After accumulating over 80,000 records over a period of 50 years, the passing of avid record collector Ken Perkins has left Australia's biggest record collection up for grabs.
The extensive collection was passed down to his daughter Natalie Perkins, who is left with the mammoth task of clearing out her father's house and figuring out what to do with her father's music archive.
To help with this, Perkins called on antiquities expert Dr. Daryl Sparkes to help figure out the worth of the collection. As of yet, a monetary figure for the whole collection has not been figured out but many of the records, including rare 78s that are over 100 years old, could be worth a fortune.
Regarding its pricing, Sparkes told "you would have to go through each individual album and rate them for quality and also for rareness and then you'd be able to work out a price. When describing the collection itself, Sparkes told the news outlet "there is jazz here, there is blues here, there's surf music, there is '50s rock and not all collectors collect all of that. It would be easier to sell it in sections rather than all in one go." When working out the amount of time it would take to listen to the entire collection, the estimate comes out to somewhere in the ballpark of six-and-a-half years.
Even though splitting the collection would most likely make it easier to unload, Ms. Perkins believes it has "cultural" and "historic" significance and is aiming to find a way to keep the collection together.
"Someone at a governmental level needs to take control of this collection as it is a national treasure," Perkins tells ABC News. She is currently waiting for a buyer and has set up an Instagram account for the collection called The Ken Perkins Collection.
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