Saturday, March 9 - Hawera

     We had checked into a campground in Hawera the night before, and the guy working there said that we had to make sure we visited the Tawhiti Museum, which he claimed was the best museum in New Zealand. Yeah, that's what they all say. We arrived around 2:15 pm, expecting to spend at most an hour there.  Turns out, he was right.  What could have been a rather ordinary museum of old farm and mining and timber machinery as well as a cursory look at Maori history in the region was vastly enlivened by the work of Nigel Ogle, a retired school art teacher who has created hundreds of life sized figures molded from the citizens of Hawera, as well as thousands of tiny people hand carved in wax, and which tell the story of the surrounding area.

The collection of old machinery would have been cool enough.  But the
vignettes created with the resin figures were charming ...

... amusing ...

... ( he reminded me of Robin Williams) ...

... and startling in their verisimilitude to real people.

One part of the museum had a 30 foot long diorama of  an historic Maori
attack party consisting of over 800 individually carved figures about one
inch tall, each one unique.

This display showed the elaborate defense perimeters on a Maori pa

We ended up racing around the grounds trying to see everything before
the 4:30 pm closing time, including the enchanting figures from the story
The Wind in the Willows at Badger's Cafe, where we bought a delicious
Oatey custard square.  If we ever go back to NZ, this is one of the places
we'll definitely return to, and schedule a whole day to see it all.

That night I cooked up veggies and pasta, and we heard stories about sheep
shearing from our new friend Mike, who has been 'waltzing with the sheep'
for the past 44 years, since he started shearing when he was 12.