship in our collection, because we can have those sort of discussions and those sort of arguments; you can engage in that level of conversation, or you can just look at some very fine nineteenth century work.

This is one of our founding fathers as I mentioned; this is William Colenso. And this year in November is his [the] bicentennial of his birth, and we’re having a conference to celebrate Colenso as a thinker; it’s one of the projects we’re doing while we’re closed. We have a very fine collection of Colenso’s writing, printing … he translated the Treaty of Waitangi into Māori and printed it. He encouraged Māori not to sign it. He of course came down here and was based in the Hawke’s Bay. But why this is really up here … this is the ambreotype [ambrotype] and we have both ambrotype and the daguerreotype of Colenso, which are the key images by which we think of Colenso. We also have the Lindauer portrait. But this is the peak of a very large collection. There are a hundred thousand objects in the Hawke’s Bay Museum and Art Gallery collection – that’s objects of this sort, you know, description … physical objects. There is an equivalent hundred thousand photographs, so you start to understand the scale of the collection. And so this is a very good example of photographs that are in the archive collection and this is one of the most valued of our photographs.

This, too, is part of the archive collection; this is Te Kooti’s prayer book, his own personal prayer book. This was borrowed by Te Papa for their opening exhibition. So when the National Museum opened for the first time on its new site [??] borrowed that exhibition, so I think it gives you a lovely sense of how [?] the exhibition is.

And this is one of the Chapman drawings; Chapman was a station holder very early on, and these are considered very significant because they’re some of the earliest drawings of New Zealand’s interiors of the colonial period. So these are incorporated into diaries.

We have an incredibly wealthy record of the sort of farming history of Hawke’s Bay; we have station diaries, and in some cases we have entire station records right down to their billing, which is absolutely fascinating. One of the things, I suppose, we need to understand ’cause it always comes up, is that we’ll never be able to take the station records of every station of Hawke’s Bay. There will always be a nice combination of who will look after those; a lot of people prefer to keep those things in private hands. As many of you will understand a lot of these properties are in private hands and they’d rather keep their own archives, and that’s fine. But this is sort of the very tip of that whole history of farms and farming. We also have Williams and Kettle’s archive, so we have all of their archives going back, and they were a very, very influential firm.

We have the Port of Napier’s archive from its foundation through to, at this point, the late 1930s. The next lot will come at some other time. But that’s a fascinating history of the business of the port, which is the business of trade, which is, you know, really Hawke’s Bay has always been a great exporter.

We have a very, very large collection of architectural drawings as you can imagine, perhaps most significantly the works of Louis Hay. I mean I’m an architectural historian and I love architectural drawings, but you get very bored by endless sets of plans and drainage drawings and electrical wiring diagrams; but Louis Hay was a wonderful illustrator, or he had wonderful illustrators. So this is the Albion Hotel, which is a [?] of a scheme which was never built, but it’s a very, very beautiful work. But we have extensive holdings of architects from right across the Bay; we’re looking at some work on William Rush at the moment; we have a strong collection of the works by Chapman-Taylor; we have strong representations by perhaps less well-known firms who have shaped Hawke’s Bay. And one of the other stand out points for the gallery is this reputation that we have for doing architectural exhibitions, and for design.

This is Garth Chester’s Nicholson chapel chair. Garth Chester is New Zealand’s most important twentieth century furniture designer, and we were the first museum in the country to buy a Chester work, way back in 1982. The Nicholson Chapel was a funeral parlour in Napier – I don’t know how many of you remember that, but in about 1948 I think it was, they commissioned Chester to make plywood furniture for their chapel. He was an Auckland designer, but it’s a very good example of the way, you know, they reached out for this interesting furniture designer, and got what would have been a very avant-garde little funeral chapel, [chapel chair] that perhaps at the time people, you know, thought was pretty smart, but soon sort of got forgotten. But when it was broken up in the eighties the gallery was smart enough to acquire some works. And these were recently in our exhibition called ‘Pliability’, which was in our closing programmes … one of the last exhibitions we did before we closed.

