Part of Waitomo Caves Museum and Discovery Centre’s palaeofaunal collection: a subfossil bat skeleton excavated from a cave floor deposit in the 1980s.
Visitors to New Zealand’s only speleological museum are being invited to go deeper into the social and natural history of the district’s caves through a $220,000 refresh.
Waitomo Caves Museum and Discovery Centre director Bridget Mosley started reviewing the attraction in Waitomo Caves Village shortly after her appointment in 2019 and developing a plan to add more context around the exploration and study of caves.
Then the Covid-19 pandemic hit, international visitors stopped, and the museum had to lay off eight staff.
“International people are 86 per cent of our visitors,” she said.
But Mosley continued with her research, rebuilt her team after the pandemic and the museum celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2023.
“We have had a bit of thinking time.”
Mosley has been in deep thought around the context the museum and discovery centre provides for learning, local perspectives and the tens of thousands of visitors arriving at the small King Country community every year.
Mosley is brimming with fun facts about the district, such as the time Waitomo set up its own postal system, built a flying fox from the hotel to the pub, invented blackwater rafting and used carrier pigeons to fly memory cards with photos back to base for digital processing before tourists arrived back from their adventures.
“Things like that will give a lot more ideas to visitors about our community,” she said.
“We have skeletons of extinct birds and animals on display, but we do not have the context of how and why they are in the museum.
Provenance of the finds will be highlighted with the installation of a shaft of light to help visitors get the feeling of being underground and appreciate that these animals had been found after falling down a tomo.
“We will be doing something similar with our stalactites and stalagmites collection, just to remind people that they are formed by dripping water. The water carries minerals and environmental information from the past.”
The parallels between Kaitiakitanga and the monitoring of carbon dioxide levels in the cave system will be explored and between the Māori god of earthquakes and volcanoes Rūaumoko and tectonic plate movements.
While work is already underway, the charitable trust that runs the museum and discovery centre hopes to raise $220,000 to see it to completion.
The centre’s 43-seat movie theatre is used by mostly North Island school groups to learn about the caves and the conservation work of Ōtorohanga Kiwi House and Native Bird Park.
