Transcript

From Polyzosteria limbata to wire strainers: A life wandering in and out of museums (and why they matter)

John Pickard, 13 July 2016

Welcome, everybody. Thank you for coming along today to the July history, culture, and collections seminar. My name is Liza Dale-Hallett. I'm a senior curator here in the humanities department and I'm chairing today's seminar. A lot of what will be discussed today relates to an area of collection that I'm responsible for.

I'd like to begin today's proceedings by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land we are on today, the Bunurong and Wurrung people of the Kulin nation, and pay my respects to elders both past and present. And I especially want to welcome members of the [INAUDIBLE] family. Thank you for coming today.

Now, to introduce what promises to be a very interesting paper by Dr. John Pickard-- John is an ecologist and a geomorphologist. He's been a senior government official and academic and is currently an honorary fellow in the Department of Environmental Science at Macquarie University and a research associate here at Museum Victoria.

His research has taken him to every corner of Australia, to South and North America, and to Antarctica. John's research seeks to understand the nature of the present landscape through the study of geology, vegetation, climate change, government legislation, geomorphology, history of land settlement, and changes in technology. John has three key areas of research-- land use and management in semi-arid Australia, landscape evolution in semi-arid Australia, and fencing in rural Australia. John is the Australian expert in fencing, so we're very honoured and pleased to have him as part of our team of people making sense of this fantastic collection, the Jack Chisholm fencing collection.

John is also a passionate explorer, intellectually and physically. You will get a sense of this in his talk today, which is titled "From Polyzosteria Limbata to Wire Strainers-- a Life Wondering In and Out of Museums and Why They Matter." Welcome, John.

Thank you very much, Liza, and thank you all for coming and especially thank you to the Chisholm family. I hope I do Jack justice. I've studied rural fences across Australia for about the last 20 years. And every time I cold call on a farmer and I say I study fences, they laugh.

They're always polite and they say, why fences? And then I ask them, how much does one of your fences cost? And the answer is quite often about $4,000 a kilometre.

We have millions of kilometres of this stuff across the street. So the total collective investment in fences probably runs into billions of dollars. It's all investment by individuals with the exception, of course, of the government rabbit-proof and dog-proof fences.

So if we have this amount of investment in our nation and it's all across the landscape and it's fundamental to the way we view property rights and various other things, then it's crying out to be studied. If you go through the literature, you'll find any number of books on how to build fences, why you should build them, where to build them, how much they cost, and so forth. But up until I started doing my research, there was really not very much about the history, the technology in them, and why they matter.

And it also provided an opportunity for travel. So I can cheerfully say that independent university tests have shown that there are no fences in most of the Simpson Desert, the Great Victoria Desert, the Great Sandy Desert, all over the country. This is a typical image of me about to measure a fence.

This was one of the filed, rabbit-proof fences that was built by the Queensland government. This was on the western side of Queensland next to the territory border. And it was built in the 1800s as part of a fence that went from about the latitude of Horsham, up the Victoria-South Australia border, then the New South Wales-South Australia border, then right up to the Gulf of Carpentaria. And it failed because people simply didn't understand how rabbit-proof fences work.

While I was doing my fence research, I ended up with a real dilemma that I couldn't understand some of the language. And so there are quite often very good historical reports describing a fence. So for example, it might say that there was a dogleg fence there.

Now, most people think dogleg fence, you think, a crocodile's a dog's hind leg. And you automatically think of a zigzag fence. You're wrong-- it's not.

Doglegs are a set of poles that go across the top of a fence. It took me quite a long time to figure this out. And so I produced a glossary of rural fence terms in 2009.

And when I was revising that, I realised that it was a really good story just in the wire strainers. So I pulled them all out. I'm currently up to an iteration on my wire strainer guide, which is now 700 pages with several hundred wire strainers, the [INAUDIBLE], the diagrams, advertisement, all sorts of information. And every now and again, I'll be sitting on a National Library Trove portal, which is the best thing since sliced bread.

There's two sort of history in Australia-- PT and AT, pre-Trove and after-Trove. And it's a dead sharp demarcation because pre-Trove, if you wanted to search newspapers, you either went through 10th generation scratch microfilms, or you got the original newspapers. On Trove, whack in your search terms, [INAUDIBLE] searching, and you're searching 20 million documents. Think you, National Library of Australia, and it's sponsors.

