Everything you could think of under one roof

OPINION: They say they're struggling to keep up the food to almost a hundred tuatara sunning themselves in their specially built pad at the Southland Museum and Art Gallery, and now the call's out for our 1950s-style furniture in order to create a nostalgic half-century back- home interior, writes Pat Veltkamp Smith in this week's And Another Thing.

We could help by digging out huhu grubs and maybe re-styling the sitting room, but what else?

Museum manager Gael Ramsay says it is space the museum needs, space to store stuff and show stuff, and storage and viewing places that are accessible to staff and public.

So what's hidden away, up and under that pyramid roof?

Everything, just everything.

Access is restricted – little lift; can't think how all that stuff got there – and there's the biggest collection of things you'd find.

It beats anything you've seen, the biggest-ever day at Todd's, a fundraising weekend of blokes' sheds tours, although at first sight it is quite like a huge blokey shed but a closer look shows how Ms Ramsay has managed during past months to get stuff shifted and kinda catalogued so that in far corners of the great sweeping-down pyramid roof are precious pieces of art and carefully curated clothing from the past – fragile and beautiful.

And then there's heaps of stuff such as early communications devices, which are everything from flags to morse codes, truly ancient wee typewriters, early telephones, later teleprinters.

Old cookers heated with coal and gas, once reticulated through the city, so lights and heaters and lantern fuelled that way, too.

And like downstairs – skeletons and skulls and stuffed birds, a one-legged moa too.

Masses of stuff we have never seen, of course, tucked away safely up there, a giant attic of acquisitions of art and artefacts, pieces given by Southlanders during the years, into safekeeping, intended for future viewing.

But it is just not accessible, although what a treat to be allowed to walk around the crowded space and picture from whence it came and when and perhaps why, since much is of very real value and would have represented big coin even in its day.

Southlanders of the past have been generous and it shows.

Guess it is just a shame so little of it can be shown now.

» Pat Veltkamp Smith was Southland Times women's editor until 1997 and is a former president of the Southland Justices of the Peace Association.

- © Fairfax NZ News

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