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Museum brings smelly sea history to life

Grace MillimaciThe West Australian
The Plymouth Company exhibit at New Zealand museum Puke Ariki brings to life the voyages of the first organised Pakeha settlers to New Plymouth.
Camera IconThe Plymouth Company exhibit at New Zealand museum Puke Ariki brings to life the voyages of the first organised Pakeha settlers to New Plymouth. Credit: Puke Ariki Museum

It has taken two years of planning and the attention to detail extends from the visual all the way to people’s sense of smell.

The upcoming Plymouth Company exhibit at New Zealand museum Puke Ariki will bring to life the voyages of the first organised Pakeha settlers to New Plymouth. That includes the sights, sounds and smells — like vomit, dirty linen, rope and tar. For the record, puke in Maori means hill.

The exhibition will capture what it was like to make the long sea journey from England to New Zealand/Aotearoa — “the first brave souls who set off in 1840 faced storms, sickness and death”.

“We’re trying to tell the story of what that voyage was like for the 1000 or so settlers who came over from Devon and Cornwall to a new life in Taranaki,” Puke Ariki manager Kelvin Day says.

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The interactive display’s odours have been sourced from AromaPrime, a company in the UK that specialises in scent experiences. AromaPrime has also created scents for other museums and attractions such as a burning witch, cannibal’s cave, dinosaur, dungeon and wartime underground.

A videographer filmed rats that will be projected on to the exhibit’s floor to explain the rat plague.

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