The pied piper of Tawhiti

The pied piper of Tawhiti
By HELEN HARVEY helen.harvey@tnl.co.nz - Taranaki Daily News | Wednesday, 24 September 2008
BRADLEY AMBROSE/Taranaki Daily News

Nigel Ogle in his workshop.


Nigel Ogle plays the Irish pipes. Little bagpipes that sound really good when they are played well. Nigel also likes Jimi Hendrix.

He plays piano, guitar and drums and has all the equipment to amp up the sound. Lucky he lives in the country. He can make as much noise as he likes.

But it is his work in heritage and historical interpretation that he is known for, not his music. And it was this work that saw him awarded a QSM in January.

Nigel is happiest tucked away in his workshop, music blaring, making his models. He has even got a TV out there so he can keep up with what's going on in the world without really trying.

For one part of the process, he has to sit in a small room behind a square pane of glass. Visitors to his Tawhiti Museum stop and watch him at work, as if he were one of the full-size fibreglass models that tell stories of the past.

Nigel hates sitting in that room, doesn't enjoy people watching him like that. It's horrible. He's quietly spoken, shy, but because of his teaching background doesn't have a problem getting up and talking to groups of visitors about the stories they are going to see.

Usually he is out the back, but today he is working on the front counter. He greets the visitors, takes their money, offers them a brochure and tells them to turn left and then left again.

Nigel, who is aged "40 plus GST", never had a grand plan to start a museum it came about by default.

With a vague idea that he might be able to make a living from his art at some point, Nigel and wife Teresa bought the old Tawhiti Dairy Factory, which included almost a hectare of land, in the mid 1970s.

"I was mad keen on pottery and ceramic sculpture at that stage. It seemed like a good way of getting a big cheap property where we could build kilns and convert part of it into a house. It just seemed to have lots of creative possibilities."

They renovated the old house and put two kilns in other buildings out the back.

The factory was unused and just sort of sat there. Over time, it became a great place to store Nigel's bits and pieces. The first displays and models he made weren't for the public they were purely for his own interest.

Nigel has always been interested in old things old wagons, old tools just the feel and character of the things. "I love it."

He has an old flintlock musket and does a bit of black powder shooting. He takes people out with him if they are interested in seeing how the old guns work. But he wasn't always a history buff. He took history at school, but was disappointed that there was no New Zealand component. He found that component while he was at teachers' college in Palmerston North. He met people interested in New Zealand history and for the first time got into books on the subject, which in those days were a bit thin on the ground.

"By the time I got back to Hawera, I was avidly reading anything I could on local history."

The museum evolved on its own, a combination of that interest in local history and having a spare building to store his increasing collection of artefacts.

"There was never a point in time when I said, I'm going to build a museum."

He remembers a local farmer asking him how his museum was going that was the first time he thought it did look a bit like a museum. He had never called it that. It was just a big shed full of all his old stuff.

Beginning in 1980, the museum was open 10 days a year. Then, in 1988, Nigel decided there had to be more in life than teaching. So he quit, with the plan to combine what was looking more and more like a museum with his pottery.

Teresa kept teaching until 2000. She now runs the cafe and does the books.

The couple met at Hawera High School and got married while they were at teachers' college. It was Nigel's interest in art that made him decide to go to Palmerston North. And it was art that kept him there.

Art students went on a lot of field trips and one was to New Plymouth, where Nigel saw some "absolutely inspirational" teachers working on what were then called integrated programmes, where the whole programme worked around a theme maths, language, art.

"They were groundbreaking in what they were doing. After seeing these teachers working, I felt, Yeah, teaching is something I could really do, because I had really seriously considered leaving teachers' college and doing something else."

Finding out there were people who lived their art was an entirely new concept to Nigel, who grew up on a dairy farm just out of Hawera.

His father used to take the milk to the dairy factory that is now the museum. Nigel went to Tawhiti School, Hawera Intermediate, where he later taught for two years, and Hawera High School, where he taught art for 13 years.

In 1987, when their three children, Jeremy, Jenni and Paula, were still small, the family went off on an overseas holiday. Nigel came back fired up with ideas he had seen in museums around the world.

"When I came back, I thought I wanted to build the figures, the scale models, that present artefacts. They just tell stories, really, the social stories on what artefacts say."

If he was going to have a museum and charge people it would have to pay its way then he needed to look at ways to present history in an interesting way that would catch people's attention.

He couldn't just put rows of artefacts in front of people and hope by some sort of infusion process they'd understand what those artefacts meant.

An example of this is a young boy who visited with his school from New Plymouth.

He got out of the bus, threw away the worksheet he was supposed to study while at the museum and did a runner into the building.

