A Journey from Uncertainty to Maritime Conservation
Like many young people, Heather Berry didn’t have a clear idea of what she wanted to do with her life when she was in high school. She had several passions but wasn’t sure how to turn them into a career. It wasn’t until she returned from a gap year teaching tourists to dive in Seychelles that she discovered a path that would become more rewarding than she ever imagined.
Before her gap year, Berry had completed an arts degree at the University of Melbourne, focusing on ancient world studies. When she came back to Australia, she knew she wanted to continue her education, so she started looking at master’s degree options.
“I just sort of read through the descriptions of what was interesting and what spoke to me,” she tells nine.com.au. “And there’s the Master of Cultural Materials Conservation.”
This course offered to teach students how to “look after ancient objects,” which sparked her interest in history. She did some research into what kinds of jobs people had, and she found that there was a whole subcategory of people who looked after shipwrecks and maritime objects, and they could dive while they did it.
“I read some of their papers, and I thought, ‘That’s what I want to do,'” she recalls.
The Role of a Conservator
Berry explains that the role of a conservator is essentially to use chemistry to look after ancient objects and preserve them. The goal is to keep them in their original condition as if the objects have been untouched. There are many different specialities, such as paper conservation and painting conservation, but Berry combined her passion for diving and history to become a maritime conservator.
She says the first time she was ever entrusted with a treatment subject, she could feel the pressure of being responsible for a one-of-a-kind ancient object.
“I did not sleep,” she laughs. “They were owned by the University of Melbourne; they were from the collection there, and they knew they were giving it to students to look after, but none of us were sleeping that well. We were all dreaming about the treatments that we were doing, but obviously, you can’t live your whole career not sleeping like that.”
Learning from Mistakes
Among the conservator community, there’s a culture of sharing your mistakes to prevent others from making the same ones. Berry has read some papers where people will just say, “Hey, here’s how I’ve broken this object. This is what I did, and this is how it messed up the object,” so that you can actually prevent yourself from doing that.
Today, Berry is completing her PhD on conserving waterlogged objects at the University of Melbourne, while also working for Silent World Foundation, the same company that employed her straight out of her master’s degree in 2019.
“I got incredibly lucky in that a 200-year-old European-style boat – but built with Australian timbers, so it’s the oldest boat that we know of of this type – was found in Sydney,” she says. “And they had somebody from the UK who was teaching how to actually conserve the object properly … and he wanted somebody on the ground in Australia who could work on it like a younger emerging professional.”
Because she was the only one in her course who was doing maritime stuff, she got the job. That boat is currently known as the Barangaroo Boat, and since working on it, Berry has never looked back.
A Love for History and Objects
“I just love history, and I love the stories the objects can tell,” she says. “I’ve always really loved that when you go, and you look at objects in a museum, and it’s like ‘oh, it was this part of a person’s life’. And then I get to delve even further into that as a conservator when I get to understand the materiality of an object.”
“So not only am I understanding an object and the place that it had in someone’s life … I now get to understand it is this kind of stone that probably would have originated from this kind of place.”
