Below Decks 4 - Ethical Research and Colonial Critique

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NEMO

Ahoy there! Nemo Martin, creator of Trice Forgotten here. Thank you so much for listening to the show. After this episode of Below Decks, we’ll be taking a short break, and we’ll be back in one week with Episode 6 of Trice Forgotten: Lay Day. See you then!

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ANNOUNCER

Rusty Quill Presents: Below Decks, a Trice Forgotten deep dive.

Episode 4: Ethical Research and Colonial Critique.

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RAF

Hello and welcome to the fourth episode of Below Deck, where we dig into some of the research questions, stories, and generally tangential interesting things that went into making Trice Forgotten. I’m Raf, my pronouns are she/they, and I’m the director of the series as well as one of the writers.

So today we’re gonna be talking about ethical research and colonial critique. This is coming out after Episode 5 of the podcast, so by now we’ve had stories about catching stingrays, we’ve had snails, we’ve met William Henry Baker Blair of the Queen’s Museum, and we have been introduced to Inez de Luna, self-described “naturalist extraordinaire.” So it’s in this context of decolonizing natural histories that we’re gonna be talking today.

We are thrilled to be joined by our guest, Jonathan Ablett. Jon, could you introduce yourselves with your pronouns and tell us what you do?

JON

Hi. I’m Jon Ablett, most people call me. He/him, and I’m senior curator in charge of molluscs at the Natural History Museum in London.

RAF

Very excited. And of course we are also joined by Nemo Martin, who needs little introduction, but I’m gonna ask them for one anyway. Nemo, could you introduce yourself?

NEMO

Yeah! Hi, I’m Nemo Martin, I use they/them pronouns, and I am the creator and lead writer of Trice Forgotten.

RAF

Brilliant. So, Jon. Can you explain your job?

JON

(groans) Ooooh, tricky one.

[A FEW SNICKERS]

Um, okay. So I often tell people that I am like a librarian. Instead of looking after books, I look after dead animals, and those animals just happen to be molluscs. So me and my team, we look after about 8 million mollusc specimens, some dry, some preserved in alcohol or some other various liquids. And we store these specimens in order to learn more about the natural world.

Sometimes it’s us inside the museum, doing the research. Often it’s scientists from around the world, a truly global audience of scientists using all the specimens we have, all the literature, all the artwork, all the attached knowledge – usually to learn more about the natural world, but we do also work with architects, engineers, designers, historians… anyone that wants to get some sense of any information, really, or how things link together using the natural history objects that we care for.

RAF

Right. So to start very broad then – and this is, I think, a question for both of you – we’ve become very aware, rightly, of conversations about decolonizing in the context of places like the British Museum and history museums and museums that have a more anthropological lens. So how does colonial critique and ethical research play into your field and the fields of natural history?

[JON MAKES A THOUGHTFUL NOISE]

Ooh, I’ve asked you the biggest question (laughs) that I can imagine. “Explain the topic of today’s episode!”

JON

Yeah. Okay. So as we all know, this is incredibly complex. There are a huge amount of different views and opinions on this. And I would like to say at the start, mine is not necessarily the view of the Natural History Museum –

[NEMO LAUGHS]

– it is a personal one that I have picked up, for good or bad, along the way. And I think is separate – I know some people don’t agree – from the arguments that we have with the British Museum.

RAF

Mhm.

JON

I mean, maybe I feel that because I don’t work in archeology and ethnographic sort of realms.

I think that, firstly, that we have to talk about name honour. The specimens that came from places where – especially when they were taken without the consent of local peoples, often when local peoples, Indigenous people, were used for collections – maybe not in the most pleasant of ways? I mean, without backtracking at the beginning, there are wonderful historical cases of a real collaboration, even in the 18–1700s, between Indigenous people and Western European collectors. But I’m sure that was not the case in all times.

NEMO

I guess part of the problem is that we already live in the world where the damage has been done to a certain extent. And so now it’s like, what can we do with what we have? And as someone who has gone through – (chuckles) I’m not sure whether this happened when I was working with you in snails, but definitely in when we were working in fish. Old men would die, and then all of the stuff in their garages would be donated to the museum. And then it would be my job for two weeks to go through every crusty old jam jar, literal jam jars that they had filled with random fish that they had taken from random rivers with no notes, or notes in a code that only they understood, with a document from 50 years ago.

