Nine delightfully weird museums to factor into your summer roadtrip

Whether you're into creepy dolls, steampunks, gem stones or outer space, Aotearoa has a plethora of small quirky museums and some passionate people curating them. Julie Hill selects her top nine.

Tripping around the country over the summer break, many of you will be after the simple stuff: sun, sand and surf. But what if you’re the kind of holidaymaker who wants to see relics from our insane asylums, learn about outer space or find out why a load of Bohemian settlers washed up in Pūhoi?

You’re in luck, because Aotearoa is chocka-block with the most obscure museums imaginable, many founded when somebody’s partner demanded they move their crap out of the lounge.

For your pleasure, and in no particular order, are nine of the best.

It’s creepy and it’s kooky, mysterious and spooky, it’s the Dunedin Museum of Natural Mystery run by Bruce Mahalski in three rooms plus a hallway of his own home.

Psychology grad Mahalski is interested in the “fine line between madness and badness”. Among his relics from Seacliff Lunatic Asylum is a painting by inmate Lionel Terry, “who murdered a Chinese man in Wellington to promote his zenophobic book”.

There are paranormal items too, like an artwork allegedly damaged by a poltergeist at Wellington’s Inverlochy Art School. “I’ve got bits of bits of stone work, bricks and slate from some of the most haunted buildings in the world, like Borley Rectory, Aleister Crowley’s house Boleskin Manor and the house where Gef the Talking Mongoose lived on the Isle of Man.”

There are scary dolls, propaganda posters, sculptures made from bones. And Mahalaski is currently on the hunt for remnants of corporal punishment. “When I was a kid, teachers used to wander around carrying canes. Some people may see it as disturbing but we’ve got to remember this stuff so we don’t go down these paths again.”

The Dunedin Museum of Natural Mystery, 61 Royal Terrace, Central Dunedin, is open Fridays 12pm to 5pm; Saturday and Sunday 10am to 5pm.

The world’s only lesbian museum used to languish in Auckland’s ’burbs but last year found its rightful home, just off queer-friendly Karangahape Road. It’s purple, of course, with a rainbow flag, and offers a fascinating insight into our sapphic history.

Lesbianism was considered a mental illness in New Zealand until 1973, and early lesbian clubs like KG Club, Lasso and Footsteps were regularly raided by the cops. But no one could stop them from putting pen to paper, and museum co-ordinator Sarah Buxton shows me a few examples of the “unusually high” volume of lesbian and feminist publications produced here, from The Circle, established in 1972, to modern zines.

Other specimens include founder Dr Miriam Saphira’s epic 80s badge collection, replicas of ancient goddess artefacts and the instantly iconic Chlöe Swarbrick “Woke Lesbo” t-shirt made by Karangahape Road store Crushes.

Buxton says its new location is a great spot to attract passersby, tourists, students – and fans of women’s soccer. “Last year for the Women’s World Cup, a lot of lesbians travelled from America and Europe to watch the games and they came in and visited, which was cool.”

The Charlotte Museum, 1A Howe Street, Freemans Bay, Auckland, is open Wednesday to Friday, 10am to 4pm; Saturday 11am to 4pm.

If you love things that go ding dong and tick tock, please enjoy the 1700 charming and bonkers timepieces crammed onto every wall and surface of this Northland museum. It turns out we’ve been keeping time for ages, and you can see it all here: from an ancient Egyptian sundial to a 1990s Garfield-themed alarm clock.

Team leader Suzy Barlow’s favourites are the hand-carved German cuckoo clocks. She tells me about Whangārei identity Archie Clapham, a posh and sporty “character” who washed up from Yorkshire at the beginning of the 20th century with hundreds of clocks and music boxes he’d collected since he was a kid.

For decades, Clapham would invite strangers around to his farmhouse for tennis and a gander at his timepieces, which included some funky creations of his own: a frying pan clock and with one with googly eyes that follow you around the room.

At 80, Clapham sold it all for a song to the Council, and the museum’s been marking time since 1962.

Claphams National Clock Museum, Dent Street, Quayside, Town Basin, Whangārei, is open every day 9am to 4.30pm.

First off, yes, artist and proprietor Blair Somerville is considering changing the name of his museum, possibly to his nickname for it, Temple of Tinkering. That’s partly because the connotations have become potentially offensive to some, but also because he’s no longer lost, having found true love with a Dutch illustrator named Sandra van der Sommen who he's just married.

Perched on the rugged southern coastline, this spot is a wonderland of automata, aka weird and wonderful gadgets and gizmos you can bring to life by pushing a button or winding a handle. Climb aboard an old Leyland house bus to discover quirky kinetic toys, musical instruments, animals and birds Somerville has whipped up using found and recycled materials.

If you’re brave, complete your tour in the Theatre of Winding Thoughts (R13). You’ll also be needing a coffee and Belgian biscuit from Carol’s yellow caravan.

Somerfield shows me his latest creation, a paper pīwakawaka kitset. He’s also working on a skeleton of a moa. Or is he? “It’s actually a horse but it looks a bit like a moa. You open its beak and it goes bawaaaa!”

