“Was it love at first sight?” asks Max Bibeau. “I would say no.”

The relationship between a musician and their instrument is always complicated. But for Bibeau and his double bass – tall, heavy and dark, with a distinctive mottled patina and floral carvings – it was a long journey from introduction to intimacy.

“I don’t think the instrument’s been played much at all in its life, except for now,” he says. “It took quite a while to wake it up.”

For many years, the bass was hidden away in an abbey in northern Italy, home for centuries to an Augustinian order of monks. German bass player, Prof Günter Klaus, found it in the late 1960s, and convinced the monks to sell it to him.

Klaus “knew it was a nice instrument”, Bibeau says, but it was “in a state of disrepair and completely black with soot”. It wasn’t until later that he learned it was crafted in about 1580 by Gasparo da Salò, a master luthier and one of the first to ever make double basses.

There are only a handful like it in the world.

Now, the instrument is with Bibeau, bought by Ukaria cultural centre in South Australia and loaned to him since 2013 to play in his role as principal double bass for the Australian Chamber Orchestra (ACO). It’s the oldest instrument in the ACO’s collection.

But is it also the oldest playable musical instrument in Australia?

Masters of the yidaki

Culturally, the oldest instrument in Australia is likely the yidaki (didgeridoo), a sacred instrument to the Yolŋgu people, which they have been making and playing for thousands of years.

For an exhibition in 2017, curators at the South Australian Museum worked with members of the Yolŋgu community to restore a selection of the physically oldest and most unique yidaki they could find to playing condition. The oldest was made in about 1890.

“You can’t play them when they’ve been sitting on a shelf for a hundred years,” says John Carty, the museum’s head of humanities at the time. “The thing that makes them playable is the moisture in the wood. Normally, Yolŋgu will just stick the hose down it, or stick it in the river – that’s what they told us to do.”

Carty says artefact preservation protocols prevented use of this more straightforward method, so the museum built a specialised humidifier – “like a humidicrib” used for newborn babies. They “slowly, slowly brought the dried out, desiccated old yidaki back up to the moisture levels they would have had in Arnhem Land, so they could be played by the Yolŋgu masters.”

Larry Gurruwiwi was one of them.

Widely known as a yidaki master from a very young age, he has in recent years taken on the role of custodian from his father, the late renowned yidaki master Djalu Gurruwiwi, and uses the instrument for healing practices as well as ceremony and music. Gurruwiwi says playing those old instruments at the museum was unlike playing the yidaki he’s made himself.

“It feels different. Very, very slow,” he says. In the older instruments, “my spirit gets lost.”

A first fleet piano and an ancient flute

The first European instrument to arrive with the colonisers in Australia, which has survived to the present day, was a piano: a “square” piano with a wooden frame, dating from 1780 by German maker, Frederick Beck. It arrived on board the first fleet ship, the Sirius.

“It has the sweetest voice,” says Stewart Smith, a senior lecturer at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, where the piano has been held since its restoration in the UK a few years ago. It is a much smaller and softer instrument than a modern piano, which is made with an iron frame and designed to be heard throughout concert halls.

Whether it sounds the same now as it did when it was first made is hard to say, but then, “it was [made] for a different world”, says Smith. “The loudest thing in the 18th century was the sound of an organ. It’s a quieter world and that really affects the way you play, the way you listen to music, the ways that singers sing.”

But there are older instruments. The oldest that Guardian Australia could find in Australia is in a repository at Queensland Museum.

There sits an ocarina, an ancient kind of vessel flute, that harks from the Nariño region of what is now Colombia. Little is known about this instrument and its provenance has not been independently verified, but archival documentation from its sale describes it as a “whistle in the shape of a shell, with a monkey hanging over the top, side panel decorated with incised linear and triangular designs”.

The estimated date of production is circa AD1200.

The ocarina is one of 830 musical instruments from around the world donated to the museum by collectors, the late Charles and Kati Marson. The donation was intended as a “living collection”: the Marsons wanted the instruments to be played, where they could.

The collection’s manager, Karen Kindt, says conservation work was performed on the ocarina in 2013.

“Can it be played? You could make a sound from it, but whether that would be like the original sound that came from it is unknown to me,” she says.

Playing the ocarina would also require community and cultural engagement, if possible. “But you probably wouldn’t want to be playing it or handling it too long given its fragility or the conservation work that’s been done to it. It’s a beautiful little piece.”

The fact that it has survived for 800 years is likely down to it being ceramic, Kindt says. “From an archaeological perspective, pottery tends to be the thing that has longevity. Bone breaks down, leather breaks down, other materials that are used to make musical instruments would start to dissipate in terms of structure, and weaken.”

‘It just keeps getting better and better’

Meanwhile, analysis of the wood used for the front of Bibeau’s da Salò bass has dated it to a tree that was growing as early as 1266. While age can add an indefinable quality to an instrument’s sound, “it’s not true that all old instruments are great,” says Bibeau. It needs to be “strong enough to withstand time, but not too strong, so that it breathes and vibrates freely.”

It took a couple of years, a lot of work on the set-up “and then playing it hard for months and months and months”, for Bibeau to bring the bass back to life. “Since this day, it just keeps getting better and better,” he says.

“Instruments need to be played. It’s like a muscle in that it needs to vibrate, and the more it vibrates, the better it vibrates and then you can learn how to respond to it. I guess they learn how to respond to you as well.”