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Object Matters
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Join Dr Craig Barker as he and a guest discuss one item in detail from our collections of art, archaeology, natural history, science and culture.
Latest episodes
Past episodes
In this episode of Object Matters host Dr Craig Barker is joined by Classics PhD candidate and 2023 Fellow of the Australian Archaeological Institute at Athens Alyce Cannon. They discuss two ancient vases from Athens relevant to Alyce's current doctoral research on dogs in ancient Greece.
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In this special episode of Object Matters, hear a live recording of a public event held in March 2023, when visual artist Mikala Dwyer is interviewed by curator Toni Ross about the Chau Chak Wing Museum's fourth contemporary art project titled Mikala Dwyer: Penelope and the Seahorse.
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Host Dr Craig Barker is joined by university administrator, historian and former museum administrator Dr Toner Stevenson. Using a coin of the Roman emperor Nerva, they discuss how his funeral coincided with a solar eclipse and how humans have interacted with eclipses for millennia.
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Host Dr Craig Barker is joined by art historian and current University of Sydney Museum and Heritage Studies Program postgraduate student Dr Ksenia Radchenko. They discuss the value of museum internships, electrotype coins, the earliest known portrait of a ruler on a coin, and if we can learn about the past from copies.
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Host Dr Craig Barker is joined by Classicist and Greek cultural historian Professor Alastair Blanshard, from the University of Queensland. They discuss two of Alastair's favourite vases in the Museum's collection: two fish plates from ancient Magna Grecia (South Italy).
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Host Dr Craig Barker is joined by Egyptologists Dr Melanie Pitkin and Pauline Stanton to discuss stelae and what they can tell us about ancient Egyptian society. The pair discuss the function, manufacture and meaning of stelae for ancient Egyptians, focusing on a stele donated by collection founder Sir Charles Nicholson.
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The Brickman, aka Ryan McNaught joins host Dr Craig Barker to discuss his recent build of LEGO Tutankhamun, his career as a professional LEGO builder and the role of LEGO within a museum context.
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Host Dr Craig Barker is joined by museum archaeologist Associate Professor Alice Stevenson to discuss museum archaeology and re-examining ways of narrating collections of Egyptology.
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Host Dr Craig Barker is joined by cultural historian Dr Cindy McCreery. In this episode, the pair discuss a commercially produced children's lantern slide in the first decade of the 20th century featuring King Edward VII, Queen Alexandria and the Prince of Wales, later to be George V, and his wife Mary.
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Host Dr Craig Barker is joined by the Museum's Curator of Natural History Collections, Dr Anthony Gill. The pair discuss a photograph of snapping shrimp that was taken in the late 1940s in preparation for the book 'Australian Seashores'.
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Host Dr Craig Barker is joined by Italian renaissance historian Dr Kathleen Olive to discuss II Spinario or the 'Boy with Thorn'.
One of the most famous works of bronze to survive from the Hellenistic-Roman world, the Chau Chak Wing Museum is home to a bronze copy of the Roman statue produced by the Fondere Artistiche Riunite in the early 20th century.
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To mark National Archaeology Week, host Dr Craig Barker is joined by Madeline Robinson, Support Officer for the Department of Archaeology at the University of Sydney.
Madeline discusses the role of photogrammetry in archaeology and museum contexts, and the role of digital archaeology more generally.
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Host Dr Craig Barker is joined by art historian and author Nicholas Croggon. They discuss our latest exhibition 'Light & Darkness', with Nick discussing a specific work featured by American artist Alan Sonfist.
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Lauren Poole, writer and post-graduate student in Museum Studies, joins host Dr Craig Barker to talk about the more than 100 rubber fragments of the Cotton Aerodynamic Anti-G (CAAG) flying suit in the collection.
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Host Dr Craig Barker is joined by Classical Archaeologist Dr Alina Kozlovski to discuss the tradition of plaster casts of Greek and Roman antiquities popular during the 19th and early 20th centuries. They explore whether casts, copies and replicas can be used to understand the ancient past.
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For Lunar New Year 2022, host Dr Craig Barker is joined by art historian Dr Alex Burchmore. They discuss a 19th-century Chinese Willow pattern dish and explore how it represents a complex series of cultural interchanges and cross-pollination.
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Museums Collection Officer Matthew Huan explores several Australian Jezebel butterflies from the Chau Chak Wing Museum's Macleay Collections. Learn all about coloration, toxicity, how new species evolve, and the unique role mistletoe plays as the Jezebels' only food source.
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Archaeologist and member of the Museum's Collection Management team, Damien Stone, joins host Dr Craig Barker to discuss a cylinder seal from Late Bronze Age Syria, highlighting its iconography and functionality.
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Join co-curator of the Museum's exhibition Pacific Views and archivist with the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC) on a personal journey to his homeland of New Britain.
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Artist Dr Sarah Goffman joins host Dr Craig Barker in this episode to discuss her current exhibition at the Chau Chak Wing Museum, Applied Arts. Goffman explores her creative processes, and her relationship with collecting and the use of plastics in her work.
