Tawhiti Museum is one of New Zealand's great private museums, built around thousands of life-size figures and scale models that recreate Taranaki's Maori, settler, farming, and wartime history. It sounds like the sort of place that could be charmingly amateur. It is far better than that.
The adjoining Traders & Whalers experience uses an underground canal boat ride to stage the region's early contact period. Allow a couple of hours rather than treating it as a quick stop.