Mōkau Museum to close till September

Collections of photos, machinery and curios at Mōkau Museum and Gallery are about to become temporarily unavailable for public viewing.

The popular stop-off point for traffic plying SH3 will close for building work at the end of this month, the renovations having been designed to transform the building frontage, create safe access for the elderly and disabled, and repair a leaky roof.

The work is expected to take up to four months, volunteer coordinator and museum committee member Kath Jennings said.

Kath said it was a shame the doors had to be closed during building work to the front of the building. The museum staff could still work in the office space within the building but couldn’t open to the public while construction was underway.

“Behind the scenes we will carry on and there will be plenty of projects underway. So, when we do open up we will have some nice new exhibits to see. We’ll have things changed around a bit and make it look nice, fresh and new.”

“In a facility like Mōkau Museum, which has a substantial collection, you never seem to get the opportunity to do all the cataloguing, curating and organising you would like to.

“Somebody could be working on something but [concurrently] there always needs to be somebody else manning the front desk to deal with the public. Otherwise, you are just running from one thing to another.”

The museum’s volunteer coordinator Jennifer Topless said the difference made by the building project would be huge, representing a vast improvement in attractiveness and accessibility.

The present steep steps worried her when she saw old people with walking sticks trying to negotiate them. And the facility had endured a roof leaking problem for quite a while, which was something a museum with precious exbibits could not live with.

The volunteers are a talented team drawn from across the region, most of them with a past connection to Mōkau. As well as folk from Mōkau, Awakino and Tongapōrutu, some of the volunteers live as far away as Uruti and Waitara.

Jennifer is always looking for additional volunteers, who can either work mornings or afternoons.

They all enjoy meeting and interacting with the travelling public.

“People from all over the country and all over the world come in here and we’ve been seeing an increase in numbers which is great.

“We are open seven days a week so it would be nice if we could have two volunteers on each day, but I feel like I am being greedy now,” she said.

“If we can improve the accessibility, we can promote the museum to the rest homes in New Plymouth. It would be such a nice outing for them; they could come out for a day visit to the museum and stay for a whitebait lunch

“It is a shame that the doors are going to be closed but we are talking wintertime mainly and visitor numbers drop off then anyway.

“The volunteers will carry on behind the scenes. We’ve got stuff in storage which we have not looked at for a long time and we have to go through it.”