Every item of a new exhibition at the University of Tasmania Academy Gallery is a treasure of history, showcasing the university’s interlinked story with the Tasmanian community. 

The exhibit highlights more than just the story of the university, however, it documents the story of Tasmania through the ages. 

Academy Gallery director Malcom Bywaters has been working on the exhibit for over six months and is passionate about sharing the vast collections of the university. 

“A lot of what I've been doing over the last 8 months is digging down into the bunkers of the university,” he said. 

“The exhibition [is] tasters of the collection, tasters of what we’ve got not so much hidden away, because we are using it for object-based teaching and learning, but what we want to do is pull that information out of the halls of the lecture room and show it to the wider people and the wider public. 

“A lot of this stuff has never been shown outside of Hobart; we are a statewide university so we need to be bringing those collections and spreading them out across the state.”

After the exhibition finishes showing at the Academy Gallery in Inveresk at the end of May it will travel to Burnie to captivate the North West. 

The exhibitions features a sample from some of the universities 25 collections; the items as diverse as they are intriguing.

Covering areas such as engineering, design, fine arts and history the exhibition features everything from a racing car to the oldest visual maps of Tasmania. 

More than just static objects, the exhibits are actively used to further education and research by providing students and researchers at the university with real-world applications, examples and demonstrations of academic theory. 

Dr Bywaters hopes by engaging the broader community the next generation of students will be inspired and realise what they can dream and achieve. 

“We promote [the collections] to the wider community, we have school groups coming in and the kids at the secondary level and primary school level can come in here and think, ‘Well actually I could be the engineer who goes on to do this, I could be the designer who works on the next Incat model,” he said. 

Dr Bywaters is particularly interested in the human stories of objects and said work has been done to discover the narratives. 

“[It’s about] how far we then drill down and find the records and the information which is hand written, then suddenly we’re starting to tell the human story of Tasmania, our history, our narrative, who we've come from, the people from our past,” he said. 

“We have volumes in the pharmacy collections; every pharmacist that you go to to get your prescription, it gets written down … If you look at the pharmacy prescriptions it tells a story of the history of Tasmania.

“A certain academic, a certain researcher in the community may want to know the story of contraception and how that has affected parenting within Tasmania; those books will contribute towards that story because all of that history is in there.”

Take also the visual atlas of French explorer Antoine Bruni d’Entrecasteaux’s expedition to explore Tasmania’s coast in April 1792. 

The atlas contains stunning drawings of the coast as seen in the 1700s, which were the source of English charts for many years after. 

Landmarks still carry the legacy of this trip in their names; Bruny Island and the D’Entrecasteaux Channel in South East Tasmania.

“This map dates from the 1790’s this is in our special and rare collection and is one of our earliest visual maps of Tasmania,” Dr Bywaters said. 

“It is pretty special to have that. This is as I understand the only colour version.”

The collections have been gathered over decades, a mixture of items created by students and kept for their value as teaching objects or for their significance, donations to the university and items academics, researchers and staff have recognised as significant and kept. 

“[These] resources are valuable now but another 20 years down the track … they become quite a significant historical, narrative and history of the university and specifically of what we’ve delivered to the Tasmanian community,” Dr Bywaters said. 

“We have three rooms filled with rocks, which are just absolutely stunning … we borrowed from the geological collection, we have a classics collection.

“In the Australian Maritime Collection we have about 30 wooden boats, which are nationally recognised by the Australian National Maritime Museum for their significance.”

Many of the exhibits are significant from both a historical and a design perspective.

Some also capture the increasingly sophisticated work of the students of the university such as the racing car displayed, one of four entirely built and designed by engineering students. 

“We have four of these, the fourth one ... is going to be electric, which will be the wow factor because it goes into all of that new technology,” Dr Bywaters said. 

The Treasures from the University of Tasmania Collections exhibition is open to the public from 9am to 5pm from Monday to Friday until 26 May at the Academy Gallery.