Peek inside the Chau Chak Wing Museum at Sydney University

Egyptian mummies, meteorites and modern art are on display at the museum, which will be open to the public.

Director David Ellis inside the Chau Chak Wing Museum. Picture: Britta Campion

Sydney’s newest museum is a place where life-size anatomical models rub shoulders with still-life paintings, and where rare cockatoo specimens may start a conversation with ­Egyptian mummies.

The Chau Chak Wing ­Museum, in the grounds of the University of Sydney, opens next week as an educational and ­research facility that will also be free for the public to enjoy. Across four storeys, the museum brings together the university’s collections of antiquities, natural history and visual art.

“It enables the collections to start to speak to one another in a multidisciplinary way,” said ­museum director David Ellis. “It’s not just art history students looking at artworks, or ­archaeologists looking at pot shards — it’s mixing of all of those.”

The museum was designed by architects Johnson Pilton Walker and takes the form of a canti­levered concrete box. It is named for the lead donor, businessman Chau Chak Wing, who contributed $15m. A third of the $66.2m project cost was raised from ­donors, also including Penelope Seidler, the Nelson Meers ­Foundation and the Ian Potter Foundation.

The exhibits are brought ­together from three formerly separate collections, including antiquities from the university’s Nicholson Museum.

Mr Ellis said when he arrived as director of the university museums in 2003, the collections were not being studied and enjoyed as much as they could be.

“It amazed me, the depth, breadth, quality of the collections, but they were in difficult locations, constrained by poor infrastructure,” he said. “There were opportunities to engage the community and students that weren’t being realised. We hatched a plan to bring them together but we had to convince the university this was a worthwhile thing to do.”

Up to 70 per cent of the objects in the new museum have not been on display for 20 years, Mr Ellis said. It opens on November 18.

The exhibits date from prehistory — including a 500,000-year-old stone axe from northern France — up to the present, with a contemporary artwork being installed by Daniel Boyd.

“We are unique, I think, certainly in this part of the world, in that we combine all these subjects in this way,” Mr Ellis said.

“It’s fitting that it’s within a university, but it’s public as well.”