Museums Australia Magazine Volume 19 (1)

vol 19 (1) – september 2010

Museums Australia

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Museums Australia Magazine includes collection overviews, education and related information, book reviews, reviews of conferences and workshops, information for professional development, coverage of new museum and gallery developments, international news including ICOM events, advertising and design, and web developments.

Museums Australia Magazine is published four times a year and has a readership of more than 17,000 professionals, volunteers, students and colleague agencies in Australia and abroad.

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6 Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 19 (1) – September 2010

Contents

In this issue Museums Australia National Council 2009—2011 Australian natural history collections revitalised for new audiences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

president

Dr Darryl McIntyre (CEO, National Film and Sound Archive, Canberra)

vice-president

European Masters: Städel Museum, 19th-20th

Lorraine Fitzpatrick (Senior Project Officer, Royalties for Regions, Cultural Centre, Carnarvon, WA)

Century at the National Gallery of Victoria. . . . . . . 17

treasurer

Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route. 20

Timothy (Tim) Hart (Director, Information, Multimedia & Technology, Museum of Victoria, Melbourne)

secretary

Indigenous art of today renewing early museum

William (Bill) Storer (previously: President, MA-NSW; Chair, Community Museums Network; Newcastle)

collections from Arnhem Land. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

members

Museum theatre. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

All the world’s museums are a stage. . . . . . 33

Suzanne Bravery (General Manager, Programs and Services, Museums & Galleries NSW, Sydney) Belinda Cotton (Head, Development, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra) Richard Mulvaney (CEO, NSW Rail Transport Museum, Sydney)

Regional training and development initiatives. . . . 35 Museum internships. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37

Australia’s cultural interactions with China over more than three decades . . 40 Book Review – Trans-Tasman monographs compared . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49

Jennifer Sanders (former Deputy Director of Collections and Outreach, Powerhouse Museum, Sydney) William (Bill) Seager (Redevelopment Content Manager, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart) Soula Veyradier (Curator, City of Melville Museum & Local History Service, Booragoon, WA)

state/territory branch presidents/ representatives (subject to change throughout year) ACT Carol Cartwright (Head, Education & Visitor Services, Australian War Memorial, Canberra) NSW Andrew Simpson (Director, Museum Studies Program, Macquarie University, Sydney)

Museums Australia Magazine PO Box 266, Civic Square ACT 2608 MA National Office (physical location): Old Parliament House, King George Terrace, Canberra, ACT Editorial: (02) 6273 2437 Advertising: 02) 6273 2437 Subscriptions: (02) 6273 2437 Fax: (02) 6273 2451 editor@museumsaustralia.org.au www.museumsaustralia.org.au Editor: Bernice Murphy Design: Art Direction Creative Print: Blue Star Print

© Museums Australia and individual authors.

No part of this magazine may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

Museums Australia Magazine is published quarterly and on-line on the MA Website, and is a major link with members and the museums sector. Museums Australia Magazine is a forum for news, opinion and debate on museum issues.

Contributions from those involved or interested in museums and galleries are welcome. Museums Australia Magazine reserves the right to edit, abridge, alter or reject any material. Views expressed by contributors are not necessarily those of the publisher or editor. Publication of an advertisement does not imply endorsement by Museums Australia, its affiliates or employees.

Museums Australia is proud to acknowledge the following supporters of the national organisation: Australian Government Department of Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts; National Museum of Australia; National Film and Sound Archive; Museum Victoria (Melbourne Museum); Western Australian Museum; and Link Web Services (Canberra).

Print Post Publication No: 332582/00001 ISSN 1038-1694

NT Helen Joraslafsky (Manager, National Pioneer Women’s Hall of Fame, Alice Springs) SA Robert Morris (Head of Collections, South Australian Museum, Adelaide) TAS Chris Tassell (Managing Director, National Trust of Australia (TAS), Launceston) QLD Lisa Jones (Curator, Queensland Police Museum, Brisbane) VIC Daniel Wilksch (Coordinator, Digital Projects, Public Record Office Victoria, Melbourne) WA Christen John Bell (Curator History House Museum, Armadale, WA)

Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 19 (1) – September 2010 7

President’s message Darryl McIntyre

T

1. Joyce Morgan, ‘Expert has a bone to pick with auction house as skull sale called off’, [illustrated]; Sydney Morning Herald, 5 August 2010. (http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/ expert-has-a-bone-to-pick-withauction-house-as-skull-sale-calledoff-20100804-11foc.html).

2. Nicky Phillips, ‘Too many specimens, not enough people at museum’, [cartoon illustrated by Cathy Wilcox]; Sydney Morning Herald, 2 September 2010. (http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/ too-many-specimens-not-enoughpeople-at-museum-20100901-14nn3. html)

he 2010 Museums Australia National Conference Committee has been finalising its program in recent weeks, through the Victorian state branch of MA. The schedule of keynote addresses, parallel sessions, panels, forums, Network AGMs, R+R Workshops and social gatherings now receiving final attention promises a rich and profitable gathering in Melbourne at the end of September.

International guest speakers have confirmed their itineraries and are eagerly anticipated as guests among us. Final details on the Trade Show, and presentations by the country’s highly valued commercial suppliers of products to the sector, are falling into place. Conference Registrations are also still coming in, after the extended Early Bird closing date, which is most encouraging to the organisers. The National Council looks forward to the gathering of the museum clans at the end of this month in Melbourne.

The National Office has continued its strong record of advocacy work on behalf of the association – with more than 15 submissions over two years forwarded in response to public (usually federal governmental) inquiries affecting the museums sector and the communities it serves directly in preservation of all parts of Australia’s cultural heritage.

A submission responding to the Commonwealth’s National Volunteering Strategy Consultation Paper, incorporating excellent input provided from MA’s state branches, was forwarded at the end of June. This was the most recent of many submissions prepared by the National Office on behalf of Museums Australia, and provided important advocacy of issues on behalf of small and community-based museums and galleries across the country that so directly depend on volunteer labour in the care of local collections and heritage.

Another strand of advocacy work involves monitoring regular coverage of the museums and galleries sector in the media. It is important to pay attention to general conceptions of the work and interests of museums (from exhibitions and programming to ethical matters) that are influenced by the media.

At the end of July, the National Office’s attention was drawn at short notice to the impending auction of a significant private collection in Sydney at the beginning of August. This was to be a prominent auction of a strikingly diverse collection of artefacts from a range of the world’s ‘tribal’ cultures, following the death of the American owner who had brought the collection to Australia where she lived in her later years.

National Museum of Australia staff were concerned at the advertised sale of modified ‘tribal skulls’ in this auction’s online catalogue, and had made representation to the vendors in relation to possible infringement of laws concerning cultural and scientific heritage protection. A request for assistance was also raised with MA, following initial resistance of the vendor to objections raised.

The National Office was able to act quickly on these issues, to achieve successful liaison over two days

with the Sydney Morning Herald, and a good article appeared by Arts Editor, Joyce Morgan – utilising interview quotes from Dr Michael Pickering, Manager of Repatriation at the National Museum, and Shane Simpson, one of Australia’s most experienced lawyers on ethics, museums and the law.[1] Meanwhile although the auction went ahead in Sydney, the lots involving unprovenanced human skulls had been withdrawn from sale at the last moment. Two other independent journalists have subsequently indicated their interest in being further informed on these topics and related ethical issues for museums as a follow-up to the SM Herald’s coverage.

However an article that appeared more recently in the Sydney Morning Herald, [2] dealing with challenging aspects of cataloguing and inventory of millions of items at the Australian Museum, raises important concerns about continuing media misrepresentation of museums. It is a task for all institutions, large and small across the sector, to be active in challenging the repeated lazy stereotypes about museums by journalists (museums-and-dust metaphors abound).

Many poorly researched articles often promote public ignorance, and even serious misunderstanding by governments: about the diversity of museum activities and programs, and the complex responsibilities they must manage as adroitly as possible with resources available year-round.

Expectations that either museums can attend to cataloguing updates on sometimes millions of itemholdings in a year or two, or if they are not achieving this rate of inventory attention to their collection records they are somehow failing public audit accountability, are ignorant and seriously harmful.

Such lazy ‘spin articles’ on museums by journalists undermine public confidence in the important civil society institutions that care for our history, heritage, research, culture and national achievements. And most damaging of all, such coverage often misleads decision-makers and governmental officers in their understanding of the high standards of performance and services that museums do provide year-round, and the resource-allocations required to continue rendering such service for public good.

The Sydney Morning Herald article alerts us to some renewed work we need to do with our natural history and science museum colleagues, to reach a clearer, more informed national perspective on the complex tasks of continuing management of our important national heritage in these areas. There are tasks ahead to establish a stronger (‘evidence-based’) picture of our combined collections’ value; their importance as a resource for all Australians; to iterate best-practice standards and prioritising of tasks for all aspects of management (including inventory and cataloguing matters) – and then to pursue shared approaches to energetically projecting this more informed picture of our museums’ activities to all parts of our media.

Turning to Museums Australia membership: the National Office has been active for some months in

8 Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 19 (1) – September 2010

developing new tools and statistical information on membership retention – which is an issue for all NFP associations in the current climate. Some members seem to have been ‘lost’ in recent years; however other ‘lapsed members’ are renewing after special communications addressed to understanding their needs and position; and a steady picture of ‘new members’ emerging each year merits our assessment. Attention to membership issues, by the Council’s Standing Committee on Membership, will be a special focus for Council at its next meeting.

The National Office recently prepared and circulated a survey of the National Networks (and SIGs), to assist the MA National Council at its face-to-face meeting in Melbourne (28 September) to gain an up-to-date picture and review of the work of the Networks and their activities. This review is already taking stock of some new Networks that have emerged in recent years, and others that have voluntarily disbanded or evolved their interests into new forms of collegial interaction.

While Council is concerned to review the levels of activity and events conducted by the 24 National Networks that exist currently, it is clear that there are varying needs served by Network-specific and chapter-level interactions for colleagues. Some Networks or regional chapters have very slender resources and interact mostly with small cohorts of sectoral membership; meanwhile others, long established and always gathering a strong catchment from across the country really do act as vigorous facilitators and leaders of interaction at a truly ‘National Network’ level. It is clear that this varying level of momentum accords realistically with the diverse needs encompassed and underpinned by the structure of a national association. Meanwhile it is reassuring that both the National Office and the Council continue to receive signals of further Network claims arising, with emergent bids for authorisation and inclusion in the MA’s activities across the country.

The MA Publications Design Awards (MAPDA 2010) have again been conducted successfully through the National Office, supporting the MAPDA Committee’s work as guides and judges for the MADA Awards.

We look forward to the announcement of the winning entrants for this year during a Conference evening event at the State Library of Victoria on 29 September, at which the work of designers and museum commissioners of our finest publications across the sector will also be displayed.

Museums Australia is again delighted by the successful partnership in 2010 with ABC Radio National, through which the ABC has used its extensive Local Radio networks, in concert with RN staff, to achieve national ABC RN Regional Museum Awards honouring the smallest and most volunteer-dependent community-based museums throughout Australia.

There are further aspects to the ABC’s increased attention to museums, drawing for a third year on partnership support from Museums Australia – and the full dimensions of this partnership are dealt with

in an article in this issue of the Magazine. With the Conference happening later this year, and the ABC Awards announced earlier, there has been more leadtime to advise the category winners and prepare for their presentation of ABC trophies at the National Conference in Melbourne – to honour them all on the opening morning of our National Conference, on 29 September. It has again been a great pleasure for Museums Australia to continue to work in supporting our museums with such an outstanding national broadcaster as the ABC, which reaches so far across the country in serving the nation’s communities. [] Dr Darryl McIntyre FAIM CEO National Film and Sound Archive & President, Museums Australia

Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 19 (1) – September 2010 9

The third year of a rich partnership between ABC Radio National and Museums Australia

ABC Radio National Regional Museum Awards 2010

The Richmond River Historical Society and Regional Museum, located at the old Lismore Municipal Building.

1. Material for this presentation on the 2010 ABC Radio National Museum Awards has been compiled from various sources: from entry submissions made according to the criteria in 2010; from the report of the judges’ final decisions uploaded on the ABC RN website for the MuseumAwards, and from information supplied by the three winning museums themselves. See abc.net.au/rn/museums [Ed.]

Presentation of Award-winning museums

T

he 2010 Regional Museums Award venture

by ABC Radio National has had its biggest response yet, since its inception in 2008. With more than 200 enquiries and just over 100 nominations received, Australia’s regional museums have, once again, delighted and amazed with their demonstration of the commitment, dedication and breadth of their collections.

This year the competition was opened up beyond the exclusively ‘volunteer-run’ category, to include museums classified as ‘small’ by having a total operating budget of not more than $150,000 per annum or less. However the overwhelming response still came from volunteer-run organisations, reflecting the often unacknowledged place these institutions have in the vital work of preserving and telling their communities’ stories, and in conserving the collective stories of Australia at large.

Recognising the importance of museums in regional Australia, ABC Local Radio played an important part this year in encouraging local organisations to consider nominating themselves for the Awards. Many of the ABC’s regional radio stations conducted talkback programs around the theme of museums and artefacts from personal collections that may contribute to their community’s history.

ABC Radio National has also been delighted to act as a conduit for enquiries sent to the Regional Museums Award website but directed at specific museums. Queries have ranged from tours availability and opening times, to seeking information about family contacts or artefacts. It has also been interesting for Radio National to observe an increase in visitor figures to the Regional Museum Awards website, where an archived ‘armchair tour’ awaits visitors who can now view entries for the 2008, 2009 and 2010 Awards on the one web platform.

Phase 2 of the Regional Museum Awards for ABC Radio National in 2010 will be a visit by the Bush Telegraph program to the national winner, the Richmond River Historical Society, in October. Bush Telegraph will record a program at the Lismorebased museum for national broadcast, shining a spotlight on another of the nation’s excellent museums.

Richmond River Historical Society & Museum (Lismore, NSW) The overall winner this year, Richmond River Historical Society (RRHS), encompasses Lismore Regional Museum. The museum is housed in the old Lismore Municipal Building, provided to the RRHS by the Lismore City Council. The outstanding and professional manner in which this fully volunteer-run museum is managed is highlighted by the RRHS taking out the 2009 IMAGinE awards for Category 1: Organisation Awards for Collection Management – Volunteer organisations; and Category 4: Organisations Awards for Excellence – Volunteer organisations.

In making the 2010 ABC Radio National Museum Awards, the judges stated that the RRHS and Capital Regional Museum in Lismore, NSW, had been selected from this year’s nominees as having the best performance against the range of competition criteria. The judges were impressed by the inclusive approach taken to local history, incorporating Bundjalung Aboriginal history alongside pastoralist settlement history and the rich maritime history of the Richmond River. The RRHS collections also include acquisitions that tell the story of more recent Richmond River community issues and events. The RRHS demonstrates an impressive care of resources and imaginative development of its facilities. Close links with local tourism show a vital commitment to promoting the economy, heritage and identity of this region of north-western NSW. The RRHS and museum clearly demonstrates the importance of community service today as the front line for consolidating the value of historical resources, education programs and a strong cultural future. Information on the museum’s exhibitions can be obtained from their website http://www.richhistory.org.au.

10 Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 19 (1) – September 2010

The third year of a rich partnership between ABC Radio National and Museums Australia

Patakijiyali Museum (Bathurst Island)

above: From left to right: Ancilla Kurrupuwu, Sr Anne Gardiner, Fiona Kerinaiua right: Tiwi ’pukumani’ poles in the Patakajiyali Museum

In awarding the Indigenous Cultural Centre/Keeping Place Award in 2010 to the Patakijiyali Museum, the judges noted (on the ABC’s website) that: [They] were impressed by the museum’s striking presentation of Tiwi culture, the outstanding quality of its collection and displays of varied cultural forms and objects, and for its direct connections with Tiwi community cultural development locally. In addition to projecting Tiwi culture to visitors to Bathurst Island, the museum successfully functions as both a cultural centre and learning resource, especially through its collaboration with Tiwi teachers in the Indigenous cultural program of the local school.

The Patakijiyali Museum on Bathurst Island introduces visitors to the multi-dimensional aspects of Tiwi Aboriginal culture through its exhibitions and guided tours. The museum tells the stories, both ancient and recent, of the Tiwi people. The museum (Patakijilyali) is named after Father Francis Gsell, who set up the Catholic Mission on Bathurst Island in 1911, and it is dedicated to the many Tiwi, religious and lay people who worked to establish this distinctive institution.

Originally a RAAF base at Cape Fourcroy during World War 11, the Patakijiyali Museum building is of considerable historic significance. Later, the Tiwi and MSC Brothers painstakingly dismantled and transported, by horse and cart, the building which became the first mission kitchen. The museum volunteers have reflected that: ‘From being a place of feeding the hungry bodies, it [has now become] a place to feed the minds of all who visit’.

One of the moving forces behind the Patakijiyali Museum has been Sister Anne Gardiner, who stated in the ABC Radio National Museum Award application: ‘[C]reating this Museum has always been my dream. I want the Tiwi children to have a cultural place where they can visit and be proud of their past’.

Sister Anne recently met with four of the local Tiwi women to discuss the process of moving the responsibility for the museum to the community. Sister Anne sees this important transfer of cultural and managerial authority ‘as giving ownership to the Tiwi people themselves’.

When notification of the award was relayed to the Patakijiyali Museum, Sister Anne reported: We were all delighted when we heard the news.

We were thrilled that we had taken out first prize for the best cultural centre/ keeping place. The local Tiwi tour guides were exceptionally happy, and soon commenced introducing each tour by explaining that we had just won this national ABC award. There was great clapping from the school children, and a cry of ‘Number One!’ erupted from many of the adults.

