As I type this, Tūhura Otago Museum’s chair is swimming the Cook Strait.

Not metaphorically.

Actually.

Twenty-odd kilometres of cold, tide-ripped water between the North and South Islands, raising money so the museum can install a sprinkler system.

Not a planetarium.
Not a glamorous new gallery. Sprinklers.

The sort of thing most public buildings quietly assume — like toilets or electricity.

You’d think protecting a nationally significant collection of irreplaceable taoka, specimens and archives might count as basic infrastructure. Something funded before anyone has to don their togs and dodge jellyfish.

And yet, here we are.

It would be comic if it weren’t so revealing.

Across New Zealand, museums are performing similar contortions. Quietly. Politely. Heroically.

Eighteen months ago, my own museum reduced its senior staff simply to stay solvent. Te Papa is restructuring. Auckland Museum is tightening its belt. Canterbury Museum is still wrestling with a funding shortfall for its rebuild.

These are the flagships. If they’re bailing water, you can imagine what’s happening in the wider arts and culture sector.

From the outside, none of this is obvious. Museums look busy. The cafés hum. School groups pour through the doors. Cruise passengers treat us as must-see stops. Researchers use our collections as if they were a free public utility.

Which, in a sense, we are.

But utilities still need to be paid for.

Most large museums now generate close to half their operating income from commercial sources — retail, events, sponsorships, and venue hire. We host weddings and quiz nights to conserve fossils and catalogue taoka Māori. Part museum, part small business, part charity.

At the same time, public support has quietly thinned.

The national fund for museum capital projects has gone.
Education funding is on hold.
Curious Minds — one of the most effective STEM programmes we ever had — disappeared.

None of these were luxuries.

They were the plumbing.

What makes it stranger is that cities happily invest hundreds of millions in convention centres and stadiums to attract visitors — and fair enough. They do bring people in.

But many of those visitors come because a city has substance. Because it has museums, galleries, and stories. Because there’s somewhere to go on a wet Tuesday afternoon, that explains where they are.

We’re not the icing.

We’re the reason the cake exists.

And then there’s the maths.

Tūhura Otago Museum holds a nationally important collection — used by researchers, schools and visitors from across the country — yet we’re funded largely by local rates. Dunedin’s rating base is about 100,000 people.

That’s a small town being asked to care for a national taonga.

It’s a bit like asking Dunedin ratepayers to run a national service on a local budget.

Sooner or later, the numbers simply don’t stack up.

So what might we do differently?

Treat museums like infrastructure. If they underpin tourism, fund them as part of the tourism system, not as optional culture.

Create national mechanisms to support nationally significant collections, rather than leaving small cities to shoulder the burden alone.

And if we’re welcoming wealthy investors through residence visas, perhaps we ask them to contribute materially to the civic life of the country they’re joining — museums, libraries, science centres. Not charity. Contribution.

Because museums aren’t “nice to have”.

They’re memory banks. Classrooms. Research labs. Insurance policies for our collective story.

Once collections are lost, they’re gone. You can’t rebuild a century of scholarship or replace a taonga handed down through generations.

Museums don’t fail dramatically. They just slowly wither. Fewer conservators. Shorter hours. Darker galleries.

Until one day, the place feels smaller than you remember.

Like a library after the books have gone.

So yes — this week our chair set out to swim the Cook Strait for sprinklers.

The Strait had other ideas. Headwinds and heavy seas forced him back short of the South Island.

Which, if I’m honest, feels like a metaphor for museum funding.

You train. You plan. You do everything right.
And still the tide runs against you.

But I can’t help thinking that in a sensible country, protecting its history shouldn’t require anyone — not even the chair — to train like a marathon swimmer just to stop it burning down.

If you’d like to support David’s swim, there’s a Givealittle page here:
https://givealittle.co.nz/cause/help-raise-funds-for-tuhura-fire-sprinklers

Every so often, the universe sends a slight surprise by email.

On 2 November 2016, a message arrived at Tūhura Otago Museum with the subject line: “Oldest telescope in New Zealand.” It came from Dr William Tobin, a retired astronomy professor living in Vannes, France.

