Eclectic sample of our rural heritage
UNLESS you visit at the weekend, you’ll need to summon a member of the West Otago Vintage Club to let you into its complex of museum sheds in Tapanui.
But that might just turn out to your advantage, as only then can you be certain of a personalised tour, allowing you a glimpse into the seemingly boundless expertise of some of its longstanding guardians.
And be assured there’s plenty to take in within its hushed confines.
Encompassing more than 1800 objects, from buttons to steam engines; 4500 photographs; and more than 1300 library and family archive items, the challenge is not what to look at, but what not to look at.
With such a rich and highly localised archive — cataloguing and illustrating first hand the postEuropean history of West Otago through a range of farming, sawmilling and domestic ephemera — naturally the museum attracts oncelocal, now remote families seeking clues to their collective past.
However, there’s something for everyone to discover here, and each corner reveals fresh fuel for the imagination, building a story held in common by much of New Zealand’s rural heartland.
Interestingly, Charlie Davis himself could be considered something of a museum curio.
The final remaining founding member of what is New Zealand’s secondoldest vintage club (founded 1958), the softly spoken, vastly knowledgeable local makes time fly with his humorously spun yarns on almost any object you’d care to pick out.
A floursifter becomes a ‘‘mousepoo remover’’, and tractors ‘‘squaredance performers’’ under his original gaze, and his love of the unusual and obscure quickly becomes evident.
One of 130 active and ‘‘less active’’ club members, Mr Davis says visitors will find any of those who volunteer at the museum have their own particular passions, and are usually happy to while away an hour or two.
So delve deep in West Otago this summer: you might depart the wiser.