Photographer, writer and artist Hardwicke Knight died in 2008, leaving thousands of collectables stacked floor to ceiling in his ramshackle Broad Bay home.
The 97-year-old's collection was left to son Simon and daughter Deborah, who decided months later to sell many of the thousands of items they had no room to keep.
The collection was packed in about 650 boxes and sent to Adelaide, where it was offered in a no-reserve auction on Monday.
Graham Small, of Theodore Bruce Auctioneers, yesterday said the "sizeable, remarkable, eclectic treasure-trove" generated sensational interest and remarkable returns.
The collection included more than 20,000 books, and hundreds of photographs, slides, cameras, telescopes, ceramics and other artefacts. It sold for more than $A200,000 ($NZ256,840), or twice the original estimate.
A collection of antique microscope slides sold for more than $14,000, one of a number of lots to be sold to buyers in the United Kingdom, the United States and around Australasia.
Before the auction, Sydney-based Simon Knight said the collection did not include photographs, paintings and autobiographical notes he had set aside as potentially interesting to the Hocken Library, the Otago Peninsula Historical Society and Te Papa.
Others were not sent for auction because they might already belong to Te Papa: Knight retained for research some of a collection he sold to the national museum for $250,000 in the early 1990s.
"But no, among it all there was no sign of any pieces of Noah's Ark, but there were plenty of books about it," Mr Knight said from Western Australia.
His London-born father spent many years travelling before migrating to Dunedin in 1957.
He travelled to Turkey in the late 1930s, where he found exposed timbers poking from the ground on Mt Ararat - the reputed resting place of Noah's Ark.
A team of American ark hunters flew him back there in the 1960s, but they did not get to the spot where he had found the wood.
The 1972 book The Quest for Noah's Ark said the find suggested Noah's Ark was still there but, after his death, his partner, Ursula Stockinger, said he thought he had found part of a cow byre.
