 The Big Sheep Wool Gallery, Tirau NZ Tirau is a small town of approximately 800 people in the Waikato region of the North Island of New Zealand, 50 kilometres southeast of Hamilton. Tirau is primarily a farming town but in recent years has begun to exploit the income that comes from being on a major road. Tirau is Maori for "place of many cabbage trees." Image File history File links Tn_p0002323_jpg. ...
Image File history File links Tn_p0002323_jpg. ...
Image File history File links 1852517-Tiraus_main_road-Tirau. ...
Image File history File links 1852517-Tiraus_main_road-Tirau. ...
Waikato is the name of a region in the North Island of New Zealand. ...
The North Island is one of the two main islands of New Zealand, the other being the South Island. ...
Waikato River passing through Hamilton Hamilton is New Zealands 4th-largest metropolitan area. ...
Māori (or Maori) is a language spoken by the native peoples of New Zealand and the Cook Islands. ...
Binomial name Cordyline australis (Forst. ...
History In the 1800s Tirau, then Oxford, was originally planned as a large-scale city for the Waikato, however plans were changed after the entrepreneurial Rose family bought up large volumes of land in the region, with the intention of making large returns when it came of high demand. Oxford later became a rural service town, and changed its name to Tirau in 1896. By the late 1980’s Tirau was fast becoming a ghost town.
In 1991, local business man, Henry Clothier, sought to advantage from the relatively low real estate and high traffic volume in the town, opening an Antique shop in the former Rose Bros. grocery store building. Many other businesses followed suit off the back of his success and throughout the 1990s until today, Tirau has built a reputation as a shopping destination for antiques, collectibles and other niche items.
Tirau Today The town is now a well known tourist stop-off, and is characterised by many local art works in the town forged out of discarded corrugated iron.
In 2000 ‘The Castle’ opened in Tirau, a large toy museum on the towns southern limits, which is in clear view when heading through the township from Rotorua or Taupo.
Among it's other well known sights are the information centre shaped like a giant dog and 'the big sheep', a large wool outlet, both made out of corrugated iron (pictured left). Many of the shops in the town also possess large corrugated iron sculptures and the church has a giant shepherd also made out of corrugated iron. Corrugated iron is a building material made by taking sheet iron or steel and pressing it into corrugations to give the flat sheet stiffness without the need for a frame. ...
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