[BACKGROUND PAINED NOISES]

And you had to decode everything. And it was like, sometimes having jars that were a tub of fish with thousands of fish in it, and going through all these gunky-ass fish and being like, “Oh my God.”

And keeping those together has… its story… in a certain way, that I feel like a lot of people don’t really – I think people go to the museum and see, “Oh, well obviously that tiger specimen was got by itself. And it was taken by this person. And so it would be very easy to return it.” But then sometimes the behind-the-scenes stuff of like, yeah, having a whole jam jar of stuff in it.

Also, this jam jar of fish had a seahorse and a turtle and a rat or a bat once in a fish jar. (laughs) I was just like… It’s not clean behind the scenes, I guess.

RAF

Thinking about collections. Actually, this is a big question which maybe I should ask at the end, but I’m gonna ask it now.

[NEMO GIGGLES]

Um, I was thinking about the act of curating, because it seems to me – as an outsider and not someone who’s ever worked in a museum – that the act of curating a collection is, in its own way, a narrative act. And as with all narrative acts, you’re choosing the story that you want to tell with this collection of specimens. I wondered if part of the colonial critique of collections and research would be to think about what narrative we are applying by how we order objects or specimens together.

NEMO

There was a really interesting exhibit and I’m trying to remember what museum it is. It’s one of the small ones in… near Soho? It’s an old house that’s been turned into a museum.

JON

It’s not the John Soane’s Museum, the one in (indistinct?)

NEMO

Maybe. One of those small natural museums in London, which started off as one person’s collection. There was a really interesting job. They did one where they went and relabeled everything. And there was a shipworm in spirits, and the label now read, “This shipworm is buried in wood that came from a ship that used to hold enslaved people.” And that information hadn’t been with the exhibit to begin with, but because of their attempts to – I think “decolonize” is not the right word to use there, but in their attempts to tell the story of colonization through specimens –

I mean, I still remember seeing that and being like, “Oh, it’s not just a fascinating little worm in a piece of wood. This was taken from something that once held people as well.” And I thought that was a really interesting way of simply telling a narrative that doesn’t get told very often.

JON

And I think it’s a really interesting part of natural history that – I mean, obviously it’s come to the fore recently and I remember, can even give a shout-out to Miranda Lowe, the very wonderful curator of crustacea at the Natural History Museum. She did a talk a few years ago, maybe 10 years ago. It was the first time I’d ever heard – I can’t remember, there was another lady that did the talk with her, who was not from the Natural History Museum. They did a talk about decolonization of natural history…

NEMO

Mhm.

JON

…And it blew me away at the time. I couldn’t decide whether it was amazing or nonsense. And I say that respectfully, Miranda, love you –

[LAUGHTER]

But I did not – I, (stutters) you know when someone says something so new that your brain has not registered? I had thoughts about the Elgin Marbles and things like that, and I had never applied it to natural history objects before, and hearing it for the first time – I remember that the room was in shock. Silence. People, I think – again, maybe I’m wrong, but I think people had got this new idea, and it was like, “Ooh, yeah. Oh, do I like this? Ooh, no. Am I a bad person?”

I think we are learning so much in lots of fields, and I think it is so interesting. And the way we deal with things I’m sure is not great at all times, and it’s very clumsy and clunky. But there are little examples of – when you see something done like that, I think it changes the view of the non-museum person, the general public. But I think it also, and it just as importantly, changes the opinion of museum professionals. Some who are crusty old white men.

[NEMO LAUGHS]

Um, but, you know, it does make a good change to the people that work in museums and deal with collections.

NEMO

I believe the other person might have been Subhadra Das, because they published a article in the Journal of Natural Science Collections, which is free to read, and I really recommend reading it. It was one of the first things that I did read for this show. The article was called “Nature Read in Black and White: decolonial approaches to interpreting natural history collections.”¹

And one thing that I really enjoyed about that article – ‘cause it did start from the, you know, “What can we as natural history museums do to approach decolonial attitudes to museums?” But it also talked about how it’s impossible – or not “impossible,” I don’t think that’s the word that they used, but – that their research can only be the first step of doing the research. We can all be doing this research. But actually what they identified, they identified a need in telling the stories in a way that you can’t do in a natural history journal, a scientific journal. And that was one of the things that I was like, “Oh! I can do that!”

