Home for Antarctic items in sight

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32903, 29 April 1972, Page 12

Home for Antarctic items in sight

(Contributed by the Canterbury Museum)

At its meeting 10 days after the official launching of the Canterbury Museum’s hundredth anniversary appeal on April 10, the Trust Board was able to report that $50,000 towards the target sum of $250,000 had already been subscribed, the notable contribution being a pledge of $20,000 towards the invalids’ lift from Mr Gerald O’Farrell. If the tide of public support continues to flow so warmly during the next 12

weeks, the museum can count on starting building before Christmas this year, with every prospect of completion before the end of 1974. A home for the museum’s precious and often bulky Antarctic treasures is now in sight. The illustration shows the largest and most spectacular of these, the command vehicle sno-cat in which Sir Vivian Fuchs crossed the Antarctic Continent in 195758. In the photograph, taken at the Ensors Road premises of Messrs Gough, Gough and Hamer on April 17, Mr Allan McLean (shown at left) represents the firm which had given house-room to this historic vehicle since it was

brought up from Scott Base in March 1971, in H.M.N.Z.S. Endeavour at the initiation of Mr R. B. Thompson, superintendent of the Antarctic Division and a consistent supporter of our Antarctic Museum Centre. New home Where could we find a home for a vehicle 20ft long and 7ft high? The firm mentioned above kindly supplied the answer, and Mr McLean, director of the manufacturing department, took the sno-cat under his personal charge and kept it long beyond the point when he could readily spare the space. When finally a new home had to be found, I was fortunate to enlist the sympathy of Mr Allan G. Williams (right of photograph), an enterprising young managing

director of a Christchurch storage business. Coast to coast As director of the museum —and this means being custodian of the public’s treasures in this regard—l record sincere thanks to Messrs Gough, Gough and Hamer, and Williams Storage, for ensuring that one day, not so far ahead. Sir Vivian Fuchs’s sno-cat will look massive, dignified, and battle-scarred in the great Hall of Antarctic Discovery as befits the command vehicle of the first convoy to travel in Antarctica from coast to coast. This was started as a foreword to the more detailed description of the vehicle by Mr B. Norris, the museum’s honorary curator of Antarctic collections, but has grown so long that this detail must be deferred until next week.—R. S. Duff.