The museum is fortunate to have the support of St. Ignatius College, Riverview, at Lane Cove in Sydney – from which teachers and boys from the school visit Bathurst Island twice a year to volunteer at the museum. This program is run in conjunction with St Aloysius College, Adelaide, and is supported through donations.

The Tiwi Land Council also recognises the importance of the museum, and has contributed generously to the museum’s latest gallery and enabled its displays of continuing Tiwi cultural heritage.

Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 19 (1) – September 2010 11

In its formal submission for the 2010 awards – available as an uploaded entry on the ABC’s archived ‘Museums’ website, linked from the ABC RN home page – the following declaration of the museum’s developmental venture can be found:

right: Narryna Heritage Museum has one of the largest costume collections in the southern hemisphere, representing the dress of women in the 19th century.

[Narryna has] opened its doors to universities. At present two students from the University of Tasmania are completing their honours thesis with Narryna’s vast and unique period costume collection. Narryna is also supervising two students undertaking their Masters Thesis at the Australian National University, as well as a student completing her PhD on the house.

Narryna is also supporting the local primary school, St. Michaels Collegiate School, by allowing it to develop educational courses as a part of schooling, as well as having guest speakers about history, archaeology, and Narryna’s history in general. Along with this, Narryna’s new developments with the Australian National University are another example of how museums and universities are working to open these institutions to the public as well as their own students for the benefit of the local community.

[ABC RNMA Application]

Narryna Heritage Museum (Hobart)

Acknowledgments

Narryna Heritage Museum is situated in the historic house build for Captain Andrew Haig in 1836, within the nationally historic precinct of Battery Point in Hobart. The museum has an outstanding Colonial collection, including an important collection of costumes. As well as a professional approach to collection and museum management, the Narryna Heritage Museum has innovative, varied and comprehensive education and professional development programs.

In making the new category award in 2010 – for a small museum with less than a $150,000 per annum operational budget – the judges noted that Narryna Heritage Museum was outstanding among national entries this year in its forging of connections with academic training institutions. The following initiative will be realised in the forthcoming year: Narryna Heritage Museum in partnership with the Australian National University will introduce an internship program ... [which will] involve some 50 interns a year, and a further 20-40 students per semester, who will undertake week-long courses at the museum.

Museums Australia is delighted by the success of this third year of collaboration in support of the ABC’s imagination and venture in recognising museums’ support to their communities across the country.

In addition to the centrepiece feature of the ABC Regional Museums Awards, the ABC also deserves tribute for its third year of recognition of International Museum Day (18 May), and third edition of a ‘Museums Week’ theming through many ABC RN programs across a week in May built around International Museum Day. Special thanks from the Museums Australia Council and National Office are due to Jane Connors, Program Manager of ABC Radio National in Ultimo, Sydney; and to Nicola Fern, ABC RN Marketing Manager, based in the ABC’s Melbourne headquarters on Southbank in Melbourne. [ ] Citation for this article: [Museums Australia, ABC Radio National & respective museums], ‘ABC Radio National Museum Awards 2010: The third year of a rich partnership between ABC Radio National and Museums Australia, Museums Australia Magazine, Canberra, Vol. 19 (Issue 1), September 2010, pp. 9-11.

12 Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 19 (1) – September 2010

Museum sector awards growing in diversity and public recognition

Rewarding excellence: The 2010 Victorian Museum Awards

Lyndel Wischer

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top: MA(Vic)’s Lyndel Wischer with comedian and television personality Rod Quantock at the 2010 Victorian Museum Awards middle: Award being presented

by Archival Survival to Burrinja Cultural Centre, Upwey for programs aimed at disadvantaged youth. bottom: Andrew Hockley (Herald Sun) presenting award for Best Museum Experience to representative of Old Gippstown Heritage Park, Moe. 1. ‘Wild and contemporary – Melbourne Museum’s progressive redevelopment of its long-term displays’, in Museums Australia Magazine, Canberra, Vol. 19 (Issue 1), September 2010, pp 13-16.

he 2010 Victorian Museum Awards were held in July and are a celebration of the museum industry in Victoria. They attracted 120 people, 23 nominations, five key sponsors and saw nine presentations made to outstanding individuals and organisations from around the state. Judges for the awards were selected from senior personnel at the National Gallery of Victoria, the Gold Museum at Sovereign Hill, Ballarat, and from ABC Radio.

This year the Awards featured a new category for large museums, which allowed the event to expand its nomination process and profile, and to represent some of Victoria’s best-known cultural destinations.

Museum Victoria is the state’s largest employer of skilled museum staff, and the Melbourne Museum was the selected venue for this major event. VIPs, sponsors and nominees gathered on the walkway outside the Museum’s Melbourne Gallery, and at 7pm were summoned by veteran comedian Rod Quantock to be seated for the awards ceremony.

Rod Quantock worked as MC for the evening, and special guests were invited to make award presentations to each recipient. This format allowed museum leaders and sponsors to be profiled during the ceremony, as well as the Award recipients. For example, Dr Robin Hirst (Acting Manager, Melbourne Museum) presented the Museums Australia (Victoria) Award for medium-sized museums to the Shrine of Remembrance, and Andrew Hockley (General Manager, Sales and Marketing, Herald Sun) presented the Herald Sun People’s Choice Award for the Best Museum Experience – which was won by Old Gippstown Heritage Park in Moe. As Event Coordinator, I was pleased that the winners of the 2010 Awards represented a strong diversity in museum type, geographic region and collection and programming focus. For example, Burrinja Cultural Centre, at Upwey, won an award for exemplary public programs aimed at disadvantaged youth; meanwhile Museum Victoria won the large-museum category for an extensive and internationally recognised exhibition about biodiversity and sustainability of wildlife: WILD: Amazing animals in a changing world – featured elsewhere in this edition of the MA Magazine.[1] Criteria for the Individual Award categories in 2010 included ‘commitment to building and sharing museum industry knowledge with peers, colleagues and community members’ plus ‘modelling best practice to museum professionals and volunteers’.

All nominees were highly worthy, and the volunteer recipient was Ms. Kay Gibson who, amongst other achievements, has created a comprehensive index system for the archives held by Victoria Police Museum and Historical Services. In the Paid Individual category, Jason Eades (CEO, Koorie Heritage Trust) was the award winner. This is the first time an Indigenous cultural leader has won a Victorian Museum Award. Jason reported that he was thrilled to receive the recognition of his Indigenous and nonIndigenous peers through the nomination and award ceremony process.

Awards may be seen by some as elitist. However, in Australia’s growing museums and galleries sector, excellence and best practice really do need to be recognised, celebrated and rewarded. The Victorian Museum Awards achieve all three of these aims.

Moreover, they publicly acknowledge the museums industry and sector as instrumental in strengthening communities, promoting their identity and protecting cultural heritage of all kinds, as well as creating ongoing access to living culture. Significantly, the 2010 Victorian Awards even gained a mention in State Parliament.

Museums and galleries are cultural centres that require dedicated and innovative staff and volunteers to maintain viability, public interface and care of collections. To encourage the people who do this work, and honour the organisations that strive towards highest museum standards of service – as the annual Awards undoubtedly accomplish – is to amplify support for their actions, and to publicise the benefit of such work both within the sector and in public consciousness more broadly. [ ] Lyndel Wischer is Manager, Professional Development, within the Victorian state branch of the national association: Museums Australia (Victoria). She played a key role as coordinator of the 2010 Victorian Museum Awards management and evening ceremony.

Citation for this article: Lyndel Wischer, ‘Rewarding excellence: The 2010 Victorian Museum Awards – Museum sector awards growing in diversity and public recognition’, Museums Australia Magazine, Canberra, Vol.19 (Issue 1), September 2010, pp.12.

Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 19 (1) – September 2010 13

Wild and contemporary – Melbourne Museum’s progressive redevelopment of its long-term displays

Australian natural history collections revitalised for new audiences

All images for this article: Museum Victoria.

Photographer: Dianna Snape.

Editorial introduction

S

ince the great eighteenth-century voyages of exploration of the Pacific, the animals, birds and plants of our continent not only augmented older collections of natural history housed in Europe. They challenged and helped ultimately to change the great explanatory systems of natural science: as to how the world evolved and the finely calibrated interconnections of all creatures within it.

Collections in Australia’s fledgling science museums, established in the century after colonial intervention in 1788, began to harvest the results of early settlers’ and scientists’ collecting in the ‘new world’ Europeans encountered through their gradual exploration of the dramatically challenging ‘fifth continent’.

The natural history collections of Australia’s museums contain the primary data-sets of scientific record of the continent’s condition, creatures, regions and life-systems since the eighteenth century. Meanwhile the geology and palaeontology collections reveal the older story of the earth’s prehistory.

They provide the basis of our research and understanding today as to how much, and in what particular respects, our country’s natural environment is undergoing rapid change. These collections are an irreplaceable and precious component of Australia’s cultural and scientific heritage – as a rich resource and legacy for future generations.

While Australian natural history and science museums evolved historically, they sought to join the

congregation of the world’s museums and play their part in representing the life systems and creatures of other countries, regions and climatic zones. Accordingly, collections of animals and birds grew – through the taxidermist’s craft – drawn from many parts of the globe, as museums sought to educate audiences in the world’s life sciences through their research and permanent displays.

Over time these displays suffered in audience appeal through their ageing and static condition, with object labels minimal or designed only for specialist interpretation, and many collection displays remaining unchanged for decades. In the gradual reorganisation and eventual wholesale revision of permanent collection galleries in recent decades, the museums themselves have tended to turn their objectives anxiously to creating more highly engineered displays, incorporating up-scaled text and information panels, and a visible emphasis on communication through new means and devices.

As natural history displays relied ever more heavily on employed exhibition designers and a rapidly developing range of new design technologies emerging commercially, attention was often diverted from the drawing power of unique collection objects in the ‘old’ collection typologies and taxonomies. There was a tendency to forget the compelling veracity and presence of the world’s creatures when imaginatively presented in their own right.

The rise of a generation of audiences highly attuned to ICT technologies and multi-media seemed often to present a dichotomy to museums: between the

14 Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 19 (1) – September 2010

Wild and contemporary – Melbourne Museum’s progressive redevelopment of its long-term displays

knowledge of specialists schooled in earlier record systems and research-based production of information, and the challenges of a mediatised learning interface in contemporary communications.

In fact this dichotomy is a false one, to the degree that it has implied a struggle between competing forces that are inimical to each other’s specialised knowledge and resources. Both are crucial contributors to the newly energised roles in public engagement and innovative learning that have emerged for the most progressive natural history and science museums today.

One of the most striking demonstrations of this transformation occurring in Australia’s natural history museums today – with considerable implications for our evolving museology – can be found in the Science and Life Gallery at the Melbourne Museum (centrepiece of Museum of Victoria’s several campuses).

The range of visual and information technologies employed in the multi-award-winning installation, Wild: Amazing animals in a changing world, provides a striking demonstration of the levels of sophistication achievable today in museum displays and public engagement, where the power of the object

is accorded a newly vivacious role, while being supported by some of the most innovative communication resources and technologies now available.

The following material (below) has been drawn from information and images generously provided by staff at Museum Victoria. [Ed./BM]

Wild: Amazing animals in a changing world This exhibition, is the latest addition to Melbourne Museum’s Science and Life Gallery and the largest display of backboned animals the museum has ever presented.

The Wild exhibition, launched in 2009, represents the second phase of the redevelopment of the Museum’s Science and Life Gallery. When complete, the gallery will incorporate four new long-term exhibitions presenting more than 3,000 objects from the Museum’s collections, many on display for the first time.

The installation of Wild encompasses a rich panorama of creatures, featuring more than 780 mammals, birds and reptiles from around the world: from Africa (the Okapi, African Wild dog, Asiatic Lion and Secretary Bird); from South America (toucans, the Jaguar, armadillos,

Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 19 (1) – September 2010 15

sloths and monkeys); from Eurasia, North America and the Arctic (the Great Horned Owl, Giant Panda, Arctic Fox and Polar Bear); and from Southern Asia (the Indian Rhinoceros, Asian Palm Civet, Sri Lankan Giant Squirrel and Luzon Bleeding-heart Pigeon).

The exhibition explores issues of climate change, stressed systems and habitats, and why biodiversity is under threat. In addition to showing the kinds of animals that are found in different parts of the world, the exhibition includes important narratives – accessible stories for diverse learning levels – of the efforts to conserve wildlife. It raises awareness of what all people can contribute to making a difference for the survival of animals and the life-systems that nourish their existence.

Recognition of technological and design innovation through awards Museum Victoria received the American Association of Museums’ Gold MUSE award for its Panoramic Navigator, an interactive viewfinder that allows visitors to explore and learn about biodiversity in the exhibition, Wild: Amazing animals in a changing world, at Melbourne Museum. The MUSE Awards are open to member institutions from across the world that use digital media to enhance the museum experience and engage new audiences; celebrating innovation, creativity and inclusivity. This is Museum Victoria’s fourth Gold MUSE Award and seventh in total.

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Wild and contemporary – Melbourne Museum’s progressive redevelopment of its long-term displays

The Panoramic Navigator – a developing feature of Museum Victoria displays How does this feature work? Visitors can rotate and turn the navigator to explore a panoramic view of the animals on display. By touching an image of an animal, visitors can discover rich layers of information about the creature presented, look at a 360° representation in the round, or view additional images.

Museum Victoria CEO and director, Dr Patrick Greene, has described the technology as follows: ‘The Panoramic Navigator takes visitors on a journey beyond the traditional museum display. It provides a sophisticated but simple and enjoyable system for accessing additional information on each and every one of the mounted specimens in the Wild exhibition.’

Tim Rolfe, Head of MV Studios, has enlarged on the more mobile and multiple learning streams that can be accelerated through new technologies the museum has employed in its re-developing displays, involving on-site and off-site learning: What is exciting about the new technology for an exhibition like Wild is that it replaces the need for labelling. Visitors can explore and engage with the hundreds of objects in Wild easily and in greater depth through text, images and video, which you can also download to your phone.

Tim Rolfe further explains the partnerships Museum Victoria has built in recent years with the commercial sector, in the Museum's increasingly strong recourse to technologically supported engagement of audiences: The Panoramic Navigator continues the tradition of Museum Victoria in collaborating with local Victorian companies – in this case Megafun Pty Ltd – on highly innovative multimedia devices for our exhibitions. Visitors marvel at seeing the dinosaur skeletons come to life in Dinosaur Walk, or watching the city grow before their eyes in The Melbourne Story, while others follow the journey of a raindrop in the Raincheck 3000 display.

Design values and sustainability recognised Museum Victoria has recently won an Australian Interior Design Award for the Installation Design of Wild: Amazing animals in a changing world; and an ECO-Buy award for environmentally sustainable approaches to purchasing and exhibition design.

Acknowledgments Many specialist staff, sections and program areas of Museum Victoria have contributed to the final realisation of Wild: Amazing animals in a changing world. Dr Robin Hirst, Director Collections, Research and Exhibitions, has explained the outcomes as follows: ‘Our extraordinary success in exhibition development can be attributed to our focus on audience, teamwork, excellent systems and processes, a commitment to research and scholarship, and creative collaborations both within the museum and with many talented people in other industries. It does not come overnight; it requires a whole-ofmuseum effort to gain the resources and apply them wisely.’ Museums Australia expresses appreciation for the generous assistance of various Museum of Victoria staff in providing a variety of materials, texts and images in preparation of this article. [Ed.] Citation for this article: ‘Wild and contemporary – Melbourne Museum’s progressive redevelopment of its long-term displays’, in Museums Australia Magazine, Canberra, Vol. 19 (Issue 1), September 2010, pp 13-16.

Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 19 (1) – September 2010 17

Seventh year of the successful joint-exhibitions series, Melbourne Winter Masterpieces

European Masters: Städel Museum, 19th-20th Century at the National Gallery of Victoria

T

he Melbourne Winter Masterpieces series began in 2004 at the National Gallery of Victoria with the presentation of The Impressionists: Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay. The Victorian Government-supported concept (in partnership with other state institutions, especially Museum Victoria) was continued in 2005 with Dutch Masters from the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; followed by Picasso in 2006, Guggenheim Collection: 1940s to Now in 2007, Art Deco 1910-1939 in 2008 and Salvador Dalî: Liquid Desire in 2009.

This year the highly successful parallel-exhibitions venture by several museums in one city, Melbourne Winter Masterpieces, presents European Masters: Städel Museum, 19th-20th Century at the NGV (19 June-10 October), and Tim Burton at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (24 June-10 October) – while the Melbourne Museum is presenting for

a longer period Titanic:The Artefact Exhibition (14 May-7 November 2010).

The following material on the National Gallery of Victoria feature exhibition, exclusive to Melbourne, has been compiled from information kindly supplied by the NGV and its staff [Ed.] Drawn from one of the world’s finest collections of the art of the previous two centuries, the exhibition European Masters: Städel Museum, 19th-20th Century brings together almost 100 works by 70 artists from one of Germany’s oldest and most respected museums, in Frankfurt.

The first section of European Masters (Germany: From The Nazarenes to Genre Painting) explores German cultural identity at the turn of the century.

The exhibition opens with the iconic painting, Goethe in the Roman Campagna, 1787, by Johann H.W.

above: Johann Heinrich Wilhelm TISCHBEIN (German 1751–1829), Goethe in the Roman countryside, 1787 (Goethe in der römischen Campagna), oil on canvas, 161.0 x 197.5 cm, Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main. Acquired in 1878 as a gift by Baroness Salomon von Rothschild.