Again this is the textile collection – we hold the archives of three major post-war textile [?]. The first one of those is William Mason, who is a Napier-born … actually think it might be Waipukurau, grew up in Napier … textile and wallpaper designer many of you will remember from the sixties and seventies. William Mason wallpapers cost, you know, practically a week’s salary; probably more. They were extremely expensive, smart, hand-printed wallpapers and curtains. He died and left his archive to us, and then this particular artist, Avis Higgs, was looking for somewhere to deposit her archive. She was from Wellington but she’d been a friend of Mason, and she thought it would be a really nice idea if Mason[‘s] and her archive[s] were next to each other, so that people could look at them at the same time. This is one of her Australian favourites which is called ‘When the Lights Go on Again’, and this is a fundraising fabric designed during World War II, so it’s a speculative women’s dress fabric; and there you’ve got the buildings of Sydney, the harbour bridge, and this notion that one day, after the war, you know, all of Australia will light up again. Avis Higgs is considered very important in not only in New Zealand, but in Australia, because she essentially invented surfing fabric; you might say what is surfing fabric? Well, basically it was this idea that on your casual clothes she put surf images; basically she was a young woman working as a fabric designer – she would go to the beach, she would do some drawings, and she’d come back and she would put surf boards and people surfing on the fabrics, and then she would put the surf slang of the day, which doesn’t sound particularly … you know, groovy now; but one of the fabrics is called ‘Wacko’ [chuckles] … it has ‘Whacko’ written on it, which is obviously the surfing language of 1940. But if you think, all those Mambo fabrics and that that come out of Australia, they build on that; and into contemporary. So she’s very, very important in both terms of [terms of both] Australia and New Zealand, and her works rest with us.

And in just the last one of those [that] really was very fortuitous, was the Frank Carpay collection which is a textile and [?china?] collection. And that was really the snowball; his widow said, “Well, if Avis Higgs is there and William Mason is there …” and I must say she’d fallen out with Auckland Museum [chuckle] … she said, “I think his fabric should be there.” So we now have the three major print fabric designers from the late part of the twentieth century, and so that is a very significant collection. And it means that people that [who] want to study how printed fabrics were created in New Zealand, they come to us.

The applied arts collection was mentioned by Bertie in the video; a very, very fine applied arts collection. This is a Bernard Leach vase from the late 1950s. We have a very fine collection of Lucy Reid, Bernard Leach and Michael Cardew; all the major mid to late twentieth century potters, and a very, very fine New Zealand collection too. But the collection is strong in glass, ceramics, silver … all of those sorts of areas. And almost all of our collection, really ninety percent of our collection, was donated to us; so this is Hawke’s Bay families giving works to us.

One of the fascinating things about our collection is that I suspect, after the earthquake, a lot of people had lost their Worcester pottery and their Dalton pottery; they glued it back together and thought, ‘Oh, it can go going to the museum.’ [Chuckles] So we actually have got quite a lot of stuff that I really believe must’ve been broken in the thirties earthquake. And it’s a really interesting question, that if you put it on display it just looks like a broken vase, usually badly glued back together; so it’s quite an issue for us deciding whether those things that don’t really tell the earthquake story, stay in the collection long-term or not.

And Rose was very nice to mention my book, which I wrote with Lucy Hammonds who’s my curator, and clearly know is the ex-curator of the Hawke’s Bay Museum and Art Gallery. That book is a celebration of the Hawke’s Bay Museum and Art Gallery’s costume collection. We have a very, very fine costume collection. Really, it’s Auckland Museum, Dunedin Early Settlers’ Museum and Otago and ourselves are the three major costume collections. One of the reasons I think, that we’ve concentrated on New Zealand designers of costume is that Hawke’s Bay women have actually always been particularly interested in clothing, and the wealth of Hawke’s Bay meant that designers knew they could sell their works down here. And Elizabeth Horne [???] in Hastings had long been, for many, many decades, probably one of the finest dress shops in the country, where some people always go and get the very, very best. And I must say there’s an awful lot of Hawke’s Bay women through the turn of the century that [who] simply shopped in Paris and London every few years. So it means that we have a lovely collection. This is a coat and dress by Joan Talbot, who had a shop and a label called ‘Tarantella’ in Auckland in the 1960s.

