Hello Everyone. I talked to Gerry Pauley by phone for about 2 hours today. Gerry deals with fine mineral specimens but was at the peak of his career as a mineral dealer during the 1970s. During this era, Gerry donated mineral specimens to The Museum of Victoria which were easily worth AU$30,000 by 1970s standards. This donation was made in an era when $30,000 could buy a full sized house in Melbourne and during an era when taxation incentives for donation of fine mineral specimens to Australian museums were more limited. After Gerry donated the $30,000 lot of mineral specimens to The Museum of Victoria, he attended one of the early meetings held in Melbourne by The Mineralogical Society of Victoria. This arcane body mainly consist of people who are not scientists but who become deluded to think that they are equivalent to post graduate qualified museum scientists simply because they have been allowed to engage in menial work in the Mineralogy Department including cataloging specimens under supervision of the curator and writing labels for them. Of course, the relationship between the Mineralogical Society of Victoria and The Museum of Victoria is close. This closeness is based on the fact that the curators of the Museum are essentially lazy and do not want to do menial cataloging themselves and access to The Mineralogical Society of Victoria and its members gives the curators such ready access to sources of labor who are fee and who make menial curatorial tasks so much easier for the paid curators. Unless others can somehow make life easier for the MOV curators, then the present regime has no interest in those who do not wish to become pseudoacademics engaged with menial cataloging. The present regime in the minerral department is Dermot Henry and Bill Birch. Both have proven obnoxious to deal with and based on their general level of laziness, arrogance and farce excuses for inaction supplied to me in writing, I chose not to donate around $1,000,000 worth of Mineral Specimens to the MOV. Instead, I chose to donate to museums that were hundreds of kilometers further away so that MOV or its disdainful personnel in the mineral department could not benefit from me in any way. After Gerry Pauley donated at least $30,000 worth of mineral specimens to MOV, he was refused membership on the Committee of Management of The Mineralogical Society of Victoria. The farce reason for refusal of this office bearers appointment was based on the fact that he had been a successful mineral dealer. The fact that he had donated around $30,000 worth of mineral specimens to MOV only few days earlier was obviously not taken into account. In my view, MOV did not deserve the donation. With the typical Australian Museum, anything done for any of them will always prove to be a one way street. Donating high value mineral specimens to museum and working with their personnel is typically a dead end only to the financial detriment of the doner. Furthermore, the cultural problem of the Victorian Mineralogical Society in allowing itself to be involved with dealers in any way is a cultural problem that persists to this day. Anyone who wants to attend meetings with mineral specimens either for sale or trade is treated coldly and in a manner most likely to deter them from ever returning. Anyone with anything for sale will generally see The Mineralogical Society of Victoria and its committee as just more trouble than what they are worth. Dermot Henry and Bill Birch has also slagged my specimens and their fair retail pricing to other mineralogical society members behind my back, in the mineral specimen slag mill: that these two have a proven history of perpetuating against me. In view of their obnoxious conduct towards me behind my back, their behavior should be disclosed in this post. A more detailed letter of complaint will also be written to the director of The Museum of Victoria to highlight important facts regarding why MOV does not attract any doners. I would be happy to write a detailed explanation of why I have donated NOTHING to MOV despite donating about $1,000,000 worth of other fine collector mineral specimens to two other Australian Museums between 2001 and 2004.
Posted on: Fri, 02 Jan 2015 18:28:54 +0000
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