Stephen Zagala’s earliest memories are of Vanuatu.

The son of teachers, Stephen spent his early years playing with the children from the local village in the shadow of a volcano.

He was very young, but that time in the Pacific (a young Stephen is pictured in Vanuatu below) had a lasting impact and eventually helped shape his career.

The Content Coordinator, Exhibitions at the South Australian Museum says that after returning to Australia he spent the rest of his childhood in Melbourne, going on to study "a fairly traditional humanities degree".

"For the early part of my career I was an academic, largely teaching art history," Stephen says.

"Then I moved into the arts scene, writing and working with artists."

But that time in Melanesia never left his thoughts, and Stephen went back to uni to qualify as an anthropologist before returning to work in the same part of Vanuatu where he lived as a child.

"I wanted to reconnect with that heritage in the Pacific, that community that I’d been born into," he says.

Back on the island of Ambae, Stephen studied the unique local practice of sand drawing, where complex geometric patterns are drawn in the sand to pass down knowledge, myths and stories.

"I was studying the distribution of the practice, which only occurs on about half-a-dozen different islands, and as part of that I did some work with the National Museum in Vanuatu," Stephen says.

"I was working with the museum and UNESCO on having this practice included in the then fairly new idea of intangible cultural heritage.

"The idea was that instead of saving the canoes or the statues or the buildings, we should be looking at what culture is really about. It's about this living exchange of information, so there are places that should be preserved, languages that should be preserved, forms of dance and music that should be preserved, because they're the vehicles for passing on knowledge."

Having made the transition from the art world to the world of museums, Stephen found himself working at the Museum of Australian Photography for a decade before making the move to Adelaide to work with – appropriately enough – the SA Museum’s Pacific Cultures Gallery.

The collection, which would be familiar to most people who have visited the North Terrace institution, is – according to Stephen – of world significance.

"It’s an incredible display or some 2000 individual objects, drawn from a collection of almost 18,000 Pacific items held in SAM’s World Cultures Collection," he says.

"There’s certainly nowhere else in the Southern Hemisphere where you can see that amount of Melanesian material."

Now Stephen finds himself working with a different, but equally fascinating, collection – the renowned Galloway Hoard.

Unearthed by metal detectorists in south-western Scotland in 2014, the hoard – which is travelling outside of Britain for the first time – has been hailed as the most remarkable collection of Viking-age treasure ever unearthed in Britain or Ireland.

Like most Viking-age hoards, it contains lots of silver – ingots, hacksilver, arm-rings and finely crafted jewellery – and a vast amount of gold.

But the most astonishing thing about the Galloway Hoard is the presence of heirlooms, relics and exotic curiosities, providing a snapshot of life in medieval Scotland and showing how Britain was part of Viking-age trade networks that stretched into the Middle East and Asia.

Current research suggests that the hoard was buried by a wealthy and well-connected group of people around 900 CE, with the presence of female-coded dress items, Christian relics and other rare items suggesting that this group included men, women and members of the clergy.

The hoard, Stephen says, gives an incredible insight into the people who came to be known as Vikings.

"To go ‘viking’ was to go pirating or exploring," he says.

"It was used as an adjective. The concept of the Vikings, as a race of people, really didn’t emerge until the 19^th century with things like Wagner’s operas.

"That’s when we started to see this idea of pagans from the north wearing these demonic horned helmets, threatening all that was German and Protestant.

"That’s been the popular cliché, and this exhibition really cuts across that."

Stephen says that one of the fascinating elements of the hoard is the presence of objects that showed what incredible explorers and traders these people were.

"You had Danes travelling down through the Russian river systems and across the Black Sea," he says.

"They were very involved with what was going on in Constantinople, they were trading with people from the Arabian world, and of course they were colonising the islands to the north like Iceland and settling as far west as Canada."

Stephen says that while the gold and silver in the hoard was impressive, it was the less valuable objects that perhaps told the real story.

"People these days like to talk with absolute certainty about what the world was like tens of thousands of years ago, but the reality is that if you go back just 1000 years things get pretty hazy," he says.

"So, these kinds of archaeological finds provide fantastic evidence.

"In some ways they throw up as many questions as they answer, but we can see that this was a very carefully composed deposit.

"It’s rich in those kinds of conventional senses of wealth, but then there are these other fascinating objects.

"In particular there's this little vessel at the heart of it which they're saying originated in pre-Islamic Persia. Somebody has treasured that and kept it safe for a very long time.

"This wasn’t something that was looted and hastily buried by barbarians – this has heritage, and a very strong female presence."

So, what advice would Stephen give to young people thinking about pursuing a career in curating or other aspects of museums?

It’s a question he mulls over carefully.

"I don’t want to give a very pat answer like 'just find what you love'," he says.

"Although the reality is that this is true to some extent. You have to find something you care about. Whether you’re a tradie or a teacher or a politician, it’s obvious when someone cares about their job.

"I guess the way I would like to answer that question is by saying that a museum like this is really critically important for the future of the planet in that it offers a way to think about the interconnection of everything.

"What we've inherited here, with all these collections of human culture and natural history and geology, is something that allows us to see the world – and life – as this network of interconnected things.

"So I think that for anyone interested, museums are a great place to work because they really are a platform for getting people to think about what it means to live in the world."

Treasures of the Viking Age: The Galloway Hoard will be on show at the South Australian Museum from 8 February to 27 July 2025. Click here (external site) (external site) (external site) for more information.