And unfortunately at the moment, the barbarians are wanting to cut the funding to Trove. That's a political statement and I make no apology for it. In between doing my forensic searching, every now and again, I'd just whack in a few search terms and see what came up.

And what came up one day was the Museum of Victoria website with this picture of Australia. And there was various bits of information with it and a couple of bits were slightly wrong. And I thought, Museum of Victoria, leading institution-- can I help them get it right? So I emailed and made contact with Liza.

And she told me about the collection and one thing led to another and I was given permission to get my grubby little hands-- in blue gloves-- onto the collection. And it's a treasure trove. There's no other way of describing it. And to have the privilege of working on that collection is just amazing.

So, this was the one that piqued my interest in the Jack Chisholm collection, a lock-grip wire strainer. And it really completed what's been a lifelong journey in and out of museums. I started off-- the first time I went to a museum was we'd found a cockroach in the bush south of Sydney and didn't know what it was.

And dad said, well, take it to the museum. They'll tell you what it is. So I wandered in there in bare foot and met a curator. And the curator took me down into the bowels of the building where there's row upon row of cabinets and drawers and pulled out this drawer.

And there was the cockroach. And it's a beautiful animal. And we have a specimen down there in our little glass box. It's only a baby one. They grow to about 75-- about three inches long.

And they're lovely animals. They're only in the bush. You never see them in houses or anything like that.

Equally beautiful for me is the technology in this wire strainer. It's a beautifully designed piece of engineering, not terribly successful because it was too expensive. And one of the things that I really want to emphasise through my talk is firstly, we need museums. The fact that you are here, I think you'll agree with that.

And secondly, we need private collectors. No museum owned by the state can afford to have every example of everything. So we need to figure out some way of integrating the private collectors with the state collections in some way. And we're now in a digital age and the world is our reason for doing that.

I don't think museums are unique. It's just a warehouse of knowledge. That's all it is.

It's no different from a library, an art gallery, or any other collection. And there's big overlap between them. State Library of Victoria has Phar Lap. Should it be in the Museum Victoria?

I don't think it makes much difference. More importantly, let's ask the barbaric question. Does it matter if we have Phar Lap at all?

I come from Sydney, so I have a neutral view about that. But I would argue strongly that Phar Lap is an integral part of Victorian history and culture. If you get past the factoids, the fiction, and the straight out apocryphal stories, then there is a genuine history of Phar Lap and the association with Victoria. So we need Phar Lap, end of story.

And we need these collections to understand our past. They provide us with the tangible records in various forms and we need that to help chart our future. Most forms of science need collections.

Taxonomy, the classification of organisms, relies on specimens. if you cannot do science with one specimen of one thing. Kangaroo grass grows all across Australia. There are multiple genetic variations between the different locations. So you need multiple specimens from multiple locations across the country.

A little bit more in medicine-- organ and tissue libraries are absolutely critical for the medical research and public health. The deep sea drilling programme, which probably most people have never heard of, was a CIA-run operation back in the 1960s. And they went around the world and drilled holes in the ocean floor to see what was there.

And that is now an international resource. The core library, of these cores, is sitting somewhere in the US available for international scientists. And using that, we get a better idea of the global changes in our oceans.

And it's obvious that one core in the Coral Sea isn't going to cut it. We need multiple cores in multiple oceans. So, when it involves objects, we need multiples. In the case of paper documents, we quite often only have an original and the copies or reproduction which are sent around to various places for safety.

Ecology is a science of the relationship between organisms and their environment. But unless you can identify that organism correctly, then you can make some really serious mistakes. So it's not good enough to, say, to rely on a common name. Oh yeah, that's a blue gum.

Oh, hang on. Is that a Tasmanian blue gum, a Sydney blue gum, or a blue gum in Queensland? They're all different species. You must have specimens. They must be lodged in a collection as voucher specimens to back it up.

Many years ago in Western New South Wales, I came across the a gypsum mine with this lovely little daisy on it. It was interesting. This is what the gypsum mine looks like most of the time-- fairly grey and not very green.

And I started counting these plants because I was curious about how they were colonising the gypsum mine. Turned out that was a silly thing to do. The mine was already colonised, but I used to go out there on school holidays with the family and kids and the kids would run right over the mine.

