Petone Settlers Museum is a local history museum located in the Wellington Provincial Centennial Memorial, a historic building in

Petone Petone (Māori: ''Pito-one''), a large suburb of Lower Hutt, Wellington, stands at the southern end of the Hutt Valley, on the northern shore of Wellington Harbour. The Māori name means "end of the sand beach". Europeans first settled in Pe ...

Lower Hutt Lower Hutt ( mi, Te Awa Kairangi ki Tai) is a city in the Wellington Region of New Zealand. Administered by the Hutt City Council, it is one of the four cities that constitute the Wellington metropolitan area. It is New Zealand's sixth most p ...

, New Zealand. The building was originally constructed to mark the Wellington province's centennial commemorations; the museum opened in the building in 1977. The building was extensively refurbished in 2016. The building is classified as a Category 1 historic building by

Heritage New Zealand Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga (initially the National Historic Places Trust and then, from 1963 to 2014, the New Zealand Historic Places Trust) ( mi, Pouhere Taonga) is a Crown entity with a membership of around 20,000 people that advocate ...

The site

The Wellington Centennial Provincial Memorial building is located on the Petone (originally 'Pito-one', or 'end of the sandy beach') foreshore and memorialises the site where local

Māori Māori or Maori can refer to: Relating to the Māori people * Māori people of New Zealand, or members of that group * Māori language, the language of the Māori people of New Zealand * Māori culture * Cook Islanders, the Māori people of the C ...

welcomed the first ship carrying organised British settlers to Wellington on 22 January 1840. The positioning of the building is approximate, rather than precise. Local Te Ati Awa chiefs including Te Puni and Te Wharepōuri sold tracts of land around the Wellington harbour to the

New Zealand Company The New Zealand Company, chartered in the United Kingdom, was a company that existed in the first half of the 19th century on a business model focused on the systematic colonisation of New Zealand. The company was formed to carry out the principl ...

to provide land for settlement. The original settlement was built near Te Puni's pa in Petone.

The building

Beginning in the mid 1930s, New Zealand's Labour-led government planned for the centennial celebrations to mark the 100th anniversary of the signing of the

Treaty of Waitangi The Treaty of Waitangi ( mi, Te Tiriti o Waitangi) is a document of central importance to the history, to the political constitution of the state, and to the national mythos of New Zealand. It has played a major role in the treatment of the M ...

. While the

New Zealand Centennial Exhibition The New Zealand Centennial Exhibition took place over six months from Wednesday 8 November 1939 until 4 May 1940. It celebrated one hundred years since the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 and the subsequent mass European settlement of ...

in the Wellington suburb of

Rongotai Rongotai is a suburb of Wellington, New Zealand, located southeast of the city centre. It is on the Rongotai isthmus, between the Miramar Peninsula and the suburbs of Kilbirnie and Lyall Bay. It is known mostly for being the location of the We ...

was the main centennial event, funds were made available for provincial memorials and events, including the construction of the Wellington Provincial Centennial Memorial on the Petone foreshore. A national competition was held to find the final design of the building, and the Wellington architect William Gray Young adjudicated. The winner was Auckland-based architect Horace Lovell Massey (1895–1979). Massey was awarded the

NZIA Gold Medal The New Zealand Institute of Architects Gold Medal is an award presented annually by the Te Kāhui Whaihanga New Zealand Institute of Architects (NZIA) to a New Zealand architect. History From 1927 until 1977 a gold, silver or bronze prize wa ...

for this design. Historian Gavin McLean describes the building as 'Wellington's provincial memorial but in many ways ''the'' New Zealand monument to pioneer endeavour' and 'an enduring celebration of pioneering'. The architecture of the memorial combines

Stripped Classical Stripped Classicism (or "Starved Classicism" or "Grecian Moderne") Jstor is primarily a 20th-century Classical architecture, classicist architectural style stripped of most or all Ornament (art), ornamentation, frequently employed by governmen ...

and

Art Deco Art Deco, short for the French ''Arts Décoratifs'', and sometimes just called Deco, is a style of visual arts, architecture, and product design, that first appeared in France in the 1910s (just before World War I), and flourished in the Unite ...

motifs. A central Hall of Memories is flanked by two rooms originally designed as male and female changing rooms for the building's additional original purpose as a bathing pavilion. The building's primary features are a large sand-blasted glass window and a stone replica of the prow of the ship ''Aurora'' (the first of the New Zealand Company settler ships to arrive in Wellington) at the base of the window facing the street. On 18 December 1938, Ivor Te Puni, a descendant of chief Te Puni, wrote a letter to the Prime Minister requesting he also remember the Māori people who "gave" one hundred years ago. The result of this letter was the depiction of Te Puni on the stained glass window extending his hand in welcome to the new settlers, represented by a suit-clad man and a woman carrying a child. The memorial was officially opened on 22 January 1940 in a ceremony led by Prime Minister

Peter Fraser Peter Fraser (; 28 August 1884 – 12 December 1950) was a New Zealand politician who served as the 24th prime minister of New Zealand from 27 March 1940 until 13 December 1949. Considered a major figure in the history of the New Zealand Lab ...

and Governor-General Lord Galway.

Petone Settlers Museum

Discharge from a major

abattoir A slaughterhouse, also called abattoir (), is a facility where animals are slaughtered to provide food. Slaughterhouses supply meat, which then becomes the responsibility of a packaging facility. Slaughterhouses that produce meat that is no ...

on the Petone foreshore, the Gear Meat Factory, made swimming at Petone beach unpopular and the bathing pavilions fell into disrepair. In 1977 the western bathing pavilion was converted to the Petone Settlers Museum; two years later the museum extended into the eastern bathing pavilion. Today the museum is a repository of information and objects relating to the history of Māori and Pakeha settlement in the surrounding area, as well as the social, cultural, sporting and industrial history of Petone. In 2016 the museum underwent a major refurbishment to both the exterior and interior. The $250,000 refurbishment sought to bring back the original look and feel of the building. Features such as decorative concrete grills have been re-instated and the building restored to its original colour. The original beach-front opening at the rear of the building was reglazed, and coloured paint that had been applied to the ship prow and bas-relief sculptures on the building's exterior was replaced with a cream shade, returning them to their original monochromatic state. While the project took place, contractors discovered the original tiled foot baths that swimmers had to walk through to get to changing rooms. The museum reopened on 29 May 2016 with a family open day celebrating the refurbishment. $75,000 was also spent refreshing the exhibition spaces inside. Petone Settlers Museum stain glass window

Petone Settlers Museum stain glass window

References

External links

Petone Settlers Museum website
{{Authority control NZHPT Category I listings in the Wellington Region 1930s architecture in New Zealand Monuments and memorials in New Zealand Museums in Lower Hutt History museums in New Zealand 1940 establishments in New Zealand Local museums in New Zealand Wellington Region Lower Hutt History of Wellington 1977 establishments in New Zealand