This is particularly … perhaps to my generation and perhaps to some of yours, is that this used to belong to Cherry Raymond, who was a well-known feminist writer and broadcaster. And we actually have a number of items from her wardrobe, which is interesting because I think … Cherry Raymond dressed very smartly so that smart, conservative women would understand or come closer to her more radical way of thinking. She used to write a column in the Women’s Weekly called ‘Speaking Frankly’, and I can remember that as a child; Cherry Raymond with severe glasses and big hair, and serious columns. They don’t seem so serious now. I saw one a little while ago that says, you know, ‘Should Women Have Their Own Cheque Accounts?’ [Laughter] But actually in 1965 that was radical. Because Cherry was an important figure, we want to build around that sort of collection. It’s top secret, but we are negotiating for Whetū Tirikātene-Sullivan’s wardrobe; you’ll remember her, she was a very distinctive dresser.

And the other day we were offered a part of the wardrobe of Norma Holyoake; you laugh, I know you laugh. I was with Lucy, who’s a lot younger than me, and she said to me, “It’s very expensive for somewhat frumpy clothes; why do we want these?” [Laughter] “Norma Holyoake’s … why do we want these?” [Chuckles] And I said to Lucy, “Okay – well if you put Norma Holyoake’s expensive gowns up against Cherry Raymond and Whetū Tirikātene-Sullivan, you can understand how they stood out.”

And the really lovely thing about the Dress Circle book, is that people are contacting us now from all over the country saying, “Look, I’ve had this particular item for years and I’ve never known what I should do; and would you like it?” And that’s something to keep in mind, the way we balance very carefully the collection between things that originate in Hawke’s Bay, and things that don’t necessarily originate here, but resonate here. So I don’t see there’s any reason why we shouldn’t tell both the Hawke’s Bay story and the national story, but do it in Hawke’s Bay. And that will always give us that point of difference and that interesting audience. The other day we took in five gowns from a woman in Auckland, and three of which are Christian Dior originals. And one of the things I sort of quite like is that you don’t expect to encounter a Christian Dior original ball gown in a provincial museum in New Zealand. And if people do come and go, “Wow!” then you’ve got them in their hearts and minds, and you can move them on to other stories; whereas I think often in New Zealand, New Zealanders actually walk in and think, ‘No, I’ve seen this reconstruction of a colonial kitchen before, do I really need to bother?’ So we’re building a museum that’s got to be big and dynamic and powerful, and that’s really one of the reasons that we need a new building, besides a property to [???].

I think that’s probably just about my slides, Pam … oh no, one more, perhaps unexpected. We have a very large and significant collection of Chinese art; and this is a Ming Dynasty scroll. And the recent research on this seems to suggest that it was painted by one of the wives of one of the many emperors. In China originality is not important, so you have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of copies of works that are exactly the same. But we have a lovely relationship with a lecturer in Asian Art at Canterbury University, and he’s working on this scroll, and he’s increasingly thinking that this could be the original which makes it globally significant. It’s also incredibly long – it’s seven or eight eight metres long and so we need a big gallery just to unroll the thing.

It’s a special collection, and I think it’s a special collection because it’s been born and raised in Hawke’s Bay, but for the last twenty years or so it’s been in a pretty poor state, and what we’ve found really is that just as people do judge books by their covers, they judge us by our outside, by our inside … a lot of people have forgotten even where we are, and a lot of people have forgotten to visit. [Coughing] And one of the really interesting things about the Hawke’s Bay Museum and Art Gallery is that eighty percent of our visitors come from outside of Hawke’s Bay. So we’ve got a tiny local visitorship really, and I would like to change that so that the locals and the … while I’d like to increase both of those audiences, I’d like to see a larger local component.

So what we’re really doing now is a complete rebuild from top to bottom. We have physically worked out; the site is deserted. We had to move that entire collection into new storage and all our staff with them, and we are building from the ground up. I’ll just explain the project in a little bit of detail and then we’ll have some questions you might have.

This is the site as it exists; and this is Education [Department] in the Borough Council Chambers; Lilliput [Miniature Railway]; the Century in the current arrangement – you came in here usually; this was our little archive library; the Holt Gallery; of course [???] the Taonga Māori Gallery; the Bestall, which is the lovely thirties one; the little Octagon; McLean Gallery, and the Malden. And the collection was sort of dotted all about the place. So this is the new basement, and if you like, the reading area is the collection store, so it’s now all concentrated in one place. So that means we can air condition and secure it all at the same time, at the same level. [It] can be quite cost efficient, but it can also be very carefully cared for, because at the moment there’s like nine little, small rooms all over the place. The green is the staff facilities … sticking them in the basement; and this orange bit on the outside is the first of our downstairs galleries, and this will be our earthquake experience gallery. Basically, those eighty per cent of visitors that come come from southern Hawke’s Bay, and come in to see the earthquake exhibition. We know that is central to the education programme; we put ten thousand children a year through that gallery. And you know, Christchurch has made it even more relevant, particularly the educational programmes. So a big new earthquake discovery experience – no, it’s not going to be a shaky floor type Te Papa experience, but it is going to be something [??].

