Preserving the past: Making the most of our history.
A new series of Heritage Rescue focuses on making New Zealand’s 600 museums more appealing to the social media generation.
As co-presenter of Britain’s popular Time Team television series, Kiwi archaeologist Brigid Gallagher spent years unearthing ancient artefacts in Britain.
Nowadays she is back in her native New Zealand helping some of the country’s 600 museums entice people through their doors.
The Choice TV series Heritage Rescue follows Gallagher and her team as they travel the country helping museums change to meet the needs of a generation that wants its information in sound bites or social media tweets.
“People have a much higher expectation than once upon a time,” Gallagher says. “Their attention span has reduced. In the past, people would go in and read screeds and screeds and screeds but now they are after snapshot images and quick-to-read signs. They want to go in there, explore the information, go, ‘Yeah I got that’ and then leave.”
Despite initial wariness, Heritage Rescue has become a hit with both museums and viewers.
“In the first year, people were suspicious going, ‘What is this?’ but by the second year it was more people coming and saying, ‘Hey, can you come and look at our museum?’,” Gallagher says.
“What we also found after the first series was that there were groups of people who were going around New Zealand on self-guided museum tours to the places that we had been to. I think that was a really fantastic outcome.”
In each episode, Gallagher and the Heritage Rescue team tackle a museum or historic site in need of help, reinvigorating the sites and buildings and fine-tuning the operations. Over five days, together with local management and volunteers, the team makes over the museum, creating new exhibits and refining displays, and discovering fascinating stories behind artefacts.
This season they lend their expertise to a museum with one of the country’s foremost collections of M ori taonga in the small farming community of Okains Bay on the
Banks Peninsula, the Ardmore Aviation Museum, which has a little-known but amazing collection of vintage and replica planes dating from World War I, and the country’s oldest jail, Napier Prison.
However, for Gallagher the story is more about the people associated with the museums’ collections than the artefacts.
“We have 600 museums in the country and probably 500 of those will have very similar objects in them,” Gallagher says. “The heart of all the episodes is about people and what I discovered over time is that really it doesn’t matter who you talk to, if you just sit down with them, everyone’s got one or two stories in them.
“After filming finished on each episode, I went away exhausted, feeling like I’d taken on some of the wider spirit of the people I’d interviewed and spoken to, but coming away feeling really good about the human race.”
This season’s premiere episode embodies that. Not only does the team go a step further than usual and build a new museum, that museum is in a car wreckers’ yard (Horopito Motors) from the classic Kiwi films Smash Palace and Goodbye Pork
Pie.
The owner, Colin, along with his wife, Barb, made a promise more than 20 years ago to her father to create a museum using Colin’s collection of vintage cars and car parts, many of which haven’t seen the light of day for more than 70 years.
“There was no end of content,” Gallagher says. “The story of the husband and wife was just beautiful. His relationship with her parents and the promise he made to get the museum up and running was just like a dream come true for us. It was amazing to go in there and learn about the movies that have been set there.
“It was just absolutely fabulous to be part of that, but really the underpinning story of that place was the people themselves and their commitment to staying there, their commitment to cars and car parts, the friends – the people who dropped in during that week we were there – just the loyalty.
“It epitomised the Kiwi ideology which is we are here for you, we’re here to help our neighbours, help anyone else to get on the road, running off in the middle of the night to help people who have broken down on the Central Plateau. The whole thing was a feel-good Kiwi story.”