Whenever Dunedin historian and Toitu Otago Settlers Museum curator Sean Brosnahan visits the Wall Street Mall, he thinks of the people who lived in the area about 150 years ago.
Some of those individual faces and voices from the past are flickering back to life in a striking new Ghosts of Wall Street exhibition which is being developed, away from public view, at the museum.
The museum show was inspired by the discovery in 2008, during preparations for the mall, of a historic timber causeway, initially developed in the 1850s to enable passing pedestrians to avoid sinking up to their knees in mud.
In those days, particularly before more money started flowing with the gold rushes of the 1860s, Dunedin was known as ''Mudedin''.
Life for pedestrians was challenging, and manuka and other wood was laid down in a footpath, added to over several decades, to lift pedestrians out of what was initially a swamp.
The Ghosts of Wall Street exhibition embodies a ''time tunnel'' concept, and several audiovisual displays are being prepared.
Mr Brosnahan said the museum display offered a ''chance to `drill down' through through the historic layers'' of Dunedin's central business district and to discover ''how ordinary Dunedin people went about their life there in times past''.
''The things they dropped, lost, or threw away are put on show here, not as the `rubbish' they regarded them as in discarding them, but as precious objects.''
Using historical detective work, he has investigated why a large white conch shell, found in Pacific islands but not in New Zealand waters, had been dug up in the area.
Through ''informed speculation'', he has linked the find with the Lo Keongs, a Chinese family who in the 19th century ran a novelty shop that was part of the extended block of which the modern mall is part.
Often objects from elsewhere in the Pacific were shipped in to be sold at such outlets.
Matilda Lo Keong was an early pioneer of Dunedin's Chinese community, and the first full-blooded Chinese woman known to have come to New Zealand.
She arrived arrived in Dunedin in 1873, following her marriage in Australia to Dunedin fancy-goods merchant Joseph Lo Keong.
In one audiovisual display being developed at the museum, what appears to be a sepia-tinted photograph of a historic Dunedin scene springs unexpectedly to life, with an actress recapturing an impression of Mrs Lo Keong, who was a kindly but determined woman who was active with her husband in the Dunedin Chinese Mission Church.
Museum collections manager Claire Nodder said she expected the museum show would be completed in about four to six weeks.