Going up to the ground floor, you now are encouraged to enter the building from the Tennyson Street end into a large foyer, that you can see on the [??] the new wing. Education is immediately in front of you, and it’s very important to me; I believe that museums are education institutions. And the idea is that students used to be able to visit our building for a programme, but never actually came into the art gallery, ‘cause the building was you know, out on a limb. Now those programmes will be very, very central to the gallery, and in actual fact you’ll be able to see right into the education suite; so you’ll be able to see a very lively space.

This is quite an early drawing now … this is the Taonga Māori gallery for our Māori collection; and again, I wanted that up front. I wanted it just like it was in the old museum. I want it to say, “This is where you start; this is the beginning.” This is up front, and that gallery now extends right down to here.

This is the new café and circulation space, and facilities of the more boring sort that you can fit into the plan; and this whole thirties building now becomes the Hawke’s Bay Archives. So you go on from – that was our little old library – to this. And this is where we’re going to have a research centre for the photographs and the documents and the story of Hawke’s Bay. And what we want to do is really make this a centre for research … for all sorts of research; and this is from “Do you have a photograph of my great grandmother?” through to “I’m writing a significant history.” So it’s going to be [a] fabulous facility. The restored building entrance will be from here. There will be a reading room; this will be literally the store where we keep all of the maps, drawings, photographs, manuscripts.

And this Bestall Gallery will become, a regional history gallery, so this will be a permanent but changing space, dedicated to telling the story of Hawke’s Bay, and by that I mean the story of Hawke’s Bay – I mean reaching out and telling the different stories of the whole community, and we’re slightly strange, we work on the boundaries of the old provincial government of the nineteenth century, so we extend our interests down to Woodville and we hold works from those areas. And I want to be able to tell that history. We’re going to – I think I can reveal this – we’re opening that gallery with an exhibition called ‘A Hundred and Fifty Treasures of Hawke’s Bay’, which we would’ve liked to’ve done for the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the provincial government, but we missed that slightly. And that’s going to be a real show-off of the real, real gems that belong here but that are the heart of Hawke’s Bay. So that’s going to be a pretty interesting space, and it’s all going in the beautifully restored thirties gallery, so you’ll have that nice sense of … particularly in the Bestall … some of you will remember it used to have dado rail; and it’ll be natural light. One of the funny things about galleries is it’s always cyclical, so we’ve gone from natural light was the fashion in the thirties; in the sixties and seventies and eighties, it had to’ve been all electric; cost us a fortune. Now it’s going back to being environmental, sustainable natural light.

And then finally, concentrated on the new wing really, you’ve got the upstairs galleries, and there are four of those. These are the two large galleries; this gives us the opportunity to do big exhibitions by opening the two up. This is a big sliding wall here, so they can be two separate galleries, or they can be one big gallery.

One of the ironies of the Hawke’s Bay Museum and Art Gallery is that we haven’t been able to take big shows. A very good example is the Rita Angus exhibition from Te Papa would naturally have come to us; we’ve loaned into it, but we couldn’t take it back because we weren’t big enough. We also can’t take international shows, and as Hawke’s Bay’s such a destination it would be nice to think we could encourage people who are visiting the country to come here, see something of the art gallery and then see the rest of the region. So we’re going to have this big gallery, and you will’ve read in the paper that we have done the deal for a big show of buried army soldiers and Han Dynasty treasures that will be coming in 2014-2015. That’ll be pretty sensational, and it’ll be on our turf.