We would wouldn't see them for hours-- you know, some old buildings in there. Forget about [INAUDIBLE] health and safety. They're full of asbestos, rusty nails, broken glass, you name it-- a complete no-go zone. But we had a great time and I counted plants.

And what's really interesting about this graph here-- that's a 40 year record. I started counting those plants in 1972 and literally nothing happened for a decade. Then, in 1994, there was torrential rain storms went through. And this prompted germination, massive germination, and a tenfold increase in the number of small plants. They're the red dots.

Most of them died. That's what normally happens. Very quickly, their numbers fell away. But within a few years, there was an increase in the number of large plants because the surviving small plants grew larger. And then since about the early 90s, not much has happened.

Does this study matter? It does. This plant has some special properties.

One is, it's got a very high content of a very rare oil which makes it totally unpalatable. Nothing will eat it. I've been out there in a drought and rabbits have been starving to death.

They're eating the bark of trees, the bark of roots, but they will not touch this plant. And yet, there's any amount of it there. This makes it a fabulous experimental plant to study climate change in our semi-arid rainslands because there is no confounding effect of grazing of any form. So I've got this 42 record and I'm trying to give it away. So if anybody here knows a scientist who is interested in this sort of stuff, please contact me and we'll negotiate an agreement.

Museums as state funded organisations are quite often very well placed to support long term research. Yes, we definitely need three-year PhD and research-grade research, but we need a commitment to long term studies. We need a commitment to places like Cape Grim, which the barbarians in [INAUDIBLE] want to shut down. We need a commitment to the data collection of the Bureau of Meteorology, which they also want to shut down. If we don't have these long term records, then we're in a seriously bad way.

Let's go a little bit further south in Ivanhoa and Western New South Wales. My first impression of the Vestfold Hills, when I saw it off the ship, was, you've got to be joking. That would have to be the most miserable looking place and I was going to spend a year there.

All right, we wandered around and my colleague and mentor Don Adamson recognised the significance of this area. It doesn't look very special, but it actually is. And-- this was about 2004 and I was revisiting some of the sites.

There was a bit of a scarp there about six metres high and I dug a trench down it. So I was doing the grunt work, collecting all the specimens and so forth. And we found fossil sholes there. And of course, fossil sholes immediately gets us to museums.

It was an international collaboration with museums in Australia, New Zealand, and the US. And we were able to sort out a really interesting story. Using those fossils and the information in museums because people had collected these both as fossils and many of them living specimens, we've got an idea of the ecology of these things as well as their age range. Because from other deposits that have been dated, we're able to conclude that this deposit was about four million years old.

But more importantly, it tells us lots of things about the climate and the ice sheet. The ice sheet at the time was no bigger than it is at present. Climate was probably a bit warmer, sea level about the same.

Again, does this matter? Well, yes, we were having fun. We were having a ball. We sweated blood, but we had a great time.

But they do matter because it provides a data point about climate change and the way the earth has evolved. But museums aren't just for scientists. They're for everyone.

And it really doesn't make much difference what your particular interest in. You'll find a museum. Interested in tanks? Go to [INAUDIBLE].

If you want to have a real caffeine hit of museums, Coleman and Holbrook off the Hume freeway. They have a choice between the Submarine Museum. It's a pretty logical place for a submarine in the middle of New South Wales, but there's an historic reason.

And again, it comes back to culture. First World War, the town was called Germanton. In a fit of xenophobic nationalism, they decided Germanton was appropriate and they renamed the town of Holbrook, the lieutenant of the Royal Navy who sailed a submarine through the Dardinelles in the First World War and won a Victoria Cross. Since then, Holbrook has acquired a Oberon-class submarine.

There's a couple of wonderful sculptures there, absolutely beautiful sculptures, and it's a major feature of the town. If you're bored by submarines, visit the National Poetry Museum in Holbrook-- again, a nice collection. And if you want to see the rural stuff, just down the road is the Woolpack Inn Museum. Many of these regional collections and local collections have very interesting objects but quite often only single examples.

Now, I have to go through some of the problems with local museums. This is not a criticism. This was is reality.

Now, you can skip most of the text and hit the bottom point-- not enough money. It's really that simple. They're mostly run by volunteers who are getting old like me.

