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!).