Devonport Museum

Devonport Museum
by Celia Walker

The fruiterer’s delivery bike with its giant cargo basket suddenly takes on a low-carbon urbanist slant in this climate aware time; painted shop windows speak of pre-mall slow shopping experiences; a huge rounded slab section of a kauri trunk that graced the white tiled interior of a butcher’s shop in Calliope Rd for a short part of its life (or really death) quietly tells an even darker history of environmental loss.

These shifting relevancies are what make such museum objects important and worth saving, not their novelty value or vintage charm. The uniqueness of the Devonport Museum comes largely from the particular interests of individual volunteers who have built up the collections, this gives the museum as a whole that eclectic character that is missing from the polish and gloss of larger institutions. There is the canny local signwriter who rescued many discarded gems of historical signage; the retired architect whose perfectionist scale models of Bean Rock Lighthouse and the old steam ferry the Takapuna effectively straddle the worlds of old-school boyhood tinkering and professional 3D modelling; the inveterate collector and auction hunter whose careful accumulations and documentation of photographs and ephemera have led to an irreplaceable archive of local history.

The decidedly analogue experience of a visit can be a bit of a low-tech nostalgia trip, but the research into the connections, lives and transitions of a community makes it much more than just an assemblage of ‘old stuff’.

Image Credits: Celia Walker