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Seventh year of the successful joint-exhibitions series, Melbourne Winter Masterpieces

Tischbein. This is the most famous image of Goethe, the esteemed German writer and philosopher. An ennobling portrait, Goethe is set within an idealised classical landscape, rendered in a refined manner exemplifying Neo-Classicism, the dominant style in the art academies of the period. The exhibition then examines the emergence of the Nazarene movement – a group of German and Austrian Romantic artists established in 1809.

The influence of the Nazarenes can be traced in some strands of art developing in Australia in the 19th century, when German- and Austrian- born or trained artists had considerable influence on the development of landscape painting in the young colonies.

The exhibition takes a strong turn towards France in the section From Romanticism to Impressionism,

where a highlight is the Städel’s impressive collection of French Impressionist masterpieces from artists such as Monet, Renoir, Degas and Cézanne. These works can be seen in company with their great predecessors from French Romanticism and Realism – key figures such as Delacroix, Corot and Courbet. Further sections return to the strength of Germany’s contribution to European modern art – in Germany: Realism and the Aesthetic Alternative (including Max Liebermann and Max Klinger); and Beckmann and Frankfurt (featuring the highly influential Expressionist painter and teacher, Max Beckmann – who fled to the USA to avoid Nazi prosecution as a ‘degenerate’ artist).

Meanwhile other thematic sections devoted to Symbolism, to Modernity, and to Sculpture enable a more expansive view of the cultural diffusion of modernistic styles across national borders in Europe,

above: Ernst Ludwig KIRCHNER (German 1880–1938), Reclining woman in a white chemise, 1909 (Liegende Frau im weißen Hemd), oil on canvas, 95.0 x 121.0 cm, Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main. Acquired in 1950.

Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 19 (1) – September 2010 19

revealing the intense interaction and cross-influences between artists, often moving between Germany, France, Switzerland and the Nordic countries, linking the dispersed art centres of the modern period in a close and intensive ferment of ideas and development.

Dr Gerard Vaughan, NGV Director, has summarised the importance of this exhibition for his institution and for Melbourne as follows: European Masters presents a comprehensive overview of the Städel Museum’s holdings of painting and sculpture from the last two centuries of European art ...provid[ing] a superb survey of the key artistic movements of the time, including Realism, Impressionism and Post Impressionism, German Romanticism, Expressionism and Modernism, and French Symbolism. ...This provides an unprecedented opportunity to see a spectacular group of masterpieces spanning the dynamic and transformative years of the 19th and 20th centuries.

The Städel Museum today has grown from one of Germany’s oldest art museums, the Städelsches Kunstinstitut in Frankfurt. It was developed through the intents of the 1815 will of a Frankfurt merchant and banker, Johann Friedrich Städel: a generous bequest of an outstanding collection and accompanying financial resources for ‘the foundation of a special, autonomous art institute bearing [his] name to provide the best for this town and its citizens’. In keeping with the wishes of its founder, this art institute was to encompass not only a collection to which the public would have access, but also a facility for the education of each new generation of artists – the present-day Städelschule.

Since its foundation, the Städel Museum has expanded its holdings continually by pursuing an active acquisition policy. Altogether the collection presently comprises some 2,700 paintings, 600 sculptures and more than 100,000 drawings and prints.

With its rich holdings, the Städel Museum presents an overview of seven hundred years of European art history – beginning with the early fourteenth century and covering the Renaissance, the Baroque, Early Modern and contemporary art.

In addition to collecting and preserving art, the scholarly study of the artworks as well as the development of exhibitions within the context of those holdings form a chief focus of the museum’s work.

The high degree of activity in the areas of research, exhibitions and museum education as well as the outstanding quality of its collection preserves the Städel’s prominent place in the international museum landscape. As Germany’s oldest and most important civic foundation dedicated to culture, the Städel is moreover a prime example of the kind of broad-based civic patronage that contributes to the preservation and development of exceptional cultural institutions.

Citation for this article: [National Gallery of Victoria & MA Magazine (Ed.)] ‘European Masters: Städel Museum, 19th-20th Century at the National Gallery of Victoria – Seventh year of the successful joint-exhibitions series, Melbourne Winter Masterpieces’, Museums Australia Magazine, Canberra, Vol.19 (Issue 1), September 2010, pp.17-19.

above: Henri ROUSSEAU (French 1844–1910), The avenue in St. Cloud Park (1907–08) (Allée dans le parc de Saint-Cloud), oil on canvas, 46.2 x 37.6 cm, Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main. Acquired in 1926.

20 Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 19 (1) – September 2010

An innovative collaboration empowering Indigenous history and voices

Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route

Michael Pickering

F above: Dr Michael Pickering, Head of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Program, National Museum of Australia. right: Country around Well 28, on the Canning Stock Route. photo: Tim Acker, 2007.

irst surveyed in 1906, the Canning Stock Route is the longest stock route in the world. It runs almost 2000 kilometres, from Halls Creek to Wiluna in Western Australia. The development of this ultimately unsuccessful cattle route dramatically affected the lives of Aboriginal people.

The Yiwarra Kuju exhibition tells the story of the Canning Stock Route from the Aboriginal perspective: through collective oral tradition and personal narratives, through art and objects.

The Canning Stock Route is a place where Indigenous and non-Indigenous histories intersect. The exhibition enables and celebrates recovery of the Indigenous histories of the country traversed by the stock route. For many years the story of the stock route was represented as a white man’s story — this exhibition, and the collection that forms its heart, allows us to recognise that its history goes back much further, and is held in the hearts and minds of the Aboriginal people of the region.

Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route (July 2010– January 2011) features 127 paintings, cultural objects, documents and a remarkable new media work, which traces the Canning Stock Route with touch-screen access to historical and contemporary detail, paintings and cultural works, and a rich oral and visual record.

The works and objects are accompanied by expansive documentation – written, audio, photographic, and film. Particularly significant is the emphasis given to the Indigenous voice, to the words of the artists. The exhibition has emerged through a strategic research process founded on ethical consultation.

This short report provides background to the exhibition’s development as an innovative project for the National Museum of Australia. It reviews the project ‘from the inside out’, highlighting its gestation, the crucial partnerships linking the museum staff in Canberra with Indigenous agencies and communities in the far west of Australia. It discloses the concepts that guided the exhibition’s development over four years, and the values that have crucially shaped the ultimate form of the exhibition and accompanying documentation as presented to the public.

Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 19 (1) – September 2010 21

Subhead

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An innovative collaboration empowering Indigenous history and voices

BELOW: The Canning Stock Route collection laid out on the shores of Nyarna (Lake Stretch).

Photo: Tim Acker, 2007.

The pastoral industry and its stock routes Running 1800 kilometres through the north of Western Australia, the Canning Stock Route is one of a number of such stock routes developed across Australia as part of the expansion of the pastoral industry. Yiwarra Kuju can therefore be appreciated at a number of levels, beginning with its illumination of a far-reaching theme of Australian social and historical development.

A stock route was basically a defined route of government-owned (Crown) land along which cattle could be driven through adjacent pastoral properties.

These routes typically allowed for access to contingent waters and grasslands so that stock could be fed and watered progressively during a long, herded journey towards distant markets. It was therefore not unusual that the routes often encompassed stream corridors, lakes, ponds, and waterholes. Such corridors of Crown Land, officially 1-2 miles wide, thus allowed guided movement of stock through the freehold and leasehold lands of pastoral stations across huge tracts of country.

Many Aboriginal people found work as stockmen and support labour in the pastoral industry.

The history of the Canning Stock Route, therefore, is not just an important story of the development of the north of the state of Western Australia; it is a case-study of the broader events and issues that accompanied the development of stock routes across Australia historically. As such, it is a national story.

Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 19 (1) – September 2010 23

BELOW: Warlayirti artist Elizabeth Nyumi painting at Kilykily (Well 36).

Photo: Tim Acker, 2007.

The exhibition’s development and guiding ideas There are important narratives in this exhibition.

Stories of people, places, histories – both sacred and secular; stories of the clash of cultures, of survival and resilience. Yiwarra Kuju speaks of and through Aboriginal history. It presents personal experiences, recollections of events and beliefs that shaped the lives of individuals and of their societies. It reminds us that the artefact does not, in itself, make history; history, both sacred and secular, is made, experienced, and told by people. Indeed, the exhibition focuses on presenting the voices of real people telling their stories, their experiences, through their art and objects.

Yiwarra Kuju has excelled as an undertaking by the National Museum in numerous ways – many of which will be largely invisible to audiences. It has emerged through a strategic research process founded on principles of ethical consultation with Indigenous communities. The works and objects in the exhibition derive from a major collection developed over some years, accompanied by rich supporting material that vitally illuminates its contents: written, audio, photographic, and film records. Particularly significant are the emphases given to presenting Aboriginal voices – the words of the artists – in both the exhibition and the behind-the-scenes documentation of the collection; and in guiding the philosophies of the exhibition and future management of the associated collections.

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An innovative collaboration empowering Indigenous history and voices

far left: Helicopter Tjungurrayi points to the spot in his painting, Natawalu, that depicts the place where he was picked up by a helicopter and taken to Balgo as a child. photo: Tim Acker, 2007. left (top and bottom): Visitors examining interactive displays of the Canning Stock Route at the opening of Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route, National Museum of Australia, Canberra, 29 July 2010. Image upper right shows (in leather jacket) distinguished guest, Mervyn Street.

Critical partnerships linking the museum and communities The collaborations involved in this project incorporate a number of firsts, not necessarily evident to audiences but nonetheless integral to the exhibition that has resulted.

The exhibition is the cumulative, enriched result of an extensive collaboration between the National Museum of Australia, FORM, (a senior cultural organisation based in Perth) and its nine-partner art centres stretching all the way from the Pilbara to the Kimberley in northern Western Australia.

The art and objects were gathered together within the Canning Stock Route Project’s advance during a four-year program developed by FORM, which involved Aboriginal artists, traditional custodians and emerging Aboriginal curators and filmmakers from Western Australia. The relationship between the National Museum and FORM therefore represents a close museum-and-community collaboration, in which the research done by FORM has come together with the resources of the Museum to present a unique historical record and memorable exhibition experience.

The National Museum of Australia, on its side, consolidated the work evolving by acquiring the collection in its entirety. It meanwhile steered development internally of the cornerstone exhibition planned in partnership with FORM: to ensure presentation of a strong and illuminating experience to a wider public, guaranteeing a final result worthy of national recognition and enduring record.

This steady accumulation of values, through a project patiently taking some years to realise, has added a special richness to the Yiwarra Kuju exhibition’s integrity. It has accrued

increasing layers of significance – through the works themselves, their documentation, and the stories and associated histories of the artists and their communities gained along the way. The whole undertaking has been underpinned by the strong ethical principles applied by the FORM research team on its side: in the collection of the material and its acquisition for the Museum’s collection; and in ongoing development of strategies for appropriate management and further use of the collection in future.

Other firsts have been on the sponsorship side.

While many museums develop exhibitions under sponsorship from external agencies, the day-to-day relationship between sponsor and museum is usually somewhat independent. The relationship between FORM and the National Museum of Australia has been different in this case. It has forged a much closer collaboration, one in which the research done by the FORM team comes together with the museological resources of the National Museum to produce not only a significant collection but also associated exhibitions of great ongoing value.

In review, the collaborative enterprise engaged by this project provides a model for future museum practice and research in general. The manifold results will serve the Australian public, researchers, and the Aboriginal communities from which the works are sourced, for many years to come.

See further: http://www.nma.gov.au/exhibitions/yiwarra_kuju/

Dr Michael Pickering, an anthropologist, is Head of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Program & Repatriation Program, National Museum of Australia.

Citation: Michael Pickering, ‘Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route - An innovative collaboration empowering Indigenous history and voices’, Museums Australia Magazine, Canberra, Vol.19 (Issue 1), September 2010, pp.20-25.

Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 19 (1) – September 2010 25

Further articles by Michael Pickering on repatriation and ethical issues for museums, for reference:

Michael Pickering, ‘Introduction: We do things differently here’, Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route (Canberra: National Museum of Australia/NMA Press, 2010), pp.x-xiii.

‘Where are the Stories?’,The Public Historian, Vol. 32 (1), University of California Press, February 2010, pp.79-95.

‘Where to from here? Repatriation of Indigenous Human remains and ‘The Museum’, in Knell, S. K., MacLeod, S, and Watson, S. (eds), Museum Revolutions: How museums change and are changed (UK: Routledge, Oxon, 2007), pp. 250-259.

‘Policy and research issues affecting human remains in Australian museum collections’, in Lohman, J. and Goodnow, K. (eds), Human Remains and Museum Practice: Ethics, Research, Policy and Display (Paris: Unesco Publishing; and London: Museum of London, 2006), pp.42-47.

In press 2010-11

Michael Pickering, 'Dance through the minefield: The development of practical ethics for repatriation', in Marstine, J., Routledge Companion to Museum Ethics:Redefining Ethics for the Twenty-First Century Museums (UK: Routledge – forthcoming).

1. D.J.Griffin, ‘Previous possessions, new obligations: a commitment

by Australian museums’, Curator: The Museum Journal (Maryland: AltaMira, USA), vol.9, no.1 (1995), pp.45-62.

Editor's note Australian museums in general, and Museums Australia in particular, have pursued a world-leading policy and affirmative action program in relation to Australian Indigenous people since Museums Australia’s incorporation as a single national body for the sector (in 1994). The groundbreaking, founding policy, Previous Possessions, New Obligations (PPNO), was achieved through a process culturally co-chaired

by Dr Des Griffin (then Director of the Australian Museum) and Lori Richardson (a senior member of staff in the National Museums of Australia) in 1992– 1993. The consultative process through a serious of formal meetings, backed by on-the ground consultation at other times (and supported financially by the Commonwealth), linked senior museums people across Australia with a geographically broad gathering of Indigenous leaders and cultural representatives drawn from all States and Territories.

The resulting watershed document (PPNO) was presented to the full assembly of the national museums conference that occurred in Hobart, in November 1993 – the last time that the annual national conference for the museums sector occurred under the aegis of CAMA (the Council of Australian Museum Associations that formed Museums Australia). PPNO was therefore promulgated as a founding document and first ethical policy of the emergent body, Museums Australia. It is on the historical record as a still-benchmarking document by world standards, in guiding museums in their responsibilities towards Indigenous people. The development of the policy document was accompanied by a comprehensive national effort on the part of museums – collaborating consciously beyond their S/T jurisdictions – to undertake a provenancing program on collections held, focused first on ancestral remains (as a preparatory phase to similar efforts on secret-sacred material later). This project affirmatively prepared for repatriations wherever possible and appropriate (in community terms). This built on repatriation efforts that museums in Australia began to undertake for the first time in the 1980s, through a growing moral commitment to seek to repair the damage to Indigenous people and cultures

inflicted historically through colonisation.

For a history of the background and often challenging processes in developing the PPNO policy, the most comprehensive record can be found in an article published internationally by Dr Des Griffin, then director of the Australian Museum, who co-chaired (with Lori Richardson) the first consultative process of policy formation with Indigenous people and communities.[1] The second (revised) edition of Museums Australia’s Indigenous policy, Continuing Cultures: Ongoing Responsibilities (CCOR), directly inherited and built upon the founding PPNO document. It was adopted by MA’s Council in 1994, after a 2003 co-cultural consultation process on a draft review document. CCOR, available for download from the Museums Australia website, therefore sits firmly within a cumulative, affirmative action policy initiative by Australia’s museums since the early 1990s. It arises out of the consciousness-change and early repatriation efforts of the 1980s.

Museums Australia’s Indigenous policy today provides a strong ethical underpinning to the national association itself, preceding, as it did, the development of MA’s own more broadly ranging Ethics Policy for the museums sector. The Indigenous policy of Museums Australia has also been used as a referencedocument in some legal actions on repatriation claims internationally – for instance, action on behalf of the Tasmanian Aboriginal community in (ultimately successful) suit for repatriations from the Natural History Museum in London and the British Museum in recent years.

Finally, it should be stressed that the Indigenous policy of Museums Australia has sought to provide a broad base-position for all museums, while recognising and encouraging the fact that individual institutions have or may develop institution-specific policies – which encompass special histories, resources and policy positions within states and territories – highlighting the histories of those institutions and diverse progressive developments in their own right. [Ed. /Bernice Murphy] Museums Australia’s revised Indigenous policy, Continuing Cultures: Ongoing Responsibilities (CCOR), 2004, can be accessed from MA’s website, at museumsaustralia.org.au/site/whatwedo_policies.php

26 Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 19 (1) – September 2010

New from the past – Gapuwiyak Miyalkurruwurr Gong Djambatjmala: Women with Clever Hands

Indigenous art of today renewing early museum collections from Arnhem Land

Louise Hamby

A

small group of women with clever hands will be making a big impression when their exhibition, Gapuwiyak Miyalkurruwurr Gong Djambatjmala: Women with Clever Hands, opens in September 2010, at Wagga Wagga Art Gallery in regional New South Wales (3 Sept. – 31 Oct. 2010). This event has been in the making since 1995, when I first went to Gapuwiyak as a doctoral student to start a learning process about baskets and the women who made them. The PhD was complete in 2001, however I am still engaged in associations with these women – my teachers, my mentors and my friends.

Gapuwiyak, or Lake Evella, is a small inland community in northeast Arnhem Land, relatively unknown in the Aboriginal art world. Until recently it has not had an art centre to promote the work of the community’s artists. On 20 June 2009, things changed dramatically with the Gapuwiyak Culture and Art Centre (GCA) officially opened and launched with appropriate celebration speeches, ceremonial dancing and presentations. As a fledging in the art centre world, this art centre has many goals to achieve to be able to function at the level of its neighbours – Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Centre, and Elcho Island Arts. Both of these centres have supported Gapuwiyak artists in the past. As part of its own fledgling activities, GCA has projected its first exhibition further afield, presenting painting, fibre, sculpture and yidaki at Territory Craft in August 2010.

