A COLLECTION of over 570 minerals will spend the more than a year in Bathurst, a place that this collection already has a special connection to.
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The Australia Fossil and Mineral Museum will house a portion of the Albert Chapman collection while its usual home, the Australian Museum in Sydney, undergoes renovations.
Bathurst is already home to the Warren Somerville collection, also owned by the Australian Museum, making the local museum a fitting place for the Chapman collection to be housed.
"Albert Chapman and Warren Somerville were friends and they used to go out fossicking together," Australian Museum director and CEO Kim McKay said.
"The fact that Albert Chapman really taught Warren a lot about fossicking and minerals in the first place, it's very nice to have the collections reunited here."
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Ms McKay said the relocation of the collection has been a five-month process, with the Chapman collection starting to be packed away in January.
The minerals arrived in Bathurst last week and more than 20 staff from the Australian Museum have played a part in the process.
The minerals chosen to come were hand-picked by Ross Pogson, a collection manager who has been at the Australian Museum for 40 years.
Mr Pogson said some pieces were too fragile to travel to Bathurst, but what has been brought is a mix of colours and mineral species.
"This collection has always been in a capital city," he said. "A lot of people in regional Australia have never had the chance to see it ... now they can see it."
Combining the Chapman and Somerville collections together, Bathurst now has the largest and most significant exhibition of minerals in Australia, with more than 1400 world-class minerals on show.