Collection Curation

Come behind the scenes at Powerhouse Castle Hill and meet some of the people who work with the Powerhouse Collection.

Curators at Powerhouse develop, care for and interpret the collection. They manage object acquisitions or loans, conduct research and share knowledge about objects for exhibitions, educational programs and publications, and collaborate on tours and displays. Curators often bring a combination of subject matter expertise and academic analysis of social issues to their work. Storytelling about collection objects helps expand audiences’ awareness and understanding of their cultural importance across time.

Head of Collections First Nations

‘My passion is storytelling and truth telling which go hand in hand. My role at Powerhouse allows me to care for First Nations stories, which as a Wiradjuri man, an Aboriginal man, is an incredible privilege but also a great responsibility. I need to ensure the stories we hold are cared for in a way that respects First Nations sovereignty, protocols and rights. We cannot let these stories gather dust. In collaboration with the relevant First Nations community, we will work to get them heard and engaged with.

I've chosen three examples from the collection. I chose ‘Protector and Aborigine’ photographic print because Dr. Fiona Foley is a legend. Their work often tackles history that Australians look away from. It is the truth telling I hope Powerhouse can engage in more.’

‘Shellworks by the La Perouse Auntys are a reminder of the resilience of Aboriginal people and how we will always find a way to keep our cultures alive, to keep our storytelling alive against colonial forces. This work is often led by strong women such as Mavis Longbottom and Lola Ryan.

I also chose ‘They #3’ by Aidan Hartshorn, an incredible cultural practitioner who narrates important realities of the impact that the disregard of Aboriginal self-determination and knowledge continues to have.

First Nations culture materials are not static objects. They are part of living cultures embedded with the DNA and spirit of the ancestors who made them. Along with a stitch or a brush stroke or a carving technique. First Nations community members see their family, their community, when looking at their cultural material. We make sure that we follow the cultural protocols when preserving First Nations cultural material, which may mean with an object it has to face a particular orientation, or a particular side might need to face the sky, or we might need to provide warnings with some cultural material to notify that only people of a certain gender they cannot engage with it.’

‘Historically, I believe museums have been — and can be — possessive, which can be problematic when it comes to First Nations cultural belongings and knowledges taken from their homelands. This material can be considered communally owned or the legacy for the community’s descendants. As such, we have started looking at new ways of acquiring material that respect First Nations peoples’ rights to their knowledges and communal ownership, ways that are mutually beneficial to the museum and community which the community need legally own their cultural material, though it can be cared for by Powerhouse and the great team of registers and conservators.

The facilities at Powerhouse Castle Hill assist to preserve objects and the relationship that object is a part of. Whether it be by having new spaces to host communities privately and hold space for them to maintain their cultural connection. Or new spaces that allow us to adhere to First Nations peoples' right to keep certain knowledge secret. Or just more space to allow the First Nations team at Powerhouse collaborate with First Nations communities and ask what stories they want to tell and how would they like to showcase their excellence in the collections.’

Director, Curatorial, Collections and Programs

‘The museum in its storage facility holds the cultural memory of the society that puts that collection together. We have a fundamental belief that material culture, as we call it, can provide us with insights into the culture that used and produced the items. Our objects embody the values and beliefs of the people that use and produce those items.

Most of the material we have in our collection has been donated over time as people within our society recognise it may have some significance. Some of the most remarkable objects have come from people ringing up and saying, ‘I just wanted to find out whether you would be interested in this little piece’.

In some cases, when I know an object is associated with somebody significant from the past, they become almost like a portal to that time. I might feel like I am shaking hands with the person who made it or worked with it. There are objects I know the history of particularly well, but I find they gain new meaning when something happens in our world today, for which these objects become like echoes of ideas from the past. They become a point of reflection for me, about my values and beliefs. And in that reflection, I can perhaps consider whether implicit values in my day-to-day life, when they're brought into relief by thinking about these objects, are values that I still hold dear or whether I need to review my thinking and my understanding of the world.’

Collection Curator

‘I’m really passionate about social history and love collecting and interpreting objects and material that documents social change and the history of Sydney. I have a masters in Feminist Studies, so I’m really interested in the way women have been seen in the past and how women are seen now. I'm also interested in diversity and how as a museum we include and showcase diverse voices in the collection. Part of our role in a museum is to be responsive to contemporary issues, so as curators we’ve met people at the Women’s March, climate change marches and events for the referendum for The Voice to Parliament for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

The museum is more than 140 years old, so the way we document and store collection objects has evolved. One of the good things about moving objects to Castle Hill is we documented them in more detail and improved how we protect them in state-of-the-art storage.

