Lizzie Marvelly
‘I don’t want to stuff it up for my people’
“I also think nothing worth doing is easy . . . but in a few years, people will hopefully be able to see the realisation of the vision.”
Marvelly said her focus had been on gearing up to relaunching the museum, which was expected to be another two to three years away.
“The building being closed does pose challenges for us, but it’s also an opportunity because . . . we have both the time and space to focus on exhibition redevelopment and do some quite exciting, challenging, groundbreaking things.
“In the next 12 months we will be going out and listening to the community to get an understanding of the stories our people want to be told, the experiences they want to have, and more importantly, the way they want to feel when they walk into the whare taonga, how they want the moko and tamariki to feel, similarly how they want their ko¯eke [elders] to feel.
“We want to make sure that we layer our storytelling in such a way that it’s accessible and interesting to all members of the wha¯nau.
“On average, only about 1 per cent of the collections in any institution are on display. There are things in the pa¯taka that have never been on display and there are so many opportunities in this redevelopment to really look at the stories we are telling, the themes we’re focusing on, the visitor experience and how we link all of our various stories together.”
Marvelly said she and her team also had aspirations for how the museum would reopen to the public.
“There’s a lot of discussion around decolonisation in institutions and from our perspective, it’s more about wanting to build a meaningful, longlasting partnership with Te Arawa.
“That concept has been applied to varying degrees of success around the country and, for us, it’s really about doing things in a proudly Te Arawa way.
“Being mana whenua myself, I feel a huge amount of excitement about this opportunity, but also a great deal of responsibility because we are the kaitiaki of these taonga.”
Alongside hui and community outreach, Marvelly said engagement would be ramping up in the next six to 12 months as well, with plans to take some taonga out to the community.
“It’ll be a process in itself, and requires a lot of consideration around the protection of the particular objects but it’s something that the team is really passionate about doing.”
Other offerings the museum team is looking at developing are tours at the off-site offices so the public can see the collections.
“When you don’t have a publicfacing building, you need to look at all the opportunities to create access and experiences for people and I hope that doesn’t end when we’re back in the building because there are so many incredible things we can do outside of the walls.
“One aspiration . . . an outdoor children’s exhibition that’s playbased, where they’re learning about the stories of this place while also running, jumping, screaming, laughing, just being children.
“There are so many amazing things that we could do that the question really has to be, rather than why but why not?”