Australian Journeys Transcript

Australian Journeys Transcript – Cheryl Crilly

Some items are very old, how do you look after them?

We have a lot of very old and very rare and very fragile items at the National Museum and many of these are on display in Australian Journeys. But before they reached that point in the gallery, they actually spent some time, sometimes years in fact, in our very large collection repository offsite. The collection repository is where the museum’s national historical collection is kept and we have about 200 000 objects out there. Now when objects first come into the collection repository, we have a large team of conservation and registration staff that immediately checks their condition, so I know of quite a few objects that have been placed into our large freezers to make sure they kill off any nasty insects that might burrow in a hole in a pocket of a dress or eating its way through a fragile diary. So there’s lots of different treatments depending on the type of object. Once we’ve taken care of conducting a basic condition check, we make sure the objects are stored appropriately so each and every object is put into a special box where it’s carefully packed with tissue paper and padding and it’s kept on a special shelf in a special place out in the collection repository and of course it’s very important for these objects to be kept in relatively dark conditions because light is quite damaging to fragile objects so they must be kept in dark and dry conditions. Moisture is also a big problem for a lot of very fragile objects because we certainly wouldn’t like to see a dress or a loved diary become mouldy because it wasn’t kept in conditions that were very dry. That all happens before our objects go on display. Once we have selected objects for display, our conservation team then begin a lot of work, and this sometimes involves vacuuming and bathing; removing all of the fine layers of dirt and dust from objects. They then prepare objects for display by making special mounts for them to sit on, so that the object is well supported within the display case. Now our aim here at the National Museum is not to return an object to its shiny original condition, we actually want to show that an object’s had a long life journey, that it’s been through a lot of different experiences so we tend to keep a little bit of come of the holes, some of the dirt, some of the rust stains, we like to keep them on there. What we do make sure we do is that we stabilise the object, so we want to stop it from deteriorating any further because we want to preserve these objects for future generations, whether you’re a visitor to our website, or a visitor to our gallery. We want to make sure that people of the future can enjoy all of these objects so it’s very important that the right conditions are maintained. Now up in the gallery we have quite low light in the Australian Journeys Gallery, and this is common of course throughout art galleries and museums right throughout the world. Some objects are very, very fragile, paper in particular, so it has to be displayed, not under a spotlight but under quite low light levels. Now of course lots of people say well, how are we going to see the objects? We take care of this by making sure we have sensory light cases, so in some instances you can actually walk up to a showcase, stand in front of it, and the light will appear to illuminate the object. When you walk away, the light goes off, so the object is only subjected to a small period of light and at very low levels. We also make sure that visitors can read our labels by inserting little backlights behind the labels so that they glow in front of the object instead of the light actually being on the object itself.