Taranaki Aviation Transport and Technology Museum – Part 1

It was second time lucky with our visit to this museum – we called around yesterday to find it closed.  The philosophy of TATATM is “to preserve the past for the future”.  And they have done this very well, with all sorts of artefacts housed in an array of buildings over the grounds.

This way to the museum

After paying our very reasonable $7 entry fee, we made our way to the agriculture and logging shed.  There were several large drays on display, both horse drawn and one huge dray formerly pulled by oxen.

Large dray pulled by a team of oxen

Huge chaff cutter

Robin was rather taken with the large collection of chain saws.

Next stop was the printing area, and there were several enthusiastic former printers there who happily got some of the machines up and running. 

The printing press has been around for several hundreds of years, virtually unchanged.  In the early days of printing they were constructed in timber, which changed to  heavy steel centuries later like this green beauty.

Printing press

Robin starting working at the Post Office as a young cadet, and stayed there for 30 years until the business philosophy changed and he was made redundant -  and I worked at Post Office Headquarters for 10 years myself.  So the Post Office section was quite interesting to us both.  In it’s hey-day the Post Office employed a huge number of staff, in many and varied professions, from posties, to linesmen, engineers and mechanics.  The company ran very successful apprenticeship schemes turning out well trained tradesmen.  All that changed when the Post Office was split into three companies and heavy redundancies followed.

Early telephone exchange

The first telephone exchanges in New Zealand were opened in Christchurch and Auckland in 1881, with Dunedin and Wellington following soon after.  Automatic equipment was used from 1913, supplementing the manual exchanges.  In the mid 1920s over 120,000 telephones were in use.  Today New Zealand has one of the highest number of telephones on a population basis, behind the USA and Sweden.