Ageing facility places New Zealand’s oldest museum $20 million collection at risk

While Nelson Provincial Museum's main building is located in the city centre, the museum's associated Isel Park facility in Stoke holds the vast majority of the collection.

According to the museum’s Chief Executive, Lucinda Jimson, the $20 million collection is at risk unless its ageing research facility is replaced soon.

The Isel Park facility is home to an extensive range of historical archives as well as collections of taonga, photographs, social history, textiles, art and natural history specimens.

Jimson told 1News "It's significantly at risk and once history is gone, it's gone, it's irreplaceable. These things cannot be replaced. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to save this collection.”

Jimson highlighted that the building wasn't even fit for purpose when it was made in the 1970s and over recent years, the conditions have significantly deteriorated with leakage, mould, asbestos and also being earthquake prone. In some parts of the building there is no temperature control.

Work has been underway for years to replace the facility but now it's "crunch time". A new $15 million building has been designed with construction due to start this year.

However, as reported in 1News, even with funding from local councils, the museum falls short of the millions of dollars required and it's hoped the Ministry for Culture and Heritage will provide assistance.

Jimson added "It will enable us to actually care for the collections properly. It will enable our staff to have decent working spaces and making the collection accessible to people."

The museum's collections leader Shae Trewin notes the collection is of huge national and even international importance and shared "We have over 300,000 objects. We have over 1.2 million photographs in the collection. We have a massive manuscript and archive collection and a really, really significant taonga collection.

"We have already preselected a lot of our vulnerable objects - mainly artworks - and we are just going to relocate them to a different space.”

Staff at the museum hope the rest of the collection will find a new home too in the not too distant future.