EXPERIENCE

Our museum experience starts with a 15 minute film about Māori lore, characters and stories of integration between Māori and European settlers.​

Life like displays showcase local Māori traditions such as tool making and harvesting, whaling history, early European settlers way of life and industries such as logging and farming, Chinese mining history.

Our display covering  war stories from ANZAC and Passchendaele is temporarily closed while we undertake cataloging, but can be accessed upon request and will be open during ANZAC weekend.

We also have a Discovery Depot, which has a focus on the geology of the area, and gives you the opportunity to use our microscope and access to our library of geology resources.

Temporary display

​Our Cabinet of Curiosities is a temporary display designed to fire up your imagination! We challenge you come take a look and use it as inspiration to create some art, poetry or fictional writing. We invite you to share your creation with us through social media, or dropping it off for us to put on display!

Project ark

We currently have a team of people here who are researching, cataloging, photographing and re-packing more than 3,000 artefacts and 4,000 photos in our collection. It will take roughly 2 years to complete.
These are being made available to see on www.ehive.com  - check it out!
This project has been made possible thanks to Lottery Environment and Hertiage Fund, Southland District, Invercargill and Gore District Councils (through Southland Regional Heritage Committee). 
We will remain open during this time. 

Shop

Our retail space features locally produced gifts and souvenirs.  

We also have a wide range of books, from unique heritage books to childrens books.

For more information about our beautiful town and planning your visit click here to go to our information page.