There’s two little galleries here. This is the balcony, which will be … sort of sculpture, jewellery sort of gallery, only because it’s exposed to quite a lot of light. And this is called The Dome, and it’s called The Dome because it’s got the giant dome. It sort of got the giant dome by accident. I was working on installing the old camera obscura that used to be in the National Aquarium; remember that? The camera obscura that was taken out was the last large camera obscura in use in the Southern Hemisphere, so – I don’t think Napier realised that when they took it out. And so I thought, ‘Well, it’s still in storage – let’s put it into the gallery’, because camera obscuras were a very important part of how artists used to operate. So Richard designed me this lovely room and this big dome, and you can see it on the elevation, this little turret that sticks up, and the camera obscura was meant to look out over Hawke’s Bay. As you know the picture appears on the floor, and I’ve been able to turn it on and turn it off, so if an artist wanted to be able to use it they could have it, or between shows it just became the camera obscura.

But Richard, being an architect said, “Oh, you know, I think we should get a computer model camera obscura”, which he did. And we revealed that we would get a complete show of the branches of Norfolk pines, and that the camera obscura [chuckles] couldn’t see between the Norfolk pines and what you were going to get on the floor was this constant, unchanging focal of the pines. So the camera obscura was taken away, but he’s left me the dome which I think is wonderful, because … now if I’d said to the council, “And by the way I want a giant dome in one of my galleries”, they would’ve looked at their budgets and said, “No.” [Chuckle] But because it’s left over, I now have this small, lovely gallery that’s just going to be so unexpected. You’re going to walk into this little space and there’s going to be this big, contemporary dome; and I can just see every contemporary artist in the country wanting to get their hands on that space. And indeed one of the things I said to the architects is, “Can you put a three-pin plug up there?” And he said, “Why?” And I said, “’Cause the first thing an artist’s going to say to us is, “How can I get power out to that document?”

So, you know, it’s a big, expensive project; the whole site from top to bottom, up and down, back to front, has been completely rebuilt, and this is the very reason that we do need to be closed. And a lot of people have said to me, “Well why can’t you have an exhibition somewhere else?” Or “Why can’t you open an archive somewhere else?” Yes, that seems a really good idea, but every ounce of energy I take away from opening day of that building, every time I distract my staff, means that this is going to be less fantastic on the day it’s opened. And what I really want to be able to do in 2013 is deliver to Hawke’s Bay that state of the art facility that I think you’re all actually hankering for; where you can find what you’re looking for; where you know collections can come. And so at the moment I’m in a situation where the collection is essentially closed; we’re not loaning to other institutions, we’re working on it ourselves. But when it comes to the public we can come to some arrangements; and particularly I know with archives, there are people writing books and they are going to write those books for the next couple of years, and it’s not my job to ruin their lives by not giving them a photograph – of course we can arrange that. If you’re going to ring me up and say, “Can I come and see if you’ve got a photo of my great grandfather or not?” You might just have to wait a couple of years. I think you all understand just how enormous this project really is.

That’s me. There’s my turret. I should comment on Sarah Hughes art works – these are not the artworks; these are just some old Sarah Hughes drawings that she allowed us to use. She kind of allowed this scheme based on the textiles, which I think is so perfect. And this whole façade is going to be pierced with hundreds of those dressmaking pins with the round ends of them, but big metal versions; and she’s going to pin, I think three hundred thousand or something … thirty thousand … pins into the side of the building, and then from a distance that’s going to make one of the textiles that’s in the collection which is actually a representation of native plants. And then she’s doing a lovely big terrazzo floor for us which is based on a pin cushion that’s in the collection, so it’s going to be dynamic.

The idea was that … many of you will remember what the press called ‘The Armadillo’; this was [?Noel Lang’s?] scheme for [??] this enormous glass dome; came in at $27 million, which was only $10 million over budget, and was going to need re-roofing in seven years. And my mayor, who’s a very sensible woman, said, “Go away and think about it again.” What was interesting about The Armadillo was that it split the community fifty-fifty … fifty percent of the community said, “This is exactly what we need; we need a dynamic building that changes how people think about Napier, and how they think about Hawke’s Bay.” And the other fifty percent said, “Oh no, no – you can’t do that in Art Deco land. It’s got to be Art Deco dominant.” And so when we went to Richard Daniels for a redesign we took that into account, and we said, “Well how do we satisfy both those communities?” And what Richard’s done is design a building that’s in scale with the Art Deco quarter, but no one is going to mistake it for an Art Deco building. And I think that’s a really [sneeze] nice way of going forward. And that’s one of the reasons we brought Sarah Hughes in, was to do something bold and dynamic on what’s essentially a white building; it’s going to be white. You know, the last thing I would want to see is the Art Deco [?] driving past and someone saying, “Is that Art Deco?” Well that’s me, really. Are there any questions?