Women with Clever Hands looks back at the past, but also leaps into the future of fibre practice in the community. This exhibition has developed through long-term relationships with women producers, incorporating many connections with museum collections for cultural context. It is an exhibition of 130 fibre works that have been made by local Aboriginal women from Gapuwiyak during the past fifteen years. Wider audiences will be able to experience classic sedge grass baskets made recently that would sit comfortably beside companions from a different era in a museum storeroom. In the gallery at Wagga Wagga an emu and a kangaroo will stroll across the floor, ready to join the menagerie of fibre animals that are currently being produced – not only in Gapuwiyak but in other Arnhem Land communities. The exhibition provides a representative view of the range and types of work being produced: from baskets, bags and mats, to sculptural figures and items worn on the body.

The exhibition is ambitious in establishing a ‘Gapuwiyak approach’ to fibrework, while also examining the styles of individual artists. One striking feature of their work is the continuing use of materials from their own country. A small group of women comprise the exhibiting group, ranging in age from 23 to 81. An abiding concern with the inter-generational transmission of knowledge is an important issue for the older women, who are eager to attract the energies of younger ones to their crafts. This exhibition therefore has a particular cultural aim of encouraging younger Aboriginal women to become involved in fibre practice, as a means of both economic and cultural benefit.

above: Exhibition opening of Gapuwiyak Miyalkurruwurr Gong Djambatjmala: Women with Clever Hands at Wagga Wagga Art Gallery, NSW, 3 Sept. 2010.

Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 19 (1) – September 2010 27

top: Louise Hamby and Lucy Malirrimurruwuy Wanapuyngu, with pubic cover Lucy made for Women with Clever Hands. Gapuwiyak, October 2008. Photo: Lindy Allen. bottom: Louise Hamby and assistant curator for the exhibition, Lucy Malirrimurruwuy Wanapuyngu, reviewing installation of the Women with Clever Hands exhibition at Wagga Wagga Art Gallery, NSW, 3 Sept.

2010. above right: Exhibition opening at Wagga Wagga Art Gallery, NSW, 3 Sept. 2010.

1. ‘Thomson times’ is an expression that many people use to refer to the period when anthropologist Donald Thomson worked in Arnhem Land in the early twentieth century, in 19351937 and again in 1942-43.

2. From 2003-2006 I was the Postdoctoral Fellow (Industry) for an Australian Research Council Grant LP0347221 (2003-2006) Anthropological and Aboriginal Perspectives on the Donald Thomson Collection: material culture, collecting and identity, awarded to the Australian National University in collaboration with Museum Victoria. Lindy Allen was the Partner Investigator and made several trips with me to Gapuwiyak.

Professor Nicolas Peterson was the Chief Investigator for this project.

3. Lucy Malirrimurruwuy Wanapuyngu, interview with Louise Hamby, Gapuwiyak [formerly Oenpelli]. 22 October 2008.

The objective I wish to elaborate upon in the remainder of this article is to highlight the continuing practice of fibre work from mission days and ‘Donald Thomson times’.[1] During the time I have lived and worked in Gapuwiyak, there has always been a strong practice amongst older artists to make what I considered classic baskets. These were baskets made from twined pandanus, with rounded bottoms and hand-spun string handles. Sometimes I would be brought a twined sedge grass basket made by either the late Mary Djupuduwuy Guyula (1945-2005) or Nancy Walinyinawuy Guyula. Sedge grass or mewana baskets are strong and capable of being placed in water for long periods of time, usually holding nuts or yams that require toxin removal.

An increased interest in past practice, people and objects became more apparent during the time I was working with people in the community, when researching the Donald Thomson Collection in Museum Victoria.[2] The Collection from Arnhem Land was made from 1935–1937 and 1942–1943, and includes more than 2,500 photographs and 5,000 objects.

During the time of our contemporary project, we were able to bring some items of bodywear and many photographs from Museum Victoria back to the community far north in Arnhem Land. As a result of this research, and my own interest in historic items of material culture, some special items were produced.

After I made the decision, in October 2006, to curate a Gapuwiyak women’s fibre exhibition, the interest amongst the community grew further. Aims for the

project developed through meetings and individual discussions. The concern with past traditions and honouring the deceased women were coordinating values in developing the contemporary project. In this spirit my assistant curator for the exhibition, Lucy Malirrimurruwuy Wanapuyngu, a Wagilag woman, explained: ‘We want to teach some stuff – that you can make things that are new, from the past.’[3] Women are always wanting to encourage children and grandchildren to make fibre objects, and in this case Lucy is emphasising that they can make things from the past but they are now also new.

Some women started to make things specifically for the exhibition that were classic items. Nancy Walinyinawuy Guylua, a Djambarrpuyngu woman, is known for making superbly crafted baskets. These are sought-after objects for events such as the Telstra National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Award (NATSIAA) – for its final presentation of prizes. Nancy Walinyinawuy Guylua made twined sedge grass baskets with the same materials, processes and techniques that would have been employed by her grandmother.

The Donald Thomson Collection from Arnhem Land has provided great satisfaction to the Gapuwiyak community, through relocating and connecting people with records of their relatives in the photographs, and seeing what they were wearing and using many decades ago. Lucy and others have been delighted with the visual and actual references to their material culture this process has brought to light. A Thomson photograph, TPH2105, was the inspiration for a pubic

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New from the past – Gapuwiyak Miyalkurruwurr Gong Djambatjmala: Women with Clever Hands

cover made by Lucy, since a Djinba woman, Maumlaumly, was recorded wearing such a pubic cover.

Lucy had also seen pubic covers that we brought to Gapuwiyak. She explained to me about her thinking and making of the cover as follows: And this one here [pointing to her pubic cover]: I brought this one that I was talking about, that Donald Thomson from the past example, because I saw this morning in the office that photo, practising.

Yaka [not] real one, practising. Where he might come truth; we don’t know yet. I want to show you something. Like you know, Yolngu yaka balgurr dja, ga magudal dunga, magudal [not kurrajong, but mugudal] for Wagilag. I saw in the Donald Thomson, yo dunga practicing. Yo dhuwal. [Yes this one] That’s only my idea you know.[4] It was important to Lucy that the pubic cover be made from magudal, a yet unidentified bark fibre, and not the normal bark fibre which is kurrajong. She showed me the traditional way of rolling it up when not in use, wrapped with a piece of bark fibre.

Lucy fears that her work does not measure up to that of her ancestors – the authoritative cultural standard of a ‘true’ one. Her pubic cover is meanwhile beautifully crafted, and looks very much like those

in the Thomson Collection. This fine piece by Lucy Malirrimurruwuy Wanapuyngu, and others in the exhibition, Gapuwiyak Miyalkurruwurr Gong Djambatjmala: Women with Clever Hands, are part of the living connections to the past that the contemporary women hoped to achieve though this project. Such connections are part of the continuum of practice that continues to change and respond to the times in which they live.

below: Exhibition opening at Wagga Wagga Art Gallery, NSW 3 Sept. 2010.

Dr Louise Hamby is a Research Fellow in the Research School of Humanities and the Arts at the Australian National University in Canberra. She teaches a course, ‘Indigenous Collections and Exhibitions’, in the Liberal Arts graduate program, Museums and Collections. The focus of her current Australian Research Council grant project, ‘Contexts of Collections’, is the role Indigenous people from northeast Arnhem Land have played in the formation of collections.

See further: http://rsha.anu.edu.au/ Citation for this article: Louise Hamby, ‘New from the past – Gapuwiyak Miyalkurruwurr Gong Djambatjmala: Women with Clever Hands’, Museums Australia Magazine, Canberra, Vol.19 (Issue 1), September 2010, pp. 26-28.

4. Lucy Malirrimurruwuy Wanapuyngu, interview, op.cit.

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A lifeline of meaning: The potential of museum theatre in transforming visitor experience

Museum theatre Alana Valentine [1]

O above: Writer/Director Alana Valentine. Image: Vicki Gordon.

1. This paper has been derived from a keynote address to the ‘Not Just an Add-on Conference’, Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, 22 April 2010.

right: Actors Annie Byron and Peter Flett with director Alana Valentine on location at Elizabeth Bay House, preparing part of the work, Tales of Galileo, for presentation by the Sydney Observatory in 2009. Image: Sydney Observatory, Powerhouse Museum, Sydney.

ne of the high points of my museum theatremaking career occurred in Sydney last year.

The story involves a vivacious redhead, a martyred Italian genius with great legs, the disgraced mediaeval Catholic Church and Stephen Hawking. The vivacious redhead is Sydney Observatory Manager, Toner Stephenson, who, with the help of a National Science Week grant, commissioned me to write and direct three short playlets about Galileo Galilei, to be filmed and uploaded onto the Observatory website.

Toner Stephenson’s vision was to take the curatorial messages of Nick Lomb and the Observatory to any corner of the earth with an internet connection. The martyred Italian genius was dressed in crimson finery after several hours of Toner’s masterful rummaging through the ABC's costume hire department, and he boasted the seriously shapely calves of actor Peter Flett. The film locations were the luxuriant Vaucluse House gardens, the refined splendour of Elizabeth Bay House, and the balcony of the Sydney Observatory itself.

Results were eventually presented to adult visitors to the Observatory, and accessed to students using the website. We also performed the works for adults and children during the ABC Science Week open day in the ABC foyer in Ultimo, with the actors shouting above the din of 800 people milling about. It was an exhilarating and nerve-wracking undertaking.

The highlight for me came in the form of an endorsement of one playlet by visiting eminent English mathematical physicist, Sir Roger Penrose. On a visit to the Sydney Observatory, he was presented the play by two staff members – including the curator himself in doublet and hose – and pronounced himself ‘very impressed’ by the work. When your humble theatrical explanation of Newton’s laws of motion is endorsed by someone who has won the Albert Einstein medal, and jointly scored the Eddington Medal with Stephen Hawking from the Royal Astronomical Society: that’s the kind of thrill I’m looking for!

When I am asked to give a workshop on writing plays, I always begin with an exercise about what we playwrights call the premise. I ask participants first to define a premise. They often reply vaguely: ‘the theme’; or the ‘idea behind the whole thing’; or ‘the message, you know, whatever you want people to end up with’. My definition of the premise of a play is ‘the supposition which motivates the action’. An easier way to put it is: ‘What would happen if...?’ I then give people an exercise, asking them to think of the premise for a play, beginning with the words, ‘What would happen if...?’ Before they do that, I call up a few plays they might know. For example, King Lear: ‘What would happen if a king thought that it was possible for his daughters to put their love into words?’ Or my own play, Parramatta Girls: ‘What would happen if the terrors of childhood could never be erased?’.

English playwright Simon Stephens states that the

best way to come up with the premise for a play is to think about the worst thing that can happen to someone and work backwards. A writer who is aiming to write a great play tries to come up with a premise that is unsolvable or impossible; a premise that is timeless and unanswerable. The best premises are those that cannot be contained, that do not have neat solutions, that speak of humanity’s complexity and articulate opposing truths. Look carefully at the plays that endure for centuries and you will see at their heart a premise that distils the contradictions of being human – a proposition that may at first sight seem unlikely or incredible but which, when contemplated for a few moments, may just harbour a vision for our times.

What would happen if a piece of museum theatre was the centrepiece around which an exhibition was conceived? What if a work of museum theatre could distil the questions that a curatorial team then used objects and acquisitions to explore – or indeed, further complicate? What if the real power of theatre – not simply the pedagogic or the entertainment value – was employed in a museum context? What if the budget given to a museum theatre presentation was actually sufficient to create a work that doubled museum visitation and sustained revisitation? What if a couple of performers and a commissioned text could provide a lifeline of meaning to an otherwise confused or museum-fatigued visitor?

By ‘a lifeline of meaning’ I mean a way for visitors to construct a context or narrative for what they are taking in. It might be a new perception, a surprising insight, an unusual realisation, a particular slant, or a curious starting-point. I have a voracious curiosity for the past, but when visiting museums I don’t always know where to look, or at least how and why to keep looking. The exhibition design and labels often assist, but even they become tiresome if I can’t personally construct a through-line to meaning. Beyond my own general curiosity, I need a guide, a premise if you like, for my cumulation of knowledge.

There is a considerable body of museum theory around the active construction of meaning; but as a playwright, I have an interest in exploring what in theatre is called the subtext. As an audience watches a

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The potential of museum theatre in transforming visitor experience

character move through the journey of a play, people are not simply listening to what a character says; they are watching what the character does. A fundamental tenet of drama is that you can’t judge someone by what they say; you can judge them by what they do.

And what a character does can create suspense or intrigue, anticipation or dread.

This is why we say that the audience provides the jigsaw pieces that complete any great drama. Until an audience is present, silently or perhaps raucously observing the action, a play’s subtext isn’t accruing.

What I need from an exhibition is a subtext, a spur that makes me look at not four but forty objects, paintings, and primary-source materials. This is how I think a play, in the museum context, can provide a set of ideas about an audience’s quest for a lifeline of meaning.

When I completed my post-graduate degree in Museum Studies at the University of Sydney in 2000, one of the things I admired about the museums sector was its genuine engagement with the practical applications of museology. Numerous examples could be observed, in Sydney and elsewhere, of museum workers putting into practice the notion of contested versions of history and the truth. I was struck by how quickly the museums sector had put into practice the notion of equal but different versions of history; how willing curators were to represent not simply the ‘dominant’ but multiple points of view; how complex and diverse were the labels and exhibition guides in demonstrating the many ways in which history, especially social history, may be approached.

I also recall the extent of museum research that supported the efficacy of museum theatre – in terms of visitor engagement, retaining curatorial messages, visitor enjoyment and revisitation, educational benefit, interpretive diversity – and all this captured also as colour and movement in an annual report, or on a museum website.

However what I am advocating here is a repositioning of museum theatre’s potential from the sidelines – where it might offer diverting and colourful educational tools – to becoming something more central and fundamental to an exhibition’s planning and realisation.

To this end, I’d like to explore what theatre does, other than to educate and entertain. I’d like to scale that lofty and daunting precipice of examining what it is that the performing arts truly provide; what I think happens when I am sitting in a room with other people watching live actors on a stage. This situation provides an opportunity to reflect back, in a condensed and idealised form, a version of life that seems, perversely, more intense and understandable than when experienced in real time.

What stage drama offers is a condensed version of events that we can identify with and understand in ways that aren’t always possible in a lived situation.

The real power of theatre is its capacity to create empathy with a personality never understood before – and sometimes that better understood character is oneself.

Theatre allows us to hold simultaneously contradictory positions. It permits us to see a situation – often quite surprisingly, even confrontingly – from several

points of view. Our ability to grasp different viewpoints simultaneously draws us emotionally and empathetically into historical situations, as well as arousing awareness of their echoes in our own era.

Finally, theatre can surprise us by creating empathy for people whom we previously had no interest in. Theatre can take the world around us, presenting people we think we understand, and then disclose new layers of insight into their experience of being human.

I have had perceptions about the power of theatre iterated repeatedly in my work – especially with living communities who are the subjects of my plays. In January 2004, Company B at Belvoir Street produced my play Run Rabbit Run, a verbatim project about the struggle of the South Sydney Rugby League Football Club to be reinstated to the National Rugby League Competition. Researching and writing Run Rabbit Run was one of the most ambitious, draining and exhilarating works of my career as a dramatist. To make known the nature of this struggle – why it was about much more than sport, and goes to some deeper sense of Australian community values – caused me to ‘pull out all the stops’ as a dramatist and create a work that finally won the Queensland Premier’s Prize for Drama, and which is now on the HSC drama syllabus in NSW. So how can this experience be transferred to the museums and galleries sector? How can these skills be brought into play in museums, and why should museums try to emulate what the theatre itself does best? My affirmative answer to these questions is: first, because of the very diverse audiences that museums attract, and second, because of the contested versions of history in which museums traffic as a core responsibility.

Just as I believe that theatre allows us to reflect on ourselves in ways that can be illuminating and selfrevealing, I deeply believe that museum theatre can allow us to reflect and understand from differing, sometimes revolutionary perspectives, our past and our history – especially our Australian cultural history and its contemporary reality.

However this awareness requires me to return to the question of what museums really do. Yes, they preserve and they evoke. But what mysterious passion may be stirred at the heart of the museum-going experience? If theatre allows us to experience the complex events of our lives in ways that we may not otherwise access, don’t museums allow us to immerse ourselves in the past, to brush up against the values and humanity of the past, in an immediate and fresh manner? When we stand in front of a painting by one of the Impressionists, or hold the cane of a sea captain tipped with gold from the Ballarat gold fields, doesn’t the immediacy of the object, the exposure to the primary source of history itself, give us access to the past in a way that no other experience can evoke? The nineteenth-century French novelist, Balzac, poses such an encounter in the following way: ‘[H]ave you hovered over the illimitable abyss of the past as if a magician’s hand were holding you aloft?’[2] Do you not, as museum professionals, believe that looking at, touching, smelling, examining and contextualising the actual relics of the past reveal aspects

2 Honoré de Balzac, The Wild Ass’s Skin; transl. Herbert J Hunt (Harmondsworth, UK, Penguin Books, 1977).

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right: Actor Mary Rachel Brown in Radio Silence, commissioned by the Australian War Memorial for its presentation of the World War II ‘G for George’ bomber installation, Anzac Hall, in 2003.