We were the first museum in the world to collect the country’s AIDS quilts and record oral histories. It’s the largest memorial in our collection, crossing social history, health, medicine and graphic design, and it was created by staff and volunteers working for five years to document this period of incredible social turmoil.’

‘Some of the quilts are works of art in themselves: there’s a lot of tinsel and sequins, there’s handcuffs, leather jackets — they reflect the passions of the people who died. Conservators made sure the material is stable and now the quilts are in one of the stores at Castle Hill, wrapped individually and stored on pool noodles to keep the pieces of fabric apart and stop them catching on each other.

Another exciting part of working with our collection is when you get to deep dive into research for an exhibition, podcast or event. Recently I’ve been looking at food production, graphic design and history for the Culinary Archive and we were exploring stories about picnics. Taking the public through the Holiday exhibition at Castle Hill has been fantastic as they share their holiday memories. The humble picnic basket strikes a chord with members of the public.

One object can tell multiple stories: you can look at it on its own and admire the craftsmanship, the shape, colour, materials and design. Then its history of use and how it fits into the larger social, political and design context. It can used to talk about the history of leisure, the development of public transport, and when the working class had access to weekends.

Really big companies would have picnics for workers and their families, and a lovely guy offered a costume made by Doris Collier from uncut Arnott’s biscuit labels for a staff event in the 1920s. This handmade dress up costume is an important part of our social history, our working life.’

Collection curator

‘Collections curators build the collection by acquiring objects and researching the collection, often through research, and connecting with the community to bring in more knowledge and expand the information we have about objects. We also think strategically about new material we might want to collect in the future, whether for programs we have coming up or other significant areas.

My particular interest is technology — I’m an engineering and innovation curator — so I’m always talking with people in the science, design and engineering communities, looking at contemporary issues in technology and science and thinking about how the objects and stories we collect might be relevant to future audiences.

I had an incredible opportunity to work on the Atmospheric Memory project with an amazing international artist and a multidisciplinary team of people within the museum. I find it exciting how our collection can be used to tell stories and connect people around science and technology. Not just how things work, which is important, but also how changes in science and technology affect us. Museums give people spaces to reflect on and process some of the really big issues in the world.’

‘It's hard to select a favourite object, though I always come back to being an engineering curator and the Boulton and Watt steam engine is an amazing object. It’s just so beautiful. The story of how it came to the museum is remarkable. While visiting London in 1887, Prof Archibald Liversidge [one of the founders of the forerunner of the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences] had the foresight to have one of the oldest rotative steam engines in the world saved from being scrapped and donated to the museum. It became central to the museum’s exhibitions for many years, and now in a contemporary context we can look at that story of steam and the impacts of the industrial revolution on the world. This object prompts us to reflect on changes in technology, the promises of innovation and the future of energy production and how it affects our climate.

Our early plastics collection is another example of innovation that in its time promised wonderful potential to solve a bunch of challenges. But looking back we can see the problems caused by plastics and their production. Modern versions of plastics that aren’t made from petroleum aim to be more environmentally friendly. We have examples of biodegradable plastic in the collection going back 20 years and I’ve been looking at other new materials being used to make plastic, such as seaweed and algae.’

‘We now have a large workroom next to the conservation labs at Powerhouse Castle Hill where we can bring out objects from the collection so researchers and members of the public can look at them in more detail. Having this big beautiful space makes it really easy for us to have people share stories about how objects were made, how they worked or how they changed people’s lives. I recently brought out some blood glucose meters for the family of Stan Clark, who’d invented them soon after his daughter was diagnosed with diabetes, and it was really lovely to share their stories. Those personal stories are something we try to collect as well as the objects themselves — they add to the knowledge we’re building and make the collection richer.’

The facilities at Powerhouse Castle Hill are purpose-built to present new exhibitions and programs and support the work of the museum’s curatorial, research and conservation teams alongside the Powerhouse Collection.

The entire collection of more than half a million objects is housed in one location. Originally a botanical research station, the site has evolved since the late 1970s to house specialised museum collection facilities, including the Museum Discovery Centre.

Building J, the newest and largest (8135sqm) of seven collection facilities, opened in 2024. It includes a huge presentation space, climate-controlled collection store and conservation lab, research workspaces and photography studios, all designed to help protect and share the objects’ stories across the generations.