Question: Getting back to your clothing collection, how do you preserve the very old lace and knitting and crocheting?

Douglas: Well really, one of the lovely things about moving the collection was that because everything needs to be moved, everything had to be repacked; so what we’ve done is we’ve brought the packing standards of the collection up to [cough] where they need to be, and the way we pack things is the way things’ll stay. So there isn’t so much a proactive programme of conservation, but there is proper acid-free storage and that sort of thing. What happens with lace and with costume particularly, is that we’re proactive when we want to exhibit. So if something’s going on display it then goes through the conservation process to make sure it’s okay for display, which then strengthens it going forward. We were very, very lucky a few years ago – we got a bequest from a woman who had died, and it was specifically for the conservation of the textile collection. It was her great love; she loved our textile collection and she left us money that allows us to keep up that programme, which is wonderful.

Question: Can the camera obscura be established somewhere?

Douglas: I’m working on that. [Chuckles] When I was trying to convince the council, I found all these new camera obscuras – they’re currently a bit of a fashion in the rest of the world, and they normally have their own camera obscura building. And I’d love to see a camera obscura building on the Marine Parade one day. It’s all wrapped up in storage, so it’s safe at the moment.

Rose: Douglas, obviously the collection of fabrics and things at the museum is hugely important nationally, but I found that you were a wee bit dismissive of the colonial kitchen concept. I do think that there’s a very large number of people … probably all of this group for a start … who are very interested in the colonial history of Hawke’s Bay, and would love to see a colonial kitchen in it … a little bit like we’ve got here at Duart, although ours is pretty basic; you could do it so much better, so …

Douglas: I grew up in colonial kitchen museum experiences. What my thing is that I feel the Hawke’s Bay Museum and Art Gallery can’t be all things to all people.

Rose: No.

Douglas: So the best thing I can do is say – or Pam can do through her team – is say, “Well have you been to Duart House?” You know, the lovely thing about the rearrangement that happened a few years ago is that we now have Hastings City Art Gallery, and Hastings is running that in its own right, and Marie is making that a centre for contemporary art. That means that ‘cause I’ve got limited gallery space, I don’t have to do all of the contemporary art shows. But what we can say to the audience is, “You’re in Hawke’s Bay – make sure you see the Hastings City Art Gallery; make sure you see Duart House; make sure you see the Faraday Centre”, you know, which is this great technological museum. And that makes the whole heritage visitor experience in Hawke’s Bay more valuable. What’s tended to happen in New Zealand, I think, is that you know, you used to have … well, you still have … your display, but we had something just like it, we had something just like it in our basement as well.

Rose: You did, and it was wonderful.

Douglas: And so we need to keep some variety out there. One of the things I think has been really missing, and that’s why I’ve been working on this regional history gallery, is that there’s sometimes, particularly in Napier I’ve got to say, a feeling that it all started in 1931. And one of the things that I have learned coming to Hawke’s Bay is that Napier obsesses about the earthquake, and Hastings and Havelock North just moved on, [chuckle] and it doesn’t occupy the same place in the imagination over here as it does over there. One of the things that we’re really trying to do with both our earthquake exhibition and with the regional history gallery, is tell the broader story. So with the earthquake gallery we’re going to show very much what Napier was like before the earthquake, but also we’re going to talk about the period between the earthquake and now. In the old exhibition you sort of went out on the street and you were still in 1931; we want to go right forward and get round the city so we understand that city. The regional history gallery is about telling the regional stories, and so there’s lots of projects that we might do that will tell different elements of the colonial story, but also of recent history.