Image: Australian War Memorial, Canberra. below right: Detail of Actors Gibson Nolte and Arabella Macpherson in Ratticus and Reidar, perfomed at Hyde Park Barracks, Sydney, in 2009. Image: Alana Valentine.

3 Andrew Sayers, quoted in Rosemary Sorensen, ‘New Director Dedicated to the Tricky Business of Being Human’, Sydney Morning Herald, 16 April 2010.

4 Eric Booth, ‘Arts orgs must reflect and learn’, Artery, Issue 12, Australia Council, Sydney, 2010, p.10.

that no pixillated screen or downloadable image can evoke? I know that the new Director of the National Museum of Australia, Andrew Sayers, affirms this immediacy, since he remarked during a Sydney Morning Herald interview earlier this year: ‘What I’ve felt in museums and galleries around the world is that in some of them you feel absolutely wanted and loved, as though the institution reaches out to you.’[3] Meanwhile in the case of contemporary art, or of migration or other museums focussing on the experience of the present, isn’t the actual paraphernalia of a life, a forest, or a living ecosystem the basis of your argument for direct experience and visitation?

Accordingly, couldn’t a work of theatre – in which people used such objects, spoke in the language of their times, displayed the attitudes and contradictions and problems of their lives – immeasurably enhance visitors’ immersion in the tangible past?

I know that these notions are familiar, since I recall from my museum studies degree the large extent of literature about the efficacy of involving communities with the work of museums. Many museums today are accomplishing aspects of what plays do through their own means in the theatre. If museums attract a community of interest to an institution by creating an exhibition that is about and for these visitors, you may redouble engagement with your stakeholders, and potentially take your aspirations and messages far beyond the bounds of the institution itself.

The Australian War Memorial, for example, commissioned a play from me in 2005, called Radio Silence – a fifteen-minute piece to be played in the Anzac Hall accompanying the unveiling of renovations to the ‘G for George’ Lancaster bomber installation. The exhibition itself involved wonderful primary material and exhibition objects – a German spitfire no less, as well as the Lancaster, and material from pilots such as their letters and uniforms; all wonderful resources. But almost nothing about women’s experience.

I located a former Lancaster pilot, a real Australian larrikin and an impeccable gentleman, who had

married a former WAAF from Britain. After meeting them, I created the premise for a play. A single female performer, speaking the part of a WAAF radio operator, is forced to maintain radio silence between the moment when her fiancé, a Lancaster pilot, takes off from Britain and later returns from his bombing mission over Germany. The monologue she whispers is a kind of prayer, a conversation with the Lancaster itself, about her fears, her hopes, her experience (and it was quite amazing to find out what a wild time was had by those WAAFs during the war). Then there was her relief when the bomber returns her fiancé to her safely from another treacherous mission. However for the emotional lifeline of meaning to resonate further, visitors have only to go to the panels on the walls of the space of display, to realise how many of these Australian Lancaster pilots did not make the safe return journey. The work has been playing now for nearly five years at the War Memorial, during every school holidays. Most recently, I’ve learned that the play is going to tour to schools in the ACT and NSW regions, taking the curatorial mission of the AWM far beyond the bounds of the institution.

Such an extension also occurred with my first piece of museum theatre, The Prospectors, commissioned by curator Paul Hundley in 2000 for the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney. This work was later picked up by a children’s theatre company, Monkey Baa, and toured across NSW. In the museum context, children and their teachers saw that play first at the ANMM, and afterwards were given a guided tour of the museum’s exhibition, specifically using moments in the play to elucidate interest in the exhibition objects. (‘Remember when Frank ran away from the Eureka stockade and hid the gun? This is a gun that was found under a barn in Ballarat. Who thinks it might be Frank’s gun?’) Teachers told us that the children frequently re-performed the play afterwards, both in the classroom and the playground. There’s nothing like a bit of fake blood to make a work stick in the mind of a ten-year old.

Addressing another museum, I worked last year with curator Brad Manera at the Hyde Park Barracks, on a play called Ratticus and Reidar – dealing with the remarkable role that rodents have played in

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The potential of museum theatre in transforming visitor experience

uncovering the history of that particular institution.

It is my opinion that a commissioned work of museum theatre benefits from being curator-led. Apart from the many practical reasons for getting a curator strongly ‘on side’, a work is going to be more nuanced and durable if someone who has spent years studying a subject contributes directly to the creative process of theatrical interpretation. One of the primary reasons I have loved working on the museum theatre projects that I have described has been the interaction with curators, most of whom are a pack of eccentric boffins with brains like overflowing filing cabinets, brimming with much more information, analysis and complex interpretation than can ever be demonstrated in the showcases or imparted in the labels or publications of the institutions for which they work. For their part, artists are often people who are equally obsessive, yet passionate about communicating their ideas, insights and paradoxes to a broader public.

What I am recommending, then, is really a fullblown proposition of letting the lunatics take over the asylums that you work for; of matchmaking a theatre-maker and a curator to produce something that will certainly be ephemeral, but also likely make a museum experience utterly memorable.

Who should write, direct or perform such works to ensure that they are far more than just ‘an add-on’?

My preference definitely favours utilising the professionals. Sometimes professional rates can seem a high initial outlay. However, just like investing in a highquality acquisition, the money is never wasted in the long term. If it is going to be more than an add-on, however, you will have to value this work as you would any other centrepiece commitment.

On some occasions a commissioned work might feasibly be performed by young people, community members, amateurs on staff or in companies – or even by museum guides. I state this because the experience of one of my colleagues who made a work of museum theatre for a particular institution was that a kind of unstated resentment arose: that these ‘professionals’ were being brought in to do what the un-paid guides took to be an encroachment upon their territory.

The reality of the culture of some institutions is that museum guides who run ‘education programs’ often themselves get to dress up in funny hats and perform amusing tasks with the school children who visit their institutions. It can be the case for these people, when a group of professional theatre-makers come into a museum, that the amateur, creative aspect of their work is superseded. This difficulty is never really overt, and I personally have always strategised to bring the museum guides and other staff ‘on side’ as much as possible in creating a work of museum theatre. However such a tension can become a very real consideration when planning to sustain a program for more than a few weeks in a museum.

Finally, and most sincerely, I urge potential museum commissioners of museum theatre works to be spiritedly prepared for the brick walls, rationalisations and resistance that you are inevitably going to encounter

internally. Plenty of people are going to protest that performance is not the core business of museums; that museum theatre can only ever be a small, decorative ‘add-on’ to exhibitions and other programs. However I urge commissioners not to let this work be cast as merely a minor event, or positioned just to divert children with dress-ups. In my heart, I love making work for children. I love making them laugh and making them learn. Yet I want to reach into those tiny little forming minds adroitly and make them think.

Don’t be deceived by the buffoonery and magic and humour of theatre. Ours is a serious business; the most serious business: the construction of meaning, the cladding of story, the drama of contradiction and conflict. As Eric Booth, an American expert on arts learning and creativity, remarked during a recent visit to Australia: [D]on’t let it get to the point of ‘change or die’ before you begin collaborating seriously across silo-ed institutions; before funders, arts organisations, politicians and audiences realise they must delve into deeper dialogue about expanding the welcome, the inclusivity, the relevance of the arts to more citizens. If you don’t like the discomfort of change, try irrelevance.[4] Theatre makers can be visionaries, revolutionaries and prophets in the museum context, and when I visit a cultural institution, that’s what I want for the price of admission.

Alana Valentine is a writer/creator of numerous works of museum theatre. In addition to the works cited in this article (The Prospectors for the ANMM, Ratticus and Reidar for Hyde Park Barracks, Radio Silence for the Australian War Memorial and Tales of Galileo for the Sydney Observatory) she has created The Witnesses for the Museum of Sydney, Moses Joseph for the Sydney Jewish Museum and The Mapmaker’s Brother for the Australian National Maritime Museum. A collection of these works is published as SHORT PLAYS: Syllabus Stories, and available from Currency Press at currency. com.au (as are all her stage plays). Alternatively, enquiries to the author may be made at alval@ozemail.com.au.

Citation for this article: Alana Valentine, ‘A lifeline of meaning: The potential of museum theatre in transforming visitor experience’, Museums Australia Magazine, Canberra, Vol.19 (Issue 1), September 2010 pp. 29-32

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MA’s National Network for Museum Theatre (IMTALAP)

All the world’s museums are a stage Patrick Watt

W above: Patrick Watt, Chair of IMTALAP right: The Redcoats (40th/2nd Somersetshire-Regiment of Foot) fire their muskets into the air daily at Sovereign Hill, Ballarat. Image: Soverein Hill Museums Association.

1. Patrick Watt, Motor Racing: It’s the pits! (National Sports Museum, Melbourne Cricket Ground, 2010).

2. Alana Valentine, ‘A lifeline of meaning: The potential of museum theatre in transforming visitor experience’, Museums Australia Magazine, Canberra, Vol.19 (Issue 1), September 2010 pp.29-32.

orld-famous racing pedal car driver, Jackie Freddo-Caldo, emphatically wipes the sweat from his brow in acknowledgement of the task at hand: recruiting from a museum audience a pit crew because his own got stuck in Wangaratta. ‘Ah, it doesn’t matter,’ he says. ‘You know Jack Brabham? His pit crew didn’t give him enough fuel, and when he run out, he had to get out and push his car over the finish-line. He was leading, but he come fourth!’[1] It’s a tale told by an idiot, full of sound...and furnished with curatorial anecdotes. We call it museum theatre. The idiot is Jackie, and he makes a lot of noise in the National Sports Museum at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. But what he also has is a big crowd, and he informs his audience about the car on display – the Repco Brabham BT 19 – and also about its designer/builder/driver, Jack Brabham, and some of his trials and tribulations.

International Museum Theatre Alliance Asia Pacific (IMTALAP, formerly known as IMTAP) is a thriving Network amongst the rustling hubbub of Museums Australia’s Networks and SIGs. Now a formal organisation in its own right, with sister organisations in America and Europe, IMTALAP is striving to equip museums’ program staff with the tools to develop innovative, engaging and meaningful interpretation ‘beyond the display case’.

Distinguished playwright, Alana Valentine, was this year’s keynote speaker at the Sydney IMTALAP forum at the Powerhouse Museum in April 2010. She had this to say: Plenty of people are going to protest that performance is not the core business of museums; that museum theatre can only ever be a small, decorative ‘add-on’....

[But]... Ours is a serious business; the most serious business: the construction of meaning, the cladding of story, the drama of contradiction and conflict.[2] Meanwhile, at Sovereign Hill, Ballarat, the Redcoats (40th/2nd Somersetshire-Regiment of Foot) fire their muskets into the air daily. It is a reminder of the power and presence this army exercised during the time of the Eureka Rebellion, and it contextualises the emergent nation that was born of resistance to British imperialism. It is also what the visitors came to see: authentic living history – sometimes sanitised, but always engaging – and if that’s what attracts audiences, then Bring on museum theatre!

In London, the Victoria and Albert Museum’s interpretive department has a resident company called ‘Little Lights Theatre’, and currently this troupe is presenting another season of Squeeze Me In – The Story of the Corset. Concerned that the exhibit of corsets and its associated panel text did not enable museum visitors to be any the wiser, the company set about demonstrating that there were many misunderstandings about this much maligned and yet admired apparel.

Gillian Brownson, Programme Manager – Theatre and Performance Director of Little Lights Theatre, says that when developing a script she asks curators to

be script consultants. ‘Our reason for producing this play was because the exhibition interpretation on the underwear display wasn’t geared towards sociological history, and I felt compelled to give another angle.’

To date – and the show is currently doing an extended season – 3,261 people have seen the show; 97% rated the show as excellent, while 99% agreed that it enhanced had their museum visit; 98.9% stated that their understanding of historical aspects of the exhibition was also enhanced. In terms of interpretation, this may be compared with 30% who agreed that the panel text on the display was good, and 12% who considered it to be satisfactory.

At Scienceworks Museum in Spotswood, Melbourne, Max Muck invites you into his world of treachery – a world of stormwater pollution. If we seriously consider our audiences, we would know that visitors are unlikely to come flocking to an exhibition on stormwater. However The Muck Bunker Stormwater Experience was designed to use reverse psychology: to trap visitors into being immersed in content and ultimately to be subtly infiltrated with understanding.

It also defined the role of the curator: the curator who writes theatrical dialogue with curatorial rigour for an actor to perform.

When the Muck Bunker Stormwater exhibition was being developed, extensive visitor research and focus-group analysis indicated an alarming misunderstanding of the state’s sewage and stormwater system. In fact 84% of adults interviewed (representing a higher-than-normal tertiary-educated sector) assumed that stormwater went into the sewer and was treated there. If we want people to change their habits in terms of pollution, we first need to make sure they understand the real workings of these utilities. It’s not really a party question like ‘What do you do for a living?’ – ‘Say, did you know that stormwater isn’t treated?’ If museums are charged with the task of re-educating, then they must first get their audience engaged. In this case, the use of theatre has proved to be a most effective means.

‘Jessie stared at a statue of a man in a long coat. She wondered who he was and why he had become a statue.

Suddenly the most amazing thing happened. The statue’s head (of Redmond Barry) moved, and he looked down at Jessie.’ These opening lines of My Library

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MA’s National Network for Museum Theatre (IMTALAP)

Adventure at the State Library of Victoria are from a story that draws young children into the world of books, objects and people from the past. As the character of Jessie comes alive (through performance), she leads the children on a journey of discovery that focuses on the people of early Victorian European settlement.

Redmond Barry reappears at the Russell Street Magistrates Court, as visitors re-enact the trial of Ned Kelly. Here the theatre – which is the real courtroom – is used for many varied courtroom dramas.

One of these is the case of a young Vietnamese boy who is on trial for culpable driving. In this performance, the students become the actors, intertwined with pre-recorded video vignettes that add pathos and poignancy to a story that is so ‘real’ that visitors almost feel they have just attended an actual court case.

Half a block up the street, in the Old Melbourne Gaol, an actor recites the Jerilderie letter written by Joe Byrne for Ned Kelly. It is another tale full of sound and fury and born of the struggle that was emerging from its Irish roots, now replanted in Victoria.

Meanwhile half an hour later, in Adelaide, Professor Flint is exploring dinosaurs through extraordinary musical adventures in Dancing with Diprotodons.

Professor Flint introduces to enthusiastic young audiences an array of giant native species that are, however, extinct. The South Australian Museum hosts this fascinating journey amongst the rocks and bones of this ancient land, and connects its audiences with issues as to how a changing climate and human behaviour impact upon the earth and ecosystems.

So audiences come and go, talking of... – well I don’t know! But what brings them back? Cog is a blue robot that lives at the Powerhouse Museum. You can visit his playground, see him online, or see him in the ‘tin’ on regular occasions within the museum. Here is a case where a museum uses museum theatre to build a relationship with its audiences and promote regular return visits, with the knowledge that Cog will offer new opportunities to his audience each time they come back.

In Armagh, Northern Ireland, I find myself reclining on a twisted wicker bed in a smoky round house right: Michael Mills as Professor Flint in palaeontology gallery at the South Australian Museum.

Image: Michael Mills.

built by the people of ancient Ulster. Ishla relates in the first person the story of raising a family, the struggle for existence, and the daily tasks that become the rituals of a life long-gone – but well researched by the staff at the Navan Centre. In a different accent, in a different country, I later hear almost the same story told by the eighteenth-century pioneers of San Juan Bautista in California. Amazed, I reflect on the performance with one of the American actors afterwards, only to discover that he’d worked closely with my sister-in-law’s brother in Nevada. The coincidence is too much for anyone to take in, so instead we sit and admire the mission church that Alfred Hitchcock used for his film Vertigo.

For some, museum theatre is still only a pleasant add-on, or it seems too new and challenging. What is new, however, is that there are people who have a lot to share in this significant dimension of museum interpretation. IMTALAP, with its fast growing interest and membership, is proving just this with its theatre makers and theatre presenters.

In October 2011, IMTALAP will host the IMTAL 7th Biennial Conference in Melbourne. The four days from the 16–20 October 2011 will be a time to explore big ideas, share innovations, and for Australian museums to show off. An accompanying travel guide with mini-programs offered in other states will ensure meaningful coordinated international visitation to the whole of this region. More information is available at www.imtalap.org.

Next time you pay for admission to a museum, ask where the theatre is. Hopefully it will be all around you!

Credits and Acknowledgements Gillian Brownson, Director, Little Lights Theatre, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK; Scienceworks, Spotswood, and Museum Victoria, Melbourne; Sovereign Hill, Ballarat; State Library of Victoria, Melbourne; National Trust of Australia (Victoria); South Australian Museum, Adelaide; Navan Centre & Fort, County Armagh, Northern Ireland, UK; Old Mission San Juan Bautista, San Juan Battista, California, USA.

Patrick Watt is Manager of Education & Public Programs at the National Sports Museum, Melbourne Cricket Ground, Victoria. He chairs the Museums Australia National Network, IMTALAP (International Museum Theatre Alliance–Asia Pacific).

Citation for this article: Patrick Watt, ‘All the world’s museums are a stage: MA’s National Network for Museum Theatre (IMTALAP)’, Museums Australia Magazine, Canberra, Vol.19 (Issue 1), September 2010 pp.33-34.

Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 19 (1) – September 2010 35

Co-location, convergence and networking: Some current issues for regional museums and galleries

Regional training and development initiatives Lee Scott

T above: Lee Scott, Manager Museums Australia National Office, Old Parliament House, Canberra. below: Albury LibraryMuseum at night.