Tobin explained that he was preparing a review for Southern Stars, the journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of New Zealand. His piece concerned the Wolf Collection, a trove of historic telescopes held in the United States. To illustrate the reach of 18th-century craftsmanship, he had been tracing the surviving instruments made by James Short (1710 – 1768), the Scottish optician whose exquisitely polished mirrors set a new standard for astronomical observation.

At that point, Tobin believed the oldest telescope in the country was the Short reflector on display at Wellington’s Space Place – a handsome instrument from 1758 that had once belonged to broadcaster Peter Read. “I had been assuming,” he wrote, “that one or other of the Wellington or Te Papa telescopes was the oldest in New Zealand.”

Then came the twist.

“Error! It looks like the Otago Museum holds an older telescope – another Short, dating from 1736 and the time when he was still in Edinburgh.”

While checking an academic catalogue, Tobin had stumbled across a brief reference to a telescope marked 1736 41/91 – a code showing it was built by Short in Edinburgh, before his move to London. If the instrument survived, it would be the oldest known telescope in Aotearoa, New Zealand.

At the time, none of us at the Museum knew such an object was in our stores. I forwarded the message to our collections team and thought little more of it – until, a few days later, a large cardboard box appeared in my office. Across the top, in faded felt-tip, someone had written “Very old telescope.”

I couldn’t stop laughing when this box arrived on my desk…..

Inside lay a disassembled Gregorian reflector: a set of brass tubes, a focus rod, and a mirror that looked faintly coppery. The serial number on its casing read 41/93. I sent photographs to William, wondering if this could be the one.

Content of the box labelled “very old telescope”

He replied within hours, delighted.

“That’s great news! The Otago Short from 1736 must be a very serious candidate for being the oldest telescope in NZ.”

Over the next few weeks, our email correspondence became a kind of trans-hemispheric collaboration – me in Dunedin with the telescope on my desk, William in France, drawing graphs, scanning catalogues, using a lifetime’s knowledge to solve the mystery. He plotted Short’s production numbers to confirm the chronology and compared our serial code with others held in Scotland. His conclusion: the Otago instrument had a focal length of around nine inches, with a mirror roughly 60 millimetres across – the 93rd telescope Short ever made, and the 41st of that particular size.

Graph shared by Tobin showing where the Otago Telescope fit into the Short catalogue

He noted that ours shared features with telescopes in the National Museum of Scotland, Glasgow Museums, and the Dick Institute in Kilmarnock. Each, he said, was slightly different – “workshop” rather than “factory” production, every detail shaped by hand. And, in a typically practical aside, he offered display advice:

“If you want to put the telescope on a stand, don’t make a replica of the original. Make a pillar out of some clearly modern material – perspex, perhaps.”

That was William all over: meticulous, generous, and faintly amused by the vagaries of history.

As the telescope’s story unfolded, another name emerged – John Campbell Begg (1876 – 1965), from whose estate the instrument came to the Museum. Begg was the “Begg” of Dunedin’s Beverly Begg Observatory: a farmer, physicist, philosopher, and soldier who, after serving in France during the First World War, helped establish the observatory and donated its first telescope. His Short reflector had travelled an astonishing route – from Edinburgh in 1736 to a Southland farm, then to Dunedin’s night skies and eventually a museum storeroom – before William Tobin rediscovered it through a chance query from France.

William Tobin's Election Video

It would have been enough for most people to end their story there, but William was not most people. In 2019, at the age of 73, he stood as an independent candidate against Boris Johnson in the UK general election, campaigning for expatriate voting rights. His slogan was both logical and delightfully absurd: “Don’t vote for Tobin; let Tobin vote.” He received five votes – an outcome that would have pleased his sense of irony.

When William passed away in 2022, we lost an astronomer of rare curiosity.

Whenever I walk past that polished telescope in its display case, I think about the artisans who shaped its mirrors, the amateur astronomer who cherished it, and the retired professor who, from his desk in Brittany, helped us locate New Zealand’s oldest window on the stars.

I recently purchased a Ryobi Dump cart for my new garden in Middlemarch. A few days later I was asked to review my purchase by Bunnings. For some reason the review wasn’t listed on the website when I submitted it. So… here it is.

