Message in a Bottle

Bottles brimming with wine, Coca-Cola and other pharmaceutical wonders are held within the general collection store, amongst thousands of other precious taonga.

And this is where the problem starts - while in Natural Sciences collections we actually use liquids to preserve objects, in Human History collections, liquids are generally to be avoided at all costs!

As we've described in previous posts, the Museum goes to great lengths to ensure that no food or drink are found in object spaces. Human food attracts pests, which also like to eat collection objects - which is the last thing we want to have happen!

However, in the case of historical bottles containing original liquids, the liquid is the very thing which we want to preserve for the future.

This gives us the challenge of safely storing liquids within their original (possibly very fragile) glass containers, while keeping other collection objects safe.

These liquids could do untold damage if spilled on other objects - just imagine a wine bottle breaking, then leaking its contents onto unsuspecting textiles stored on shelves below. A red wine spill onto your favourite dress is disasterous enough at home - but cleaning takes on a whole other dimension within a Museum context.

Therefore, the first rule of Museum conservation is prevention - storing taonga in ways to stop damage from occurring in the first place. In the case of the history collection bottles, this means keeping them in strong plastic tubs, nested in protective ethafoam, and sealed in individual plastic bags. As well as this, the tubs are stored on the bottom shelves in the collection store, so that they cannot leak onto any other objects if disaster strikes.

In order to rehouse this entire collection, we recruited two lovely volunteers, Margaret and Elise, to assist with nesting bottles and updating collection records.

They helped me assess if glass bottles contained liquids or other mysterious substances, measure bottles to scope the size and number of plastic tubs required, and ensured that we kept track of which bottles we had removed from their storage crates.

This project gave us a rare chance to delve into the history collection, and enrich the catalogue records of these weird and wonderful objects.

Some of the more interesting finds along the way included a Food Demonstration Model, which contained over 40 bottles of 'fatty matter', 'alcohol', and other constituents of food; a 30+ year old bottle of coca cola from the 1987 America's Cup in Freemantle, Australia, and a selection of wines made in Henderson!