1. Convergence: Albury City LibraryMuseum: Carina Clement http://lists.collectionsaustralia.net. au/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/can-talk

hursday morning on 3 June 2010 saw me sitting, with around 40 other expectant and interested museum representatives, in the excellent facilities of the Albury Entertainment Centre situated in Albury’s cultural precinct. We were being welcomed by Jacqui Hemsley, the Group Leader of Cultural Services for Albury City’s converged LibraryMuseum, to their first annual museums conference.

In an interview for Collections Australia Network (CAN) in April 2010, Carina Clement (Cultural Programs Team Leader of Albury City LibraryMuseum facility) suggested that one of the key challenges of implementing a converged cultural facility can be the development of the wider range of skills required by the staff.[1] Jacqui indicated that one of the motivations for suggesting that a museums conference be incorporated into Albury City LibraryMuseum Cultural Services’ annual program – and in fact one of the Cultural Services team’s central objectives for the conference – was the internal professional development opportunity opened up, and the need to respond to this affirmatively.

The inspiration for the conference, however, went beyond internal issues of staff professional development. Jacqui Hemsley believes strongly that the Albury LibraryMuseum has a leadership role to undertake in the region, to nurture and assist the smaller museums. Mindful of the current challenging economic environment, the theme of the conference, Thriving in the face of adversity: how regional museums and galleries can shine, was developed to deliver

practical, low-cost perspectives and solutions to a number of important issues that all regional museums and galleries encounter currently.

Accordingly, the initial expectation and interest of conference delegates from museums and galleries on both sides of the border was rewarded by an eclectic but sharply relevant program of speakers and workshops. Albury City LibraryMuseum Cultural Services team plans to upload conference papers and presentations to their website as a post-conference resource. It is worth keeping watch for them at http://www.alburycity.nsw.gov.au/www/html/101-librarymuseum.asp.

I later interviewed Jacqui Helmsley for her insights about the Cultural Services team’s opinions on the outcome of the conference. She provided the following useful debriefing comments: We have had some great feedback, which is wonderful and gives us confidence to do it again next year...

[W]e will probably call it a Forum rather than a Conference, as it was a lot more casual than a formal event and we would like to keep it that way – to ensure that it’s accessible. We will also spend more time in promoting the event and include our NZ brothers and sisters, since I think that we have these wonderful juxtaposed positions on so many museum activities – such as on indigenous protocols, collection diversity and standards generally.

We will maintain the low cost and subsidise the event ourselves. One thing that definitely came out of the recent Albury conference is that there are so many under-funded museums in regional Australia that need opportunities to meet, learn and discuss issues on a regular basis. By keeping this event affordable we can provide that leadership and directly meet widely

36 Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 19 (1) – September 2010

Co-location, convergence and networking: Some current issues for regional museums and galleries

registered needs.

It was an eclectic mix of speakers this June, which I liked – and that is a good aspect we will continue next year; in particular, concerning the areas of marketing, funding and promotion.

One other significant feedback comment was that we should incorporate more physical workshops, rather than rely on lectures or formal presentations alone, which we will certainly attend to.

I look forward to next year’s Albury City LibraryMuseum’s museum forum – and urge other colleagues to be attentive to future announcements about the next instalment of this event.

One of the acutely nagging issues facing regional and remote small museums is their accessibility (or usually, lack of this) to professional development (PD) opportunities from their widely dispersed regional locations. Albury City LibraryMuseum’s conference, Thriving in the face of adversity: how regional museums and galleries can shine, was an important step towards closing this gap.

Museum development programs based on the National Australian Standards for Museums and Galleries (National Standards), which promote sustainable museum practices across the country, are available in a number of states. These programs usually include workshops and on-site visits that can provide vital professional development, providing a basis for ongoing learning and enrichment through mutually supportive networks gained in the process. The National Standards document is currently under review. A more detailed report on the current programs based on the National Standards, Australiawide, and an analysis of the Standards Working Group’s review, will be targeted in future issues of Museums Australia Magazine.

Metropolitan-based organisations may include in their annual programs events held in regional areas.

Museums Australia (Victoria) is organising excellent workshops in a number of regional centres this year – including a Disaster Planning workshop (at Bairnsdale, on 8 September 2010), and a practical demonstration on Preserving Collections (at Wycheproof, on 6 October 2010). Full details on these MA (Victoria) training programs can be found at http:// www.mavic.asn.au. Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, this year’s Museums Australia (WA)

branch conference was held on 20-21 August 2010, in the regional centre of Kalgoorlie-Boulder.

Exciting recent developments, however, are arising from local bases, instead of being ‘fed out’ to regional areas from metropolitan nerve-centres. These include the small number of regional initiatives that focus on providing affordable, practical PD activities for small, predominantly volunteer-run, regional museums – to which Albury City LibraryMuseum’s program is an important addition. Museums Australia Lachlan Chapter’s Working Spaces workshops for museum volunteers – held in a monastery near Yass, NSW, drawing on expertise in Canberra’s national museums and reported on in a recent double-issue of Museums Australia Magazine (Vol.18, issues 3+4, published in July 2010) – is now in its fourth year of presentation annually. Working Spaces 4 will be held on 15–17 October 2010, and details of this year’s program can be found at http://www.lachlanmuseums.com.au/index. htm.

In the north of Australia, the Eumundi and District Historical Association is hosting the 2010 South East Queensland Small Museums Conference (to be held at Eumundi), also being realised across the weekend of 15–17 October this year. Meanwhile the SE Queensland Small Museums Conference has now become a regular and important event. Their theme for this year is The Future of Our Past. Details of the program are available on the Museums and Gallery Services Queensland website at www.magsq.com.au.

Museums Australia is keen to be informed of other projects that extend this picture of self-activated initiatives at the local level, and the extensive interactions that exist throughout regional and rural networks.

Lee Scott is Manager of the National Office of Museums Australia (located in Old Parliament House, Canberra). This position provides an opportunity to combine managerial work for the national association, previous academic training in archaeology and heritage, and years of volunteer experience with Australia’s museums and collections at a regional level. Working with architect John R Carr, Lee produced a series of Conservation Management Plans for University of New England heritage buildings and precincts; she also served as voluntary Secretary and Curator at the award-winning McCrossin’s Mill Museum, Uralla, near Armidale, over more than 20 years. Further contact: manager@ museumsaustralia.org.au Citation for this article: Lee Scott, ‘Co-location, convergence and networking: Some current issues for regional museums and galleries’ , Museums Australia Magazine, Vol.19 (Issue 1), September 2010, Canberra, pp.35-36.

left: Pictured at the MA(WA) 2010 conference Welcome Reception in the historic Kalgoorlie Town Hall: Jane King, Executive Officer MA(WA), Anne Brake, Manager, Golden Pipeline, National Trust of Australia (WA), and Laura Miles, Executive Director of MA(Victoria).

Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 19 (1) – September 2010 37

Museum internships: Making them a successful venture for all parties

Museum internships Sharon Peoples

W above: Dr Sharon Peoples, Research School of Humanities, Australian National University, Canberra. right: Detail of student Karoline Kilian at Te Papa, Tongarewa/ Museum of New Zealand, re-rolling a large tapa cloth. Image: Melanie Camp.

1a [ICOM/ International Council of Museums], ICOM Curricula Guidelines for Museum Professional Development (Washington: Smithsonian Center for Education and Museum Studies, 2000).

1b ICOM International Committee for the Training of Personnel: ICTOP Curricula Guidelines for Professional Development (Paris: International Council of Museums; Revised Edition, February 2008). (http:// ictop.alfahosting.org/images/pdf/ ictop%20curricula%20guidelines. revdocument081.pdf ).

2 Sherene Suchy, ‘Grooming New Millennium Museum Directors’, Museum International, UNESCO, Paris (Vol.52, No.2) (2000, pp.59-64).

3 Kirsten Holmes, ‘Volunteering in the UK Museums Sector: The Case of Aspiring Museum Professionals’ (International Association of Arts and Cultural Management, 2005)., (http://neumann.hec.ca/aimac2005/ PDF_Text/Holmes_Kirsten.pdf )

hat happens when you get an email from a student wanting to do an internship at your institution? It is pretty easy to ignore them.

Having a student shadowing you can be hard work.

As a university internship co-ordinator, my role is to assist students in fulfilling career aspirations, getting them to think of the big picture, and of where they want to be in five years’ time. Many students are often second – or even third – career students, and have a lot to offer.

Universities keep track of former students, and we use them to assist us for such purposes as internship placements. This situation again reflects the nature of the internship process: arrangements and outcomes often rely on personal networking and ‘favours’ to find suitable placements and workplace supervisors.

Trying to find the right match between a student and a desired project at a host institution is one of the key aims; yet often just ‘getting a foot in the door’ seems to overwhelm this process. Once on its way, however, an internship placement can be very rewarding to observe.

There is a regrettable lack of consistency in internship programs and nomenclature throughout higher educational institutions in Australia. However, this reflects the diversity of the museums sector as well as of higher educational institutions themselves. As those in the industry know, the term ‘museum’ can cover museums of science, history, art, keeping places, archaeological and ethnographical sites, national parks and botanic gardens, as well as tangible and intangible heritage sites. A museum internship course can sit anywhere from within schools of history, heritage and society; environmental science and management; or art curatorial programs. Courses where internships are available can range from VET courses in TAFEs to post-graduate degrees, with the majority of museum studies courses as post-graduate certificates or degrees.

What are the benefits to the student, the host museum institution, and the educational institution?

With the growth in popularity of internships as an educational tool, it is important to understand the relationship between the museums sector, the education providers, and of course the student. What are internships, and why have they persisted?

The internship student The skills needed to work in the museums sector have become more sophisticated.[1] Those aspiring to work in museums and galleries are expected to be highly qualified. In the past, career paths may have taken a straightforward route: from on-the-job training or a basic degree, to further in-house training and professional development, with some mentoring as people rose up through the ranks to senior positions.

For the route to the top, Sherene Suchy has noted that the path to museum director shifted dramatically in the 1990s. Historically, directors advanced from the pool of senior curators. Now the job is far

more complex, involving executive-level leadership, museum business management, developed political acumen, skilled work with board members and expression of high-energy passion for the institution.[2] For those just at the entry-point to the sector, and embarking on an internship within a museum studies course, the museums sector can appear to be overwhelmingly daunting until they get started.

Internships, however, provide a great taste of what could be the threshold of a rewarding career.

Universities recognise that students undertaking internships receive highly specialised on-the-job training that they cannot provide. One of the key aims of the internship is to integrate classroom theory with occupational field learning. The host museum environment provides an invaluable living framework to comprehend the context of academic studies.

Students develop an understanding of the workplace norms, subtleties of vocabulary, expectations, museum hierarchies and management at work. By providing insights into the diversity of specialised occupations within the sector, museum internships help graduates to become job-ready and assist in making informed career choices. This situation also helps to understand the educational background required for the career path ahead, and modifies unreal or inappropriate expectations of employment.

Internships tend to be viewed as being at the nexus of formal education and practice. Writing essays about repatriation of indigenous objects is nothing like assisting in an actual hand-over process. Spending days opening containers of tapa cloth, making new storage sleeves, unrolling the bark cloths, relabelling and repackaging them for long-term storage, yields many great insights into the interconnectedness of a museum’s systems. Those that already work in museums know these activities are more than one-sentence descriptions on a page. However, for an internship student, the steep learning curve fills reflective journals across copiously annotated pages. One student noted in an ‘Aha’ moment in her journal: ‘[N]othing you see in public display ever happens by accident.’

Students’ experiences and observations through their internships provide invaluable case-studies for class assignments. This is apparent when students ideally have ‘ownership’ of projects, and the work supervisor

38 Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 19 (1) – September 2010

Museum internships: Making them a successful venture for all parties

has shown confidence that a student can carry out complex and challenging tasks. While students do not become acknowledged experts, they nevertheless develop a tacit knowledge of how the profession works.

Through this process, students also become confident in using the institution as a resource – not only for student work, but for other prospects down the track for both primary research and further academic work. More specifically for the individual, this experience establishes the groundwork for developing a professional or vocational identity. Enriching a CV with sector-specific experience is vital – the host institution can be a source for later professional references and mentors that are directly related to the industry.

can enhance their own management and training skills.

Building relationships with educational institutions can also be a positive avenue for museums to potentially influence curriculum content or coursework.

With closer training ties fostered, museum staff can be invited to be guest speakers as part of a museum stud-

The host museum For the host museum, it cannot be denied that internship students are not only an inexpensive source of labour resources, often to assist with back-logs, but also a means for coming to know potential recruits for temporary, short-term contracts or part- and full-time positions. Knowing who is ‘out there’, and nurturing them as potential employees, can facilitate future employment opportunities that enrich the museums sector. While the little white buds in students’ ears wired to an iPod or iPhone can be annoying to supervisors, it often means that many students come with technological and social media skills that the sector must utilise today.

These skills can stimulate new ideas and viewpoints, help to complete projects and instigate others. Students, if encouraged, can provide up-to-date theory, current and diverse ethnic opinion (and vice versa), bringing fresh perspectives to the profession as a whole.

On the other hand, some work supervisors consider it a chore to organise projects that are required to keep students active and engaged over the weeks they are on location in an institution. And if they do so, it is often out of a sense of duty more than pleasure. Such reluctance can also, quite rightly, relate to questions of best use of resources, including the supervisor’s time – and this needs to be clearly recognised by students and acknowledged by their educational institutions alike.

In many cases this is offset by students making significant contributions to a museum’s work tasks.

One useful tactic to overcome this dilemma is to ask for a CV and an Expression of Interest at the outset.

Many host institutions do this as a matter of course.

Some institutions interview, or at least have an informal chat, to potential students. As noted, matching the right people and the right activities is important.

Working with a disgruntled student (or museum staff ) for 20 days is no joy.

A secondary benefit to a host institution in taking on internship students, meanwhile, is the opportunity for staff themselves to learn valuable mentoring skills.

This by-product can be a method of providing informal professional development for staff. Through strengthening skills that are transferable from working with students to other colleagues in their institution, staff

ies course. Universities are keen to develop and present relevant and current topics that enhance employment prospects for their students, since they build their own academic reputations on the success of their graduates.

Skills shortages can meanwhile be attended to through such relationships. Sectoral links are sought-after by universities, since they are acknowledged as a source of highly-valued expertise. Once well established, collaborative projects of many other kinds can evolve from these institutional relationships.

Higher educational institutions Universities need to play their part throughout the internship process. Very few higher educational institutions simply send their students off to host museums without thinking of them again till they hand in their assignments. Universities now utilise new technologies, flexible learning opportunities and reflective practices – to ensure that students are constantly engaging with the hands-on nature of workplace learning, as well as the more theoretical constructs proposed by academics and the empirical evidence of researchers.

New technologies also allow for new assessment methods that are more immediate – thereby keeping a lecturer in recurrent contact with students. The reflective ‘journal’ is one assessment tool regularly used in internship courses by tertiary institutions. The hard-copy journal of the past often played the role of an historical document. Today, an online journal – which requires students to use a reflective mode of writing – further assists in ensuring the active educative role of an internship, with both the student and lecturer in constant communication. This can then be a dynamic ‘work-in-progress’ tool and has an immediacy for students who are stimulated by ideas, new experiences and situations.

left: Intern Katy Penman, at Bula Bula Arts Centre, Ramingining, Arnhem Land. Image: Philippa Penman.

Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 19 (1) – September 2010 39

4 Maurice Davies, ‘The Tomorrow People: Entry to the Museum Workforce’, (UK: Museums Association, 2007). (http:// www.museumsassociation. org/asset_arena/text/al/ thetomorrowpeople_final.pdf ) 5 Marian Hoy, ‘What Next? How to Support Professional Development in the Information Sector’, Information and Records Management Annual (in press, 2010).

“Wow!” That was my word for the day. However it was definitely an understatement to how I felt about the whole ... experience. The start of the morning was a bit frantic, as there were many other interns, volunteers and contractors which needed to sign in for the day.

[Excerpt from a student journal] Students discussing their experiences while still fresh in their minds, and eliciting direct responses from a lecturer, enhances the learning experience immeasurably. For the above-quoted student, on her first day it was the newness of the large institution, museum management meetings, exhibition planning and then discussion of her project that were all important. Within the journal, she highlights how much she has learned, and how she has learned.

Meanwhile, host institutional supervisors may themselves become interested in further study, and forging professional networks can facilitate this process.

Increasingly, less money is spent on academic training and on forming the next generation of professionals.

Fewer than half of the heritage organisations in the UK now have their own training budget.[3]; instead, many heritage institutions now ‘rely on their staff to organise their own training and development’.[4] In such a situation, incoming students from a variety of educational institutions, through their own interaction with staff, can be a source of useful current information, stimulating staff to think about further higher education opportunities and training. Marian Hoy, in her study on professional development in the Australian information and heritage sectors, has found that the cycle for early-career employees considering further professional learning has shortened. She notes that, after as little as six months, ‘most participants were ready to continue learning beyond that required for current responsibilities’.[5] This may indicate that the policy objective of life-long learning has increasingly filtered through, and is accepted. It may also reflect that self-directed training has become the norm, with some staff not waiting for institutions to implement training to advance their careers.

So, back to that initial approach-email. One of the first questions most potential host institutions ask is about insurance. The second question is usually: How long and how many days per week will the prospective student be working? I cannot answer for any other higher educational institution here, but there are a few more things to consider.

Guidelines for shaping positive internships, which can benefit all parties and contribute to grooming the next generation of museum professionals, should include the following elements: • Organising an induction or familiarisation with the institution: building layout, research facilities, museum hierarchy, etc.