Nigel followed him and found him entranced by a display of small-scale figures of Maori in canoes. The boy told Nigel he knew where that was, he went fishing there with his dad. Then he asked what the Maori were doing there and then he wanted to know how come they had guns. That's exactly the sort of reaction Nigel wants. In three questions, the youngster had got to the core of that display and related to it as a place he recognised and had experience of.

"If everyone who came to the museum went through the process he went through, we'd be winning."

The first models he made were ceramic. He sculpted all the body parts as one-offs and fired them in the kiln. "When I had six blow up in the kiln because I'd fired it up too quickly, I thought, Oh, there's got to be a better way to do this."

That's when he started using fibreglass, which while smelly and dusty is a stunning process, he says.

He either sculpts the figures or casts them from life.

"I've just finished a face of a guy who was working here for a while, from England." He thought the face didn't look like a Kiwi face and would be good for a sailor in his new trading display.

All of the faces of the children in the museum are sculpted, not cast. "They wouldn't enjoy the process."

Nigel uses a range of silicon products and for a cast, the person has to sit for between 10 to 15 minutes while it sets.

Some people find the process a little claustrophobic, things go dark and suddenly they are breathing through their nose and dribbles go up their nose and they cough and splutter. It's the next part of the process that Nigel loves.

"I enjoy the sculpting because once you have taken the cast, you get a very bland looking face. The eyes are closed. It's what to do with it after that that brings it to life. That's the creative part trying to turn something that is essentially a blank face into something that has expressive eyes."

Adding the hair makes it look like a real person with real expression. "We swap noses and change features and ears, aiming to make them look alive."

The little figures, in the dioramas, are started off in wax.

The are all sculpted. It's very fiddly it takes as much time to make a scale figure as it does to make a full-size figure.

"I love sculpting the small figures. I'll sit there with a lump of wax on a stick making a new face and a new head as I watch TV."

Hours and hours go into making new heads, but because he uses silicon for casting the time is not wasted. He can use them again.

"I love that sculpting of figurines and building them into display. Some people weave or knit. I sculpt figures."

And he likes it when they connect with people, which doesn't always happen in the way he expects. One day a bus group came through and a woman told Nigel he had a very romantic view of childhood because all the child figures look happy and contented. Nigel thought that was a reasonable comment.

"I saw a photo in the Daily News of a boy absolutely distraught on a piece of playground equipment in New Plymouth. I sat down and sculpted his face."

He then added two crying children to the museum. Another bus group came through. A woman saw the crying children and told Nigel that he must have had a very unhappy childhood. "I can't win."

The first day the crying little girl figure was there, a wee girl, aged about three, came in with her mum. While her mother was paying, the girl walked up to the crying figure and burst into tears. It's never happened again.

At the moment Nigel is making one full-sized figure a week. He has 60 to do for his new display.

That's pushing it along. Normally he makes about one a fortnight.

The new display is called Traders and Whalers and is looking at that very early contact period between Maori and Europeans 1820 to 1840. It is being made in partnership with the South Taranaki District Council.

"We are telling the public what we are doing in terms of stories, but exactly how we are doing it we are keeping under wraps because it is very different.

"It's incredibly exciting. I'm working on it 24 hours a day every waking moment." He has been working on it for two years and has one year to go. Despite seemingly spending every waking hour in his workshop, Nigel has time to go beachcombing, tramping around the mountain. He paints when he has time and makes bone carvings.

But it is telling stories through his museum that gives him the most pleasure. That and the four grandchildren.

They think all granddads have their own museum.

State of grace(land)

By HELEN HARVEY helen.harvey@tnl.co.nz - Taranaki D


Elvis is not allowed inside the house. Or in the car, at work or down the pub. He is confined to the garage. And Hawera's biggest Elvis fan, Kevin David Wasley KD to his mates is quite happy about that.

He doesn't have tunnel vision. His whole life doesn't revolve around the king of rock 'n' roll. But part of it does ... and has done for more than 45 years.

KD was about 12 when he first heard Elvis Presley sing. But it wasn't until he saw what the singer looked like that he became totally hooked. He saw the cover of an EP record with a black-and-white head shot of Elvis taken side on.

"The way his hair hung down in front motivated me to find out what Brylcream was." Later, KD's parents banned mirrors from the house because he was always combing his hair.

His hair is gray now, but KD still has the same swished-back hairstyle. And he still has the sideburns.

Wife JJ has never known him without the sideburns, though his three now adult sons, David, Greg and Chris, once planned to shave one while their dad was sleeping. Their mother talked them out of it. Just as well, KD growls, or they would have been sleeping out here.