an extraordinary thing to think of these
tins of chocolate making their way over
to the other side of the world where
we've unearthed them 120 years later
[Applause]
the chocolate is in a very good
condition it's certainly i think one of
the best preserved chocolates that i've
seen of this age
anywhere it was made by cadburys and you
can still see the engraving of cadburys
on each finger
there was tin foil that was originally
around the chocolates
and that tin foil has started to
disintegrate
but the chocolate itself is still in
remarkably great condition
patterson would be known to many people
for his poetry he was probably one of
the most famous poets in australian
history
um you know he wrote things like the man
from snowy river and clancy of the
overflow
and also waltzing matilda which is sort
of virtually a second australian
national anthem
and uh in fact he's on the australian
ten dollar note um he's that famous
but what isn't known that is that he
actually was a
uh war correspondent during the boer war
and
whilst the ball war was going queen
victoria decided
that to mark the the dawning of 1900
she would provide chocolates to the to
keep troop morale high
[Music]
but uh in the end cadbury's decided they
would donate their chocolates as
a you know i guess a way of not
defending queen victoria
and queen victoria then arranged and
paid for the tins of
the chocolates were in to be to be made
and they're really beautiful tins as
[Music]
well
it's not unthinkable that he either
would have um purchased them or somehow
traded something perhaps for them
but obviously there was something that
he did value because of the fact that
he's kept them
um and uh uh ensured that you know they
weren't eaten and that they
sort of outlasted um you know anything
that anyone would have imagined
[Music]
[Applause]
to ensure that it sort of manages to
survive for another 100 years another
120 years
but we're certainly digitizing a lot of
images of it so that people can
get a sense of what its dimensions are
what the box looks like this beautiful
tin box and get that real sense of the
item
so that people can enjoy it wherever
they might be