Without the volunteers, we would have no local museums. But they're quite often in heritage buildings, which are an absolute disaster for museums. They have no security on them.

There's no air conditioning or humidity control, which is essential for maintaining collections of fabrics, in particular. Quite often, the curators don't have good skills. But most state museums run very, very good outreach programmes to help upskill the local curators.

Then there's theft, decay, and fire. Some of these collections are quite valuable. In the Museum of the Tamworth Historical Society in New South Wales, they have I think it was a sextant owned by Philip Gidley King, one of the very early explorers. Now, on the antique market with that provenance, that is a very, very valuable item-- definitely worth breaking into and stealing. But we come back to the bottom line-- not enough money.

Pigeons are technically described as rats with wings. They are not a good combination with a collection. Here at the Fairlie Heritage Museum in New Zealand, which is a wonderful museum-- very, very nice displays. Got a nice collection of wire strainers in the corner and they're all sitting on the floor because they're in the process of making some shelving.

And unfortunately, there's pigeons getting through the eaves, roost directly above the wire strainers, and crap all over the wire strainers-- not the best conditions for a collection. The Gulgong Pioneers Museum in New South Wales-- that was Henry Lawson's birthplace. Again, a very nice collection-- a series of ramshackle buildings with leaking roofs, water running down the walls. And in one corner, here's a nice collection of unlabelled, unaccessioned wire strainers with no information.

But every now and again, you come across barbed wire displays. These are always problematic because there's very few labels on them showing which ones were Australian. They all have patent names and patent numbers, but of the wires on that display board, there's only about three of them were used in the strike. The rest of them was swamped by collectors with overseas collectors, which is fine.

But the key bit of information that is missing more often than not is the provenance. Where did it come from? Where did you get it? This makes the difference between an interesting specimen and a really, really valuable specimen.

And yes, money does matter. In New Zealand, I think you could probably recognise the turn off to the Hayes Engineering Works and Homestead. There's enough signs there for it.

It's run by New Zealand, by Heritage New Zealand. They're government funded. And they have spent an absolute fortune on this complex. In the far left is the homestead that Earnest Hayes built.

In the centre there is his workshops and so forth. And on the right hand side of the workshop, the funny little truncated pyramid, that was his power station. He built a Pelton wheel, sort of water turbine, and ran water in a pipe down off the hill where I'm standing through the Pelton wheel to generate electricities for his factory.

So not only do we have the objects, the strainers and other agricultural things that Earnest Hayes invented and manufactured-- we also have the factory, and this is really an extraordinary valuable combination. Inside, it was just like home to me because it was just like my father's workshop when I was a kid with a dirt floor.

Rather large lathe there, still in working condition, and most of the machinery there is still operating. If you're ever in the south island of New Zealand and you get a chance to visit this place, I would really urge you to do so because you can really see the way in which an inventor and an entrepreneur managed his engineering business. And there's lots of displays, including casting patterns for the various bits of the strainer.

One of the really interesting things they have there is a prototype. Now, this never proceeded to production, but it demonstrates the continual search for a better idea. And I have a prototype down here that Marissa is going to hold up. This is a-- this one, the big one.

[INAUDIBLE]

Yep, yep, that one. Oh, sorry. Sorry, I mean [INAUDIBLE]. Sorry, Marissa.

[INAUDIBLE]

And I was visiting an agricultural supplier to buy a wire strainer off of him that he had invented. And he casually said, I've got the prototype here. Would you like it?

And I bit my tongue and didn't say, are you sure? Are you really, really sure? I said, that would be fantastic, thank you.

The prototype is more valuable than what the finished strainer is-- the finished strainer is just next to it-- because it shows the way he was thinking. Now, the reality is, he ripped off the design from an existing thing-- no question about that. This is the one that he ripped off.

And what he did was, with the next blue one, he added a leaver at the bottom and came up with a different idea. But apart from anything else, it shows that people build on previous ideas. But having that prototype there performs the link between the rip-off idea, between the idea that he ripped off, and the patent that he put it-- extremely valuable acquisition. In the Hayes museums, they've got quite comprehensive displays of the strainers plus the other material. And.

