Object Matters

Cultural producer and artist Dr Sarah Goffman joins host Dr Craig Barker in this episode of Object Matters to discuss her current exhibition at the Chau Chak Wing Museum titled Applied arts. In this episode they discuss Sarah’s creative processes, her relationship with collecting and the use of plastics in her work and in particular discuss the role the AGNSW’s Chinese scholar’s table has taken throughout her career including the current exhibition. Join Sarah as she takes us into Applied Arts.

In this episode of Object Matters host Dr Craig Barker is joined by Mediterranean archaeologist and Project Officer of the Australian Archaeological Institute at Athens Dr Yvonne Inall to discuss her research into ancient spears and the Chau Chak Wing Museum’s red figure bell-krater from south Italy attributed to the Nicholson Painter. The vase features a scene of a warrior holding a spear alongside two women, and provides the inspiration for a discussion ranging from weaponry in the ancient Mediterranean world, the legacy of University of Sydney archaeological scholarship of South Italian vase painting and the way that we may read identity and cultural significance into a scene painted on a vase over 2300 years ago.


Object details: Campanian Red Figure Bell Krater by the Nicholson Painter, Campania, Italy, c. 340-320 BC, NM46.1

View object online

Host: Dr Craig Barker, Head, Public Engagement, Chau Chak Wing Museum and Director, Paphos Theatre Archaeological Excavations. Follow @DrCraig_B on Twitter and Instagram.

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Ngāpuhi leader and warrior, Hongi Hika (c. 1772 – 1828) was an important figure in Māori history. Hongi Hika successfully negotiated trade and missionary activities in the early part of the 19th century, living in Sydney from 1814 to 1819. In 1820 he visited England where he was feted by society and introduced to King George IV. His main aim however was acquire muskets; the weapons would be used in the Musket Wars in which Hongi was a successful military campaigner. The Chau Chak Wing Museum houses one of three busts of Hongi, one of which was a self-portrait carved by the warrior.
In this episode of Object Matters Dr Craig Barker is joined by Brent Kerehona, an educator, film marker, Māori-Australian scholar, Director of Purakau Productions and a descendant of Hongi Hika. Brent has been engaged in years of research on Hongi which will culminate in a film. In the podcast we discuss the bust and explore Brent and Hongi’s journeys through culture, family and through tāonga (artefacts).
Note: this podcast was recorded prior to the Sydney lockdown when an event was at that staged planned to be hosted in the Chau Chak Wing Museum to mark Hongi Hika’s bicentenary. That event will now place in early 2022.

Object details: Bust of Hongi Hika, ETI.570
View object online

Related article: Brown, D. (2016), Hongi Hika's self portrait, MUSE, 14, pp. 19-21

Host: Dr Craig Barker, Head, Public Engagement, Chau Chak Wing Museum and Director, Paphos Theatre Archaeological Excavations. Follow @DrCraig_B on Twitter and Instagram.

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Subscribe to Muse Extra, our monthly newsletter and follow @ccwm_sydney on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. Learn more about the Chau Chak Wing Museum at sydney.edu.au/museum

Michelle Whitford is a doctoral researcher in Department of Physics and Astronomy at Macquarie University who has been conducting research on thousands of ancient Egyptian objects made from faience, including many from the Nicholson Collection at the Chau Chak Wing Museum, using new and innovative scientific techniques.

In this episode of Object Matters she joins host Dr Craig Barker in a discussion about seven shabti buried in the tomb of Djedher in the fourth century BC and together they discuss ancient Egyptian religious practices, how faience was manufactured and the methods that Michelle employed to bring new data from these seven figures.

Objects: 
Shabtis of Djedher, 30th Dynasty (c. 380-343 BC)Nicholson Collection, Chau Chak Wing Museum
NM02.2.1 to NM02.2.7
View NM02.2.4 online

Journal article: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jasrep.2020.102541

Host: Dr Craig Barker, Head, Public Engagement, Chau Chak Wing Museum and Director, Paphos Theatre Archaeological Excavations. Follow @DrCraig_B on Twitter and Instagram.

