The Rotorua Museum Te Whare Taonga o Te Arawa is a

local museum A local museum or local history museum is a type of museum that shows the historical development of a place/region (local history) using exhibits. These museums usually maintain a collection of historic three-dimensional objects which are exh ...

and

art gallery An art gallery is a room or a building in which visual art is displayed. In Western cultures from the mid-15th century, a gallery was any long, narrow covered passage along a wall, first used in the sense of a place for art in the 1590s. The lon ...

in the

Government Gardens The Government Gardens is a Urban park, public park, partly laid out as gardens, located beside Lake Rotorua in central Rotorua, Bay of Plenty, North Island, New Zealand. It was built by the government as a tourism attraction, and is still a maj ...

near the centre of

Rotorua Rotorua () is a city in the Bay of Plenty region of New Zealand's North Island. The city lies on the southern shores of Lake Rotorua, from which it takes its name. It is the seat of the Rotorua Lakes District, a territorial authority encompass ...

, New Zealand. The museum is housed in the former Bath House building which was opened in 1908 and is noted as the first major investment in the New Zealand tourism industry by the government. The Bath House is a

half-timbered Timber framing (german: Holzfachwerk) and "post-and-beam" construction are traditional methods of building with heavy timbers, creating structures using squared-off and carefully fitted and joined timbers with joints secured by large wooden ...

building that has been called the most impressive Elizabethan Revival building in New Zealand. The museum is currently closed as of 18 November 2016 due to not meeting stringent New Zealand earthquake standards and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Rotorua Museum opened in the south wing of the Bath House in 1969; Rotorua Art Gallery opened in the north wing in 1977. In 1988, the museum and gallery combined to form the Rotorua Museum of Art and History.About Us
Rotorua Museum, New Zealand. The museum is run by the

Rotorua District Council Rotorua Lakes District or Rotorua District is a territorial authority district in the North Island of New Zealand. It has one urban area of significant size, the city of Rotorua. The district is governed by Rotorua Lakes Council, which is headq ...

. It has collections covering

fine arts In European academic traditions, fine art is developed primarily for aesthetics or creative expression, distinguishing it from decorative art or applied art, which also has to serve some practical function, such as pottery or most metalwork ...

photography Photography is the art, application, and practice of creating durable images by recording light, either electronically by means of an image sensor, or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film. It is employed ...

social history Social history, often called the new social history, is a field of history that looks at the lived experience of the past. In its "golden age" it was a major growth field in the 1960s and 1970s among scholars, and still is well represented in his ...

, and

Taonga ''Taonga'' or ''taoka'' (in South Island Māori) is a Maori-language word that refers to a treasured possession in Māori culture. It lacks a direct translation into English, making its use in the Treaty of Waitangi significant. The current d ...

objects from the

Māori culture Māori culture () is the customs, cultural practices, and beliefs of the indigenous Māori people of New Zealand. It originated from, and is still part of, Polynesians, Eastern Polynesian culture. Māori culture forms a distinctive part of Cul ...

Geothermal bathing in Rotorua

Early

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 ...

in the area the

iwi Iwi () are the largest social units in New Zealand Māori society. In Māori roughly means "people" or "nation", and is often translated as "tribe", or "a confederation of tribes". The word is both singular and plural in the Māori language, an ...

Te Arawa Te Arawa is a confederation of Māori iwi and hapu (tribes and sub-tribes) of New Zealand who trace their ancestry to the Arawa migration canoe (''waka'').croquet Croquet ( or ; french: croquet) is a sport that involves hitting wooden or plastic balls with a mallet through hoops (often called "wickets" in the United States) embedded in a grass playing court. Its international governing body is the Wor ...

lawn in front.

References

External links

Official Rotorua Museum website
{{authority control Museums established in 1988 Local museums in New Zealand Art museums and galleries in New Zealand City museums in New Zealand Museum of Art and History Former public baths 1988 establishments in New Zealand Museums in the Bay of Plenty Region Terminating vistas in New Zealand 1900s architecture in New Zealand NZHPT Category I listings in the Bay of Plenty Region Tourist attractions in Rotorua

Geothermal bathing in Rotorua

References

Further reading

External links