The other material, quite often ephemera, is vital for reinterpreting the history of these places. He has advertisements, order books, flyers, a whole bunch of stuff. And I use stuff that-- I'm not using it in a derogatory term. I'm using it as a collective noun for what's in a collection like that.

One of the ways of using those multiple collections is to develop an integrated explanation of something. And these are spiral fence posts-- well, short lengths thereof. Normally, when I collect things like this, I collect the full object and I always collect two and chop one down to about 18 inches because I can carry it around me.

And what's interesting about these is they're left hand and right hand spirals. Right hand spiral goes that way like an ordinary nut and bolt. Left hand spiral goes the other way. Why would you produce a left and a right hand?

Also interesting is the very common story-- every farmer I've ever met has told me, oh, yeah. There was a special tool that fitted over the top and you screwed it into the ground. Can you show me the tool?

No. No one has ever shown me the tool. So I, being this curious sort of person, I started to look at this.

So, here's the post in the paddock and the right hand side of the wire tower [INAUDIBLE] post. And this commonwealth post was the last post designed in Australia before the wire tower post in 1926. The spiral post was invented by a Kiwi, George David Watson.

There's his patent and it shows a left hand spiral out and also a ground plate, which was never used. He invented a machine to make them, and the way this machine is set up with the gears, it makes two at a time-- one left hand, one right hand. That's the exclamation of the left and right hands-- really quite simple, no mystery.

And then, if you get another source of information out of that knowledge warehouse, this is the Australian Pastoralist Review. And here's a beautiful full page illustrated ad with a very happy farmer up there with a load of posts on his shoulder. Down on the bottom right hand corner, there's left hands and right hands and that lovely little image, little circle there.

He's hammering the post in. So in other words, the special tool is a rural myth. So, by integrating the specimens, the patents, the advertisements, I can solve those mysteries.

Who cares? Well, I do, actually, because I actually enjoy those sort of questions. And it's not just show that farmers are telling fibs or anything like that. They genuinely believe it. But it shows how knowledge has been lost out of our landscape. Just because you have a fence on your property, you may not know anything about when it was built, how it was built, and so forth.

A few other posts end up on a rubbish tip like this. Now, I love rubbish tips. I call them museums without accession numbers. And they were an absolute gold mine.

Unfortunately, these days, the environmental authorities have put up big fences and barbed wire and locked gates and all sorts of stuff and I'm getting too old to climb over cyclone fences with barbed wire. So I've pretty much given up going scrounging through tips. But I have collected a lot of stuff out of rubbish tips.

Some of these posts were re-used. Here's some being re-used by a farmer to improve the height of a gate. Innovative, agile, and nimble-- three adjectives that were banded around with gay abandon recently, but they've applied to farmers for years. And a few of the posts were collected by Jack Chisholm

Unfortunately, I don't have an image of Jack's posts, but here he is with some of his travelling display of his wire strainers. And directly in front of him is pliers and fencing tools and wire cutters and things like that with a bunch of strainers on the side. Some of these are unique specimens. There are no other examples in captivity.

They're almost certainly out there in the cobwebs in the back corner of a shed somewhere. But at the moment, they're not available. And being allowed to get my hands on this collection has been an absolute privilege.

The collection is about nearly 700, 800 objects. Many of them, there's multiple examples. It might be a cluster of barb wires so there's duplicate.

It may be in the case of some of the wire strainers where there's several examples. But an awful lot of them are unique objects. There are no other known examples in captivity.

Most of them are collected in a strident, but there's also a significant number of the wires and the strangeness were swapped or obtained from overseas. It is without doubt the most comprehensive collection of fencing material in Australia. It's of international quality and it's here courtesy of a bequest from Jack Chisholm

This is a very, very important collection, not just for someone like me, who is obsessive about fences-- oh, sorry-- passionate, passionate, passionate. In the off-site store, there's cabinet after cabinet after cabinet with drawer after drawer after drawer. And every one is like opening a treasure chest.

I love this collection. It's fantastic. And I've been allowed to examine and photograph them and the arrangement I have with the museum is that I'm photographing them and the museum gets a set of all of my images for use on their websites and for education and so forth. So it's definitely a reciprocal benefit and it's one of the examples of the way in which museums operate.

If you have a good reason, you can get access to this stuff, to these collections, and use them. And that's a privilege. Some of the treasures, Creed's wire strainer from 1884, was a combination tool.

