This article was first published on RNZ.
A world class museum on Canterbury’s picturesque Banks Peninsula will mark 50 years of hosting the South Island’s biggest and longest-running Waitangi Day commemorations on 6 February.
The Okains Bay Māori and Colonial Museum has one of the most significant historical collections in the country.
The museum and annual event were the brainchild of the museum’s founder Murray Thacker, whose passion for preservation formed the foundation of the vast 20,000-object collection of Māori and colonial artefacts, from waka to wagons, taonga puoro (traditional Māori instruments), kitchenalia, a blacksmiths forge and hei tiki.
The first Waitangi Day commemoration was held at the museum site in 1976 when an open day raised funds to finish the buildings, with the museum officially opened a year later on Waitangi Day 1977.
Manager Nigel Intemann said it was difficult to explain the significance of the Okains Bay collection to first-time visitors.
“You can imagine going to a metropolitan museum, you’re going to expect a really amazing collection, but to visit a small town like Okains Bay with so few residents, to come across such an extraordinary collection of national significance, it’s just amazing,” he said.
Intemann did not know the museum existed until he moved to the bay in 2020.
“Of course my first trip out here, I wondered why I’d never been here, then coming through the museum and absolutely realising that every New Zealander should make this journey,” he said.
The annual Waitangi event has traditionally been co-hosted with iwi, including a formal powhiri, kapa haka and hangi.
During the 1980s and early 1990s when the Ngāi Tahu claim was before the Waitangi Tribunal, the commemorations were an important platform for the iwi.
Since the late 90s, the iwi began alternating hui at each of the papatipu marae closest to the sites where rangatira signed Te Tiriti at Ōnuku, Te Rau Aroha and Ōtākou marae.
Ngāi Tahu and mana whenua Te Rūnanga o Koukourarata still play intrinsic roles in the museum and the commemorations but during years they are unavailable to co-host, such as 2026, the event becomes a family fun day without a powhiri or hangi.
The first event raised money for the whare taonga roof and was run as a fundraiser over many decades. In recent years, in line with tikanga, it has become a free event.
Intemann said fundraising was always front of mind, despite the day’s popularity and the museum’s national and international significance.
“Funding is one of the hardest aspects, especially in terms of paying bills. People like projects, they love to give you money for a new project, but if you keep building projects, you keep building costs in. Finding the money that keeps the lights on, that keeps the rates paid, is a continual effort,” he said.
On 6 February, blacksmiths fire up the forge, the three-tonne waka Kōtukumairangi is paddled up the Ōpara Stream and competitions including the famous tug o’ war are held in the museum courtyard.
The waka will not be launched this year because of an early high tide but will be on display in the whare waka.
Nor will there be one of the event’s highly sought after hangi in 2026, which feed 500 to 750 people.
However, a 150-year-old colonial oven will pump out hundreds of buns, sausages will be sizzled and stalls sell everything from kai moana to local cheese and wine.
The museum began as Thacker’s private collection, as the great grandson of some of the earliest Pākehā settlers in Okains Bay.
Board chair and Te Runanga o Ngāi Tahu representative Helen Brown said Thacker was drawn to history from an early age, collecting his first toki (adze) pounamu at the age of 9.
He would go on to amass a vast collection of taonga, from the prestigious - such as hei tiki and taiaha - to the less coveted mahinga kai (food gathering) equipment, which has seen the museum possess one of the best collections in the world of objects like nets, hinkai (eel traps) and kō digging sticks.
Brown said Thacker forged important relationships with Ngāi Tahu and Mātāwaka leaders from Ōtautahi (Christchurch) and Te Pataka o Rakaihautū (Banks Peninsula), who had a role in establishing the museum and discussed hosting an annual Waitangi commemoration.
“The Ngāi Tahu rangatira who supported the Waitangi Day commemorations at Okains Bay in those early years were very keen on the opportunity to educate people about Te Tiriti. There was always this idea of education and both tangata whenua and tangata tiriti coming together that was integral to Murray’s vision and was wholeheartedly supported by tangata whenua at the time,” she said.
While the first official Waitangi Day commemoration was held at the treaty grounds in 1934, 6 February did not become a public holiday until 1973 when the name was changed to New Zealand Day.
The Waitangi Day Act 1976 restored the former name, the same year Thacker held the first commemoration at Okains Bay.
Brown said the small museum punched above its weight.
“We care for three collections recognised as being of national significance. The jewel in the crown is the taonga Māori collection, there’s also a really significant antique arms collection and a collection of European boats,” she said.
Plans were underway to redevelop parts of the museum buildings, which were no longer fit for purpose, to protect its precious displays, and a fundraising campaign would be launched in the lead up to the museum’s 50th anniversary on Waitangi Day in 2027.
Visitor host Raukohe Hallett (Ngāti Hine, Tūwharetoa, Ngāti Kahungunu) said the opportunity to show visitors so many historical objects and tell the stories of the people who used them helped to bring the past alive.
Museum patron Nigel Hampton KC, who has been involved with the museum almost from its inception, described the Waitangi Day atmosphere as jubilant.
He said Thacker was ahead of his time in recognising the importance of commemorating beyond the treaty grounds.
“He saw individual events should be held up and down the country and started a trend to have that occur 50 years ago, before the museum was even properly created,” he said.
The museum’s collection of taonga Māori was “up to or beyond the standard of the country’s major metropolitan museums”.
“One of the outstanding things is that so much of the collection is on display, available to be seen and to be explained, and it’s the conversations - and I meant this quite sincerely - you as the viewer can have with the exhibits. They’ve got to commune with you and you with them and you get a much better understanding of the culture that lies behind and in those taonga,” he said.
“As a pākeha, you come to have a better understanding of the people that were here before our predecessors arrived.”
Continued support for the museum was vital, Hampton said.
“It seems extraordinary doesn’t it, that a small valley - not somewhere you pass through and stop but that has to be a destination - that such a place can have such a museum, such a treasure for all New Zealand. We must retain it,” he said.
By Keiller MacDuff of RNZ.
