Behind Melbourne Museum's shiny facade sits a world hidden from view

Through the Melbourne Museum's shiny glass-and-chrome entrance and past a handful of exhibits, you'll find a scruffy, nondescript door shut to the public.

As tall as it is wide, behind it you'll find dimly lit corridors snaking off in different directions.

Those corridors lead to numerous research departments, storage rooms, workshops and laboratories, and an elephant-sized goods lift to transport artefacts between floors.

More than three million visitors walked through the museum's front door in 2024–25. But it's estimated that museums keep 70 to 90 per cent of their collections in storage, and Melbourne Museum is no exception.

We were given access to explore the hidden world that keeps one of Australia's oldest museum's running and met a few of the people who help bring our favourite exhibits to life.

The untold stories hidden from view

If the public exhibits are the museum's beating heart, then these back rooms are the arteries sustaining it.

Hidden from public view, scientists, curators, archivists, exhibitors, preparators and many more toil away.

Explore the various storerooms and you'll find rare books, taxidermied animals, an assortment of bugs, insects and reptiles, and even a wondrous collection of marine animals, like the surprisingly cute sea pig.

The small translucent pale-pink blob with tentacles and feet, that walks along the seabed in search of "marine snow", is technically a sea cucumber.

And you'll find one stored in a glass jar alongside an astonishing collection of sea creatures — some dating back to the 1700s — in what marine invertebrates collection manager and sea cucumber specialist Melanie Mackenzie calls a "life library".

The "life library" is located in the museum's marine lab, and today it's a hive of activity.

Mackenzie is busy measuring sea stars, and a pair of graduates are working on extracting tissue samples from some newly arrived sea animals.

The lab not only conducts research, it's also where specimens are classified before they go into the collection.

They have more than four million specimens, and the collection is growing.

According to senior curator Tim O'Hara, sea creatures are brought back to the museum for identification following "voyages of discovery" taken on a research ship appropriately named the Investigator.

"We collect animals from areas we know nothing about. So last year, we went to the Coral Sea, which is north-east of Brisbane and towards New Caledonia," he says.

"We dragged small bits of equipment on the sea floor, took out some mud, sorted it aboard, and then we brought back the animals to describe or to get DNA out of them."

Like a treasure hunt, the mud can yield everything from teeny tiny sea urchins to giant sea stars.

Once specimens are dried out for exhibition, they're not as good for research purposes, so a lot of the marine collection is preserved in ethanol in order to retain important information, like DNA in the tissue.

They live in what is called a "wet" collection.

A library 'with jars, not books'

Before we enter the wet store, Mackenzie must ensure the area is "spark proof" via a meter that takes an ethanol reading. Our mobile phones are also set to airplane mode.

Once we get the all-clear, we enter a room humming to the sound of fans. Rows and rows of metal cabinets reveal jars containing an assortment of sea creatures.

Huge sea stars in a tub rest on the floor; a jar of krill sits on a nearby bench.

It's a "life library with animals in jars instead of books" says Mackenzie.

A blue-ringed octopus (collected from Blairgowrie Beach in 1964) mingles with jelly fish, a venomous pyjama squid, deep sea worms and yes, a sea pig.

"It's beautiful, isn't it?" says Mackenzie of the collection.

For these creatures, it's the first time they've ever been identified, an essential part of the lab's work.

"Our job is also to facilitate access so that researchers can do all the research they need to do," says Mackenzie.

"Sometimes we have to actually pack them up in parcels and send them in the post.

Glass eyes and death masks

Mackenzie and O'Hara might be undertaking important marine research, but the museum's preparators are the ones readying items for public viewing.

Instead of workbenches littered with vials and microscopes, their workshop features bundles of wood wool and varieties of glass eyes. Plaster death masks of animals like a tiger and orangutan hang on the wall.

Yet taxidermy takes up only a fraction of the preparator's work. This department also creates models, prepares skeletons and builds replicas.

"We're one of the oldest continuing departments in the museum," says preparator Michael Pennell.

Their biggest project to date? Bong Su, the beloved elephant from Melbourne Zoo who died in 2017.

Tackled a section at a time, the Asian elephant now sits proudly on public display.

Like the marine department, the preparators also look after some items that date back 150 years.

According to senior preparator Dean Smith, taxidermy back then was "pretty crude".

"Taxidermy was done at a period where the reference wasn't there," he says.

"[There were] beautiful old anatomical illustrations that were done in the field by artists, and the taxidermist probably referred to that, so if the artists had it wrong, that's how it was done."

Arsenic, mercury and asbestos were also commonly used on these older items, a hazard for today's preparators.

And while 3D printing today plays an increasingly important role, some things haven't changed. Moth infestations remain an issue.

"We have a staff member whose job is to control vermin, so they're constantly monitoring stores and checking traps," says Joanne Taylor, natural science collections manager.

Discovering 'unexpected treasures'

Isobel Andrewartha is a senior curator of cultural heritage at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG), Australia's second-oldest museum.

She says working there is like being a "link in a chain that's been going for a long time".

"One of the amazing things about working in a museum, especially a museum like TMAG that's been around since the 1840s, is that you're part of something so much bigger than yourself."

After years of working in museums, Andrewartha knows there is a public expectation that permanent displays will frequently change.

 "And I agree, in a perfect world that would be amazing. But it's more difficult than it looks."

For example, most items require expensive custom-built mounts.

Then there are the hazards that can accompany items from the collection, like the presence of radiation and asbestos, all of which are handled under strict museum guidelines.

"You hear about the natural scientists who are working with bird specimens that were historically dusted with arsenic and that's awful," Andrewartha says.

But despite this, the collection often yields unexpected treasures, such as a set of extremely significant and rare postage stamps from the early 1830s that Andrewartha re-discovered last year.

"The stamps were cut in half. It's called a bisected stamp. And that's because the postmaster at the time had run out of the denomination of stamp he needed so he just cut one in half.

Chronicling everything from 'football to sex'

Covid may seem like an unlikely topic for a museum to address, but that's just one of the many areas Melbourne Museum's Michael Reason has been busy documenting.

As the curator of leisure and social spaces, he essentially chronicles life or, as he describes it, everything "from football to sex".

Reason's work can be loosely grouped into two categories. He's either a "proactive collector" or a "reactive collector".

During Covid he did a lot of the former.

It's likely these signs will be used in future COVID-19 exhibitions.

"[They'll be talking about COVID-19] like our grandparents talked about the Great Depression or the war," he says.

Then there are those who get in touch with donations, such as the descendants of Florrie Hodges, a 15-year-old girl who used her body to protect her sisters from the flames of a bushfire in 1926. Suffering serious burns, she spent months recovering in hospital.

The Royal Humane Society awarded her a medal for her bravery. She was also given a purse containing a thousand pounds following a fundraiser in her name.

The medal and purse are now with Reason at the museum.

"These stayed with the family until about 15 years ago, when they decided to give it to us to preserve her story and to preserve the objects," he says.

"[Curators] come and we go, but the objects and stories stay."

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