And we [are] at the moment trying to charm the regional council into giving us a bit of assistance, because I’ve got to say, our regional archive is entirely funded by Napier City. Neither of the other councils have given any money, so Napier City provides this great … So we’re trying to charm this money out of Regional Council, and they’re saying, “Well, what sort of exhibitions will you put in this gallery? We don’t understand.” It sounds facetious when I say things like, ‘Water usage in Hawke’s Bay’, which doesn’t sound like the most exciting story; but it is, actually. The whole history of flooding and environmental change and water management – that’s the sort of story that the gallery can make come alive; that you can go, “Oh, I never thought that would be so interesting.” And so that’s the sort of project that I can see. But there’s a fabulous project to be done [?on water?], and you know that impacts from Napier right through the whole province. And you know, I can just imagine now the fantastic story I could do about that sort of thing. So I very much want to make nineteenth century history much more of an element of recent than it has been in the past.

That’s the other thing. You get this thing … museums don’t change. We do eleven exhibitions a year. That’s constant change.

Rose: I think we’ve all learned from Te Papa that museums do change.

Douglas: Yes, yes.

Rose: I think that’s given us all a wake-up call about what museums are.

Douglas: Yeah, the question that I get all the time – and actually I did an interview on Saturday with Kim Hill, and she said to me, “So your museum’s closed … what are you doing? You’re on like, a really long holiday?” [Laughter] You know, we are full tilt because we have fifteen exhibitions to open on our first day.

Question: Do you have an actual date you plan to open?

Douglas: The mayor of Napier will tell you January 2013; probably a little bit later. You know, by mid 2013.

Question: In the light of recent developments, particularly in Japan, you will have a very strong policy for tsunami events?

Douglas: That’s the question I get asked second most often. The packaging of the collection protects it to a far higher degree than it ever has been, so we’re much more protected from all the likely things that are likely to happen in the collection. Where we are of course weak, is catastrophic loss; and catastrophic loss is catastrophic. We’re seven metres above high tide where we are, but a tsunami that devastates the museum would devastate the city entirely. I could argue with Hastings District Council that they might like to bring their collection over here away from the water, and then there’d be an earthquake or a tornado; we could have a big liquefaction problem; we’ve all seen what that does. The very interesting thing that we’ve learned from Christchurch, is that … they’ve got two institutions; one, Christchurch Art Gallery, is a new building and they moved their collection out – packed it, moved it out, and moved it back in. They’ve come through the earthquake with no damage. Canterbury Museum has been on the same site since the 1860s … never packed, never moved; and their collection’s been devastated. And so our collection, the regional collection, is much, much safer than it’s ever been before. But, can we guarantee Act of God … utter protection? No. Yes, we could build a giant concrete bunker somewhere, you know, back in the hills, but … I’m doing my best to raise $18 million for this project, let alone the $200 million that would cost. [Laughter] So, look, I don’t want to sound facetious, you know, it is a valid question; but that scale of loss … there were two-hundred and ninety museums lost in that Japanese tsunami; museums and art galleries, from tiny through to substantial. But, you know, there’s nothing I can do. We could’ve designed a museum with all the protection on the top floors, but basically I think the visitor would’ve said, “Well, why are we based in galleries this tall?” And we couldn’t’ve shown the works in them – most works are bigger than that. So it’s a very, very complex situation, and, as I say, I don’t want to seem facetious about it; we have thought about it a lot; it’s been a big part of our planning process, but you cannot protect these things.

Question: It should create more jobs too, shouldn’t it?

Douglas: Oh, yes, fantastic. Yes, this is the biggest building project in Hawke’s Bay in quite a long time, and also one of the most high-profile building jobs – you’re not going to miss it.

Question: So how many people does it currently employ?

Douglas: Well at the moment we’ve probably got …

Pam Joyce: ‘Bout twenty-six full-time.

Douglas: … because at the moment we don’t have a front.

Question: So would you double that, triple it?

Douglas: Oh … no; I’d love to, but I don’t think the council’s going to let me. I reckon that we’ll have around thirty full-time people and then ’cause we run the cinema and we run the front desk and it’s all on roster, we have a lot more than that. But yeah, it’s going to be a big facility. I think one of the things that Hawke’s Bay’s got to get in its mind is that this is a big museum. We’re not a little museum; and indeed, when I go to museums conferences, you know, we’ve got a bigger staff than Dunedin Public Art Gallery. We’re bigger than them, but you’d think they’d be much bigger than us. And I think one of things is that people think, ‘Oh, we’re a regional …’ you know, someone [cough] spoke the other day about us and Aratoi; Aratoi’s the museum in Masterton. They have three staff. You know, we’re not on the same scale.