[LAUGHTER]

Um, like I can get this research that people are doing and starting to do. And there are loads of people now who have the colonial thinking groups about museums, and the history of natural history is a really interesting place where all these conversations are happening. But for people who don’t work in museums and people who don’t work in this field, that information does need to be transferred some way. (laughs a little) And hopefully in a way that’s not just a lecture. And so hopefully people are going to listen to Trice Forgotten and have these thoughts and be like, “Oh, I can go and do more research about it,” but that you’re not getting the experience of having someone talk at you about science.

RAF

I remember you saying – well, you’ve said, I think on this podcast, a couple of times, that Trice Forgotten originally was gonna be more about food.

NEMO

Mm.

RAF

And then over time it turned into a show about science.

NEMO

Mm.

RAF

And I was gonna ask you sort of why that happened, or when that happened.

NEMO

I think because… I actually was gonna soften the idea of colonialism in the show. So I was formulating this idea about nautical epics, and I wanted to do it about collection and collecting. But was a bit – scared, (snickers) that – ‘cause I really, really like my friends at the Natural History Museum –

[JON LAUGHS]

That I wouldn’t be able to say anything that would, I guess, upset that relationship. Also because I was working there, not just had friends there. And it was in conversations with people like Jon and the other people that we’re going to be talking to that I was like, “Actually, I don’t think that I need to be afraid of that?” (laughs) “Hopefully?” They were starting the conversations with me and giving me ideas.

And I mean, any time that I was in – there’s a coffee break room where Jon works. And so I would have my phone out and be writing things on my phone as Jon and –

JON

I saw you. I saw you doing that.

[LAUGHTER]

NEMO

It was literally anytime, anything interesting was raised. And I was like, got my phone up, pretending to text!

I do wanna say that nothing is fully based on anyone at the museum, (laughing) Jon is not a character.

Um, but yes. Initially I was like, okay, maybe food would be an interesting thing. ‘Cause you still have things about plants, you still have things about animals, you still have things about like collecting and killing and all of those conversations. But it wasn’t to do with museums, and then I was like, (sighs) “No, I think it does have to be about museums.” It does have to be about – ‘cause those are the people who were making this terminology, like “taxonomy,” into vocabulary, that then went into racial science and gender science and all of those kind of things.

So yeah. (laughs) That’s why I hopefully made it more complicated, which is a good thing.

RAF

That’s a really, really good segue, actually, into asking about methods of collection, in terms of speaking of ethical research. Cos obviously we have in Episode 5 a lively discussion of the catching of the coelacanth. And Inez, our character Inez, makes the argument, “Uh, no, we absolutely have to kill it because if we don’t look at the insides, how can we collect all of this valuable data around it?” And some of our other characters, Noor and Siva in particular, are very pro-keeping-it-alive.

So you’ve kind of touched on something there, Nemo, in that episode, about methods of collection. Obviously with a living specimen this also veers into zoological territory, methods of preservation. But yeah. How does that kind of intersect with ethical research?

JON

Ooh. So I’m not sure in the past – again, views my own, not Natural History Museum. I’m not sure in the past that the museum have been great, or… and I don’t just mean in London, I mean any museum, any natural history museum. About saying that we go out and we… kill, for want of a better word, animals. We remove plants from the environment to preserve them in the museum.

RAF

Mhm.

JON

And I’ve occasionally given talks or given tours to people and you can see slowly, they understand, “Oh, you actually go and kill these, occasionally.”

NEMO

Mm.

JON

And sometimes there is… some people can be upset by that. And I understand that. I love natural history, I work in natural history. I don’t enjoy killing animals.

But what I try to explain to people is when – I mean, we can talk about days gone past: people going out to another country, shooting something, putting their suitcase, coming back. Of course that happened. Nowadays if I go and do field work, I have to get permission from the highest areas in science. Say, “I want to do this. I want to go and collect these kinds of animals. And this is the kind of research it’s gonna be, this is the gap it’s gonna fill in our knowledge.” If it’s in another country, for example, I have to go and do the same with the national park or the local landowners, the local wildlife officials. I have to get export permits, I have to get import permits from this country, and we have a team of registrars who make sure that we do everything legally, by the book.

