Te Papa Tongarewa

Why it matters

Te Papa Tongarewa is New Zealand's national museum, and the name is a statement of intent rather than a label: te papa tongarewa, the container of treasured things. It sits on reclaimed harbour at the eastern end of the Wellington waterfront, it is free to the country that owns it, and it is the single most visited attraction in New Zealand.

What makes it unusual is not the collection. It is that the building is trying to do something most national museums do not attempt. It holds a working marae on Level 4 — Rongomaraeroa — whose iwi is everyone who comes through the door. It holds an exhibition about the Treaty of Waitangi that presents the English and te reo Māori texts as the two different documents they are, rather than as one agreement. And it puts the natural history of the country, its migrations, its wars and its art in the same building on the understanding that they are the same subject. You can disagree with how it does that. You cannot see it done anywhere else.

The practical consequence for a visitor is that Te Papa does not reward the sweep. It is six levels of very different registers, from a colossal squid in a tank to a war memorial to a contemporary art gallery, and the common failure is to try to walk all of them and retain nothing. This page is mostly about choosing.

What it's like

From the waterfront it reads as a large grey and rust-coloured building that does not obviously look like a museum, with a wedge of it pushed out towards the water and a green hill of native planting on one side. That hill is Bush City, and it is part of the museum — you can walk out of the natural-history galleries and into a slice of the forest they describe, which is a better piece of curation than it sounds.

Inside, the first impression is of volume. The atrium runs up through the building and the levels are not stacked in a way that lets you guess what is above you, so the museum unfolds rather than announcing itself. This is the source of both its pleasure and its problem: people wander, find something extraordinary by accident, and then discover they have two hours left and four levels to go.

It is also, quietly, one of the most interesting buildings in an earthquake city. Te Papa does not sit on its foundations. It sits on 152 base isolators — a rubber-and-steel sandwich with a core of lead, set between the building and a concrete slab, with a 400-millimetre seismic gap around the base to give it room to move. In the 2016 Kaikōura earthquake the building slid fifteen to twenty millimetres and the collection was fine. Nothing on display makes a fuss about this. It is worth knowing while you stand in it.

The register changes sharply between galleries and that is deliberate. Gallipoli on Level 2 is dark, close and quiet, and people come out of it not talking. Te Taiao | Nature is bright and loud with children. Toi Art is a contemporary gallery with the manners of a contemporary gallery. Rongomaraeroa, the marae, is the one space in the building that asks something of you rather than offering something to you.

How to visit

Open every day from 10am to 6pm, except Christmas Day. There is no booking for general entry — you walk in. Paid special exhibitions and the guided tours are booked separately, and those do sell out.

On the money. Free for New Zealanders and people living in New Zealand; NZ$35 for international visitors aged 16 and over. Under-16s are not charged. If you are living in New Zealand rather than visiting, expect to be asked to demonstrate it — carry something that shows a New Zealand address rather than assuming an accent will do the work.

Getting there is a walk and should be. The museum is on Cable Street on the waterfront, rarely more than twenty minutes on foot from anywhere in the central city and about twenty from the railway station. The approach along the waterfront from Frank Kitts Park is much the nicest way in, and it is flat the whole way. Buses stop on Courtenay Place and Willis Street, a few minutes away, but in a city this compact the bus is usually the slower option.

There are self-service lockers, which matter more than they sound if you are carrying a day's luggage between a ferry and a flight, and two cafés inside, so you do not have to break the visit to eat.

A note on Gallipoli and children. Te Papa's own warning is that the exhibition “contains graphic content and realistic sound” and that “certain content may disturb some visitors”, with adults asked to supervise. That is not boilerplate. It is a war exhibition built by a film-effects workshop and it is extremely convincing.

Making the most of it

Gallipoli: The Scale of Our War, Level 2. Free with entry. Eight figures of real New Zealanders, each 2.4 times human size, made by Wētā Workshop over 24,000 hours. They are not generic soldiers: they are named people, among them the surgeon Percival Fenwick and the nurse Lottie Le Gallais, and the exhibition follows them rather than the campaign. Around them are three-dimensional maps and projections, miniatures and dioramas, a reconstruction of Malone's dugout, and an interactive Gallipoli post office. The number the exhibition is built around is 2,779 — the New Zealanders who died there. A one-hour guided tour runs at 9.30am from NZ$50, before general opening, which is the quietest the exhibition ever is.

The colossal squid. It is the largest ever captured and the story is better than the tank. In February 2007 the longliner San Aspiring was fishing for Antarctic toothfish in the Ross Sea when a colossal squid attacked a fish already on the line at 1,500 metres, and would not let go; it was hauled to the surface still attached and died on the way up. It weighed about 495 kg when it came aboard packed in ice, which Te Papa's scientists later revised to roughly 470 kg. The museum holds two more complete specimens, from 2003 and 2014, that are not on display.

Rongomaraeroa, the marae, Level 4. This is the space most visitors walk through and least understand. It is a functioning marae with a contemporary wharenui, Te Hono ki Hawaiki, and it belongs to no single iwi — its people are all New Zealanders and, by extension, everyone who enters. Take your shoes off where you are asked to, and give it more than the ninety seconds it usually gets.

Treaty of Waitangi: Signs of a Nation. The exhibition sets the English and te reo Māori texts opposite each other and lets the differences between them do the work. It is the least visually spectacular thing in the building and probably the most important, and it will explain more about New Zealand than anything else you can do in a morning.

Te Taiao | Nature, and Bush City. The natural-history galleries cover the geology, the earthquakes and the extinctions, and they open onto Bush City outside — native planting, a lagoon and a swing bridge, on the museum's own ground. It is free, it is outdoors, and it is the best thing to do with children who have run out of museum.

Mana Whenua is the museum's Māori exhibition proper, with taonga held on behalf of iwi rather than owned. Phar Lap is here too, or at least his skeleton is — the horse is split between three countries, and the argument about who he belonged to is itself a small lesson in trans-Tasman relations.

Toi Art, on the upper levels, rotates. Check what is on before you plan around it; it is the part of the museum most likely to be between exhibitions when you arrive.

Nearby

Te Papa is on the waterfront, which is the spine of central Wellington and the reason the city is so easy on foot. Turning left out of the door takes you along the harbour past Frank Kitts Park to the lagoon and the civic centre; turning right puts you at the Courtenay Place end, which is where the city eats and drinks.

The ferry to Matiu / Somes Island leaves from Queens Wharf, a fifteen-minute walk along the same waterfront, so the museum and the island make a workable single day if you take the early sailing. The Cable Car and the Botanic Garden are at the other end of the centre, uphill from Lambton Quay.

If you are working out where Wellington fits in a wider trip, our North Island in two weeks puts it in sequence, and the cost of visiting New Zealand page has the wider budget picture that a NZ$35 museum ticket sits inside.