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Subscribe to Muse Extra, our monthly newsletter and follow @ccwm_sydney on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. Learn more about the Chau Chak Wing Museum at sydney.edu.au/museum

Matthew Gibbs wears many hats. For eleven years he served as President for the Friends of the Nicholson Collection, but he is also the General Manager, Media and Communications at the ASX, a collector, and a lover of Shakespeare. He joins Dr Craig Barker to discuss one of his favourite collection items; the mounted specimen of a Thylacine or Tasmanian Tiger. In a wide-ranging discussion they talk about Matthew’s interest in Tasmanian Tigers and their enduring role in Australia’s consciousness, as well as Shakespeare, extinction and the importance of museum supporters.

Specimen details: Thylacinus cynocephalus (Harris, 1808), donated by Macleay Family 1865-1892, Macleay Collections NHM.496

Host: Dr Craig Barker, Head, Public Engagement, Chau Chak Wing Museum and Director, Paphos Theatre Archaeological Excavations. Follow @DrCraig_B on Twitter and Instagram.

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Subscribe to Muse Extra, our monthly newsletter and follow @ccwm_sydney on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. Learn more about the Chau Chak Wing Museum at sydney.edu.au/museum

18 May 2021 was International Museums Day, an annual celebration created by the International Council of Museums (ICOM), designed to raise awareness about museums and their role in enriching culture and sharing knowledge. The theme for 2021 was The Future of Museums: Recover and Reimagine.  Four panellists from the Museum and Heritage Studies program at the University of Sydney joined Dr Craig Barker on International Museums Day in a live panel in the Nelson Meers Foundation Auditorium. Discussing the future of museums and some of the current issues facing the museum sector globally and here in Australia, this special episode of Object Matters dissects the concept of a 21st century museum. 

Panellists:  

Dr Anna Lawrenson 

Dr Helena Robinson 

Dr James Flexner 

Dr Alex Burchmore

Host: Dr Craig Barker, Head, Public Engagement, Chau Chak Wing Museum and Director, Paphos Theatre Archaeological Excavations. Follow @DrCraig_B on Twitter and Instagram.

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Subscribe to Muse Extra, our monthly newsletter and follow @ccwm_sydney on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. Learn more about the Chau Chak Wing Museum at sydney.edu.au/museum

Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie (1853-1942) is an important and somewhat controversial figure in the history of archaeology. The grandson of Matthew Flinders, Petrie rose from a surveyor to becoming the Professor of Egyptology at the University College London, where the Petrie Museum was named in his honour. He excavated more than 60 sites in Egypt during his career and a number of others in the Levant in his twilight years, pioneering a range of methodologies and techniques that would become standard practice in archaeology in the 20th century. 

Under the auspices of the Egyptian Exploration Fund (EEF), now Egyptian Exploration Society, Petrie worked at the sites of Hu and Abadiyeh (Diospolis Parva) near Naqada in Upper Egypt for a single season from 1898-1899. His 1901 publication of the excavation contained a plate featuring illustrations of ceramic pots laid out in a chronological sequence that would revolutionise archaeology. From thousands of objects excavated from more than 2200 pit graves dated to the fourth millennium BC, each recorded on small bits of card, Petrie was able to develop the concept of sequence dating; that is that particular styles of pottery were associated with specific time period so a relative chronology could be developed where objects were older or newer than other objects from other graves within the sequence. The Pharaonic Obsessions exhibition in the Chau Chak Wing Museum has a carefully recreated version of the published sequence-date chart including objects found during the EEF excavations at Diopolis Parva. The Nicholson Collection is home to hundreds of pots found by Petrie in the pre-dynastic graves of the cemeteries.  
Chart details: Flinders Petrie “Diospolis Parva: The Cemeteries of Abadiyeh and Hu 1898-99” Plate 2. Courtesy of the Egypt Exploration Society.

Guest: Dr Thomas Hikade is an archaeologist who specialises in Egyptian prehistory and occasionally lectures for the University of Sydney. In this special episode of Object Matters for National Archaeology Week 2021 he joins Dr Craig Barker to talk about the influence Petrie would have on archaeology, the importance of this chart in the way subsequent generations of archaeologists processed materials and his own work researching stone tools and ceramics from the fourth millennium BC in Egypt and the Middle East.

Host: Dr Craig Barker, Head, Public Engagement, Chau Chak Wing Museum and Director, Paphos Theatre Archaeological Excavations. Follow @DrCraig_B on Twitter and Instagram.

