Refurbishing the Museum of Antiquities

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After years of languishing as a low priority – if it was a priority – UNE’s Museum of Antiquities earlier this year re-opened with a new look and new amenity to visitors. The Museum’s glow-up didn’t happen overnight, and would not have happened at all had it not been for the determination of one person: Dr Bronwyn Hopwood, Lecturer in Ancient History.

How does a project get bootstrapped into being when funding and support have to be conjured out of thin air? Pulse spoke to Dr Hopwood about the challenges and rewards of taking a project from inertia to completion.

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PULSE: How did you find yourself in charge of overhauling UNE’s Museum of Antiquities (UNEMA)?

DR BRONWYN HOPWOOD: At the end of 2015 there was an attempt to reactivate the Governance Committee of the Museum after the last committee disbanded. The call went out for interested people, I put in an expression of interest, and it went from there.

There are a lot of people who care about UNE’s collections, but who don’t necessarily want to be actively managing them.

I’ve always been quite passionate about museums. I just love fossicking in any kind of museum. So I was quite happy to be proactive about bringing UNEMA up to the state it deserved. The committee were quite happy to make me Honorary Curator and later the Faculty appointed me as the Collections Manager.

Pulse: Was there something particular about this museum that really got you inspired?

BH: My training is in Ancient History, specifically the Roman era, and one of the Museum’s two primary collections is Classical Antiquities – right in my field of research expertise and interest.

We have artefacts from many key civilisations of the classical Mediterranean world. But the Museum is much broader than that.

The second collection is ethnographic, reflecting on material cultures from beyond the world of classical antiquity as it is traditionally understood. So it’s been pushing me to expand my boundaries and get familiar with things beyond my expertise.

Pulse: Do UNEMA’s collections have real depth – enough to make it a valuable teaching resource?

BH: Absolutely, in fact the museum started as a teaching collection. But to give some context, the oldest and largest museum of antiquities in the Southern Hemisphere is the Chau Chak Wing Museum at the University of Sydney. Its collection is around 30,000 objects.

Most other universities with collections have between 500 and 3,000-ish artefacts (more if you count individual photographs, books, and slides). But in terms of artefacts, 3,000 is the upper limit, and we’re at 3,000. So we punch with the best of them besides the Chau Chak Wing, which is out on its own.

What’s particularly special about us is the regional location. We are Australia’s only regional museum of classical antiquities, and the quality of the collection is superlative.

So, for example, our unofficial mascot is a little askos. It’s a wine or oil vessel – depending on how you interpret it – in the shape of a boar, so it literally looks like a wild pig.

There’s only 22 of them in the world and we’ve got the only one that’s in Australia.

Pulse: How did you go about rebuilding something that seemed to be struggling to attract resourcing?

BH: The public and academic interest has always been there, but not the money. Even after I started pushing for investment, it took four attempts before the current refurbishment went through.

When I started in 2016, one of the first things I did was to throw myself into the records to see what I could learn about the collection. What I found was 20 years of correspondence between the different incarnations of UNE’s Estate and Built Environment (EBE) and the Museum’ Governance committees, which kept reiterating UNE’s support for refurbishment and expansion, providing costings, …and then nothing. That cycle kept repeating over many years.

And at first it continued with me too. At one point there was a proposal to devote a floor of the Dixson library to the Antiquities Museum, Art Collection, and a general collections exhibitions space. But that fell through. There was the ongoing conversations about the Campus Plan – do we fit into it, or not? Do we have any funding, or not?

None of it happened.

Eventually I decided to bet on the fact that the Arts building is solid, that UNE currently can’t afford to replace it, and we haven’t got money for anything else – so we weren’t moving anywhere anytime soon.

But even after the choice to refurbish in-situ was made, we kept on cycling. A decision to formally make the Museum a capital project with a designated budget was never taken. Instead attempts to repaint and re-carpet the facility out of Consolidated Revenue were made. These, of course, were subject to the usual delays in approvals, funding, and manpower, and if you don’t spend the funds within Consolidated Revenue by the end of the year, it disappears.

In 2021, when we were three days away from approval to go to tender to refurbish the space with custom-built cabinets, the tornado came through. Literally overnight, we lost funding, manpower, and willpower.

At that point it became clear that the project was not going to progress from planning to reality unless we made it a fait accompli. So I fundraised donations, won grants, acquired some quality secondhand cabinets, bought many more new ones, and just said: “They’re turning up.”

 In some ways the lack of choices was great. We just had to do the refurbishment where we were, with what we had.

Museums can easily spend millions of dollars on infrastructure and displays, but we couldn’t do that. So I had to start thinking about clever, cheap, off-the-peg solutions that still convey quality.

All the new cabinets in the Museum cost a total of around $60,000. Some of the ones in the corridor came free from the Hyde Park barracks in Sydney – all I had to do was get them here. That amounted to another $30,000 or so worth of free infrastructure. 

And we got a grant to establish a 3D-printing hub, and 3D-printed most of the display stands and supports we needed ourselves.

Being creative and having fun with your space can actually produce more memorable results than if you have the money to build a completely customised system.

Pulse: Where did the labour come from?

BH: I spent some early mornings and many, many weekends sewing things and painting things and sticking things together and that kind of thing. When you get sick of marking essays, it can be a productive form of procrastination.

With the assistance of several of the wonderful trades staff and technicians in EBE we slowly made inroads.

We got it to a stage where volunteers could really start to make a contribution – moving things, documenting things, preparing displays, doing the work that carries no occupational health and safety issues but requires attention to detail.

Volunteers have been incredibly generous with their time and formed a really nice group. The students and community members involved have made some really good friendships, there’s a great energy in the group, and a sense of pride too.

Pulse: Have there been rewards for all this effort?

BH: It’s nice when the kids from Yarm come through and want to push all the buttons; when grandparents visit with their families; seeing differently-abled people able to engage with the space; having students take up research on the collections. And I’ve had so many colleagues say how much they love just being in the space. Of course, everyone loves the mummies.

In museums you get people that will get through the space in two minutes flat, and then others who read absolutely everything and walk incredibly slowly and spend the entire day. You’ve got to cater for these extremes in taste, and everything in between.

It’s a constant negotiation, trying to think of ways to engage and be as inclusive as possible, while also having content that challenges and inspires.

Pulse: For those in the University who can see that something needs doing, but don’t know where to start: what advice do you have? Especially assuming that funding support will be limited, at best.

BH: Not everything needs funds. And sometimes you have to find the funds rather than waiting for the institution to find them for you.

The tricky bit is knowing how to get things done, how best to collaborate, and when to comply with the letter versus the spirit of the rules.

My general approach is to ask: are you doing good in the world? The world you want to live in is the world you should aim to create, and not wait for somebody to hand it to you.

Find a domain that you can contribute to and focus on the things that you can do. Don’t worry about the things you can’t do. Very few of us will be able to rebuild a campus or reinvent the promotions system or whatever. But you can improve the things that are within your control. Partly because it will be a better world for you to live in, and partly because it will be better for everyone else.

And collaborate. You can usually find support. You don’t have to do it alone.