‘What do you do when there are no ships in?’
It has been a busy season in Grytviken. January brought us to 79 ship visits and well past 10,000 visitors for the season. We often get asked what we do when there are no ships visiting. With ship visits starting to wind down in February, we have had time to do some non-ship work so we can give you some answers.
The list of jobs that can be tackled on ship free working days is miles long. We all have things we look forward to tackling when we get a moment. Livvie dreamt of tackling some outside jobs, especially cleaning our windows and maintaining our museum benches. Unfortunately, the weather at the start of February had other plans. Luckily our Curatorial Dream Team, Helen and Jayne, arrived at the end of January with a miles long list of museum jobs we could help with. We kicked off February with sorting through the museum archives.
Looking through the archive reveals some real treasures. Here our Curatorial Intern Bodil is studying a rope tag.
Working with the archives is a long, but worthwhile process. It gives us a chance to assess what we have and check that it is all stored correctly. An orderly archive makes all the difference for both day-to-day research and long-term projects like our Whalers’ Memory Bank which is launching this June.
Finally, the weather cleared up. Livvie seized the chance to wash the windows and to sand and oil the museum benches.
Livvie working hard sanding the benches to prepare them for treatment. This keeps them healthy year after year.
We spend a lot of time looking out the window watching the seals and watching the weather. Clean windows make all the difference so Livvie’s efforts in the cold are much appreciated.
We are incredibly thankful for her hard work. As of writing this I can clearly see our benches gleaming through our immaculate windows – such a joy!
Curatorial Super Duo, Helen Jayne, are not only here to audit collections and archives. They were also on a mission to install our new Darwin Plus Local funded exhibition ‘We are All Whalers’. We have since also finalised the online version of this exhibition which you can see here. It was exciting to see the new gallery take shape, after a long preparation period involving de-installing the previous display, prepping and painting all the walls.
A lot of work goes into installing a new exhibition. Here the work table is all laid out and ready for us to get started.
While we were hard at work installing the panels (see and read more here), we were interrupted by a special visit from our Government Build Team. They had not only been hard at work painting the gallery but also making personalised Valentine’s messages for all on station.
Our personalised Valentine’s messages on temporary display in the gallery window. They were a great morale boost!
We also found time to review our other displays and care for the objects on open display, i.e. not in a case. Objects on open display are at higher risk of damage without the protection of a case. To limit this risk, we decided to put sheets of Plastazote, an inert curatorial foam product, under our largest section of objects on open display.
Our display in the Allardyce room before and after the installation of the Plastazote sheets.
The objects on display are now much safer and will be able to stay there much longer. They also look much better if I do say so myself.
Reviewing displays also involves looking at the stories we are telling with our objects. Often this is quite a creative process and can require a lot of shifting and moving objects around. We set our sights on the historic whalers’ warehouse. We had spotted some objects upstairs that we wanted to bring down for display. Some things were easier to move than others.
An incredibly long line cutter took quite some pivoting to get down the stairs but it was all worth it to get it on display for our visitors to appreciate.
Moving the wheelbarrow was a lot more straightforward.
The wheelbarrow is now out for people to appreciate alongside these beautiful tools.
Outside of work we had to get creative too. There has been more people on station than usual and no delivery of fresh food in February. This combination meant that we saw the end of freshies quickly. Lack of fresh food drives people to strange things. One of the museum team even put raisins on their pizza! (I will not reveal who to protect their privacy). The most devasting loss was running out of eggs. The last ones on station were treated with special reverence.
Each one of us thought long and hard about what to do with our last egg. Most of us opted for fried and it was absolutely delicious!
Despite lacking fresh food, we stayed fit and carried on with the planned South Georgia half marathon. Dee ran as representative for the museum team while the rest of us cheered on the runners and walkers from Maiviken Hut.
Livvie, Helen and Bodil cheering on as the first runner rounds Maiviken hut. People walking the route also took a moment to cheer.
The half marathon happened to fall on Jayne and Helen’s birthday. Alongside our cheering we found time for a lakeside birthday picnic complete with birthday cake and chocolate dipped strawberries (which work surprisingly well with defrosted strawberries by the way). We cannot think of a better way to round of February.
We all save snacks for special occasions and nothing is more special than a double birthday. We were particularly excited about the crispy crisps and massive chocolates.