Museum Notebook: My journey to the depths

Museum intern Henry Buckenham hard at work on the coral collection. Photo / Whanganui Regional Museum

Starting an internship at a museum is an exciting prospect.

There's a chance to explore the depths of a collection that spans thousands of years and every continent. The chance to get to know and learn from museum professionals. The chance to gain some insight about how a museum fits into its community and what it does for that community.

What I did not expect was to be confronted by a forest of coral.

The glory days of natural history collecting involved amassing examples of everything that swam, flew, crawled or sat attached to a rocky shelf. The collected items were preserved via taxidermy or pickling in spirits or laying them out, pinned in sequence and according to classification. Unnerving to modern sensibilities, the lack of ready access to high-quality images and the generality of scientific practice meant these collections served a useful purpose. They provided people with an opportunity to understand and marvel at all creatures great and small, sourced from all over the planet. The treasures of the sea floor were no different.

The founder of the Whanganui Regional Museum, Samuel Drew, collected examples of corals from throughout the Pacific Ocean.

Two huge ledgers in copperplate handwriting give species identifications to some of them and, occasionally, a broad location of where they were collected. Drew was not a man who organised his collecting practices with a young intern's cataloguing process in mind. Personal, beautiful (if illegible), and with details sometimes totally absent, his ledger is both helpful and unhelpful in identifying corals.

Part of the Whanganui Regional Museum coral collection. Photo / Whanganui Regional Museum

My education is not as well-rounded in the natural sciences as a Victorian gentleman's might have been, so the idea of identifying each piece of coral was quite daunting. As it turns out there are more than 2500 species of coral in existence. There begins the challenge, bringing out the magnifying glass and inspecting the structure of the corallites to indicate family, and then the pursuit of a matching structure in the depths of coral enthusiast publications and academic journals.

Once an identification has been ascertained, an annotation must be made on each of the pieces of coral by applying a layer of removable celluloid gently to the tiniest strip of the least obvious part of the object. A dip pen is used in writing no more than 3mm or 4mm high, a number indicating the date of its accession and the number of the item in the series. Again, unlike the Victorian gentleman, my dip-pen-handling skills are sadly lacking, especially when it comes to application of tiny numbers to the misshapen corals.

Do not let this description mislead you. Although my work may not have been glamorous or romantic, it was a fantastic adventure through time and science. Armed with a ledger and a magnifying glass, I became a sleuth tracking down the lost identities of forgotten colonies.

Along the way I gained a new respect for the dedication of scientists in relation to taxonomic issues. Perhaps more importantly, I realised these collections often represent species that once thrived but are now rare. Where "common" is scrawled across Drew's ledger, "endangered" is often encountered on the appropriate Wikipedia page.

* Henry Buckenham is a candidate for a Masters degree in Museum and Heritage Practice at Victoria University, Wellington. He has just completed an internship at Whanganui Regional Museum.