For example, in 2019, I went on a marine collecting trip. And one of the things that we collected was cephalopods, and cephalopods are one of the few invertebrates that – there’re actually protocols about how to euthanize them.

NEMO

Mm.

JON

So, you know, I hope – and I like to think that pretty much everyone that works in natural history has a huge respect for the animals that they work on, that they care for. And you want to kill, “dispatch,” however you want to pretty up, things with the least harm. Only take what you need. And when we have these objects, by making them available to the global community, it means that other people don’t need to go. We can have a limited number of collecting trips.

Saying that, you do need series. One of the most important things that people often say is, “Why do you need another one? You’ve got one tree snail. Why do you want another tree snail?” And I always say: our specimen, or a group of specimens, are an example of a species collected at one time and one place. If you want to see changes over time, if you want to see changes globally, then you need representatives of that species from every corner where it exists. And also through time, things getting bigger, smaller, rarer, are there more females in the populations, are there more males? Are you seeing deformities? What happens when there are industrial incidents pre- and post-atomic bomb testing, how does this affect animals? Global climate change? Can you detect that in the shells or the bones or the structures or animals that we have in our collection?

So there is a need for ongoing collection, but I hope that people understand, and I’m sure museums do practice safe and ethical and responsible collecting.

NEMO

Yeah. I remember, I think one of the things that I’ve held in my brain for a really long time – and especially when I was writing this show – it must have been you who told me that. Anytime I have anything to do with snails in my head, I’m like, “It must have been Jon. I don’t know where else it could have come from.”

[JON SNORTS]

But the idea that sea snails are getting demonstratively thinner in their shells because of the acid in the water, is, I believe, what I remember of that conversation.

JON

Yeah.

NEMO

And the idea of, like, we can actually track, between the 19th century and the 21st century, how the level of acid in the ocean is affecting animals and thus it will affect human beings. ‘Cause these collections do exist at the Natural History Museum.

And so that was one of the things when I was writing Inez is, like, not written out loud, but Inez will be one of these characters who is arguing for that. (laughs) That it’s not just about having a trophy on the wall, as a lot of 19th-century or 18th-century collectors were seeing natural history, but as a way to hopefully understand the natural world.

And then I was also doing loads of research about Indigenous people, and obviously that’s also filtered into the conversation a little bit. And there was one story about a man who grows, I think pine martens, in Mi’kma’ki. And he helps female pine martens go through breeding season, in order to make sure that they survive through winters. And they were saying, this is not just altruism – by understanding the community of animals, they were also then able to see how many that they could take and kill and use for food or clothing.

And so it’s not just white men scientists who are doing these kind of cataloguing, but even in Indigenous times, even though we wouldn’t have seen it as being “natural history science,” that same idea of understanding what the population is in order to ensure that you’re not taking too much, and in order to ensure that the whole population of creatures or plants or trees is good to take from? I thought it was really interesting that they did line up in my head, even though these characters on the ship are a bit like – (incomprehensibly) ahh! Ahhh… (laughs)

RAF

To be fair, Siva makes the argument for not killing the coelecanth ‘cause it’s cute. So I don’t think he’s wholly on the side of scientific inquiry.

NEMO

(laughing) Yeah, yeah.

JON

Yeah. Just if anyone wants to check it out, what you’re referring to, do you remember, was pteropods – these kind of sea angels, beautiful, very very thin shell organisms. And as the changes in ocean acidification happen – yeah. These shells are starting to get thinner, well dissolved. They’re kind of what we call an indicator species.

NEMO

Mm.

JON

And actually, it could happen with lots of things. Things like baby squid, octopus, have very thin internal shells that these other things that may be affected and… yeah. You’re right.

And, sorry, I’m just thinking – I’m brain dumping. Now what I really liked, going back to the podcast, is Inez’s tone of voice. I love the way that – I love the character. I kind of kept changing, I couldn’t quite place them for a long time, but there were definitely ways I spoke that I could see that natural historian element, as not a professional natural historian but someone with a great understanding and respect of nature.

NEMO

Mm.

JON

And funny enough, in the way they spoke – not necessarily the words, but some kind of sentence structure – I saw that in other people I’ve heard. Maybe something you were noting down in the TV room –

[NEMO LAUGHS]

You never know. Yeah. It was really interesting to see that in a character.