There's one down here for you to have a look at. Please don't handle the objects afterwards, but by all means, come and have a look. The patent is down there as well.

You could modify it. You could vary this a little bit, use it as a bracing bit for boring holes and also as a wire strainer. What is amazing about that example is that it's complete, including a couple of the fragile pieces. That make it a very, very important object.

Morgan's wire strainer-- very, very expensive, quite large, and interesting cultural difference between Australia and the US. These things are quite common in the US, rack wire strainers, but really very, very uncommon in Australia. Why? I have no idea-- a different approach altogether. So we can actually make international comparisons on the basis of this collection.

Probably my favourite strainer in the collection is Thomas's success strainer. This was an absolutely beautiful piece of precision engineering. It has more parts in it than a dog's got fleas and that plus the quality of the engineering meant it was simply too expensive and success was a misnomer. It was unsuccessful.

But if you want success, you go for simplicity. Walker's wire strainer form 1884, commonly known as dog bones or cotton reels-- these are some modern examples from Jack's collection. And you can say that the top left one has cast [INAUDIBLE] a phone number. So it obviously doesn't come from 1884.

And just those five examples there of which there's-- that's only a few of the examples in Jack's collection-- show the range of variation. They're variations because they were cast in different foundries around the country. So, success is 132 years of sales.

They were used in the Queensland, New South Wales rabbit fence in the 1886. And this may be one from the original batch that was ordered. But you can still say them in vineyards.

They're commonly used for trellis wires because they're cheap, they're simple, and they work. Cheap, simple, and they work equals success. But Walker had the odd bit of problems. And I really love those two patent diagrams and I'll just move over here for a sec. OK, so this is Walker's original patent diagram on the top here.

And from 1884 and 10 years later in Tasmania, Davidson and Brown patented their wire strainer. Well, as a university academic, I saw lots of plagiarism. I think this is plagiarism on steroids. They didn't even have the decency to modify the diagram.

Why did this happen? It's because of the nature of the legislation in Tasmania at the time. All the patent examiners had to do was to check that the patent was in the correct format. There was no requirement for them to check the originality of the patent.

So this was perfectly legit. And if anybody wanted to object, someone like Walker, then it was up to him to object. But the patent office would have accepted it.

Reg Doogan was the brother of John Doogan. And John Doogan should be a household name in Victoria, the first powered flight in Australia using his home-made plane. The original is in the off-site store and there's a fabulous replica hanging in the foyer.

That was my boy-- John Doogan and his brother Reg in their dirt floored workshop on their property [INAUDIBLE] just north of Melbourne. Reg's wire strainer was sold for many decades and I've met farmers who still swear by them-- best wire strainer ever made. By using the multiple examples in the collection and integrating that with information from advertisements, we can follow the evolution of the nose on this strainer.

The original nose was quite short, a bifurcated thing, here in the patent and here in one of the strainers. Trouble is that there was very little room here to tie a knot. And so he extended the nose and that improved things. But it still wasn't very good.

In 1919, there was an advertisement showing this funny nose with a round thing and I simply could not understand what it was. But lo and behold, in Jack's collection, here's an example and it's a special form of grip. It improved things, but obviously it wasn't the answer.

By 1924, he'd put a standard grip from the rest of the strainer onto the noise. So he was innovative and he was agile. Does that sound familiar?

One of the other ways of using the collection is to figure out what's not in the collection. And so here on the right hand side, we have the beautiful bronze and steel crown wire strainer. But there were actually three variations of it, different in design. So the first one was spur gears.

And that was modified to a worm and pinion gear, which was used in the bronze one. We know of no examples of those first two iterations. Private collectors are absolutely essential. The other thing that we are missing is the factories.

There's any number of railway preservation societies around with fabulous steam locomotives in various states of disrepair because to overhaul a steam locomotive would probably cost many hundreds of thousands of dollars. And that's not including volunteer time. But there's no doubt that for many things, if somebody makes it, somebody will collect it.

Now, an honest answer-- how many of us have laughed at the people on "The Collectors?" Why would you collect something like that? Go on, hands up-- hands up.

