The Collectors
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Friday 26 October 2007
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This week Niccole visits an area of Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum many people may not know even exists.
The Powerhouse, like other museums, only has limited floor space for its exhibitions. This, Niccole says, can result in as little as half a percent of a museum’s whole collection being on display at any one time which means thousands of objects can go unseen.
To overcome this, a growing trend in major museums has been to establish publicly accessible storage facilities where visitors can see many of the objects not currently part of an exhibition.
Encompassing six state-of-the-art warehouses covering 13,000 square metres, the Powerhouse Museum’s Discovery Centre in Castle Hill, New South Wales is home to about 50,000 artefacts, some of which have rarely been displayed. One of the more intriguing items in the Centre is a mouse-trap maker. Hand made in the 1940s, this machine was able to produce more than a thousand mouse traps per hour.
Visitors to the Discovery Centre can also learn about conservation techniques for collectibles, such as the correct storage of photographs or keeping bugs at bay. There’s also a display showing the harmful results to artefacts of high humidity.
People can visit the Discovery Centre at Castle Hill between 10am – 5pm every second Saturday of every month. The other 5 buildings on the property are accessible by pre-booking a tour.
