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It was like opening a treasure chest - a very prolonged opening that took four years.

This is how long it took to pack and verify every one of nearly 12,000 pieces in the Berndt Museum collection for its move from the cramped basement under the Social Sciences building to its new, albeit temporary, home beneath the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery in the Dr Harold Schenberg Arts Centre.

Dr John Stanton, Director of the Berndt Museum, has devoted his life to the Museum, begun and bequeathed to the University by anthropologists Ronald and Catherine Berndt.

But even he was surprised to see some of the artefacts he had almost forgotten about. "It was 30 years since I had seen some of the pieces and it was such a wonderful experience," said Dr Stanton, who positively glows as he walks through the gallery space that is the Museum's exhibition space while awaiting a purpose-built home for the Museum.

If the exhibition space produces a glow, the offices, work area and storage space under the Art Gallery generate a metaphoric brilliance, as Dr Stanton sees the precious pieces finally cared for as they deserve to be.

For years, staff and visitors were tripping over boxes as the collection spilled out of inadequate storage into the gallery space.

It took three full-time packers as well as the Museum staff to make the move. The Museum Gallery was closed to visitors for the past two years.

"It's a long time to be closed, but our collection was still available on-line," Dr Stanton said. "We are one of the few museums in the world which has a catalogue of all our objects on the Web. About 15 per cent of the collection is shown in photographs but we were able to photograph every piece as it was rediscovered and packed, so we hope to have the whole collection on-line eventually."

Dr Stanton said visitors to the website were monitored and there had always been a lot of overseas interest, with students and academics from the US, the UK and across Europe using the website. There are also plenty of requests for commercial use of images.

About 70 per cent of the collection is Australian objects; the rest are from Asia and Melanesia, complementing the Australian Indigenous pieces.

How to reintroduce the public to the Berndt collection stimulated vigorous discussion during the packing and it was decided, after a suggestion from Relocation Manager Fiona Gavino, that staff should choose their favourite pieces and the first exhibition could be a collection of those favourites.

Relocate and Rediscover: Treasures of the Berndt Museum is the result. It is a small exhibition that includes a feathered mask from the New Guinea highlands, a wooden figure from the T'ang Dynasty, possibly the oldest Australian bark painting in existence and a contemporary Aboriginal painting of a football match. It is a beautifully-lit exhibition, eliciting a feeling of entering something extraordinary.

One of Dr Stanton's favourites is the mask from New Guinea, from 1951. It is displayed in a glass case, alongside a rare photograph of it being worn in the Highlands.

Paintings on the inside of a bark shelter were probably created around 1875, making this the oldest bark painting in the world. "They are from the period of transition when Aboriginal people were just coming into contact with white people," Dr Stanton said, "A pivotal incident in the history of Aboriginal, indeed world, art."

There is a ‘sister basket' woven from pink sedge in 1860; a photograph taken in the Kimberley from 1937 when the local Indigenous people were already using dots on the ground to tell stories; and a brightly coloured painting of a modern football match.

"All the pieces have a story to tell," Dr Stanton said. "As anthropologists, we deal with culture, not art as such, and these objects speak volumes if you know how to decode the story."

He said bark paintings from western and north-eastern Arnhem Land were a response to a demand for portable craft in the 1950s. "The movement was well-established by the 1960s and by the 1980s, it was rivalling dot paintings. Bark paintings are not found anywhere else in the world."

Dr Stanton was a young PhD student when he started working at the Berndt Museum with Professor Ronald Berndt. He is looking forward to its new home in the Dr Harold Schenberg Arts Centre, well before he retires.

The Berndts spent their lives building up the collection; Dr Stanton has spent his bringing it to the world.

Relocate and Rediscover continues at the Gallery until the end of the semester. A new exhibition will be mounted every semester while the Berndt Museum occupies its gallery in the LWAG

Published in UWA News , 19 March 2012