Right, that's fine. But maybe the question is, how do we harness that so that those amazing collections can be a little bit more accessible? Assuming people want to make them more accessible. And this is where digital records, digital images, are so valuable.

And these collections can make a very real contribution. But again, the provenance is critical. And if you know anybody that is a private collector, please, please, please ask them to record the provenance. Where did they get it?

When did they get it? What's its backstory? It's the difference between a specimen and a very valuable record.

No such thing as a free lunch-- when Jack bequeathed his collection to the museum, those 1,700 objects took nearly six months to catalogue accession. That cost real money. That's salary money. That's probably $50,000.

Then it has to be housed and curated and looked after. Unfortunately, the collection is now out of date because it essentially stops in the late 1990s. So, what's Museum Victoria gonna do about that?

There's several possible strategies. I'm going to contribute to it. I've been gradually buying up modern strainers and I intend on donating those to the museum. But I'll make sure that they go with money or with a whole bunch of records to make life simple.

Converse question is how does a local museum say no to material that's being donated without offending somebody and quite often maybe offending an extended family? It's a very real social problem for the museums. Who cares about wire strainers? Now, quite honestly.

Well, they are of interest to a significant number of people. But they actually provide a very, very good story about the development of technology in Australia. We've got the objects themselves-- the patents, the advertisements, all those records.

And we can integrate those and we can actually trace some of those development paths and we can put dates on them. And this makes a real difference-- we can actually put dates on them. So, political statement again.

Innovative, agile, and nimble-- Australians have been doing that since 1788. And of course, indigenous Australians have been doing it for a lot longer. We don't need that message rammed down our throat so we can become a research source so that entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley can make money. We've been innovative ever since we've been here. And I say we collectively for all Australians.

One of the common myths about inventions is the Great Man Theory. Stevenson invented the steam engine because he saw a kettle boiling or something. That's just not true.

He built on decades and decades and decades of experience and previous designs. He was a very, very gifted engineer, no question. But he wasn't the sole inventor. There were other people.

Most inventions are incremental, slight improvement on a previous one. And the example down there shows that Sam [INAUDIBLE] ripped off the design and improved it and he came up with another strainer-- incremental changes. Large corporations-- they simply weren't involved.

This was grassroots invention pretty much most of the time. And there are some women who were patentees. So it wasn't just blokes. The women were involved as well.

Now, before I close, if you'd like more information, I'll be giving a PDF of the talk to Lisa. And that'll be up on the website at some stage. I'll include in that list of references.

Unfortunately, most of them are American and they don't apply very well here. but I've put all of my fence-related research as PDFs onto a Dropbox site, including my PhD thesis. And if you send me an email, and that'll be on the information afterwards, I'll send you the URL for the Dropbox site.

And they're all freebies. [INAUDIBLE] your life. Now, two things that aren't there is the current draft of my encyclopaedia of rural fences and the wire strainer guide because they're draft and they're still subject to substantial change. Conversely, I would like some information as well.

So if you know of anything unusual, wire strainers, that sort of stuff, please contact me. Send me an image. I will definitely respond to you. So we need collections, end of story, full stop.

We don't need politicians cutting budgets. We need collections. We need multiple examples of many things.

We need to be able to understand their variation, development in technology, and also evolution of organisms. We need to build on existing collections, especially very, very good collections like the Jack Chisholm fencing collection to keep it up to date. If you get on to Google and look at the online catalogues of the museums around Australia, there is not a single wire strainer in the Queensland Museum or in the Powerhouse Museum in Sidney-- none.

And yet, both states have extensive agriculture. If you want to see fencing stuff, you come to Museum Victoria. Or you go to a couple of the private collections here on a public exhibition. Bob Dobbins from South Australia is a superb collection.

It's on display in the [INAUDIBLE] National Trust Museum in South Australia. And his son Leon Dobbins, his collection is on display at the Barb Wire Hotel in Spalding in South Australia. But the collection in public ownership is the Jack Chisholm collection.

The other thing that we need to do is to develop a digital museums Australia. I don't know what we're going to call it, but where private collectors can contribute and so researches from anywhere around the world can see the full range of material and objects that we have. This would be a bit like the National Library Trove portal.

The National Library provides the gateway and they have information fed to them from all sorts of sources-- state libraries, municipal libraries, and so on. And finally, we've got to fight the attacks on our knowledge warehouses. These are essential.

