Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery conservator David Thurrowgood said for the period it would be akin to the level of exploration that took man into space.

“I am still amazed it’s in Australia, it is such a fragile and significant history of the world object,” he said.

The plate was left as proof of the presence of Dirk Hartog, the captain of the Dutch East India Company ship De Eendracht.

The ship was on a voyage to Asia and did not turn north early enough.

Hartog and his crew landed on what is now known as Dirk Hartog Island, near Shark Bay, and on October 26 became the first confirmed Europeans to see Western Australia.

The flattened pewter dish was nailed to a pole with an inscription to mark his landing.

Eighty years later, in early 1697, the Dutch explorer Willem de Vlamingh landed on the island and found the Hartog plate, which lay half-buried in sand. He replaced it with a new plate, which reproduced Hartog's inscription and added notes of his own, and took the original with him.

It has since remained in the Netherlands but has returned to mark 400 years since Hartog first inscribed the plate.

While the plate is in Australia Mr Thurrowgood and the Rijksmuseum's metals conservator Tamar Davidowitz will be undertaking international collaborative research on the plate. 

Mr Thurrowgood pioneered a technique to study the plate, by working on the de Vlamingh plate, which replaced the Hartog plate.

“Rijksmuseum have approached us to try and repeat that work because we have a technology called the Australian Synchrotron at Monash,” he said.

The technology accelerates electrons to almost the speed of light and has previously revealed hidden details underneath paintings by the likes of Edgar Degas and Arthur Streeton.

Ms Davidowitz said the synchrotron will allow them do a very high resolution elemental scan of the surface of the plate.

“This can tell us a lot about the condition of the plate and how we can best preserve it in the future but it can also potentially give us a lot of information about surface details that we can’t see very well with the naked eye,” she said.

“It is made up of many different fragments, this is largely due to the fact that it was exposed to the worst things you can expose a metal object to for 81 years.

“We’re talking salt water which is terrible for metals, enormous fluctuations in humidity and temperature, and the winds.”

The fragility of the plate is not just because of its age but its restoration history.

“It went from the archives of the VOC into the royal collections and to the Rijksmuseum and it was always regarded as an important document but its value is historic not aesthetic ... it’s not terribly beautiful but it tells an amazing story,” Ms Davidowitz said.

She said previous restoration work saw the fragments adhered to each other and filled to give the plate a more robust appearance. But these restoration materials caused a lot of stress.

It took many “hundreds of hours” for Ms Davidowitz to remove the restoration materials to reduce the risk of the plate being damaged while it traveled to Australia. 

“Another important consideration was that we only wanted to show authentic material because the condition of the object is so bound to its history and we don’t want to hide that,” she said.

“Underneath (the plate) is a support, completely fitted to the surface. 

“We made very high resolution structured white light scans after the restoration of each fragment and we made a digital reconstruction to make sure that all of the fragments were in an optimal orientation. 

“We used the digital reconstruction to produce a support and to produce all the transport packaging materials to transport it safely.”

Mr Thurrowgood said the corrosion problems were very complicated.

“We will get some answers to those problems which will mean it will survive into the future,” he said.

“It’s one of those objects which belongs to humanity and to have it here is fabulous and it really comes down to that cooperation between the Rijksmuseum and QVMAG to do that research and go forward.

“It shows the sort of growing knowledge in this community and within the museum sector, the fact that we have this knowledge in Tasmania and can assist the situation is fantastic because it means we can grown those relationships. I hope this will be the first of many highly significant objects to come to Tasmania for the first time.”

The plate is on show in Launceston at the QVMAG Royal Park until November 26.