A Thousand Years of Stories
They say a journey takes a thousand steps … ours took about 1000 years!!!
And so our journey has now been laid out in a new exhibition installed at the Mercury Bay Museum in Whitianga, named ‘Shaping Te Whanganui o Hei – People, Place & Time’.
It has been a labour of love for the museum team. We started in October last year with a discussion about creating a timeline and a space on the main floor of the Museum for our people to be more visible and help tell our local stories – a space that will take the visitor through time to learn and interact with people, events and places that have shaped our area since 950 AD and the arrival of Kupe.
The information and research for this space has taken immense work by the team as we worked our way through many different resources to come up with ALL (or a majority) of the events that have shaped, impacted and moved our area into the modern era.
Our timeline follows the historical events through Kupe, to Hei and other early navigators to our pristine shores, then to 1769 and Captain James Cook and the crew of the HMB Endeavour. We then move through the 1800s, and this is when our townships were really solidified into our history. Our more recent history includes war, those campaigns that were held on distant shores but impacted our people and history more than is realised. On we travel to a more modern time that includes that famous America’s Cup win for Mercury Bay and the impacts of Covid-19.
We complete our journey in a more recent time. In fact, at the devastating time where the weather and a ‘cyclone that will not be named’ impacted not only our communities, but communities in the wider North Island.
This new space is the museum’s first foray into the digital world – with touch screen interactives that take you to the heart of our people – their families. The families that we have displayed on our wall are first generation and today we still connect with them, be it through place names, street names, fond memories or through family members that remain here in our community.
The information must come with a disclaimer though – the information is only as good as the source it was from, and we know some of our sources may be questionable. But the technology allows us to change and update as we confirm the data.
Pulling all our family history together into one place and focusing just on the first generation took us on a journey too. I am sure most of the team now feel that these families are a huge part of our own lives, and we feel we know them more intimately now. Working through the lists of names, births, deaths and marriages, there quite quickly appeared to be links to other families within the wider district. This then meant a slight change in the way we display those links for our visitors to get a true measure of our community – lights will be used in the space to connect our whānau members. Maybe not on the first-generation level, but further down the family tree we can see their connections to each other. A strong community growing more and more with a solid foundation.
We look forward to having our visitors interact and join us on a journey as we follow the whakataukī – Titiro whakamuri, Kokiri whakamua – Look back and reflect so you can move forward.
The new exhibition is open from 1 July 2024.
Words by Becs Cox – Mercury Bay Museum manager.
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