Some may say $300 for a small green plastic trailer is a bit excessive. Those people lack vision. When I first laid eyes on the Ryobi Ride-On Mower Utility Dump Cart at Bunnings, something deep within stirred—possibly indigestion, possibly destiny.

I knew I had to have it.

To fund this noble acquisition, I made the obvious sacrifices. First, I cancelled my child's swimming lessons. Why swim when you can haul? I explained to her that life is full of trade-offs, and this cart would one day pull firewood that might keep her warm in the winter. She cried, but I knew in time she'd understand.

Next, I sold the dining table. Meals are overrated when you can dine on the raw power of molded polyethylene and 16-inch pneumatic tyres. I now eat most of my meals seated in the dump cart, parked triumphantly in the lounge.

There was a brief moment of financial hesitation, but then a Ryobi-shaped lightbulb went off in my head. I realised my bank offers “buy now, explain to your partner later” schemes, so I clicked purchase. Three days later, it arrived. Four hours after that, I’d assembled it with only minor emotional scarring.

The dump cart is a masterpiece. It can carry things—many things. Firewood, compost, a disillusioned toddler who no longer has swimming lessons. The manual claims it hauls up to 270kg, which coincidentally is also the approximate weight of my regret during the first uphill test run. But fear not, the cart rolled smoothly and with the grace of a slightly drunk wombat.

And the dumping mechanism? Oh, the dump. So satisfying. Like peeling plastic off a new phone or finally clearing your email inbox. You lift, it tilts, gravity does the rest. I now find excuses to dump things. Leaves. Gravel. Intangible emotional baggage.

In conclusion, the Ryobi Utility Dump Cart is not just a cart. It is a lifestyle. A bold statement. A wheeled extension of your soul. Would I buy it again? Yes. Would I sell something else to do so? Absolutely. Goodbye, fridge. Hello, freedom.

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Picture a group of curious art enthusiasts strolling through the Cleveland National Art Awards at Dunedin’s Railway Station, admiring the dazzling array of paintings, sculptures and weaving. In a quiet corner, they might notice entry number 71—a small, unassuming 4-by-5-inch photograph, easily overlooked among the bolder pieces. It’s a bit blurry, showing a figure-eight shape floating above some fuzzy trees. Intrigued, they check the catalogue for number 71 and—goodness!—nearly spill their tea when they see the eye-popping price.

Here’s the story behind it.

That modest photo is an analemma, capturing the sun’s position at the same time each day for a year. Earth’s tilted axis and its slightly oval orbit mean the sun doesn’t sit in the same spot daily. Instead, it traces a graceful figure-eight in the sky, like a gentle cosmic sketch. (Though, on weekends, it often hides behind clouds, as if taking a break.)

To catch this subtle wonder, I tried my hand at a simple pinhole camera—just a basic box with a tiny hole. I placed it in my office window, and every day, at 12:30 in winter or 1:30 in summer (thanks to daylight saving’s quirks), a small dot of sunlight marked a glass plate. No fancy equipment, just a bit of physics and a lot of waiting—twelve months, to be exact.

After a year, I carefully developed the image, feeling a quiet thrill. It might be the first southern hemisphere photographic analemma, though I’m no expert. I entered it into a prestigious astronomy photography contest, hoping for a nod. It didn’t make the cut—a beautiful shot of the Moon rising behind a lighthouse shone brighter, and deservedly so.

So, I submitted it to the Cleveland Art Awards, and to my surprise, it was accepted. The art community’s eye for the unique is truly special. I worked hard in the darkroom, navigating a few chemical mishaps, to produce the final print. But there was a catch: entries had to be for sale. Sell it? This photo took a year of quiet effort. So, I set a price that reflected its long journey, hoping it would stay with me.

Is it science or art? Einstein said, “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.” I like to think it’s a bit of both—a small blend of curiosity and creativity. Unfortunately, the camera got nudged near the end (my fault, likely), so the image isn’t perfect. I’ll try again someday. That’s just how it goes with pinhole experiments.

So…. today I appeared on the RNZ radio show “Summer Times”. You can hear the interview at this link… Here

It was quite strange to do such a long-form interview; normally, I am only on for 2-3 minutes!