RAF

So I need to bring a character into the mix who has a scientific method, basically. Um, we have other characters on the ship who are interested in the natural world around them, but probably in a way that’s much more about communing with it. But actually I think what’s really lovely about what you’ve both just said, about why it’s so important to do these studies and to take from the population but to know how much you’re taking, is actually that feels like it sits across both of those approaches. Because these measures of populations are a way of communing with those populations so that you know exactly how much you can can take.

NEMO

Mm.

RAF

Let’s use that, actually, to step back in time a little bit, to take us back to some of the stuff that we probably, again, we probably should have talked about at the beginning – (mumble to self) I’ve hosted this episode very well.

[LAUGHTER]

So we’ve been talking a lot about things we can do in the present, to make sure that the research is ethical, to apply colonial critique. But I wondered if you could talk a bit about why we had to apply a colonial critique to natural sciences in the first place. So I’m thinking about things like: museums being these – in their original inception – these bastions of empire and ways of preserving, ensuring our empire. I wonder if that’s either of you something that you could talk about.

JON

Ooh, that’s a tricky one, because like I said, this whole way of thinking is completely new for me. I think I sometimes can be quite wide-eyed and naive about things, and – you know, I just think nice scientists do nice things.

[LAUGHTER]

I think, first of all, it’s about acknowledging the harm and the people that went along with these things. I think probably the notion of setting up museums is a very old one. Museums have existed for thousands of years, and I think people like to share their knowledge or show off about their knowledge, at least. And people love order: whether you are ordering your CD collection, your book collection, your comic collection, whatever, we love order. We love organizing the natural world. And I think the aims of a museum are usually pure – all the lovely Greek, Babylonian examples… libraries as well, libraries are a type of museum.

But the reason I think it’s important is obviously these are global things, and they happened at a time when there was things like slavery. There were obviously – things were transported on boats I’m sure where slavery was involved in somehow, either within the shipping or the boat owners, the people that funded the boats, made their money by sending the products of slavery back through… you know, things like that. People had to transport these natural history objects some way or other. The way that they were collected using Indigenous folk, the way that – I’m sure areas were cleared of their natural history, which may have been useful for farming, agriculture, wood, whatever, habitats possibly damaged in collecting them.

And I think these stories need to be told, and I think society are hopefully becoming more aware that what happened in history didn’t happen in a capsule and, and affected more than the storyteller and the people that you think of – these people, these famous collectors and explorers, but they were only the people that we hear about. The whole other story of the people that helped them, assisted them, freely or not. And it’s not something that I know a huge amount of in a professional way, but it’s something that I am fascinated by.

And I love the fact that we talk about it within the museum over coffee, as much as we talk about it in conferences – it’s not something that I think people are wheeling out because they feel they should say it. It’s something that the community is starting to question and understand slowly. And I find it really fascinating and I’m a hundred percent not an authority about it, but as someone that’s stuck in the middle, I hope that my knowledge and understanding of it grows, and how we can deal with it better. ‘Cause I’m sure we’re not doing it as best as we can.

NEMO

No. I think one of the first things that made me think about it was – I was actually working on a theater project with someone who is Canadian First Nations person. And when I told them that I was working at the Natural History Museum, they asked me outright whether any of the bones of their family were at the museum. And I was like, I don’t know, actually, and I will check for you. I don’t think so, because it’s the Natural History Museum in my head. Like we were saying at the beginning, like, oh, it’s not the British Museum. So there’s fish and snails, but it was only fairly recently that human remains were moved from the Natural History Museum to the British Museum, I believe.

I then went and read a book by Samuel Redman called Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums. And he talks quite a lot about this idea of moving from not just collecting animal specimens, but how human remains became seen as animal specimens, because of scientific racism. And so the moving from – there were quite graphic descriptions, I guess, in this book about people who then started hunting people in the same terminology of hunting animals, because they knew that museum curators wanted specimens to analyze. And that there was some complicated stuff in there, in that it wasn’t always that museum – people who worked at museums were like, “We want all of these things,” but people got it into their head ‘cause they were going to museums and seeing human specimens that they were like, “Oh, they want those things. They’ll probably pay me to hunt some people.” So they would just kill people first and then give them to the museums and be like, “So you’re gonna pay me for killing these human beings.” Similar with human zoos and stuff like that, which in my head are very attached to museums.

