Amongst Fryer's manuscript collections is a folder of papers relating to the 1948 St Patrick's Day clash in Brisbane. The papers form part of the collection of Connie Healy, whose husband, Mick Healy, was secretary of the Trades & Labor Council of Queensland at the time. Mick Healy was the leader of the protest march that was met with such violence by the Queensland police.

In the seventeenth century, many members of the upper classes collected objects for 'cabinets of curiosities', amusing their guests with rare and unusual specimens of natural history. Shells were one of the most popular objects among collectors, and in the eighteenth century, as major voyages of discovery made available new and previously unrecorded species, these shells came to be studied in a more scientific way.