Visiting Te Papa Museum.

Yesterday was a lovely sunny day with almost no breeze. We decided to walk along the Wellington waterfront, past some historical cranes and cargo handling equipment, to Te Papa (the National Museum of New Zealand.

The building has five floors – each with a different theme. On the ground floor was the section with a stunning display of natural phenomena like this eagle.

Level four had a very intersting section on culture and society. A large area was devoted to the story of Maori arriving in New Zealnd and other sections showed how recent immigration after WW2 has contributed to the country.

The display that I found most facinating was the story of ANZAC – New Zealand and Australia’s involvement with the military campaign in the Dardanelles that brought both countries together. Some interesting maps showed the history of that debacle of a campaign but the most impressive things were the huge realistic statues of eight ordinary Kiwis and their experience. Each is captured frozen in a moment of time on a monumental scale – 2.4 times human size. In total, 2,779 Kiwis lost their lives on Gallipoli, and many others were scarred forever.

It’s a free exhibition with the double life-sized mannequins made by an astonishingly talented team that took over 24,000 hours to make. These figures are SO life like that I kept loooking closely just to get my head around the intricate pores on the skin, their veins and the realistic body and facial hair. It was just superb. 

As you enter the exhibition, you come face to face with this overwhelmingly large figure. My photos don’t do it justice. It’s very confronting to come face to face with this absolutely realistic figure that is much bigger than me. Lieutenant Spencer Westmacott was among the first New Zealand troops to land at Gallipoli. He was propped up on his elbow, searching through binoculars trying to see the enemy when his right arm was hit by enemy fire and badly damaged. He did not let that stop him. He just rolled onto his right side and continued to fire left-handed.

Lieutenant Colonel Percival Fenwick had served as a surgeon during the South African war 15 years earlier, but from the first grueling hours of the Gallipoli campaign, he was among the earliest New Zealand on shore. He saw many casualties with horrific and devastating injuries from shells, shrapnell, and high velocity bullets.  So many men like Private Jack Atkins, who is depicted lying before him in the exhibition, is one of the men that he and his fellow doctors were unable to save.

Private Jack Dunn was having a quiet day at Quinn’s post and was trying to get some food into his system. He was typical of the troops at Gallipoli who, on top of the ever present threat of injury or death, suffered the misery of primitive, living conditions, and poor food and were often ill with disease diseases, such as typhoid fever and dysentery.

I took this photo to show the level of detail that has been built into these figures. Note the flies on the tin of blly beef, the veins on the ear and the hairs on the leg.

It’s easy to see the scale of these 2.4 times scale figures when compared to a normal person.

Private Rikihana Carkeek was a combat engineer who guided his 16 man team up to the Apex of a ridge just below the summit of Chanuk Blair. They joined Captain Jesse Wallingford’s machine gun teams already there. They came under intense fire, but the machine gunners kept their guns going each moving forward in turn as their mates were hit.

Lottie (Charlotte) le Gallais, was a military nurse on board the hospital ship Maheno which was sent from New Zealand in July 1915 to care for, and transport, the wounded from the Galilee campaign. She hoped to meet up with her brother who had left for Galipoli in April of that year.  In July, shortly before the Maheno sailed, she wrote to him to share the news of her selection as a nurse and saying “Perhaps we will meet up”.  In November, she received her mail to find that her brother had died four months ago.

Private Cecil Malthus landed on Gallipoli on 25th of April 1915 and remained there until December when the Allied troops were withdrawn. He was one of the few members of the main body to make it through the campaign intact apart from being hospitalised several times with illness.