And yeah, I think that’s where for me – it’s like, we can’t fully detangle what we have now from where it came from, because like I said, it was only recently that the Natural History Museum didn’t have human bones in the basement. And I mean, they’ve also recently changed one of the exhibits that was there for a long time – the human being exhibit or something like that. And it’s now not that, or they’re revamping it, I’m not sure. But there were human skull in the same kind of way that animal skull were being presented. And I don’t think in anyone’s brains, it was like outright, like, “because non-white people are animals,” but that is where it started. (laughs) And that is the kind of convention.

Um, so yeah, so that’s kind of where the messiness for me comes in with someone who really likes natural history museums. Like you said, Raf, I have loads of really good experiences there and I really like the science and I think that there is so much benefit in them, but also a lot of tragedy.

And that was, um, I think a storyline that we were considering putting in with these bone rooms, of human remains, but ultimately decided wasn’t the right fit for this show because it’s a lot. It’s very traumatizing for a lot of people – not people that I am a part of – and I didn’t feel like it was appropriate for me to be writing those stories. And I’m sure if you are interested in those kind of stories, you can search them out from OwnVoices. But yeah, just wanted to acknowledge that that was a thing that we wanted to talk about, but was probably a step too far. The, this is a dark podcast. Yeah.

RAF

Well, as you have said a number of times, it’s not a podcast designed to re-traumatize anyone – quite rightly.

So listening to that, it feels like – and I’m just literally putting this together as I speak – it feels like the common thread through a lot of what we’ve been discussing, both in terms of the history of natural history and now contemporary practices, is that when we have this boundless drive for sharing of scientific knowledge and expansion of scientific ideas, which is really phenomenal, has a real material impact on human lives that sometimes is overlooked. In, at worst, probably in this way, going “it’s science, it’s just science.”

And we are kind of above this conversation that at its worst, and at its quote-unquote “best,” is this naivety, I think, that we’re all waking up to this idea that actually this is something that impacts natural history just as much as it does archeological history.

So yes, that’s – I think where I’m coming to on this is… I don’t have an end to that. So I hope whoever’s editing this can do much (laughs) with that.

JON

Could I, can I just pick – I just wanted to carry on from Nemo cause I was really intrigued what you were saying, ‘cause it’s the whole of human biology that was recently deconstructed. I’ve obviously been around it many times. No idea if the, the skulls in it were real or models. I once studied in a institution, which – I won’t name it – did hold human remains. And I found it very unnerving working with them, I did not like working with them, so somehow my brain just disconnected. Dead animal specimens, but when faced with dealing with human, I just, I did not like it.

I mean, they were very old and they’re now not in this institution, they’ve been moved to a more suitable institution. But there’s the wonderful Royal College of Surgeons Museum, which is harrowing, but beautiful in linine field. It’s a medical teaching museum first and foremost that there is a public aspect to it as well. And it talks about the history of medicine and I’m sure there are some traumatic, I know there are some traumatic stories and sort of artifacts in there, but they do deal with it very well. But it’s a completely – in my head it’s completely different from Natural History Museum. But of course there’s crossover.

NEMO

Yeah. I mean even the stuff of whether they’re real skull or fabricated ones. I remember also other specimens on public display, obviously a lot of them are real skins and stuff, but I know there’s a lot of fiberglass used so that people don’t steal things. (laughs)

Um, there’s also in the Horniman Museum, the absolutely hilarious chunky boy walrus,who is the icon of bad taxidermy. If you’ve never seen it, it’s great. You should look him up. But he’s this walrus that – I believe the story is that because the scientists hadn’t seen a real walrus, they didn’t know it was supposed to be wrinkly. So they just kept stuffing it and stuffing it until it was just the chunkiest boy, just…

RAF

Hilarious. The smooth, chunky boy of the museum. (laughs)

JON

I love those old kind. Like when people send back kangaroo skins and then someone try to reconstruct him in a painting and they’re like, these floppy skins, they’re like, yeah, I think it’s a bit like this dude. They’re like, it’s not really a kangaroo. I love these things. They’re so wonderful. Yeah.

