Final installation work began on Sunday 11th for the Raglan Museum’s major new exhibition, Te Horea – the Bird Family Collection. Dean Cato from Design Strategies and Andrew from Anderson Design are working with Lynette Williams and Museum Society volunteers on installing interpretation panels and the artefacts.
The official opening is on Saturday 17th October at 10am. The Museum Society Raglan Whaingaroa has invited the community and says everybody is welcome. There will be free entry to the Museum for the morning.
The Bird Family Collection of Maori artefacts is from Horea, the north head of Raglan (Whaingaroa) Harbour. Horea was a desirable place to live. Large numbers of people lived there in kainga (villages) over the centuries. Some of the sites are amongst the earliest known for the west coast between Manukau Harbour and Mokau dating back to before 1250 when moas were last seen in the area.
Keith Bird farmed Horea from the mid-1940s. Keith and his family collected the taonga (treasured artefacts) from the property. The collection is significant in being one of the largest collected in New Zealand by one family from a small localised area. In 2012 the Bird family deposited the collection of over 2000 items in Raglan Museum as a long-term loan.