There’s been a bit of action going on at the old Buck­et Foun­tain, icon of Cuba Street.

First, it mys­te­ri­ous­ly dis­ap­peared:

We ini­tial­ly thought this was a retro ’80s David Cop­per­field-style mag­ic trick, but it turns out it was just tak­en down for main­te­nance.

The foun­tain returned, with a fresh coat of paint, ready to splash the good folk of Cuba Mall once again.

But then a hand-writ­ten sign appeared up the top. It’s not so leg­i­ble from the street, but zoom­ing in revealed this mes­sage:

“Prove your hunter-gath­er­er skills by find­ing food in the for­est at Te Papa.”

Per­haps, with the Cur­rent Eco­nom­ic Sit­u­a­tion, Te Papa is right to put the empha­sis on nat­ur­al his­to­ry and away from art.

And if you’d like to escape the mis­ery of mod­ern life, you can now jour­ney back in time to when the Buck­et Foun­tain was first installed in 1969, thanks to the WCC’s The Cuba Street Mem­o­ries Project.

From this, we learn that the Buck­et Foun­tain was orig­i­nal­ly nick­named the Sug­ar Shov­el Foun­tain and it was paint­ed yel­low and black (so 2000s!).