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Behind the scenes of the Australian Museum's public galleries, in a rather evocatively named building, The Spirit House, lives one of the Museum's greatest resources - the research collections.
Museum collections function as libraries where specimens and objects replace books. These specimens and objects are regularly borrowed, studied and returned, with the information from each new study added to their records. This reduces the need for scientists to collect new specimens when conducting research and is especially important when research is being conducted on endangered or vulnerable species.
After over 180 years, the Australian Museum collections, by any definition, can be considered immense, with more than 4,000,000 insects, 1,000,000 fishes, around 1,000,000 archaeological items, 120,000 ethnographic objects and 60,000 rocks and minerals to name but a few. These collections represent a readily accessible portion of our natural and man-made world.
The Australian Museum has one of the most comprehensive fish collections of the Australian and Indo-Pacific regions in the world. Every year, hundreds of Australian and international fish scientists borrow specimens from the Australian Museum fish collection to use in their research.
The Australian Museum also houses one of the largest collections of Aboriginal archaeological material in Australia. As a combined resource, these two seemingly unrelated collections can help researchers answer questions such as:
What fish species were caught and eaten by the Aboriginal inhabitants of the Sydney region before 1788?
Do these fish species represent the fish fauna of Sydney Harbour or did Aboriginal people catch a select few?
Fish bones excavated from ancient Aboriginal sites can be identified by comparing them with skeletons and x-rays from the fish collection. Through identification of the species found, it seems Aboriginal people definitely preferred a select few of Sydney Harbour's tastiest species.
Each specimen has a unique registration number. The label holds essential information about the collection of the specimen, including the date, location and collector.
This information is also entered into an electronic database so that researchers can find out which specimens are contained in the collection without having to look at every specimen on every shelf. Without this information, the value of each specimen to science would be greatly reduced.
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