Covid-19 Collection

The Covid-19 pandemic has changed everything here and around the world. We’re keen to collect material to document this event and its impact, with a focus on Christchurch and the Canterbury region.

Museum founder Julius von Haast

Canterbury Museum collects contemporary objects now so that we can tell these stories in the future, when they will have become history. For over 150 years, we’ve been collecting objects that reflect current events as they happen, from the great fire of Timaru in 1868, through the First and Second World Wars, to the 2010/11 Canterbury earthquakes and the School Strikes for Climate.

We are already doing some targeted collecting but we are also looking for photographs, art projects, journals, and any other objects that represent your experience of the pandemic and the lockdown in your bubble.

 We’d like these kinds of objects:

1. Photographs. Empty streets, closed businesses, queuing supermarket shoppers, people involved in bubble activities. Anything that illustrates the Government and public response to the pandemic in Canterbury.

2. Objects. Posters and signs, social distancing enforcement, vital household items. Things that became important because of the pandemic and the lockdown.

3. Arts and crafts. Anything creative that you or your bubble made as a way to record and reflect on your experience of lockdown, or simply to pass the time at home.

4. Documents. Diaries, journals, etc. in which you recorded your experiences, thoughts and feelings during the pandemic.

If you’d be willing to donate objects like these to the Museum, please complete and submit the form below, making sure you include a photograph. We’re grateful for all offers, but we cannot accept everything. We have to take into account what we already have in the collection and other Covid-19 objects we are offered. 

 Thank you so much for helping us represent this important moment in history in the Museum’s collections.