150 years of the SA Museum exhibition: With Keith Conlon in the Adelaide City region of South Australia

One hundred and fifty years ago a law was passed in South Australia that set up Adelaide's cultural boulevard, North Terrace. It began in the 1860s with the Institute building, the museum and library moved into the grand Jervois wing in the 1880s, the east wing followed twenty years later and in the 1890s the two were linked by what was supposed to be a 'temporary' building. It's still there and is now the main entrance to the museum. A lot has happened in its 150 years and to mark the event a special 150th anniversary exhibition is has been mounted.

The very Romanesque stately dressed stone exteriors of the buildings suggest quiet scholarships within and the staff are still pushing the edges of our understanding of the natural world. Out front, you're likely to find groups of school kids playing on the lawns before heading inside to explore six floors of exhibits, which range from the finest Aboriginal cultural collection in the world… to fossils of giants that roamed our parts on the age of the dinosaurs.

The museum's collection is significant - in the extreme! So how do you go about mounting a special exhibition to reflect a century and a half of work? That job fell to curator, Philip Jones who had about 3.5 million specimens to choose from. "The trick is to look for a story," Philip explained. "The story is the history of collecting and the way that collections were built, and the way they continue to build into the future."

Philip had to persuade his fellow curators to find items that reflect the museum's fine reputation for collecting, collating and preserving our natural wonders. And they've done us proud. The exhibition contains many odd and beautiful surprises like a brick from the Great Wall of China - but of course a lot of the objects go back a lot further. Take this juvenile Diprotodon for example - a giant and distant relative of our wombats. It was wandering about our backyard ten thousand years ago.

"The museum began receiving reports of extraordinary fossil specimens from Burra in the 1860s," said Philip. "Periodic visits were made and specimens gathered and then this extraordinary skull of a Diprotodon was excavated just three or four years ago. The collection keeps growing - it's a like a jigsaw - piece by piece we're building up a picture of the deep past as well as the recent past."

And to do that, the tradition of meticulous expeditions and field trips to far-flung places continues. A video in the exhibition shows researchers scouring the sandhills on all fours, trawling the depths of the gulfs or getting bogged in the outback. It's all part of the museum's quest for knowledge and understanding.

There's a stunning display of Australian Ethnology including a collection of ceremonial ornaments from the Diyari people who lived around Coopers Creek well before the likes of Burke and Wills wandered in. It demonstrates the museum's important role in documenting not just South Australia's but the nation's history.

"Adelaide was the missionary capital of Australia and the Pacific," said Philip. "It was like the head office for the Lutherans and the Methodists missions of the pacific also had many connections here in Adelaide."

The wonderful expedition film proves the museum is about far more than dusty collections. The look on the faces of a group of Central Australian aboriginal kids is priceless as they hear themselves back on Norman Tindale's 'state of the art' recording equipment in the 1930s.

We all love big and scary - and even a little macabre. For that, turn to the display that reveals some of the tricks of the taxidermy trade. It shows that natural fibre is not the preferred stuffing anymore - these days it's polystyrene! A couple of the best known examples of the taxidermist's department are on centre stage in a permanent exhibition next door. The Bengal Tiger was once a resident of the Adelaide Zoo along with many of the other animals in one of the museum's long time favourite sections.

Back in the 150th anniversary exhibition, another example of how much we've lost in such a short time. Specimens like a numbat - the earliest documented mammal species in the museum's vast collection. Discovered in Murray scrub in 1862 - it's now extinct

"The museum is really an 'arc'," said Philip. "It's a receptacle for a lot species that are still with us, and a lot that have disappeared, and if we don't have these reminders of what we've lost we're likely to keep losing them in the future."

From the incredible and the bizarre… to the beautiful… the exhibition has it all. And that's why nearly seven hundred thousand people visit the museum each year making it one of our favourite institutions.

The exhibition "150 years of the South Australian Museum" is open daily until Sunday July 9, 2006. And like the rest of the museum - it's free!

150 Years of the South Australian Museum
North Terrace
Adelaide
Open 7 day 10am - 5pm
Free entry