We cried when we installed this object.
As a museum professional,
it’s a real privilege to work on these incredibly rare objects.
But there’s a huge responsibility.
My name is Jennifer Brian
and I’m an objects conservator at the National Museum of Australia.
I’ve been working on the Great Southern Land gallery for the last two
and a half years.
Here we have a wet specimen of a thylacine.
And from my understanding, there are only four of these in the world.
And of course the thylacine is now extinct.
So this is a very precious, very significant object.
It has had a pretty hard life.
We don’t know when it was killed or by whom,
but as you can see from the specimen itself, it was skinned very roughly.
And so it’s quite an emotive object.
It’s quite vulnerable in the position that it’s in.
And I think it really gives us an insight into what
we’ve done to this species.
During World War Two,
this specimen was stored in a metal rusting tank,
and they weren’t able to get access to formaldehyde.
So from the war years,
this was just topped up with de-ionised water.
So the specimen itself wasn’t properly
set during that time and it essentially rotted.
It is the most fragile wet specimen
I have ever worked with.
I started working on this object about two and a half years ago.
I understood that this object had been on display before,
but that the vibration from people walking past had affected the specimen.
And so we knew that vibration was a risk.
It had been in storage for the last 16 years,
and it had been nice and safe in that storage.
And so we knew that whatever vibration it was exposed to
in that area was safe.
So we did vibration analysis of that space
to work out the maximum acceptable level of vibration.
We then worked with an engineer to develop a vibration isolation table
that the vitrine holding the specimen would sit into,
which would then isolate the specimen from those specific frequencies.
And actually, the table that we’ve got isolates significantly more than that.
So hopefully in its current position,
this thylacine is going to be
more stable and more safe than it would be even in storage.
The treatment that we did to get it on display was
very lengthy and very nerve-racking for me.
But it was a real privilege to work on.
It’s probably one of the highlights of my career, actually.
We very carefully removed
the specimen from the old vitrine
and took it out of its old formalin solution.
We then placed it onto a plastic covered tray and covered it
and moved it through the galleries, what we would call dry.
And every time we went over a little bump, we carefully lifted the tray
to make sure that that vibration wasn’t transmitted through to the object.
We had to lift it on the tray because the thylacine
is too fragile to be physically handled.
We brought it up into the gallery and then placed it
into the new vitrine,
and then we carefully siphoned in fresh fluid
to make sure that the stream was going as smoothly
and gently as possible so that it didn’t cause any swirls or eddies
while it was filling up, to minimise the impact on the thylacine himself.
We finished filling up the solution,
we added the formalin, did a final top-up, and then I applied
silicon to the edge of the vitrine to make sure that it’s really well sealed,
and we lowered the glass top of the vitrine onto the silicon
so we have an airtight seal. And we’ll keep an eye on it
to make sure that it doesn’t have any deterioration.
So long as the fluid doesn’t drop,
we don’t see any clouding or any physical deterioration of the specimen,
then we will leave it on here for as long as we can
to make sure that it can tell its story for as long as possible.
As we were
working on this specimen, people would come up
and look at it and initially recoil
because it is challenging.
It’s upsetting. It’s distressing to look at.
This creates a visceral response
in anyone who sees it.
But I hope that that visceral response is then followed up with a questioning
of, ‘Why did I find that so challenging?’
and then that questioning moves into compassion
and respect and understanding, not only for this thylacine,
but for our environment more broadly
and a reconsidering
of how we can do better moving forward.
And as a conservator, it’s really important
to me to be able to share this thylacine story
and the story of its species more broadly as long as possible.