Inside the Collection

Sextant, used by Phillip Parker King, made by Matthew Berge, London, England, 1805-1819

An Australian Explorer’s Sextant

January 25, 2012

Geoff Barker
Like many early scientific instruments that made their way to Australia this particular sextant is doubly significant. For while it played an important role in Australia's early colonial history it was also manufactured by one of the foremost instrument makers of the early 19th century.
Colourful ceramic Dragon or lion

Chinese New Year 2012: Year of the Dragon

January 23, 2012

Anni Turnbull
Sydney holds the largest Lunar New Year festival outside Asia, where communities from Asia celebrate the first day of the first lunar month of the year. Lunar or Chinese New Year falls on 23 January this year, with celebration lasting 15 days, until the first full moon appears.
Single used rubber thong

Rubber thong

January 20, 2012

Lindie Ward
Not what you were expecting – tricked you! Have you bought shoes for 99 cents and got ten years international travel out of them? Well a Mr Fuller bought these in 1978 and trudged them all around Europe.
Satellite fragment, one of 2

What Goes Up Must Come Down

January 18, 2012

Kerrie Dougherty
Somewhere between 5 and 6am on Monday morning (Sydney time), Russia’s ill-fated Fobos-Grunt space probe disintegrated on re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere, most likely over the southern Pacific Ocean off the coast of Chile (a summary of information about the Fobos-Grunt re-entry can be found on the Planetary Society blog .
Woven Japanese Waraji Sandals

Summer Sandals:

January 16, 2012

Anni Turnbull
Warm weather changes the way we dress including what we put on our feet, initially I started thinking about strappy, elegant, contemporary sandals and yet when I looked at our collection I was drawn to a range of 19th century sandals from a variety of cultures and made out of unusual materials.
New Year's card, Laszlo and Sibyl Moholy-Nagy to Dahl and Geoffrey Collings, 1937

Collings Collection; Maholy-Nagy New Year’s Cards

January 11, 2012

Geoff Barker
This is the third post in our series based on the cataloguing of 2007/30/1, the archive of Dahl and Geoffrey Collings, specifically on the Christmas and New Year’s cards sent to them by family, friends and professional colleagues.
Digital Dark Age book cover

4000 years of mistakes

January 10, 2012

Matthew Connell
Recently we were doing the final proofs for a new book about the issues of long term preservation of digital information. I came across a discrepancy in two separate entries on the same object that introduced its own issue about information preservation.