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Join Mediterranean archaeologist and Project Officer of the Australian Archaeological Institute at Athens, Dr Yvonne Hall, as she discusses her research into ancient spears and the Chau Chak Wing Museum's red figure bell-krater from south Italy.
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Ngāpuhi leader and warrior, Hongi Hika (c. 1772 – 1828) was an important figure in Māori history. In this episode of Object Matters, Māori-Australian scholar and filmmaker Brent Kerehona explores his and Hongi's journeys through culture, family and tāonga (artefacts).
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13 August 2021
A doctoral researcher in Department of Physics and Astronomy at Macquarie University, Michelle Whitford discusses seven shabti buried in the tomb of Djedher in the fourth century BC.
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7 July 2021
President of the Friends of the Nicholson Collection for 11 years, Matthew Gibbs discusses a favourite specimen from the collections: the Tasmanian Tiger.
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28 May 2021
An expert panel from the Museum and Heritage Studies program at the University of Sydney discuss the future of museums and some of the current issues facing the museum sector globally and here in Australia.
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21 May 2021
In this special episode, archaeologist Thomas Hikade joins Dr Craig Barker to talk about the influence Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie had on archaeology and the importance of his chart that revolutionised archaeology.
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6 May 2021
In this episode, Craig Barker invites nine CCWM Collection Management staff members to discuss how they document, digitise, register, monitor and care for the objects that matter so much to us all.
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8 April 2021
Middle Eastern archaeologist from the University of Sydney Dr Joseph ‘Seppi’ Lehner speaks about a number of bronze and copper alloy objects in the Museum collection, recovered in the British Museum and University of Pennsylvania excavations at Ur in Iraq, directed by Sir Leonard Woolley in the 1920s and 1930s.
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29 Mar 2021
In this special episode of Object Matters, Dr Craig Barker is joined by Toni Hurley, teacher, educator, historian, one-time president of the History Teachers Association and known to generations of school students as a co-author of the Antiquity series of textbooks. Toni is also the grand-daughter of renowned Australian photographer Frank Hurley (1885-1962).
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4 Mar 2021
In this episode of Object Matters Dr Craig Barker is joined by Chris Jones, the Chau Chak Wing Museum's Collection Manager, Documentation. They discuss an oil painting by Walter Armiger Bowring (1887-1971) in the museum's art collection titled Cellist.
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23 Feb 2021
Dr Shuxia Chen, Curator of the China Gallery at the Chau Chak Wing Museum, joins Dr Craig Barker to welcome the Year of the Ox with two artworks from the collection.
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3 Feb 2021
Artist, author and archaeologist Diana Wood Conroyand and Dr Craig Barker discuss a fragment of Pompeian wall painting, her own archealogical work in Paphos, Cyprus, and the concept of the artist in both ancient and modern cultures.
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28 Jan 2021
In this episode of Object Matters Dr Craig Barker is joined by the Chau Chak Wing Museum’s former Conservator Alayne Alvis to discuss the function of conservation and the role of a conservator in the process of collection management and exhibitions. The object the pair discuss is a Neo Assyrian carved ivory plaque of a female figure that Alayne has worked very closely with.
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2 Dec 2020
In this episode, Dr Craig Barker is joined by Candace Richards, Assistant Curator of the Nicholson Collection. Together they discuss a ‘Promesse de mandat territorial'; a French bank note issued in 1796, two years before the Napoleonic campaign in Egypt.
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19 Nov 2020
Director David Ellis joins Dr Craig Barker to discuss his love of mineralogy and the remarkable history of a mineral from deep in the earth’s past, and its journey from Broken Hill to the Chau Chak Wing Museum.
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8 Oct 2020
In this episode, Dr Craig Barker is joined by Dr Jude Philp, anthropologist and Senior Curator of the Macleay Collections. Together they discuss a jar of partially dissected bird and small mammal brains, each individually wrapped in muslin or gauze.
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2 Sept 2020
Our guest this episode is Matt Poll, Curator of Indigenous Heritage at the Chau Chak Wing Museum, who selects a stone axe to illustrate the deep time history of Sydney.
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5 Aug 2020
Senior Curator of the University Art Collection, Dr Ann Stephen introduces us to Dr John Joseph Wardell Power (1881-1943), painter, author, medical doctor and philanthropist. In this episode, Ann introduces his life and work by focusing on a single painting, Femme à L’ombrelle (c. 1926), in the Chau Chak Wing Museum collection.
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1 Jul 2020
In this episode, art historian Dr Ann Elias joins Craig Barker to discuss the image of a scallop opening its valves. The gaze of the scallop captured the attentions of artists, philosophers and marine biologists. Science, philosophy, art and dreams are all on the table in this deep dive into an underwater lantern slide.
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3 Jun 2020
Dr Paul Donnelly speaks to Dr Craig Barker about Greek ceramic vessels and their journey from ancient Athens to the Nicholson Collection in Australia, via World War Two Paris.
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5 May 2020
Dr Craig Barker was an archaeology student when he first encountered the captivating painting of Caterina Cornaro, Queen of Cyprus, in his professor’s office. He talks about her life and how this portrait of the Queen made its way to Sydney.
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