Boost for National Cricket Museum at Basin Reserve

Wellington's National Cricket Museum now has a full-time curator in self-confessed cricket nut David Mealing. His appointment has an added bonus in that his vocation has always been as a museum curator.

Mealing will give the Basin Reserve-based museum some permanence of administration after the death of long-serving enthusiast Stanley Cowman earlier this year. From the time it was opened beneath the Old Stand at the ground in 1987, the Museum was lovingly managed by Cowman and his crew of volunteers.

Mealing, most recently, had been curator of the Petone Settlers Museum on the foreshore of Wellington Harbour in the Hutt Valley. He was a schoolboy chum of avowed cricket enthusiast, the Speaker of New Zealand's Parliament, Jonathan Hunt.

Mealing's appointment is the second piece of good news for the Museum. It follows its placement under the wing of the Wellington Museum Trust which runs the City to the Sea Museum alongside Wellington's commercial sector, Capital E, a family-oriented entertainment centre, the Cable Car, the Katherine Mansfield Cottage and the Colonial Cottage.

The Cricket Museum's spokesman Don Neely said the link with the Museum Trust was a huge boost. Neely said: "The Cricket Museum has gone from being run as an amateur organisation into a serious museum."