It’s a far cry from her days as a flaming redhead treading the stage in Thoroughly Modern Millie for Canberra Philo in 2008, but Georgia Pike-Rowney is playing a vital role in leading and promoting one of the ANU’s treasures – its Classics Museum. 

Pike-Rowney’s contract as the lecturer in classics and curator of the ANU Classics Museum since 2022 has been extended until July 2026, thanks to contributions from the very active Friends of the ANU Classics Museum, who hold regular talks, functions and walk-throughs of the priceless objects collected by the university since 1962.

The announcement of her extension came just in the nick of time, as the ANU’s general refurbishment necessitated Pike-Rowney and her colleagues packing the entire collection out.

The  museum has now augmented its ageing glass exhibition cases with more upmarket “vitrines”, secure glass display cases that are carefully light controlled.

Neither Pike-Rowney, the Friends nor the scholars at the Centre for Classical Studies take their responsibilities lightly, for in 2004 there was a crisis when the “head of Livia” was stolen from the museum – they don’t want that to happen again.

Pike-Rowney’s appointment is central to the centre’s teaching and outreach program, its research on object-based learning and the university’s management of restitution cases, the return of improperly-acquired objects to their countries of origin, a big deal in museums these days.

She is working with the Embassy of Italy on a number of restitution cases, and in a happy compromise, the pieces will remain on loan in the museum after their official restitution is complete.

In a more complex case, a Roman marble portrait head belonging to the Lateran collection in the Vatican, has been negotiated with Italy as the go-between.

Far from regarding the question of restitution as negative, she believes it can be a positive and says: “My style has been to swing away from being negative… the students are so interested so I decided to go totally public and totally positive.”

Besides which, given our distance from the ancient digs of Mesopotamia and the Graeco-Roman, world, she says: “Students can’t afford to miss the opportunity to get close up and personal with real material culture… but these matters must be managed sensitively.”

It’s not all about her, but they’ve picked someone with impressive qualifications. 

For with a classics/law degree and PhD from the ANU mixing classics, music and education, a stint analysing quality of research data at the university’s College of Health and Medicine and an ongoing role as a music director, actor and educator for Child Players ACT, she is well  placed to communicate the ethos of the Classics Museum.

Central to the museum, located in the AD Hope Building, is the large Rome replica, surrounded by artefacts, but there’s an obvious need to find ways of activating items in the collection for present-day appreciation, so Pike-Rowney has spearheaded a project called ARTefacts, still on show until March. Here five artists responded to works in the collection.

In Spiralling, for instance, artist Harriet Schwarzrock responded to an eighth-century BCE brooch using glass tubing, neon gas and electrical input from a high-voltage transformer, while in If Only You Could See What I Have Seen with Your Eyes, Robert Nugent activated a bronze head of a woman from the first century CE by giving the bust eyeballs. 

In Of Pots and Prams, Susie Russell responded to Wendy Wood’s wild modern take on Attic vases and bowls, while Braidwood artist Julian Laffan’s answer to first and second century CE writing tablets was a woodblock print, The Eye of the Tree: Reading with Platanus acerifolia. Probably the most striking objects are Aidan Hartshorn’s Treasures of the Wolgul Tribe, gilded objects inspired by First Nations artefacts from southeastern NSW. 

To  further help bring the classics to life, Pike-Rowney and the Centre for Classical Studies’ lecturers have been teaching young and funky new courses such as tThis year’s Life, Love, and Loss in Ancient Greece and Rome, co-taught with Simona Martorana, and next year’s The Muse and the Machine: The arts, technology and society in Graeco-Roman Antiquity, with Tatiana Bur.

Meantime, now that they’re back after several months of languishing in temporary locations, they’re sprucing up for something really big – the centre will host the Australasian Society for Classical Studies’ Conference, February 3-5.

The ANU Classics Museum is open from January 6, Monday-Friday, 9am-5pm.