The Owl That Fell from the Sky Read Free Page A

to understand and interpret the specimens. Continuity in curatorial care is important, so that when a curator leaves the knowledge about his or her collection can be readily taken up by a successor. There are few museum circumstances more tragic than a once active collection no longer having a curator.
    Curators have three main roles. First, we develop, record, maintain and manage the collections, directly or indirectly. Second, we make the collections and associated documentation accessible to the public by putting forward objects and information for exhibitions and displays, helping visiting researchers, answering public enquiries, and participating in the museum’s educational and outreach programmes.
    Third, we conduct our own research. Most educational activities—including secondary schooling, undergraduate tertiary teaching, non-fiction book publishing, broadcasting of television documentaries, and the mounting of museum displays—largely involve the communication and recycling of existing knowledge. Museums, through the research of their curators and visiting scholars, are in that select group of scholarly institutions that generate new knowledge.
    This important principle was touched on in the will of the British philanthropist James Smithson, whose bequest to found an establishment at Washington, D.C. led to the formation of the Smithsonian Institution. The Smithsonian was intended to not just communicate information, but generate new insights through research on its collections and by its curators. In the words of Smithson’s will, it was to be an establishment “for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men”.
    Curators often serve long periods with the same collection as they delve deeper into its delights and mysteries. At Auckland Museum, Thomas Cheeseman, the director and botanist, served forty-nine years and his successor Gilbert Archey, director, zoologist and ethnologist, forty. In my time, at least four curatorial colleagues have left after serving twenty to thirty years. The legacies of these long careers are the curators’ numerous publications, the exhibitions to which they have contributed, the public talks and media interviews they have given, and the arrangement, growth and recording of the museum collections themselves.
    Ron Scarlett (1911–2002) spent some fifty years at Canterbury Museum in Christchurch, continuing in a voluntary capacity after his retirement until he was ninety. However, his long academic career had a shaky start. An opportunity to attend university presented itself when Ron was twenty-six. He cycled from his home on the West Coast across the Southern Alps to Christchurch to enrol for a Bachelor of Arts, only to have his studies interrupted by the Second World War. He was unsuccessful in volunteering for ambulance duty and was interned at Hautu Detention Camp for conscientious objectors. In 1952 he got work at Canterbury Museum, where he became the osteologist, an anatomist skilled in the structure and function of bones. His work identifying bird bones over many decades greatly helped archaeologists whose digs were uncovering new details of Māori settlement of New Zealand.
    Perhaps New Zealand’s best-known bird curator, and the leading ornithologist of his generation, was Robert Alexander Falla (1901–79). As a young man, Falla secured a position as assistant zoologist on Douglas Mawson’s British, Australian, New Zealand Antarctic Research Expedition during the summers of 1929 to 1930 and 1930 to 1931. He was then appointed ornithologist at Auckland Museum, one of that institution’s first specialist curators. In 1937 he became director at Canterbury Museum, and in 1947 moved to Wellington to take up the directorship of the Dominion Museum. Falla popularised ornithology through frequent public lectures and radio broadcasts, and was a firm advocate for conservation. He was also renowned for his puns, quipping after a