, Petone, Petone, Lower Hutt City

Petone Settlers Museum

Lower Hutt City Museums

The museum is also the Wellington Province Centennial Memorial. It covers Hutt Valley history with an emphasis on stories of migration and settlement to the Wellington region. The architect was H L Massey (1940).

**Celebrating the pioneering ethic
By Gavin McLean **

From the mid 1930s, the Labour government presided over elaborate plans to celebrate the centennial of the European settlement of New Zealand. The Centennial Exhibition at Rongotai, Wellington, was to be the national event but the government also subsidised many provincial memorials and events. For its provincial memorial Wellington had many suggestions, including one to build a full-scale concrete sailing ship atop Mount Victoria. Based on the clipper Taranaki, the Pioneer, as it was poignantly christened, would have been 67 metres long and would have had masts, rigging and yards. On its gunwales bronze plaques were to record the names of the pioneers and Wellington’s movers and shakers. It would be set in a courtyard garden, and on each of the steps leading up to the ship would be the name of one of the first ships.

The Pioneer’s lower deck would house a community hall, its walls lined with friezes showing the progress of Te Aro and Wellington since 1840; the upper deck would have a tea room, shop, cloak room and ‘pioneer cabaret’. Howls of derision sank the Pioneer but the sailing ship metaphor resurfaced in this building, Wellington’s provincial memorial, but in many ways the New Zealand monument to pioneer endeavour. Located on the Petone foreshore where Wakefield’s duped settlers waded ashore in 1840 to ‘Britannia’, their flood-prone raupo and canvas shantytown, Aucklander Horace Massey’s stark white memorial set in concrete is an enduring celebration of pioneering. The bow of the first migrant ship, the Aurora, thrusts triumphantly from a massive great window. Sandblasted into glass are the figures of a Maori chief welcoming a pioneer family.

The European male steps forward confidently, his mate standing behind him carrying a baby, symbolising the motherhood of New Zealand. Overhead is a cloud symbolising the original name of New Zealand, and in the offing is the ship from which the pioneers have landed. Beneath the Aurora’s bow the foundation stone acknowledges the achievement of the pioneers. On 22 January 1940, five thousand people braved atrocious weather to hear Governor General Lord Galway and Deputy Prime Minister Peter Fraser open the building and praise the pioneers. The wings flanking the central portion were bathing cubicles. But the blood and guts pumped out by the nearby Gear freezing works made dipping an ordeal in ordure and over time they fell into disrepair.

In 1977 the western portion became the Petone Settlers Museum. Two years later the eastern portion was refurbished and since then the museum has gone from strength to strength.

© 2002 Original text – Gavin McLean.

NB the Museum went through another overhaul and was relaunched in 2016

TRANSPORT Bus routes 83 and 91,The Airport Flyer, stop nearby in Jackson Street, Petone.

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