The main complaint people seem to have with Te Papa (and I think Hamish Keith mentions something like this in the article) is that it can’t just let objects be – it has to make them FUN and EDUCATIONAL. And if you spend all your time pushing buttons and pulling out draws with quotes in them, you risk missing the core of the exhibition.

Te Papa has improved since how it was set up in the early days. Lessons were learned and objects and exhibitions seem to be displayed in more sympathetic contexts.

Like this…

Their giant Treaty of Waitangi has me totally in awe.

There it is – the Treaty, rips and stains and all, blown up in your face. It’s there aren’t any buttons to push. It’s a special part of the museum and it works with the subject.

And apparently it’s so terrible to hang a Colin McCahon next to a refrigerator.

The controversy was that there was no real connection between the two, other than they were both New Zealand artworks. Te Papa has learned from this and hangs its McCahons on a blank wall in the gallery section, to let the works speak for themselves without trying to make them FUN or EDUCATIONAL.

Anyways, the article says that the museum’s Centennial Street is “a cluster of colonial shops with soundtrack of people making clanking noises. It’s usually empty, faintly ridiculous, obviously unloved”. Well fuck you, Metro, Centennial Street was always my favourite place in the Auckland Museum, and I was gutted when Karen and I went there in January and couldn’t find it.

Oh, Centennial Street is still there! It’s a bit hard to find as it’s sort of hidden away on the top floor, behind the maze of the War Memorial section. It’s been renamed to something like “Auckland 1840s”, but it’s where it’s always been.

I loved Centennial Street as a girl (I used to pretend I was a lady from that time who’d suddenly been transported into the future world of 1985). But Metro’s description of it as “usually empty, faintly ridiculous, obviously unloved” is bang on.

There used to be an Auckland City section of the museum, but that was removed to make way for the grand renovations. So Centennial Street is all that currently represents Auckland City at the museum. I’d like to see the best bits of Centennial Street and the old city exhibition combined to make something that represents Auckland City from past to present.

If Auckland Museum needs some guidance or inspiration, they should take a look at the Wellington City & Sea museum for how to show a city’s history.