The Treaty House

The new home for the Treaty of Waitangi is pretty cool. The nation’s founding document is now inside a wooden room like a giant waka huia, the carved box traditionally used for taonga (treasures). And the treasure chest lies opposite the great entrance space of the National Library.

This is a proper place for the Treaty, and it is much better than its old posse down the road in National Archives. The room that held it there resembled nothing so much as a bank vault, and you had to walk down a bureaucrats’ corridor to find it. That was not the proper way to keep the country’s greatest treasure.

Outside the new Treaty room – which also contains the 1835 Declaration of Independence by Maori tribes, and the 1893 Women’s Suffrage petition – there are modern and, yes, interactive gadgets to help visitors understand the documents kept in dim light inside.

He Tohu (the sign) is aimed first at the young, as it should be. The hope is that every young person will visit the exhibition at least once in their school years, and so they should.

Curious kids will see, for instance, that the Treaty has been gnawed by rats during its decades of neglect. So the Treaty document is an emblem both of our colonial failings and, in its new setting, of a rediscovered sense of national honour. Go and see it as soon as you can.