CFCA flag flying atop Waikato Museum.
Since 1974 there was a close working relationship between the Chartwell Collection, and from 1982 with the Centre for Contemporary Art (CFCA hereafter), and the Waikato Museum of Art and History Te Whare Taonga o Waikato (Waikato Museum hereafter) in Hamilton City. This relationship took on an entirely new dimension with the opening of the new Waikato Museum building in 1987 on the Victoria Street bank of the Waikato River in Hamilton.
Next to the land, long ear-marked for a new city museum the CFCA had opened to the public in 1982 as a free-entry public gallery showing contemporary New Zealand and Australian Art, housed in what had been the Hamilton Hotel, a large, ideal gallery style building owned and managed by Chartwell. The Waikato Society of Arts was next door to the CFCA, the Left Bank Theatre and Left Bank Cafe were on the Waikato River bank behind the CFCA, and the Hamilton Operatic Society was close by.
This unique cultural neighbourhood spearheaded the late 1990s explosion of cafes, restaurants and shops in the Victoria & Grantham Streets south precinct to become the new lively centre of New Zealand’s largest inland city. The Hamilton City Council had only just discarded the last vestige of ‘cowtown’; banning enormous cattle trucks roaring daily along Victoria Street, State Highway 1, the main road through the Hamilton CBD, on their way to the abattoir north of the city, spewing cattle urine and faeces over people and cars and along the city centre road.
This cultural quarter could not have come together better if it had been planned. The CFCA was a major contributor and market leader to this civic renewal and being next door to what was to be the new Waikato Museum was an astute commercial decision for the benefit of all.
The new Waikato Museum was New Zealand’s first purpose-built, interdisciplinary, multi- million dollar museum. It was the Nation’s biggest single cultural building project to date, the most structurally, and technologically sophisticated museum building in Australasia and reasonable to say, the world at the time. It was a civic achievement for the Hamilton people to be proud of. The Waikato Museum building coincidentally became the template a few years later for Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington in that Ivan Mercep ONZM and JASMaD were architects and architectural practice for both.
July 2024
Bruce M. Robinson was Director of the Waikato Museum of Art and History Te Whare Taonga o Waikato from 1984 -1995
