Army museum has expansion plans

The national army museum in Waiouru is gunning for more visitors.

The opening shot in its new campaign is the creation of a multimillion-dollar building over the moat, linking the Kippenberger pavilion with the rest of the museum and offering a new entranceway.

Work is hoped to be finished by the end of June.

It will house a large exhibition gallery as well as a first for Waiouru, a councilrun i-site, and an expanded retail gift shop.

Marketing manager Nicola Bennett said the idea was for the museum to display a wider range of exhibitions, such as the touring Anne Frank exhibition, expected in New Zealand within a couple of years, and an army art exhibition.

Bennett said the museum also had numerous artefacts in storage, like a large vehicle collection.

But finding somewhere to show off the likes of tanks, armoured personnel carriers, recovery trucks, Land Rovers and artillery pieces is no easy task. There is no shortage of ‘‘big boy’s toys’’ left over from the various wars in which New Zealand fought, it seems.

With 150,000-plus people a year passing through its portals at last count, the museum is keen to brainstorm how it can offer more to the public.

Bennett said raising the money for the new building had been a work in progress for years.

Currently, it is running two major exhibitions – one about the role of food in World War I – everyone knows an army marches on its stomach, and a photographic display plus a model of what the New Zealand tunnellers got up to in Arras, France, 100 years ago.

Bennett said inclusion of an i-site in the latest development at the museum ‘‘made sense’’ given the big number of inquiries it fielded from visitors passing through and the Ruapehu District Council’s desire to set up an i-site in Ruapehu’s southern gateway.