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Subscribe to Muse Extra, our monthly newsletter and follow @ccwm_sydney on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. Learn more about the Chau Chak Wing Museum at sydney.edu.au/museum

Behind the scenes it takes a mighty team to care for the Chau Chak Wing Museum’s vast collections. In this episode, Craig Barker invites nine CCWM Collection Management staff members to discuss how they document, digitise, register, monitor and care for the objects that matter so much to us all. We explore their roles at the museum, the philosophy and practicalities of collection care and the processes the team undertook to move more than 110,000 objects physically into the museum in 2020. 

Guests: Maree Clutterbuck (Head, Collection Management), Chris Jones (Collection Manager, Documentation), Julie Taylor (Museum Registration Officer), Madeleine Sneddon (Acting Museum Conservator), David James (Museum Photographer), Virginia Ho (Assistant Museum Registration Officer), Aggie Lu (Assistant Museum Registration Officer), Rachel Lawrence (Museum Registration Officer), Damien Stone (Assistant Museum Registration Officer).

Host: Dr Craig Barker, Head, Public Engagement, Chau Chak Wing Museum and Director, Paphos Theatre Archaeological Excavations. Follow @DrCraig_B on Twitter and Instagram.

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Subscribe to Muse Extra, our monthly newsletter and follow @ccwm_sydney on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. Learn more about the Chau Chak Wing Museum at sydney.edu.au/museum

Middle Eastern archaeologist from the University of Sydney Dr Joseph ‘Seppi’ Lehner speaks to  Dr Craig Barker about a number of bronze and copper alloy objects in the Museum collection, recovered in the British Museum and University of Pennsylvania excavations at Ur in Iraq, directed by Sir Leonard Woolley in the 1920s and 1930s. In particular they discuss a copper alloy axe head found in one of the tombs dating to the Early Dynastic period (c. 2900-2350 BC), and talk more broadly about archaeology in Mesopotamia, the ancient trade in metals and resources, and potential links between metal objects in Ur and the mines and production centres Seppi is excavating in Oman.

Object details: Copper-alloy axe, 2900–2350 BC, Iraq, donated by the British Museum 1935, Chau Chak Wing Museum, NM35.9.1

Guest: Dr Joseph ‘Seppi’ Lehner

Host: Dr Craig Barker, Head, Public Engagement, Chau Chak Wing Museum and Director, Paphos Theatre Archaeological Excavations. Follow @DrCraig_B on Twitter and Instagram.

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Subscribe to Muse Extra, our monthly newsletter and follow @ccwm_sydney on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. Learn more about the Chau Chak Wing Museum at sydney.edu.au/museum

In this special episode of Object Matters, Dr Craig Barker is joined by Toni Hurley, teacher, educator, historian, one-time president of the History Teachers Association and known to generations of school students as a co-author of the Antiquity series of textbooks. Toni is also the grand-daughter of renowned Australian photographer Frank Hurley (1885-1962). 
In this podcast Toni and Craig discuss two lantern slides of Hurley photographs, formerly from the Geology Department collection. Both are images of the 1st AFC Australian Flying Corps campaigning in Palestine in World War One, and Hurley’s pioneering work recording the missions of the Flying Corp in the Middle East both from the ground and from the air. We discuss Frank Hurley as a grandfather and a photographer, his love of the Middle East, his experiences in Antarctica and Papua New Guinea, the importance and controversies of his war photographs, including composite images and the role of museum collections in school history education. We also look at Frank Hurley’s love of risk and his interest in aerial photography during this pioneering phase of aviation and aerial warfare.

Photographs: 

Frank Hurley, ‘Machines returning to the hangars’, 1918, lantern slide, Chau Chak Wing Museum, HP90.28.2808 (pictured) 

Frank Hurley, 'A machine descending to the Hangars of the 1st Australian Flying Corps, Palestine’, 1917-1918, lantern slide, Chau Chak Wing Museum, HP90.28.2741

Guest: Toni Hurley

Host: Dr Craig Barker, Head, Public Engagement, Chau Chak Wing Museum and Director, Paphos Theatre Archaeological Excavations. Follow @DrCraig_B on Twitter and Instagram.

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Subscribe to Muse Extra, our monthly newsletter and follow @ccwm_sydney on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. Learn more about the Chau Chak Wing Museum at sydney.edu.au/museum