The Mammoth Move 2022–2023

If you think shifting house is complicated, try moving a Museum!

In 2022, Museum staff began the monumental task of packing and moving 2.3 million collection objects out of Rolleston Avenue to off-site temporary storage in Hornby. Everything and everyone had to be out of the building by the end of April 2023 so that demolition work could start.

The first Crown removals truck left Rolleston Avenue in September 2022. From October, the Museum galleries were progressively closed so that the exhibitions could be dismantled and the objects packed.

The Museum as we knew it closed in early January 2023, reopening a few weeks later with SHIFT, an urban art takeover of the empty building by more than 60 creatives from across Aotearoa New Zealand and around the world.

We finally closed the building at the end of April and the demolition contractor moved in.

In July 2023, we opened a pop-up Museum at 66 Gloucester Street in the central city. Here we are hosting temporary exhibitions, alongside displays of Museum collection highlights and visitor favourites, until our return to Rolleston Avenue.

The mammoth move included relocating two 500-litre stainless steel tanks filled with fish preserved in 800 litres of IPA, a class 3 flammable liquid.

The stainless-steel tanks were really heavy. They couldn’t be lifted, and to make things trickier, they didn't fit in the Museum lift horizontally, so they had to be emptied for the move. A chemical transfer operator had to decant the IPA into a large number of 20-litre containers.

Handling specimens was another kettle of fish (or in this case, a tank of fish). Museum staff had to kit up in personal protective equipment, including Tyvek suits, respirators, gloves, gumboots and eye protection.

The fish were carefully placed into a large, sealed plastic container. Muslin cloth was used to protect them from abrasion and to stop them from rubbing against each other. Some of the large fish were heavy, slippery and delicate, making them difficult to carry by hand. We acquired an emergency response sling (usually used for people injured outdoors and needing to be carried to safety) to move these fish from the tank to the container.

In Hornby, the empty tanks were placed into a new purpose-built dangerous goods store, the fish container was opened, and the specimens, one by one, were placed back into the stainless steel tanks.

This part of their journey is now at an end; the fish are docked in a temporary port for the next few years, awaiting their return voyage to the redeveloped Museum.

Some of the really big objects in the collection were among the last to leave the building.

The taxidermied Asian elephant was particularly challenging to extract from the attic. Earthquake strengthening in the 1990s trapped it inside, too large to move through the only doors to the space. Expert taxidermists had to cut it into pallet-sized pieces so that it could be moved out through the storeroom doors.

A hole was cut in the side wall of a storeroom to remove the skull and two jawbones of the Museum’s Ōkārito blue whale. The 1.5-tonne skull and jawbones, which together weigh almost a tonne, were moved through the wall onto a small roof area and craned down to a waiting truck in the Botanic Gardens.

A large window in the Museum’s Level 3 Visitor Lounge was removed so that a crane could lift out other whopper-sized taonga (treasures) into the Botanic Gardens.

The giant rotating globe, which had hung in the Museum since 1975, was among the objects wheeled out onto a scaffolding platform so that they could be craned out, as was the Tucker Sno-Cat Able that, as part of the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition (1955–1958), was among the first vehicles to cross Antarctica.

Sir Edmund Hillary’s modified Ferguson tractor, part of the same expedition, was also removed, along with Ivan Mauger’s gold bike, a taxidermied rhinoceros and several slightly smaller objects from the Antarctic Gallery.