In 1876 the 23-year-old Auckland Museum moved into its fourth home and first purpose-built premises, at 2 Princes Street, on the corner of Eden Crescent and the top of Shortland Street. The occasion, marked by an opening exhibition and a two-week long programme of events, was something of a multimedia extravaganza, the likes of which had not previously been seen in that city—or perhaps even elsewhere in the colony.
Prior to its official opening the New Zealand Herald suggested that the new museum would, more than any other to date, mark the Auckland province's progress in ‘the development of thought and culture’. It would represent another step in the transplanting of ‘civilisation’ to this distant outpost of the Empire which, 30 years ago, was said to be known to the people of England only through accounts of ‘the savagery of its aboriginal owners’.1 It was also a time when items of Māori material culture were commonly referred to as ‘curiosities’.
In 1876 the estimated population of Auckland borough was 12,156.2 The city (proclaimed in 1871) possessed neither a public library nor a public art gallery and, until they were established, the Auckland Museum assumed some of the duties of those institutions. There had been a library in Auckland since 1842, but only for members of the local Mechanics’ Institute, and while it was later taken over by the City Council it would not open to the public until September 1880. The Auckland Institute, a regional branch of the Royal Society of New Zealand, was founded in 1867, and the following year it assumed management of the Auckland Museum. At the formal opening of the museum, on 5 June 1876, Mr Justice Gillies, president of the Auckland Institute, expressed the hope that it would develop a free public library and museum ‘equal to anything in the South’, thereby acknowledging the current superiority of such amenities elsewhere in the colony.3
A few months earlier the previous president, businessman Josiah Clifton Firth, suggested that members of the Auckland Institute should not limit their interests to ‘strict science’. Instead, they should consider such other Firth's vision of a more expansive attitude appeared to be accepted with the announcement that the opening event in the new museum building would be ’A Grand Industrial, Artistic and Scientific Exhibition’. The temporary loan of exhibits was now ‘earnestly solicited’, and the Society of Artists obliged by promising a ‘Black and White’ display by members. A section of the building was permanently fitted as a picture gallery, and for the opening event it was hoped that citizens would also loan works by ‘foreign and colonial artists’.
