There’s much heritage to be uncovered amongst the plethora of geological materials we find in storage cabinets in the Tate Museum in the Mawson Earth Sciences Building at the University of Adelaide.  One interesting ‘gem’ is a specimen that was donated, then retrieved under some duress but held in a form of trust before being returned to the Museum 65 years later, with a detailed letter of explanation, by the same person,

In 1934, Jack Gaetjens, an Unley High School student who was interested in mineralogy, was an oft time visitor to the Tate Museum after school.  On one of these occasions, and because he was not interested in palaeontology, he decided to give a specimen of fossils¹ brought to Australia when his grandfather emigrated in the 1800s to the Museum.  As a result, he was able to meet Sir Douglas Mawson, Professor of Geology & Mineralogy, who was pleased to receive the fossils and wrote a letter (copy now housed with specimen) to the Gaetjens lad stating this.  Unfortunately, the lad’s father was much displeased with his son’s disposal of the specimen and ordered him to retrieve it.

In 1999, some 65 years later, when Jack Gaetjens would have been around 80 years of age, the Tate Museum received a letter from him (copy now housed with specimen).  In the letter, Jack provided a detailed explanation of the dilemma he faced as a High School student when his father demanded that he retrieve the specimen from the Tate Museum, which he somehow did.  He stated that he ‘couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about’ and attached a copy of the original ‘thank you’ letter he had received from Sir Douglas together with the fossil specimen that he had held onto since the original fracas.

Snippets of information like this accompany many of the specimens in the Museum and provide glimpses of the complex heritage of the materials, some of which were gathered in the late 1800s.

¹ The fossils (light colours) are graptolites, probably Didymograptus sp., of Lower Ordovician age (around 480 million years ago).  Although Jack Gaetjens initially thought the specimens had been collected from the Salisbury Plains in England, it’s possible they came from near Albereiddy (Pembrokeshire) in Wales.