The Auckland War Memorial Museum’s Māori and Pacific galleries could remain closed until 2029.
The museum was planning a major redevelopment for its centenary, which would revitalise much of the original 1929 building.
That redevelopment was expected to run from about 2026 to 2029, but the discovery of asbestos in May of 2025 had complicated those plans.
“The discovery happened because we started doing some scoping around what state the air conditioning systems were in, and we went up into the ceiling and that’s when they discovered the remnants of a previous removal effort in the 1980s,” museum director David Reeves said.
The majority of the museum was reopened on June 3, and more galleries were set to reopen by the end of the year, but Reeves said the original 1929 foyer and connecting Māori Court and Pacific galleries would take a lot longer to reopen.
“The Māori Court is a complex job because we’re dealing with a glass ceiling, heritage architecture and spaces which are really inaccessible and difficult to get to,” he said.
“That could be up to 12 months to remedy that, by which time we’re probably looking at when we might have had to close anyway for the centenary redevelopment. These two things have ended up colliding.”
The centenary redevelopment would be “substantial,” Reeves said, and require the Māori Court to remain closed for about three years, although he noted the museum hadn’t finished scoping that project.
“Our desire is spruce up and make good some of the heritage architecture from 1929, there’s renewal of air conditioning, electrics, lighting and things, and there’s the renewal of the narratives, the displays, the interpretation of our world class Pacific and Māori collections,” Reeves explained.
Reeves hoped the asbestos clean-up would be finished sooner, but said it was possible the current closure could lead right into the next.
“It is possible things might be closed until 2029, but we don’t have the full information and the decisions on that yet,” he said.
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