So, next time you hear a politician talking about cuts to the state library or the public records office or the Bureau of Statistics or the Bureau of Meteorology, write to your local member and tell them no. These things are essential. And I'd like to close with Jack Chisholm. Thank you.

I use that word amateur there in the best the sense of all. he was unpaid, not a professional in any sense of that word, but he was an expert. And I would take my hat off.

Thank you very much, John, and I throw it back over to our audience here. Is there anyone who'd like to ask a question? Yes, Richard.

Excuse me, sorry.

Not so much a question, John-- just another example. I mean, it's always struck me, looking at the museum's collections here, that so many of our collections are, in fact, have come in like Jack Chisholm's collection, have come in as individual passions and knowledge and then come into the state collection subsequently. And just another nice example I sort of give is Murray Littlejohn moved all around southeastern Australia recording frogs for a period of 50 years.

And his recordings then eventually found its way to the museum. Those are all digitised now. They're on our field guide app. So you can have them on your phone as well.

I could play you one now if you wanted. So that if you're out in the field and you're wondering what that frog call is, you can start to work out, because frogs are so much heard rather than seen typically, you can work out by the frog call what species it is.

But even more than that now, we're setting up remote sensing systems for birds and frogs so that we can actually put little recording, digital recording, all around Victoria. And from that, we can then do just a digital analysis to work out what frogs and what the frequency of the frogs are in different places. So, one person's passion in terms of recording something specific like that--

Yes.

--just lives on and lives on and lives on in different ways. And obviously, moving into the digital space as [INAUDIBLE] suggested too opens up all those possibilities.

As I said, we need private collections and we need to integrate those. We don't necessarily have to have them in public ownership, but there must be some way of integrating them because most people who are passionate about something, they want to share it. Now, they'll swap stuff with other collectors, but they also want to share it.

So I would argue very, very strongly for support of private collectors in some way. And the digital is the way to go. Yeah, down in the front here, there's a range of things. There's an example of the cockroach, some wire strainers, and there's some patent documents there.

By all means handle the patent documents but not the objects please. That's a bit naughty. But the patent documents, no problem. There's a couple of the bits of my wire strainer guide.

And with these wire strainers-- these ones here are mine-- it shows the development of this particular strainer here from the one that was ripped off [INAUDIBLE] then his prototype and then what he came up with. But a question-- I've talked before about Thomas's success or unsuccess wire strainer. The best chain wire strainer in Australia at the moment is this one, a spring grip-- beautiful piece of engineering, laser cut pieces, modern manufacturing technology, stainless steal, all sorts of really nice features about it.

It's about between $250 and $300. Or you can get onto the web and buy any number of no-name, made in China for about $35. That's a bit of a dilemma for Peter Barrett, who invented the spring grip. How do you compete with this?

Even if I break it on my second job, it's only another $40 to buy another one, $35 to buy another one. So that's a few of the examples. And these ones from Museum Victoria, they're just wonderful. Thanks.

Any questions? I just wonder while we have you here, John, whether you can comment without giving us some-- probably another multiple lecture in great detail. But just briefly, what are your reflections on the impact of fences on the landscape that you've been through and across Australia? In what why has it impacted the ecology, the nature of that environment?

Fences, they're simply tools. They're screwdrivers. Basically, it's to keep yours on that side and mine on this side. And I don't want that dreadful bull that you've got, which is a mongrel anyway, over my [INAUDIBLE] cows. You probably think the same thing. So there's a social dimension to it.

In terms of the landscape, you only have to look at the satellite images and you can see fence patterns. You're not seeing the fence. What you're seeing is the changes in the land next to the fence.

And a lot of that is caused by animal behaviour. Sheep, for example, drift to the southwest. So you get more barriers in the southern corners.

The impact has been staggering. Interestingly enough, barb wire wasn't essential in Australia. We had plain wire here from 1840, which was only a few years after it was used in the UK. So barb wire was not essential for us, unlike in the US.

But in terms of the changes in the landscape, it's staggering. But not only that-- you can use fences to show those changes. Buried fences-- you know when the fence was built and it's buried?

You can figure out how much deposition there's been over what period of time. So they're actually quite invaluable things to have. Right.

That right? OK, I think we might close there.