KiwiJournalz: Otago Settlers Museum

We spent a Saturday afternoon in the Toitū Otago Settlers Museum in Dunedin. This quality experience is provided for free. What a wonderful facility it is..... especially if you like old vehicles like Elder Edward does. This desk for 6 is from a bank, how is that for an early model cubicle?

Settlers Room

The most amazing thing we saw in the museum was the room full of paintings of some of the Otago area settlers. It is a very large room with all four walls covered in old paintings. In the center of the room are four interactive control consoles. Each console controls one of the walls. On the console screen is a view of all of the paintings you see before you. Click on any of the paintings and it will appear on your screen with the ability to zoom in and out. There is also a description of the person you are looking at. This is a genealogist's dream! What a wonderful way to share the past. These old settlers come alive again to those wanting to know their family history and the curious like us.


West Wall with view of control consoles.


East Wall


North Wall


South Wall


West wall again - notice the top, center painting.


West wall as it appears on the screen.


Screen after touching the top, center painting.


After touching the painting again, it appears larger. If you zoom in all the way you can actually see the brush strokes. They are very high quality renditions.

Cable Cars & Trams

Great photo of an early tram. Ridership started to dwindle in the 1930s, spiked again during the war in the 1940s and then faded out in the 1950s as motorized buses took over.

Beautifully restored tram sits in the Otago Settlers Museum for everyone to enjoy.

The attention to detail in this restoration is spectacular. It is wonderful that the museum avoids a hands off everything mentality and lets people experience the beauty of the past. Sister Edward looks very relaxed.

We can only imagine how much stress it would have been to operate one of these trams, especially considering all the people playing frogger with us as we drive through traffic today.


Hope they took the baby out of the stroller!

Another quality tram restoration.

As cool as it has been, the inside seats were probably preferred.

Other Modes of Transportation

Old whaling boat.

Early canoe.

Love the imaginative horses.

Harbor runabout.


Wonder how hard it was to ride one of those big wheeled bikes?

Let's try it and find out! Piece of cake with stairs, platform and training frame.

I'm glad our Sister Missionaries don't travel on these. Can you imagine balancing and riding down a bumpy brick or dirt road on this? And if you fell off, without a curb to climb onto it, how would you get back on??? Did women ride these bikes? It would be quite a chore in a dress.