Pam: We’re looking at projected figures of about a hundred thousand visitors just to the museum and art gallery when we reopen …

Douglas: Annually.

Pam: … annually; and to the complex, about five hundred and sixteen thousand, so we’re our key destination.

Douglas: Well at the moment we do three hundred thousand visitors a year through the site, and we do round about thirty-five, forty thousand paying, which is [inaudible]. And in case you were thinking of asking, I’m working on free entry. We are. Well, there’s only really two quasi-government run museums in the country that really do charge anything more than a token – that’s us and Rotorua. The difference between us and Rotorua is they don’t charge their ratepayers; and I’m working very hard on wearing Napier City Council down with the idea that if the people of the region get in free, they’ll bring their visitors, who’ll pay.

Pam: You can always have specific things that are charged for, like specific exhibitions, and a donation box, and …

Douglas: But when I first came I thought, ‘Oh, the most important thing I have to do is to get rid of that door charge.’ But what I’ve realised is that that door charge allows us to be a big museum, because the foreign tourists who don’t think twice about paying really do fund the institution. And the reason I can publish books from the museum point of view, that I can put in staff that will do the research is that door charge. So Pam?

Pam: Very quickly; I’m not going to be very long at all. As part of the fundraising campaign we’ve been approaching all the large corporates; and we’re starting off very shortly the community campaign ‘cause we do still need a bit more money for all these fantastic things that we’re going to provide. And we’ve come up with this amazing digital artwork, that has been designed by two Scottish designers … I’m sorry, I don’t remember their names …

Douglas: Chris Speed and Duncan …

Pam: And this is the graphic that you can see here. So what it is, is when you put your name on our website, if you like you can actually donate anything from $25 up, and your name gets represented in this digital art work. And what we didn’t want to happen when we opened the building was, you know, a static list of everyone’s names; so this artwork lives on the website at the moment, but when we re-open it’s actually going to be in the building, and it’s going to be able to be seen for the rest of the building’s existence. ???? So if you do want to donate, you’ve got the brochure, please go to the website to put some money in. If you do want to give a larger cheque, please speak to us.

Douglas: Really, as Pam says, we didn’t want to be in a situation where we … like, had to put a name on every brick, because what happens in time is that those can become problematic. And so even though it sounds less permanent we’ve gone for this digital artwork, and Chris Speed is the top British digital artist. This is actually more a promotion for the artwork; what happens is that you type your name in, and the more names that are typed in when you make a donation … it’s just done through your credit card … that circulating series of names; the more there are, the more accurate a picture of the building it becomes.

Pam: It becomes this thing here.

Douglas: So you are, physically building the building by your donation. And it’ll look like a roll of honour; and you can see your name, and you can watch your name dissolve in the roll of honour and rebuild as part of the building, with your name highlighted. And so in part it was very much designed to get young people interested in giving to the museum; so you can give to the museum, if you can go without; you’re going to have a small absence and donate twenty dollars that you’ll be able to show your children and grandchildren when the building is, you know, well down the track. So that was the whole notion.

This is what’s called a viral campaign at this point; it’s just there, you can go on the website and visit it. But once physical building starts on the site and [?] going to get excited about the project, we’ll be promoting it a lot more heavily. So you can see here that it’s forming a very small amount of the building, but …

Pam: And children do like it; my seven-year-old son was very adamant that his name is on, just so … he would want to watch it, so … a lovely gift, if you wanted to give to people …

Douglas: So thank you very much for listening to us. If you’ve got any other questions ..?

Jim Watt: Douglas, Pam … I’ve been asked to say thank you to you both for coming; and I thank you on several scores … thank you for your ideas that you’ve shared with us this morning; thank you for your visions, and how you’ve taken these through, right to signing the contract with a good Havelock North company to build this new enterprise; thank you for your enthusiasm, both of you, in the project, and we share that with you, because as a little museum, we sort of have some empathy with the issues that you have to face. Thank you for your encouragement too, for recognising that little museums still have a place; and I think they do. And I note that your new museum doesn’t have a huge storage facility, but probably big enough – just. So thank you for your encouragement, and for your advocacy in keeping these things in Hawke’s Bay, and recognising that you have a national responsibility as well. I sense from what you say that you are well aware of the difficulty in keeping that balance, and we applaud you for all that. Thank you, both of you, for coming.

[Applause]