05/07/2010 Te Papa and the Weta Cave

05/07/2010 Te Papa and the Weta Cave
Today I went downtown to check out the national museum Te Papa, something that was highly recommended by many people I talked to. I ended up going to the Weta Cave first. It is a small little museum of artifacts of items built by the weta workshops folks. It also doubles as a slightly larger place to sell replicas of weta props and sculptures. It took me about 45 min each way to get there because I was going by public transport and didn’t really know where I was going. I had seen that there were half day tours of various LOTR sites around Wellington, but thought that I would just check out the cave for free (minus bus tickets, but those were essentially free too as I had a 6$ day pass and each way from the home to downtown was 3$. It turns out that with all that time the tours would probably have been a better idea.

So then I got to Te Papa and started wondering around. It is a really big museum with 6 floors of varying surface area. The second has general stuff about plate tectonics as NZ is on the intersection of several plates, which I skipped, as well as info about native plants and animals. I went to that section mainly to see a giant squid that was on display. They also had some deep sea corals that are found around NZ on display and those were neat to look at.

This squid was bycatch caught in the Antarctic by a fishing vessel with NZ flags and scientists on board as it was trying to eat a fish that they had caught. It was then gifted to Te Papa for display as the only giant squid specimen on the *surface* of the Earth. (Obviously there are more below the surface.) So it was examined by biologist and whatnot with every non invasive scan know as well as that pipe camera thing who’s name escapes me, but its outer shape was preserved. They had 4 days to examine it before it started to decompose. Now it is on display, though disappointingly it has shrunk by quite a lot. In movies of its capture it looks like it is ~4m long, but now it is only ~2m.

The fourth floor had Maori history and wood and greenstone carving on display. The carvings were neat though the history was mostly review from my course. It also had a short discussion of the treaty of Waitangi, the agreement between the British Crown and every Maori group to get along nicely. Apparently the English translation was not the same as the official Maori version and so some problems quickly emerged that are still under resolution today as the Brits ran with the English version. It seems that the main difference is the idea of sovereignty, the Maori thought they were keeping it but the Queen thought otherwise.

The fourth floor also had a modern day Maori meeting house for all the tribes of new Zealand as well pakeha (white people) and other immigrants. It was a bit strange because of the pastel lighting and stylised Maori art.

The fifth floor had european and more modern art, most of the European stuff was landscape, kind of like how Canadian art is all landscape. The modern section contained the most recent kiwi contributions to the Venice Bienally, most of which seemed to contain little of artistic merit. The worst offender was a single black rectangle maybe half a square metre that contained a very thin orange cross going through its midlines. Apparently this was supposed to convey some sort of beauty of simplicity, but I thought it was stupid. Probably the most interesting bit took up a whole room and was a curvy and segmented white canvas with orange and black splotches and lines. It looked kind of like music sheets.

The sixth floor was very small and had some pottery by a New Zealand potter. Mostly they were wheel thrown teapots, mugs and urns with a few plates thrown in. Mostly they had earthen tones. I thought they looked quite nice.

I cant remember what was on the third floor, it must have had something, but I think I must be merging it into the others.

Those floors pretty much took up the rest of my day until 430 at which point I wondered around the city for a while taking photos of the parliament buildings, which are a strange mix of architectural styles before finding a bus stop to take me home. Fortunately I had a list of bus times because the bus that took me right back to the home ended services at 6pm.