For lovers there are (as The Beach Boys famously sing) good, good, good, good vibrations. But there are only bad, bad, bad, bad vibrations when you are a fragile treasure more than 350 years old.
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On Monday and down in the Quarantine cellars of the National Library of Australia ("Authorised Persons Only – Heavy Fines Apply. Quarantine Act 1908" signs warn) one of the Library's dearest treasures was prepared for a journey.
Archipelagus Orientalis, sive Asiaticus the 1663 map of New Holland was gently installed in a specially-made-just-for-it vibration-defying crate. That crate and its contents in turn are the precious cargo (the only item aboard, and with its own special courier riding shotgun) on a journey to the University of Melbourne. The map is in need of some specialised conservation analysis and so it is being sent gliding southwards to where experts await it.
On Monday the library (making us for an hour honorary authorised persons under the Quarantine Act 1908) invited us, and the ABC, to watch the suspenseful placing of the map into its crate. Slightly anxious people present included the library's curator of maps Dr Martin Woods, the manager of preservation services Denyl Cloughley, preservation laboratory manager Lisa Jeong-Reuss and Peter Faulkner (we will come to his rank and role in a moment). And, fittingly, they were the four people who reverently lifted the big map (it measures 1185mm x 1520mm) off a bench and installed it in the crate, their style reminding one of conscientious pall-bearers bearing a coffin from A to B.
The map fitted precisely into its inner shelf in the crate.
"What if it hadn't fitted?" someone wondered.
But nothing has fitted what it was intended for quite so perfectly since the famous moment when Cinderella's exquisite little hoof slid into the glass slipper proffered by the Handsome Prince.
Peter Faulkner, whose work and tile everyone on Monday struggled to define, is the man who crafts the supportive artful innards of the crates in which any NLA treasure ever travels. And to call Tuesday's big, flat, tangerine-coloured container a "crate" is to do it a serious injustice. It is like calling a Ming Vase a "container" or Cinderella's crystal slipper a "boot".
To stamp out almost all risks of bad, bad, bad, bad vibrations Faulkner devises crate innards of foam-covered beams and struts specially shaped pieces of foam. Monday's crate for the famous map was a work of art in its own right. So too are his specially made containers (he showed them to me with quiet pride) for two valuable and delicate globes of the world that have just come home to Canberra from travels to exhibitions elsewhere in Australia. Dr Woods thinks that of all the things the library ever sends on the road these sorts of globes pose the biggest packaging challenges.
Yes, after all they are in shape and in fragility very like big, fresh eggs. But Peter Faulkner's elaborate globe packagings rise to these challenges.
Craftsmen who make wooden barrels are called coopers and craftsmen who make fine wheels are called wheelwrights but Faulkner's craft, though crucial to institutions like the library, seems to have no name. Packagesmith? Wrappingwright? He and his library colleagues had a playful go at defining him on Monday, calling him things like "Pete the Builder" and "Peter the exhibitions go-to man".
Meanwhile, as you read this (especially if you are reading it on Tuesday morning) Faulkner's super crate and its precious contents are being carefully trundled down the Hume.
Archipelagus Orientalis, sive Asiaticus (the eastern or Asian archipelago), created for the Dutch East India Company by master cartographer Joan Blaeu, badly needs this coming conservation help. The library advises that "Verdigris, a brilliant blue-green pigment, was applied as a decorative element to embellish the surface of the map. But over the last 350 years the pigment has corroded to become a brown crust on the surface, damaging the paper underneath and surrounding the pigment."
Yes, on Tuesday the intriguing map (it boasts the first reporting of New Holland and New Zealand in the Dutch language and includes, for the first time, details of the sighting of Tasmania by Abel Tasman's crew aboard the Zeehaen on 24 November, 1642) offered an unhealthy, pale greenish hue. It was suggestive of the colour of the cheeks of the poorer sailors among those whose voyages it served.
It was acquired by the library after being found in 2010 languishing in a facility in Sweden where it is believed to have spent most of its life. The library acquired it in 2013, with assistance from the federal government. Expert National Library staff stabilised it in 2013 so it could safely go on show during the Mapping Our World exhibition, and a crowdfunding appeal for funds with which to complete its stabilisation was overwhelmingly successful. That appeal has helped send it to university, to the vibrant University of Melbourne where we hope it will arrive late on Tuesday after a vibrationless journey.