• Stating clear expectations through a work proposal • Arranging a discrete project for which the student can develop a sense of ownership; one that allows engagement with some theoretical ideas and one that has a realistic time-frame

• Managing to make a space for students to work each time they are there • Involving the student in the day-to-day activities of the institution – such as meetings, visiting the storage facilities, etc. – which ensure variety and a broader knowledge of the institution • Knowing what the student is being assessed on – a journal, report, essay, or other measures • Establishing clear supervisory roles – both museum host and educational host • Making time for regular contact between the student and their work supervisor – there should also be some contact between the host supervisor and the educational institution supervisor • Finding out what the student’s skills are, and utilising these in ways that benefit the institution for the short time they are present.

When internships don’t work out, it tends to be because of personality conflicts. Even the most well-designed internship programs cannot guarantee against personality clashes. Hopefully, there are some mechanisms in place that can ease any difficult situation that might arise. Constant contact between a student and their university supervisor, through an online journal that encourages frank and open discussion, can head off tensions before they may erupt into an unfortunate public display.

These can be delicate situations, and emails are best avoided. I have found that a phone call, or arranging an appointment to talk with the work supervisor, can work well. Some large institutions have staff appointed to oversee internships – providing a useful first point of contact in such situations.

While a closer investigation of internships as an educative tool is on the agenda of many higher educational institutions, there is no doubt that more work needs to be done in this area. Higher educational institutions are expecting a post-graduate experience from museums that may not see formal education as their main responsibility. However, I believe that what museums can do best in their educative role is to enable provision of informal learning in a rich and ‘real’ context. They do this uniquely well, and especially through their education and public programs sections. The internship students are meanwhile learning experientially. I believe this positive orientation of museums themselves to in-situ learning is among the many reasons why internships continue in the museums sector – there is such a strong alignment between both learning and teaching modes and objectives.

Hopefully, you will answer that approach email next time with enthusiasm, and might end up working with a future leader of the museums sector.

Dr Sharon Peoples is Internship Co-ordinator, within the Liberal Arts Program, Research School of Humanities, at the Australian National University, Canberra http://rsh.anu. edu.au/graduate/liberal_arts/intern/index.php Citation for this article: Sharon Peoples, ‘Museum internships: Making them a successful venture for all parties’, Museums Australia Magazine, Canberra, Vol. 19 (Issue 1), September 2010, pp.37-39.

40 Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 19 (1) – September 2010

Australian museums and China since 1975: An exhibitions history encompassing a transformation in capabilities

Australia’s cultural interactions with China over more than three decades

Bernice Murphy

Introduction

T

he present article brings to a conclusion a suite of articles that have focused on China, marking also the forthcoming premier event for the museums sector internationally, the ‘ICOM 2010’ General Conference and Assembly to be realised in Shanghai in early November 2010 – a gathering that brings together all specialist committees and bodies of the International Council of Museums (ICOM) in a selected city once every three years.

In the previous issue of Museums Australia Magazine, an article arguing for Australian museums’ needed enrichment of their engagement with Asia was contributed by Dr Caroline Turner, [1] founding director of the early Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art projects, accomplished through Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, since 1993 – of which the sixth edition closed in Brisbane in April this year. A further article in the same issue, by the present author, reported on the highly successful Gallery Management training program coordinated by Museums Australia and richly resourced by our leading galleries, for a delegation of senior Chinese museum colleagues and cultural heritage representatives that visited Australia in June 2009.[2] An additional article reviewed the opening of the Ningbo Museum, near Shanghai, in December 2008 – reviewing its strikingly new inflection of Chinese architectural tradition (neo-nativism), and comparing this with Chinese heritage architecture at the nearby Baoguo temple complex dating from the Tang and Song dynasties; the article also surveyed some of the new tendencies in Chinese museology evident in the Ningbo Museum project.[3] The article below sketches an historical context and narrative of Australia’s relations with China involving the museums sector over several decades – since the depth of the relationship, involving all types of our museums and sustained public interest, has been immeasurably important in Australia’s cultural relations within the region, and indeed the wider world.

Accordingly, the sustained foundations of Australia’s engagement with China over more than three decades directly shaped a favourable museums-sector response to the Chinese request in 2008 (through the Ministry of Culture in Beijing) to develop a Gallery Management training program of in-situ seminars and site visits to leading Australian institutions – as realised in 2009.

Australian museums and colleagues were outstandingly generous in contributing to a program that honoured the depth of a long engagement and steadily deepening relationship with China culturally.

The present essay therefore steps back in time to review how our museums have both nurtured and themselves been transformed through this relationship since the 1970s. It undertakes a small journey in retrieval and rebuilding of our collective memory of museum developments nationally. The essay seeks to heighten understanding that the challenges of presenting major exhibitions in Australia, and the revolution that has been accomplished in facilities, capacities and skills-development for these purposes since the 1970s, was highlighted and dramatically accelerated by Australia’s opportunity to present the first great Chinese Exhibition of archaeological antiquities to a broad public in Melbourne and Sydney (and later Adelaide) in 1977. That watershed exhibition in Australia (following on the heels of the Modern Masters exhibition in 1975) paved the way for increasingly varied and imaginative exhibitions to develop in subsequent years. It marked a threshold of crucial transition for the museums sector, whereby largescale exhibitions of rare cultural material (at first from abroad, later including Australian material raised to a new level of presentation) would provide the critical drivers for museum development: for new buildings, amenities and facilities improvement; the acquisition of new skills, interpretive capacities and types of public programs; and the steady commitment to exhibition and events planning, ensuring an engagement of broader audiences.

The process of exhibitions development linking Australia and China gradually involved a great range of institutions, individuals, scholars, curators and agencies from the 1980s onwards, eventually incorporating projects involving contemporary art and artists from both countries, and including Australian Indigenous art. Meanwhile more ‘classic’ exhibitions of each country’s cultural heritage have been shuttling back and forth over more than three decades.

The depth of Australia’s continuing cultural engagement with China may be characterised by a forthcoming event of reprise. This will occur with the scheduled return and reconceived presentation later this year of a selection of the celebrated terra cotta Entombed Warriors, first shown in Australia in 1982. A new exhibition of the famed figures from Xi’an, highlighting the cultural milieu, commemorative sculpture and quest for immortality of ‘The First Emperor’, will open at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in December 2010[4] – where the Gallery’s director, Edmund Capon, wrote the catalogue that heralded the earlier version of this striking material of Xi’an heritage presented at his institution almost three decades ago. [5]

above: Bernice Murphy, National Director, Museums Australia, National Office, Old Parliament House, Canberra.

1. Caroline Turner, ‘Asian collaborations: Networks, ‘soft power’ and the challenge of the contemporary’, Museums Australia Magazine, Canberra, Vol.18 (Issues 3&4), June 2010, pp.14-19.

2. Bernice Murphy, ‘China-Australia Art Gallery Management Program 2009: A report on Australia’s ongoing interactions with China’, Museums Australia Magazine, Canberra, Vol.18 (Issues 3&4), June 2010, pp. 21-28.

3. Bernice Murphy, ‘Ningbo Museum: A new architectural style and an evolving museology in China’, Museums Australia Magazine, Canberra, Vol.18 (Issues 3&4), June 2010, pp. 42-47.

4. The First Emperor: China’s Entombed Warriors is scheduled to open at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in December 2010 and remain on view until 13 March 2011.

5. Edmund Capon (and Art Gallery of New South Wales and International Cultural Corporation of Australia), Qin Shihuang: terracotta warriors and horses (Sydney: International Cultural Corporation of Australia,

Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 19 (1) – September 2010 41

right: Catalogue cover of The Australian Landscape, 1802-1975, curated by Daniel Thomas (Art Gallery of New South Wales) for the Australia Council. Exhibition toured to Beijing and Nanjing, 1975, under the first Australia-China Cultural Agreement.

Australian recognition of China in 1972

6. A Joint Communiqué establishing diplomatic relations between Australia and the People’s Republic of China was signed in Paris in December 1972.

Of all countries with which Australia has been dealing in international cultural relations since the early 1970s, especially through projects backed by government cultural initiatives and diplomatic exchanges, China has occupied a singular position in Australian museums-sector consciousness throughout this whole period. Accordingly, sustained professional contacts and exhibition exchanges between the Australian museums sector and China over more than three decades have steadily nurtured understanding of Chinese culture and a positive desire to maintain such interchange. This engagement has also been underpinned by the broader dynamics of cultural connection that link both our countries with other neighbouring nation-states within the Asia-Pacific region.

The intensive network of varied cultural

relationships between Australia and China today can be traced to Australia’s decisive recognition of the People’s Republic of China by the Whitlam government in 1972. Recognition of China was symbolically one of the first actions of Australia’s 21st Prime Minister, and within weeks of his assumption of office (at the beginning of December), Gough Whitlam had moved to establish diplomatic relations with China and have a Cultural Agreement signed between the two countries.[6] It was then possible for exhibition exchanges between Australia and China to be conceived for the first time. Australia was keen to send as well as to receive. Nevertheless the proposed content for any exhibition to visit China in the 1970s was a carefully negotiated process, observing certain content boundaries and diplomatic protocols. This invariably precluded sending any works of modernism or abstract art from outside China in the earliest years.

42 Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 19 (1) – September 2010

Australian museums and China since 1975: An exhibitions history encompassing a transformation in capabilities

The Chinese Exhibition (1977)

Exchange exhibitions begin in 1975 Under the terms of the Cultural Agreement with China of 1972, Australia prepared and sent an exhibition in 1975 of eighty-five works (mostly paintings, with some drawings and photographs) – all selected to illuminate Australian art through the theme of landscape painting. The Australian Landscape, 18021975, was selected by Daniel Thomas, then head of Australian Art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, who travelled to China to accompany the exhibition’s showing for two weeks each in Beijing and Nanjing.

Highlighting China’s gradual opening towards the world in the 1970s, this Australian exhibition, together with an exhibition of landscape paintings from Canada presented earlier in 1975, ‘marked the first public display in China, within [recent] memory, of art from the western world’.[7] In the following year (1976) the Australia Council was in close consultation with the state galleries in Melbourne and Sydney, following the national impact of Modern Masters: Manet to Matisse (from the Museum of Modern Art, New York) shown in those venues in 1975 – the first ‘blockbuster’ exhibition in Australia, in fact.

In 1976, however, discussion was advancing about planning for a major exhibition of a very different kind, then under government-to-government negotiation: a large archaeological exhibition to be loaned from China, similar to an impressive assembly of items that had already gained huge crowds during earlier visits to Europe and North America in 1973–1975.

The Chinese Exhibition: a selection of recent archaeological finds of The People’s Republic of China (promoted simply as The Chinese Exhibition when it arrived in January 1977) was composed largely of archaeological finds and rare antiquities, much of its contents three-dimensional and in diverse media – from ancient Palaeolothic tools in stone and bone to high-quality court artefacts in bronze, ceramic, lacquer ware, wood and jade from the dynastic periods of Chinese history. The Chinese Exhibition was significant at the time in the scale, character and outstanding ‘national cultural heritage’ focus of its contents for the lending country.

Having pursued an independent destiny politically throughout most of the twentieth century, in many respects rupturing continuity with its own past culturally, China was turning outwards to the world again. It was now ready to project its vast heritage and antiquity of continuous cultural traditions as a direct vehicle of renewed international engagement with the modern world.[8] A version of the exhibition offered to Australia had gained intense international attention some years earlier, beginning a tour of selected capitals in the West in 1973–1974. There was great excitement when it was learned that Australia would receive an exhibition of comparable quality (and similar contents) from China, as had already fascinated crowds in the Petit Palais in Paris and the Royal Academy in London (where the present author visited the exhibition with a travelling party of students).

Interest was spiked also by the inclusion for Australia of the celebrated ‘jade suit’, a royal funerary body-suit, some 2,000 years old, from a Han dynasty tomb excavated only a decade earlier, in 1968. Composed of 2,160 reassembled plates of jade linked by gold wire, this astonishing mortuary ‘shroud’ of Princess Tou Wan had been a pivotal focus of attention at the venues where it had been shown previously. It was to be generously lent again by China – this time to the smallest nation to which it had been permitted an outing on international tour.

far left: Catalogue cover of Modern Masters: Manet to Matisse, 1975, curated and edited

by Wlliam S Lieberman, Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Exhibition organised through the International Council of the Museum of Modern Art. Cover design features a painting by Henri Matisse, The Young Sailor, 1906.

Collection Mr and Mrs Jacqes Gelman, Mexico City. above: Catalogue of The Chinese Exhibition (1977), with detail of three-coloured T’ang pottery figurine of a female courtier; ceramic, 42 cm, 8thC AD, on cover.

7. Bernice Murphy, ‘Australian art abroad’, Art and Australia, Vol.13 (4), Sydney, April-June 1976, p. 331; a review of three cultural exchange exhibitions of Australian art toured in Europe and South America in 1974-5, through the Visual Arts Board, Australia Council, and the Department of Foreign Affairs, Canberra.

8. It is noteworthy concerning the mood of change gathering in China at this time that the pivotal Third Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, held in 1978, not only mandated a crucial new phase of economic reforms. The changes of 1978 also signalled a reorientation in the sphere of cultural relations.

As part of a decision by the Central Committee of the CPC in 1978 ‘to emancipate people’s minds’, the expansion of museums became part of governmental planning to renovate cultural development. This led to a new phase of rapid expansion of museums after 1978, with the number of museums in Beijing alone being more than quadrupled by the end of the twentieth century. (Author notes on developments reported in paper by Zhang Wenbin (President, Chinese Society of Museums) to International Directors Forum, Beijing, 16 Sept.2006.)

Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 19 (1) – September 2010 43

above: Title page of The Chinese Exhibition catalogue, 1977. top right: Catalogue cover of Peasant Paintings from Hu County, Shensi Province, China, an exhibiiton that toured five Australian venues in 1977. This Australian Gallery Directors Council-presented exhibition of early 1970s peasant paintings from Husien (lent for Australian tour by the Arts Council of Great Britain), presented a very different experience of Chinese contemporary culture in 1977, alongside the national impact of The Chinese Exhibition of archaeological antiquities. bottom right: Wang Yung-yi and Yang Chih-hsien, commune members, Hu county, The New Look of Our Piggery, gouache, 1973 (copyright & image: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1976). Painting included in Australian Gallery Directors Council-presented exhibition, Peasant Paintings from Hu County, Shensi Province, China, 1977. This exhibition, presenting a contemporay view of Chinese culture and society, toured Australia in the same year as The Chinese Exhibition (of archaeological antiquities), which had a huge impact in Australia, creating great public interest in China.

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Australian museums and China since 1975: An exhibitions history encompassing a transformation in capabilities

The impact of blockbuster exhibitions on the Australian museums sector There were special challenges presented in Australia by the advent of blockbuster exhibitions from abroad. Exhibitions of rare cultural material, with items of hugely expensive value, posed logistical and organisational tasks beyond the capacity levels, infrastructural provision or staff specialisation then prevailing in the state museums (under separate public service administrations that guarded their independent authority over local institutions). Meanwhile there were as yet no major national museums in Canberra at the time that could have been charged to provide leadership. The National Gallery of Australia was not opened until 1982; the National Museum of Australia was deferred much longer, opening finally to mark Federation’s centenary in 2001.

An indication of the challenges presented by The Chinese Exhibition, and the Commonwealth government leadership required to address the operations of the state galleries at the time – constrained under their local public service board regulations – is revealed by the direct agency of the Australia Council in the exhibition’s negotiation, its final physical assembly and handover in China, and the methods of transportation used.

The rapidly growing Australian Council for the Arts (created in the Holt era for the performing arts) was undergoing major changes in 1973-74 under the chairmanship of H.C. (Nugget) Coombes and executive director, Dr Jean Battersby. The ACA was now a dynamic and encompassing arts body under the Whitlam government, assuming the functions of the former Commonwealth Literary Fund (CLF) and Commonwealth Arts Advisory Board (CAAB). Meanwhile new, artform-specific boards with separate chairs, directors and staff (for Visual Arts, for Craft, for Aboriginal Arts, and for Film and Television) were created under the re-geared Commonwealth arts body, defining an audacious period of increased cultural support in Australia.

Having himself assumed the portfolio of Minister for the Arts, the Prime Minister at the same time steered transition of the ACA to become a new statutory body, the Australia Council, to sharpen Australia’s cultural profile internationally as well as providing greater resources to assist artists and cultural development across the country.

The Australia Council’s Visual Arts Board became engaged directly in the tasks of advancing an expansive cultural vision mandated by the new government – while needing to address in consequence the capacity gaps in large-scale exhibition organisation that then existed across the museums sector itself in Australia. Daniel Thomas, today one of the most longserving and distinguished art museum colleagues nationally, reflected recently on an earlier era of

professional capacity, with some telling vignettes encapsulating the paradigm changes that have occurred in his lifetime. Reconsidering the state of art museum work as a profession in the late 1950s, when he first returned as a young graduate from Oxford, brimming with the excitement of great art museums and collections experienced on vacations in Europe, it was a very limited situation in career prospects when he joined the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1958. At that time, ‘The only other AGNSW staff, the director Hal Missingham and deputy director Tony Tuckson, were both artists outside their day jobs...

