The Treaty House at Waitangi

The treaty house, New Zealand's most-visited historic building, began life in 1833 as British Resident James Busby's house. By the time that Governor-General Lord Bledisloe and his wife bought the house for the nation a hundred years later, it was very run-down.

The new Waitangi National Trust Board hired leading architects William Gummer and William Page to restore the place. With the centennial of the founding of a British colony looming, there was a desire to recreate the building as it had been in 1840. Unfortunately, inadequate historical research led to an architectural avalanche overwhelming the house and produced a structure seven-eighths new. With the burial of so much of the material of the past came a change of resonance. The institutionalised former Residency, the old Busby house, emerged as the treaty house, surrounded by the trappings of nationhood - formal grounds, cannon and flagpoles.

By the 1960s and 1970s many experts questioned what had been done. This time the Waitangi National Trust Board commissioned historical research and, after making some inadequate minor changes, hired conservation architect Clive Lucas in 1988 to prepare a thorough conservation plan.

Lucas recommended presenting the house as it appeared during the Busby family period between 1840 and 1860. This enabled the Trust to display the original prefabricated house inside the 1930s creation that, whatever some critics thought of it, had by now become an icon, reflecting the national aspirations of an earlier generation. In the words of one heritage expert, 'the house was to be put in touch with 1840, yet the words of 1933 would not be eaten'.

In recent decades the Trust has changed the interpretation considerably. Today visitors reach the house after viewing a slide show at an elaborate visitor centre and shop. Inside the house itself they can see the historic skillion (rear lean-to) presented in gutted form, protected by a covered space at the rear of the building. Special plinths and signs describe the original surviving fabric. Elsewhere wall notices and panels tell the story. The south wing contains a small museum and in the late 1990s the northern wing was altered to provide space for the twentieth century story of the place and its guardians. Like our understanding of the treaty itself, the old building continues to evolve.