The hugely popular Te Papa exhibit Gallipoli: The Scale of Our War will stay open until 2032, after opening a decade ago.
“It’s been unimaginably popular,” Te Papa chief executive Courtney Johnston said.
“I think the most popular exhibition ever done in New Zealand… has introduced audiences to a new kind of immersive storytelling.
“It’s so popular and there’s a reason for that. People just love it.”
The exhibit opened in 2015, 100 years after New Zealand soldiers landed at Gallipoli as part of the ANZAC forces in World War I.
It was originally planned to close in 2019 before it was extended to 2022, then 2025.
The latest extension will see the exhibition set to run for 17 years before the planned 2032 closure.
“I don’t think anyone did anticipate how much it would resonate with people and I think it’s because it’s about more than just a specific moment in history,” Johnston said.
“It’s this empathy and connection with the harsh realities of war and the resilience of people.
“That’s a story that keeps on being relevant and people so powerfully respond to it through this particular display.”
So far, there’s been more more than 4.7 million visits to the free exhibition to the end of last year, and 2 million red paper poppies have been left by visitors at the end of the exhibit. The average visit time is 59 minutes.
Wētā Workshop crafted the eight New Zealanders who are captured in a moment in time from the eight-month campaign, looming over visitors as 2.4 times life-size figures.
“We are incredibly thankful knowing that the exhibition is being extended, so that future visitors to Te Papa will continue to gain a deeper understanding of this critical moment in New Zealand’s history, and so that young Kiwis who served in this campaign are never forgotten,” Wētā Workshop co-founder Richard Taylor said in a media release.
Love and heartbreak
A new addition will be added to the exhibition next month, covering the story of Greymouth woman Dorothy Broad. Her fiancé, Thomas Wyville Leonard Rutherfurd, never came home from the war, dying from illness after fighting at Gallipoli.
“It’s incredible when you think of having someone you really love, you’re engaged to, and they survive Gallipoli… so just the relief of that, and then he went to Somme… and then finally, all the soldiers are starting to come home…” his great niece Marianne Abraham said.
“It’s just near the end of 1918 and Wyville was in Persia and he died with pneumonia so I can’t imagine Dorothy’s heartbreak.”
Abraham said the lovers were in their mid-twenties when Rutherfurd died.
Broad wanted to keep his memory with her so she made Rutherfurd’s uniform insignia and a button into hat pins, which she wore as a tribute to her love. Her sister Frances’ fiancé Mackenzie Gibson was killed during the campaign, and the women supported each other in their grief and never married.
“Both Dorothy and her sister always, they wore their engagement rings all their lives,” Abraham said.
Rutherfurd’s uniform jacket cuff was returned to family after he died and a photo of a doll Broad made – which she referred to as Rutherfurd while he was at war – will also be displayed.
One of the original curators of the exhibit, Stephanie Gibson, said the donation of Broad’s pieces by the family allows the museum to show the wider impact of World War I.
“We were really hoping to tell more women’s stories and more stories about the home front because the exhibition is really tightly focused on the Gallipoli campaign and invasion,” Gibson said.
She said visitors will be able to relate to how objects can hold so much emotion.
“People will have similar keepsakes from their own lives that help them remember special people and I think it’s a common journey.
“We all grieve, but these stories tell a specific story about a specific moment in time and she stands in for the thousands of people who suffered bereavement.”
The exhibit will close from late July for eight weeks so technology upgrades can take place.
