Wellington: Te Papa’s Gallipoli exhibit is astonishing

I was in Wellington yesterday on a quick whistle-stop trip for a meeting, lunch with my niece then home, and decided to swing by Te Papa for my last half hour as I’d heard so many good things about the WWI Gallipoli exhibition.

All I can say is, spending 30 minutes whizzing through this incredible historical account of the war was ridiculous, but it gave me enough to know that I will be making a special trip back to Wellington just to see it with more time.

It’s a free exhibition with double life-sized mannequins made by the astonishingly talented team at Weta Workshop over 24,000 hours. These figures are SO life like that I peered with my nose almost touching them just to get my head around the intricate pores on the skin, their veins and the realistic body and facial hair. Just extraordinary. And then you’ve got the fascinating and heart wrenching stories of New Zealand soldiers clambering up the cliffs of Anzac Cove in 1915 into an adventure that would change their lives.

This display shows the powerful moments in eight ordinary New Zealander’s lives…

Enter the Gallipoli experience

The first thing you see is this guy at 2.4 times the size of the average person

I love this guy. A broken hearted doctor. See the perspective of the woman looking at him. She was kind to pose for me!

And a close up of every whisker and pore

This guy is feeding bullets into a machine gun as another soldier lies dead beside him

The fallen comrade

This guy is eating meat out of a tin with larger than life flies all over him

Check out the veins on his hands

And finally this nurse touched me, reading a letter saying her loved one had died in the war

As you leave you can cleanse yourself as is the Maori custom

This exhibition is free and open from 10am to 6pm daily. It’s expected to be here until at least 2019.