Tūhura Otago Museum

The name "Otago Museum" was first used by James Hector to describe his geological collections on display at the 1865 New Zealand Exhibition, held in Dunedin.[2] Some of these collections were the nucleus of the Otago Museum, which first opened to the public on 12 September 1868.[3][4] The museum was originally located in the Dunedin Exchange building on Princes Street. As the collection began to grow, it soon became clear that a larger, purpose-built site was required; the foundation was laid at the current Great King Street site in December 1874. In August 1877, the new building was opened and remains a part of the museum today. The original entrance to the museum, with its Oamaru stone Doric-style pillars, is still visible on Great King Street, though the main entrance is now from the Museum Reserve.

Interior of Otago Museum, between 1883 and 1886, by Burton Brothers studio, featuring a fin whale skeleton (mounted 1883) and a spirit collection of fish and reptiles.

Management of the museum passed to the University of Otago in 1877.[2] This arrangement lasted until 1955 when a new governance structure was established by the passing of the Otago Museum Trust Board Act.[5]

With well over 100 years’ history on the current site, the museum building is classified by the Historic Places Trust as a Category 1 historic place.[6]

The first substantial addition to the original Museum building on the Great King Street site was the Hocken Wing, which opened in 1910, housing Dr Thomas Hocken's collection of manuscripts. This collection now forms the basis of the Hocken Collections. Another new wing, named for benefactor Willi Fels was opened in 1930 and today houses the People of the World and Tangata Whenua galleries. A further expansion of the museum occurred in 1963 when the Centennial Wing was opened to provide additional display space. With all of these separate developments, the museum had grown to several times its original floor area, resulting in a complex layout of multiple internally connected wings.

A multi-stage redevelopment project in the 1990s and 2000s largely resolved this, with the addition of architect Ted McCoy's spectacular integrating central Atrium. The collection storage area was also redeveloped with specialised shelving and environmentally controlled storerooms. The redevelopment project reached a milestone in 2002 when the Southern Land, Southern People gallery was opened by Sir Edmund Hillary, along with the governor general (then Dame Silvia Cartwright) and prime minister (then Helen Clark).

The Exchange Building, original home of the Otago Museum

The museum's interactive science centre, Discovery World, opened In 1991. During the redevelopment it was moved from its original ground floor location to the first floor. The Tropical Forest, an immersive butterfly rainforest environment featuring the flora and fauna of the tropics, opened as a major addition to the science centre in 2007. Discovery World Tropical Forest has become an important visitor attraction in its own right. A planetarium was a further addition to the science centre in 2015. During 2017 the science centre was further redeveloped, and opened in December of that year as the 'Tūhura Otago Community Trust Science Centre'.[7]

2013 saw the opening of a redeveloped historic bluestone building on the Museum Reserve, which serves as an exhibition space and additional Museum venue. The building, now named the H. D. Skinner Annex after museum director Harry Skinner, was formerly a post office.[8]

The skeleton of an eastern moa (Emeus crassus) compared to an ostrich and Fiordland crested penguin in the Otago Museum.

Largely due to generous benefactors and judicious acquisition strategies, the Otago Museum has one of the most significant museum collections in New Zealand.

Many of the museum's key benefactors were part of the same eminent Dunedin family. Among them, German-born businessman Willi Fels had an especially long and impactful relationship with the museum. Fels contributed many items personally, as well as establishing a purchasing fund, facilitating acquisitions made by others, and encouraging others to pass on valuable items to the museum. He also coordinated the fundraising efforts for the construction of the wing ultimately named in his honour.[9]

In natural science, the museum's holdings in insect and type specimens are internationally significant, with the spider collections including specimens from the wider Pacific area as well as a representative collection of arachnids from around the world. Marine invertebrate specimens number in the 40,000s, while 30,000 bird specimens (including nests and eggs) are held. The moa collection is among the world's best, with two out of the three complete moa eggs in the world held, the Ettrick Egg and the First Earnscleugh Egg.[10]

In the humanities, the collection has strengths in both everyday and art items from all over Micronesia, Melanesia, Polynesia and Australia, as well as an extensive collection of Māori taoka. From the rest of the world, the broad ethnographic collections include particularly significant collections of edged weapons and armour from India, ancient coins from the classical world, Islamic ceramics, and Ashanti goldweights. The museum also has some 150 cuneiform tablets and inscriptions in its collection, the largest known collection of its type in the southern hemisphere.[11] Wide-ranging collections of pottery, jewellery, costume, glassware, clocks, furniture, stamps, guns, cameras, and stone tools are also held.

In 1981, Queen Elizabeth II was shot at while arriving onto the Otago Museum Reserve during a royal visit. The shooter, 17 year old Christopher John Lewis, had shot from the window of a nearby building, but missed the Queen. He escaped, but was taken into police custody eight days later, and would later reveal the BSA .22 bolt action rifle used, along with its spent cartridge, in a toilet on the fifth floor of the nearby Adams Building.[12]

Otago Museum has seven long-term galleries:

• Southern Land, Southern People: geological and natural history of Otago; natural resources as used by the people of the south; a plesiosaur fossil, considered to be New Zealand's largest fossil specimen, is a feature exhibit.
• Tangata Whenua: Māori taoka (treasures/artefacts), with a focus on Southern Māori.
• The Nature gallery: natural science specimens and stories from Otago, including an historic moa diorama.
• Animal Attic: a Victorian-inspired zoological gallery, with nearly 3,000 historical specimens, including the Lawrence lions, a male and female lion which escaped from a travelling circus in the town of Lawrence in 1978.[24]
• People of the World: humanities artefacts from all over the world, including an ancient Egyptian mummy.
• Pacific Cultures: masks, tools, weapons and more from the islands and cultures of Polynesia and Melanesia.
• The Maritime gallery: maritime history of Otago and New Zealand with over 50 model ships and an historic fin whale skeleton.

Alongside the galleries, another long-term offering is:

• Tūhura Otago Community Trust Science Centre, the museum's interactive science centre. The centre has two distinct sections: the first explores science (primarily physics and technology) through interactive exhibits; the second is an immersive rainforest experience. Known as the Tropical Forest, it houses hundreds of exotic, live butterflies, as well as other tropical flora and fauna, in a three-level environment with a six-metre waterfall.

The museum's large Special Exhibitions Gallery on Level 1 is its primary display area for temporary exhibitions on wide-ranging themes. Temporary exhibitions are also displayed in other parts of the museum, including the Atrium end of the People of the World gallery. Some exhibitions are developed in-house, while others tour from elsewhere in New Zealand or the world. Associations and partnerships with international museums have brought world class exhibitions to Otago, and seen Otago Museum exhibitions reach wide audiences. For example, the Shanghai Museum sent The Emperor’s Dragons to Otago Museum in 2008; with dragon motifs as its theme, the exhibition included ancient artefacts never previously seen outside of China. As an exchange exhibition, Otago Museum sent Te Ao Māori: Māori Treasures from the Otago Museum, New Zealand to Shanghai in 2011. It was the first exhibition of Māori artefacts in a Chinese museum. Te Ao Māori was visited by over 600,000 people.[25]