The Lost Gypsy, Papatowai Highway, Papatowai is open every day but Wednesday from 10am to 5pm.

If you’re hoping to find out about anti-establishment types wearing long scarves and drinking absinthe, you won’t do it here at Pūhoi’s Bohemian Museum, because that’s a different kind of bohemian. What you will find is the tale of some German-speaking, bagpipe-playing settlers lured to New Zealand with exaggerated promises.

In the 1860s, when the government was merrily doling out free farmland to Europeans, 83 Bohemians washed up in the tiny settlement just north of Auckland and, to cut a long story short, it wasn’t what they expected. But with the help of local Māori and something called a potato plough, they persevered.

Jenny Schollum is married to a Bohemian descendant. As a newcomer in town half a century ago, she met a lady known as the Queen of Pūhoi, who passed on all the old yarns in exchange for some games of 500. She’s been running the museum since the 1980s and was this year awarded a Queen’s Service Medal for her services to the community and heritage preservation.

The Bohemian Museum, 77 Puhoi Road, Puhoi, is open daily from 12pm to 3pm.

Finally, a museum where you can touch all the things. As you enter, guides Gerda Gorgner and Kim Whitaker will ask if you play the piano. If so, you’re allowed a tinkle on the ivories.

Lloyd Whittaker (no relation) was a self-taught multi-instrumentalist who grew up in a shack in the Taranaki bush. He and his wife Joan started collecting rare instruments in the 1980s. Their first find was an “Egyptian” piano, complete with golden sphinx details, made in Liverpool in 1880. It was gathering dust in a Te Awamutu garage, and there are only a few of them in the world.

Whitaker says that after the Gold Rush of the 1850s, there was a mania for musicals and opera, and hundreds of pianos washed up in New Zealand. Exhibits include a Steinway grand which doubled as an ornamental table, a piano built to withstand the rolling of a sailing ship and a nine-foot grand owned by the celebrity Polish pianist (and later prime minister) Ignacy Paderewski.

There’s also a dulcimer, a psaltery, clavichords, harpsichords, reed organs, piano accordions, harmoniums, pianolas, a transposing piano and a piano that’s also an organ. The museum offers monthly concerts and talks, some of them free.

Waiheke Musical Museum, 2 Korora Road, Oneroa, Waiheke Island, is open Friday, Saturday and Sunday, 10.30am to 1.30pm, entry by koha.

When a bunch of Oamaruvians launched a museum to pay tribute to the “retro-futuristic sci-fi” art of steampunk, manager Jan Kennedy says they had no idea if it would take off. Thirteen years later, the once humble farming town is now the world’s official steampunk capital.

Kennedy defines steampunk as “how Victorian people would have imagined their future without electricity and if it was still run by steam-powered machinery”. Steampunkers get to dress up and choose names, like Agatha Cavendish, say, or Hugo Winchester. “People love it. It’s an escape from reality.”

She says Oamaru, with its Victorian architecture built during its brief heyday as a major trading port, forms the perfect backdrop.

Steampunk HQ has a portal that takes you to a different time dimension, a Gadgetorium full of fantastical creatures and machines, a pipe organ, a canon and a train carriage with a film playing inside, much of it recycled from pieces donated by Weta Workshop.

“It’s a fantasy world but one that’s tangible,” Kennedy says.

Steampunk HK, 1 Humber Street, Oamaru, is open every day 10am to 4pm.

Are you a stone stan? A pebble person? Birdlings Flat is a teeny weeny coastal settlement on Banks Peninsula with a beach so rocky, my car barely made it out of the carpark. It’s also a paradise for gemhounds, who can be spotted prowling for agate, greywacke, quartz and jasper.

Vince Burke has been scouring for treasures since he was a little kid, and now has 10,000 exhibits to show for it. We’re talking stones, fossils, sea creatures, a petrified log he reckons has been preserved in agate for 65 million years, plus side-collections of combs, foreign money, bottles and lighters.

Twenty years ago, Burke’s wife Colleen decided it was high time Vince shifted his rocks all out of the lounge, and the Gemstone and Fossils Museum was born. Now, at 85, Burke is looking to sell the whole damn lot, either in its entirety or as individual pieces. Get in touch if you have a spare $650,000.

Gemstones and Fossils Museum, 67 Hillview Rd, Birdlings Flat, is open daily from 9.30am to 5pm.

Sure, Te Awamutu can claim Tim and Neil Finn, but you can also find out about a little thing called the universe at this facility run by the intriguing local identity “Space Dave”.

Become a total space cadet as Dave Owen shows off what he believes is New Zealand’s biggest collection of objects from the US and Russian space stations, and takes you on a virtual journey into the cosmos. Kids can play games, earn badges, get their astronaut wings, even learn how to land a space craft. Best of all, there are spacesuits for everyone.

Before discovering outer space, Owen worked as a nurse, then a musician, then in TV production. He’s prepared to guarantee that even if, for some reason, visitors aren’t obsessed with space, “there’s enough to keep them occupied for a couple of hours”.

Te Awamutu Space Centre, 5 Whitmore Street, Kihikihi. Email Dave at info@thespacecentre.nz to plan a visit.