RAF

These beautiful bits of unfinished stories they kind of attempted, or fragmented stories popping up through. So I, what am was I looking at the other day? Um, someone tweeted an image of, I think it was a dinosaur skeleton, but with this caption saying, “This is widely regarded to be the worst reconstruction of any kind of remains ever.” And it is the head – sort of the tail is attached to the head, a head and a tail under a leg – (laughs) uh, and you’re looking, going, “Do you have my dude? You can’t have thought it really actually looks like that!” but yeah. And you are reconstructing from nothing. I don’t know, maybe.

NEMO

Yeah. I just find that really funny. (laughs) In my head, I’m like, I think it’s funny because people were trying to reconstruct, they were trying to classify people that they had never met based on bones that they had been given, and in the same way, the same people – maybe within a century – were also trying to reconstruct dinosaurs. I know the one that you were talking about, Raf, and it’s got this huge unicorn horn on its head, and it’s got little troll legs.

And in my head, those ideas are really connected. One is very funny and one has serious ramifications on how people are treated in the 21st century. Um, but they are linked because they both are to do with taxonomy, they’re both to do with taxidermy, they’re both to do with categorizing. And like you say, Jon, I love organizing things. I loved working at the Natural History Museum ‘cause part of my job was making things go in the right order and making it all neat. And sometimes with snails, just moving loads of boxes around in a drawer in order to make it fit nicely, like a nice little jigsaw puzzle. Great job.

Um, I guess the ongoing question is, where is the middle? Where is the not doing genocide thinking, but is doing good thinking about the world and our place in it. Yeah. Trice Forgotten. (laughs)

RAF

I was saying, if the question didn’t have complexity in it, you wouldn’t have created an entire series to explore it!

Probably something that I wanted to ask both of you, which we’ve touched on a few times, is this idea of the museum as an archive or a library as well as the public collections. And I wonder if there’s a bit of this idea of our perception of science museums and natural history museums not having as much to do with colonial critique as other museums might, because we, as visitors, we see the public collections and we don’t see these miles and miles of what’s going on behind those scenes. We only really see the tip of the iceberg.

Is it – I feel like a child asking this – what’s it like behind the scenes? What are the archives and libraries like? Do you deal with specimens differently back there?

JON

Yeah. I think despite the Museum’s best efforts, I think lots of people come to the Museum, they see the whale, they see the dinosaur, they have a coffee, they buy a rubber, and they go home. (laughs) And they have no idea that we have over 300 scientists working on the Natural History Museum, that we have 80 million objects. Which is a crazy number, I just cannot get my head around, like – me and my team look after 8 million snail specimens. And it is rooms and corridors with cupboards as far as you can see, filled drawer after drawer after drawer of specimens, dry snail shelves, jars on shelves.

And I feel immensely proud and lucky to work in the institution – take away all the difficult conversation we’ve had a little minute ago, just for one second. (laughs) I, you cannot believe sometimes I get to work. It’s wonderful to think that I am a small cog in a chain of curators, starting from when the Naturals Museum was part of the British Museum, ‘cause separated in 1881. And it’s like the campsite, where you should leave your collection in better condition than you found it in. I try to acknowledge, adding new specimens, updating the information on the things we have, caring for it as well as I can. And hopefully whoever takes over my job and the person after them will continue doing this, and the collection will be able to grow.

I always think the museum’s different from a gallery. A gallery is – things are on a wall, on a pedestal, and you look at it, and that’s it. We want people to take the things off the shelves, open the jars. By people, I mean other scientists, hopefully. We want them to look at them, photograph them, dissect them – if it’s acceptable, cut a bit off, and do whatever test they need to do, literally. But it’s a living collection that changes our understanding, our classification, our knowledge. And if we don’t prop them, weigh them, cut them, examine them, photograph them – then we’re not doing our job, because it isn’t just to be looked at.

I mean, of course we have to put on display because educating the public, inspiring their wonder of the natural world – and especially at this time of huge climate change and habitat loss, species disruption… I think the job of museums should be and is, certainly as a natural museum in London, is to inspire passion and wonder and appreciation of the natural world. So there is this double-edged sword. And I think maybe we do get away from some of the tricky questions because people go as a kid, they sometimes go as a parent or a grandparent, so people possibly have more of an emotional attachment to the Nat Museum than they may do to other museums or galleries. Because for me, I remember going – I went for my seventh birthday. I have a picture underneath the giant squid, which I now look after. It was a model at the time. Um, thumbs-up, looking really happy. I have this lovely image for my seventh birthday, I remember going to school. You have these kind of emotional attachments and the museum grows with them, that, lovely. There was a bit of an outcry when they decide to move Dippy from the central H –

RAF

I was sad.

