Lake Coleridge Hut
- The End of an Era
The Coleridge Hut, 1950s
By David Watmuff (Collections Manager, Air Force Museum of New Zealand)
Lake Coleridge Hut—located at Ryton Bay, Lake Coleridge, in Canterbury—holds particular historical significance for the Royal New Zealand Air Force, as many personnel have stayed in it over the years. So when the Museum received advice from RNZAF Base Woodbourne that the hut had to be removed as part of an overall reclamation of the camping ground by Glenthorne Station, it was quickly decided that the hut needed to be saved from destruction.
The hut, an old, Canadian-built, vehicle-mounted radio station building was used by the RNZAF in the 1940s and 1950s. In mid-May 2009, the Museum sent a team of three—Matthew O’Sullivan, Dave Nicholson, and John McKim—to carry out a reconnaissance of the hut to determine the practicalities of disassembling it and moving it to Wigram. In the last week of May the building was successfully removed to Museum storage, allowing the Woodbourne team to clear the site and the hut to be ‘saved’.
The Coleridge Hut
Subsequent research by archives staff at the Museum revealed that the building had sat on at least two trucks in the 1950s—one an RNZAF GMC truck, the other a Chevrolet—and images from the photographic collection were able to pinpoint the exact vehicles. It was particularly satisfying to make a connection between the vehicles in the image and the actual building.
The recovery of the hut is an example of the sort of contemporary, proactive collecting undertaken by museums when time and opportunity present themselves. Most donations of material to the Museum, however, tend to be unsolicited. Now that Lake Coleridge Hut is in the Museum’s collection, it will be considered for future conservation work.