Robert O'Hara Burke's name is usually uttered in the same phrase as his fellow explorer William John Wills.
Their disastrous expedition from the south to the north of the country has long been the stuff of Australian legend.
It was one of the most expensive expeditions in Australian history, and after their deaths they were given the first Victorian state funeral on January 21, 1863.
Now, 160 years later, Australia's oldest regional museum continues to bear Burke’s name — and the eclectic collection brought together in his memory.
Exploring the limits of knowledge
Before he led the Burke and Wills expedition, Robert O'Hara Burke was a police superintendent in regional Victorian towns, including Beechworth.
"He was quite an eccentric fellow," Burke Museum collections manager Ashleigh Giffney said.
"We've got all these stories about him having a bathtub in the police paddocks reading police reports … but we also have stories where he would get lost as well. This was man who was then supposed to lead an expedition across Australia."
After Burke's death, the Beechworth community held a town meeting to vote on how to memorialise him — and decided to start a museum run by the local council.
"I suppose the story of the Burke and Wills expedition was all about exploration — discovering what settlers thought was the unknown, and so turning it into a museum was … memorialising this idea that he was discovering and learning and bringing information back to [the] Crown," Ms Giffney said.
An appeal was sent to museums across the country, asking for donations to start up a museum in Burke's name, to be filled with the "cabinets of curiosities" popular at the time.
"So you'd have something from Ancient Egypt, you'd have a geological specimen, you'd have an artwork, you'd have a rifle, you'd have anything that was kind of interesting, anything to kind of draw someone into the cabinet to… have a look and wonder and think and compare."
That's how the Robert O'Hara Burke Museum came to hold mineral specimens from the mid-19th-century Geological Survey of Victoria, Ned Kelly's death mask, a 13th-century ushabti figure from an Egyptian tomb, hundreds of animal specimens including a thylacine (the only one outside a state institution), and a unique collection of hairballs from the stomach of livestock.
A 'museum of museums'
Australian Museums and Galleries Association vice president Julie Baird said the Burke Museum could be seen as a "museum of museums", documenting the way collecting and displaying practices have changed over time.
Ms Baird noted immersive streetscapes such as the gold rush era room installed in the museum in the 1970s were the "classic" display of the time and popular all over the world, much like cabinets of curiosities in the 1800s.
There are now plans to renew the museum's display of Burke and Wills' expedition and put it alongside the story of the museum's repatriation project of First Nations' artefacts.
"Times change, and tastes change, and that political baggage that a lot of museums carry of inappropriate collecting in the past, Burke [Museum]'s trying to rectify that," Ms Baird said.
"And I think that that's a really wonderful way of looking at those changes that flow in what we collect and how we collect and what’s considered important."
"Our role now is less about just preserving history," said Burke Museum manager Cameron Auty.
"Particularly now that everybody has all the world's information in their pocket, you don’t need to come to the museum to learn about things, you need to come here to understand the world and I think that’s a different way of being."
He says there's a weight that comes with bearing Burke's name.
"Burke, for all of his interesting character and fascinating stories, he also is a representative of the British Empire," Mr Auty said.
"His expedition across Australia is intricately linked to Indigenous dispossession, and we've had a number of internal discussions about what that means and how we deal with that going forward."
At this stage the Burke Museum will continue to be just that, but he indicated even a name etched in granite isn’t set in stone.
"[A name change is] a bigger question and that would be one for the people of Beechworth … but over time history changes, what stories we choose to tell change, and what we choose to memorialise changes, and the future of this place — who knows what happens?"