JON

I was initially sad, but the whale is beautiful.

RAF

(laughs) The whale is beautiful. And I have been back, since we’re moving towards a really beautiful place to wrap this up. So I will just tell you that very shortly after I got together with my now-husband, we were having a conversation when we realized neither of us could remember how fossils were formed – (laughs) and we went, “Should we go to the Natural History Museum?” And we just took the Tube across town to the Natural History Museum, because it is free. And that is an astonishing thing.

So off the back of what you just said, Jon, if you are able to, if you have access to it, go to the Natural History Museum as an adult. It’s free and it’s great.

NEMO

And go on the Spirit Specimen Tour, because tucked away at the back of the Natural History Museum in London is the new building, which is where I mostly worked, which is the Spirit Building. And so you can see through the glass windows all of the fish specimens, and you can see how many layers of building there are because there are corridors and corridors, floors of floors. And you can really get a sense of like, oh my God, there are so many specimens in there that we’ll just never be able to see. And you can go on Spirit Tours. I believe they’re free, or…

JON

They’re not free anymore. Sadly.

NEMO

Oh, really?

RAF

Wow. Okay. The Museum’s not entirely free, but it’s mostly free. I stand by what I can. You –

JON

If you want to get an idea of this, I mean the Spirit Collections, if you can afford them, they are well worth it. They’re really wonderful. But even if you just go onto the principle floor of the Darwin Center you can get an idea, because it’s got the same layout you can see through the glass.

But yeah, I agree. And it’s a wonderful place again over at.

NEMO

Yeah. And there’re creepy specimens. It’s not all the cute little panders or whatever, no clean bone things. You get to see some of the weird stuff! (laughs)

RAF

Yeah. You wanna see a squid eye, the size of a fist…

JON

And you can see my giant squid. It is mine. The museum might loan it, but it is mine. Um, 8.62-meter giant squid.

NEMO

Cool. Yeah. And it is just creepy. Like I, working there sometimes, there’ll be nobody else on the floor. And there are these really dark rooms that are really – they’re really air conditioned, so it blows cold air and it’s freezing in there. And to save electricity, the lights don’t turn on unless you turn them on. And you’re walking down these dark corridors of metal and glass, sometimes the cabinets are glass-doored. And there’s this one area, this one corner where there’s loads of eels in jars, and they’re so creepy. I always creep myself out every time I’m walking down, ‘cause there’s this whistling sound and it’s pitch black and it’s freezing cold and you’re all alone and your podcast is playing, but that means you can’t tell who’s behind you.

And it’s just like, yeah, if there’s a horror movie set anywhere, I know that it –

RAF

We’re gonna start talking about our new horror podcast. (laughs) Yeah.

NEMO

Go!

RAF

After this episode. Great, lovely. So I think that is a lovely place to wrap things up there in that place of horror and wonder. Thank you so much, listener, for joining us this week. That is it from me, Raf. That is it from Nemo.

NEMO

Bye.

RAF

And from Jon – thank you so much for joining us, Jon.

JON

Oh, such pleasure. I’ve had a really lovely time.

RAF

So thank you, and goodbye. We will see you next time, Below Deck.

[Show Theme – Outro]

Trice Forgotten is a podcast distributed by Rusty Quill and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 4.0 International License. The series is created by Nemo Martin and directed by Rafaella Marcus.

Today’s episode featured Rafaella Marcus, Nemo Martin, and Jonathan Ablett, and was edited by Lowri Ann Davies, and Catherine Rinella. Trice Forgotten is produced by Ian Geers, Lowri Ann Davies, and production manager Natasha Johnston, with executive producers Alexander J Newall and April Sumner.

To subscribe, view associated materials, or join our Patreon, visit rustyquill.com. Rate and review us online, tweet us @therustyquill, visit us on Facebook or email us at mail@rustyquill.com. Thanks for listening.