There were no art historians in Sydney till the Power Department started up ten years later’. [9] Speaking further of this period (the early 1960s) in a recently published interview, the limited place and low momentum of state gallery exhibitions was characterised as follows: The only current idea about what a curator was, was care and development of collections. Exhibitionmaking was a very occasional activity for collection curators. Most temporary exhibitions came through Government cultural agencies from overseas.[10] An Australian Gallery Directors Conference (of state gallery directors) had existed since 1948 – renamed in 1973 the Australian Gallery Directors Council (AGDC), after it had grown to admit some involvement of regional gallery directors. However the annual Conference meetings of state directors in the 1950s and 1960s had gained only slender Commonwealth resources in the first decades of its existence. Despite best efforts of its directors, it had achieved some increase in funds available from the Commonwealth for exhibitions of Australian art sent abroad, but a limited advocacy impact for issues of common standards, insurance provisions, staff development and training within the premier state institutions, to improve their collaborative endeavour within the country.

The state galleries in Sydney and Melbourne were meanwhile poised to leap ahead of their peers in building improvements and facilities provision in the late 1960s. The relocation of the National Gallery of Victoria to its dramatic new St Kilda Road building in 1968, and planning for rebuilding and opening of the fine Captain Cook bicentennial extensions to the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1972, both signalled a new era for those two state galleries.

Nevertheless professional cooperation at a national level still remained limited by both the administrative strictures of state public service boards and the power of governing trustees – who traditionally exercised unchallenged control over professional matters, especially through their treasured control of collection acquisitions in art galleries (without the director even having a vote on purchases in some institutions[11]).

Against this background, Commonwealth leadership and initiatives of direct support to state galleries

top right: Jade Suit of Princess Tou Wan being packed at the Museum of Chinese History, Beijing, December 1976. Seated at rear: Leon Paroissien, Director of the Visual Arts Board (Australia Council), and (C, on his left), curator Jen Chang-tai, heading the Work Party on the Chinese side.

An ABC camera-man is shooting film for a 1977 ABC documentary on China, directed by Brian Adams. middle right: Crates leaving Museum of Chinese History, Beijing, Dec. 1976, for Beijing airport and transport to Australia, with the China-Australia working party accompanying on two RAAF Hercules aircraft (Beijing-DarwinMelbourne). bottom right: Documentary conclusion of packing and consignment of The Chinese Exhibition for its journey to Australia (Museum of Chinese History, Beijing, Dec.1976).

Leon Paroissien (seated L), Director of the Visual Arts Board (Australia Council), is Australia’s representative. Curator Jen Changtai (seated R), is representing China’s Bureau for the Administration of Cultural Relics.

Jen’s associate curator (standing third from R), Tung Te-yi, was also about to make the journey to Australia with the exhibition consignment. Dr Jocelyn Chey, of the Australian Embassy, Beijing, stands centre (rear) at this fomal handover.

9. ‘Daniel Thomas: Empathy and Understanding’ [Steven Miller in conversation with Daniel Thomas AM], Artlink, Adelaide,Vol. 26, no.4, [2009?] – accessed electronically May 2010.

10. Daniel Thomas, ibid.

11. Hal Missingham, They Kill You in the End (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1973); Ch.2, ‘Trustees’, pp.24-44. Hal Missingham was Director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales for twenty-six years (1945-1971).

12. Australian Art Exhibitions Corporation Limited: 1977 Annual Report (Melbourne: Australian Art Exhibiitons Corporation Ltd., 1977), p.5.

Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 19 (1) – September 2010 45

through the burgeoning Australia Council had an indirect but crucial effect not widely remembered today: of increasing the professional authority, responsibility, and credibility of state gallery directors. This began their rise to the standing on professional matters that they enjoy today.

The Visual Arts Board further assisted professionalism at state levels by intervening directly with provision of new opportunities for staff development through Commonwealth assistance: the VAB assisted with travel grants for individuals, international skills exchanges, and an increase in curatorial and exhibition development experience for art museum staff regionally. This was also extended through measures such as funding of the first national conference on conservation needs, in Perth (for non-art, history and art museums alike); and commissioning of state-employed staff to be released to act as curators and couriers on projects involving Australian museum holdings touring to other countries.

There was special attention by the Australia Council to new targets of Australian governmental policy interest in the field of diplomatic relations with other countries, and a focus was inevitably directed to cultural exchanges with the People’s Republic of China.

The logistical challenges of staging The Chinese Exhibition in Australia The Chinese Exhibition was co-supervised by Australia Council and Chinese museum representation in its final assembly in Beijing. The exhibition’s contents were initially packed in form-moulding hand-crafted boxes with slip-clasps (each box silk-covered and flock-padded); these were then consolidated into ten separate large crates weighing a total of a little over two tonnes. Seals were re-set and broken on the cases after each packing session (including lunch-breaks) as the work progressed, reflecting the precious cargo and formality of operations entailed.

The total consignment was eventually sealed for the last time and ‘officially received...on behalf of the Australian Government by Mr Leon Paroissien, Director of the Visual Arts Board, Australia Council’ in December 1976. It was then accompanied to (and later from) Australia not on commercial airlines, but on two Hercules four-engine military transport aircraft crewed by the Royal Australian Air Force.[12] Meanwhile it had become evident to the Australia Council in the previous year, noting the logistical and coordination challenges posed by Modern Masters: Manet to Matisse from New York in 1975, that some new management structures were needed to enable Australia’s state galleries to work on an international scale of exhibition organisation recurrently.

Many structural and developmental issues were

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Australian museums and China since 1975: An exhibitions history encompassing a transformation in capabilities

posed before our major institutions could have the capacities to maintain a continuing momentum of long-range planning and coordination across separate state gallery venues, realising a sequence of large-scale projects now actively sought for Australia from different parts of the world.

The Australian Art Exhibitions Corporation formed, 1976 Many lessons had been learned through Modern Masters: Manet to Matisse in 1975, when the state galleries in Sydney and Melbourne had experienced acute strains in handling both the exhibition itself, and its unusual management requirements, and the unprecedented crowds that thronged through their doors. Planning for The Chinese Exhibition in 1976 therefore occasioned the formation of a new, government-instigated, non-profit exhibition management company – Australian Art Exhibitions Corporation Limited. Headed by the Chairman of the National Gallery of Victoria, Andrew Grimwade, and including his Deputy-Chair, Baillieu Myer, this body was incorporated in September 1976.

A new managerial entity of this kind was deemed necessary to bring together the public and private sector resources needed to steer management of exhibitions of outstanding quality as a continuing strand of our national cultural life. The Australian Art Exhibitions Corporation (and two succeeding corporations evolved after and replacing it) formed an antecedent structure to Arts Exhibitions Australia today, which arguably addresses different needs for exhibitions shared by the museums sector, in a now very different context that has evolved since the founding years of the 1970s.

Development of Commonwealth government indemnity, 1975–1976 A further example of the far-reaching nature and repositioning of temporary exhibitions in the programming of art museums in the 1970s may be highlighted by the development of an Australian Government Indemnity Scheme for major exhibitions from abroad (following a limited precedent from the UK, confined to national institutions).[13] Australian government underwriting of rare cultural material, overcoming preclusive insurance premiums necessary otherwise, was inaugurated with the Whitlam Government’s indemnification,[14] steered by the Australia Council’s Visual Arts Board, of the artworks loaned internationally through the Museum of Modern Art, New York, to present Modern Masters: Manet to Matisse in Sydney and Melbourne in 1975.

That exhibition’s quality and success in Australia had occasioned a short-notice programming at MoMA itself before dispersal of loans internationally.

The Commonwealth’s new Indemnity Scheme commitment, as extended under Cultural Agreement

negotiations with China in 1976, was expanded to cover The Chinese Exhibition’s estimated value at the thenunsurpassed level of $189 million Australian dollars.

This upgraded the Australian government’s underwriting to more than three times the value of Modern Masters: Manet to Matisse a year earlier, which had an estimated value of $70 million US dollars in 1975.

Rise of major commercial sponsorship for exhibitions In addition to Government indemnity covering The Chinese Exhibition’s contents, commercial sponsorship for the exhibition also reached an unprecedented level, and again attracted a single company (as Alcoa had been the major sponsor for Modern Masters).

Mobil Oil Australia guaranteed the Chinese exhibition’s organisational costs against loss, in exchange for being positioned as sole and ‘naming sponsor’ of this event, which was then a relatively new phenomenon.

These arrangements linked both China and Australia, and government with non-government support, in ways that established a new trajectory of resource development for major international exhibitions brought to Australia in subsequent decades.

above: Cover of AAEC corporation’s first Annual Report, 1977.

New financing, merchandising, and projection of major exhibitions as public ‘events’ There were some other statistical benchmarks in the financial outcomes of The Chinese Exhibition that pointed to new directions to be consolidated

by Australian museums in the 1980s. For the first time a substantial profit was achieved – $516,271 – with partition of the surplus funds shared between the Australian Art Exhibitions Corporation (70% or $361,390) and the participating galleries (30% or $154,881). The Corporation’s surplus was then carried forward ‘to provide the working capital for future block-buster exhibitions in Australia’.[15] For the first time also, the commercial development and merchandising of specially-sourced products thematically tailored to an exhibition’s character was escalated beyond the provisions of ‘gallery bookshops’ as previously conceived. Sales of goods through a specially installed Merchandise Shop in the vicinity of the Chinese Exhibition achieved an unprecedented revenue level for an exhibition’s tour ($783,070) – almost equal to the income achieved through ticket sales and admission fees ($796,402).

Appropriate skills in marketing, public relations, event management and exhibition merchandising had to be contracted initially from the commercial sector. No dedicated positions covering these functions existed within the staffing establishment of state galleries in the mid-1970s. However such capabilities

13. There is much slippage in memory of events of the 1970s and 1980s, highlighting the need for research and a more accurate historical record to be formed by the museums sector itself. An example is provided by the crucial development of government indemnity provision for major exhibitions, which was established in 1975.

14. The first, ad hoc indemnification arrangements by the Commonwealth (begun for Modern Masters: Manet to Matisse in 1975) were later regularised in the form of Art Indemnity Australia, established in 1979. According to government statistics in 2010: ‘Since 1979, 102 exhibitions with a total value of over $14 billion have been indemnified under the scheme.’ However Art Indemnity Australia itself is scheduled to be phased out from 1 July 2010, to be replaced by the Australian Government International Exhibitions Insurance program. See http://www.arts.gov.au/collections/ art_indemnity_australia – accessed 30 May 2010.

15. This and other quotes and statistical information supplied here are derived from the Australian Art Exhibitions Corporation Limited: 1977 Annual Report, op.cit., pp.3–7.

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right: Opening Ceremony for The Chinese Exhibition, opened by Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, Murdoch Court, National Gallery of Victoria, 18 January 1977. Guests welcomed by NGV Chairman, Andrew Grimwade CBE (also Chairman of the new Australian Art Exhibtions Corporation Ltd, created for the exhibition’s commercial management and associated entrepreneurial activities). The banners carry the chop mark used widely in publicity and branding of the event in Australia; the characters simply mean ‘Chinese Exhibition’.

Photo: from the Corporation’s first Annual Report, 1977, p.2.

16. Andrew Grimwade, ‘Chairman’s Report’, Australian Art Exhibitions Corporation Limited: 1977 Annual Report, op.cit., p.7.

17. The breakdown of visitors and itinerary of the exhibition in 1977 was as follows: National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (18 Jan—6 March), 242,475 visitors; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (24 March—8 May), 227,163 visitors; [and by special extension] Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide (8 June—6 July), 125,287 visitors.

18. Andrew Grimwade, ‘Chairman’s Report’, Australian Art Exhibitions Corporation Limited, op.cit., p.3.

19. Survey of Visitors to The Chinese Exhibition in Sydney 1977 (Sydney: Australia Council [Research Program], July 1977. Typescript publication.

were soon needed within museums on an ongoing basis, to augment traditional strengths in curatorial work, research and collections development. New staff positions and specialised departments were required to accomplish a more complex interconnection of skills and capabilities, lifting museums to a higher threshold of continuous public performance and audience involvement.

Temporary exhibitions begin to redefine museums The importance of The Chinese Exhibition in Australian cultural experience broadly, and the impact on the Australian art museums sector in particular (notably through its showing in the state galleries in Melbourne and Sydney, and by generous late-stage extension of the tour, Adelaide), cannot be overestimated. Andrew Grimwade, presiding as hosting chairman of trustees at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, when the exhibition was opened by Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser (18 January 1977), later recorded in the introduction to a review report on the whole project: ‘Without question the Chinese Exhibition is the most distinguished exhibition ever to visit Australia. Public response has been far in excess of any previous Australian experience.’[16] A total of almost 595,000 visitors[17] had attended the Chinese Exhibition before it concluded. Moreover: ‘Each gallery achieved record attendances for any exhibition yet seen in Australia.’[18] This marked an historical watershed – of an unprecedented percentage of the Australian population having viewed a presentation of foreign cultural heritage from a single country. One of the early marketing surveys of visitors to exhibitions – examining demographic backgrounds, income and educational levels, and interests in further exhibitions – was conducted around The Chinese Exhibition. It was published through the Australia Council’s Research Program, in July 1977, and disclosed new horizons for audience development. For example, 17 per cent of Sydney residents attending the Chinese Exhibition in Sydney had never visited their state gallery previously.[19]

cross-section of Australians, of all ages, had proved ready to be challenged and excited by substantial presentations of cultural heritage from different parts of the world.

A new age of large-scale exhibitions was opening internationally in the early 1970s – and by good fortune of timing, spurred by the imaginative vision of a culturally ambitious government under Gough Whitlam, whose commitments were subsequently maintained by the government of Malcolm Fraser, Australia was spurred to take its place as a direct agent and beneficiary in a dynamic age of vitally intensifying cultural exchange. For the first time in Australia’s history, the ‘tyranny of distance’ and time-lag that had seemed to keep Australian cultural life inexorably divorced from the richness of amenities on offer in some of the world’s great cities could be overcome.

Australian state galleries, in particular, were within a short period learning how to innovate and even lead in new cultural developments, not simply remain perennial followers of precedent and expertise concentrated overseas. As jet-travel carried Australians out into the world, cultural riches from museums and collections abroad, in turn, could now be brought before Australian audiences at home. In international cultural exchanges, Australia was enabled to become a partner and first-hand cultural participant in a transforming world globally.

A new civic space of recurrent engagement between museums and audiences is gained

Exhibitions drove museum development: new buildings, facilities and expanded staffing followed

The Australian public’s broad and keen response to both Modern Masters and The Chinese Exhibition (transiting from modern art to archaeology with equal enthusiasm) had demonstrated that our audiences were ready to move out from ‘cultural cringe’ containment and repudiate stereotypes of philistine indifference to cultural heritage offered through museums and galleries. A wide

Reprising some of the changing conditions of recent decades provides a barometer of how extensively cultural institutions have been transformed in Australia. Historical review discloses the levers that drove the museums sector’s expansion in the late-twentieth century.

The sea-change transformation in capabilities and capacities within major institutions that was first

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aroused in the 1970s – pointing towards the highly skilled, multi-purpose, civil society organisations they are today – can be traced steadily through the exponential effects of large-scale touring exhibitions in Australia over more than three decades, beginning in 1975. Building developments were driven by the need for upgraded facilities (climate controlled environments, new exhibition galleries and public amenities) – as required to organise and present exhibitions of outstanding and rare quality, capable of drawing a greatly expanded public to our major institutions.

The clear demonstration of public impact achieved by large-scale exhibitions of high-quality material vaulted over earlier sectoral arguments for development presented to state governments for many years.

Evidence of public appetite for expanded cultural experience drove building- and capacity-development cases home to governments, where professional advocacy had often failed to gain adequate attention previously.[20] Such lessons still have validity today.

above: Publicity card for The China Project (Gallery of Modern Art/GOMA, Brisbane, 28 March–June 2009). The project comprised three individual exhibitions reflecting the Queensland Art Gallery’s long-term engagement with contemporary Chinese art. (a) Three Decades: The Contemporary Chinese Collection; (b) Zhang Xiaogang: Shadows in the Soul, presenting one of the major figures of the Chinese avant-garde in a solo show; (c) William Yang: Life Lines – presenting Australian artist William Yang, with works reflecting on his Chinese heritage and his experiences in Australia.

The cumulative impact of change Museums now encompass a great variety of public facilities, from restaurants and multi-merchandise shops to high-quality temporary exhibitions spaces, lounges and interpretation areas, which were only emergent concepts in the 1970s. Our major museums and galleries are now intricately geared institutions, producing a diverse range of services, changing events and programs throughout the year. They are reflexive organisms geared to an interactive public, providing a wide variety of leisure and learning experiences for all ages.

These changes have radically transformed the image of museums as being anchored in their long-term displays of permanent collections, on which they relied in the past. Major museums and galleries in our capital cities today (and their most successful smaller and regional counterparts) have worked actively to overcome social barriers that restricted their image and positioning in the past. The best-performing institutions have built new public constituencies and provided diverse, ongoing programs and experiences.

They have become centres of social interaction in their communities.

In retrospect, a great variety of projects, including contemporary art exhibitions, have made up the cultural exchanges to and from Australia and China since the 1970s. Australian audiences have continued to be fascinated by the ancient cultural heritage and new archaeological discoveries and excavations (including an extraordinary scientific wealth of Jurassic-era fossils) emerging in China. Notable stages along the way have been marked by the presentation of The Entombed Warriors in 1982–1983,[21] this time involving not only state galleries but also the new National Gallery of Australia, where an audience of 50,000 people flocked to see the exhibition in a tight slot of merely nine days in September 1983; and the Chinese Dinosaurs presented to the natural history museums sector in 1984.

In dialogue with many ‘classic’ presentations of Chinese art, culture, and scientific inquiry, Australian art museums and smaller galleries, patrons and animateurs, curators and collectors, have meanwhile been active participants, interpreters and presenters of the rise of contemporary Chinese art as a steadily growing phenomenon. They have been part of the process of Chinese contemporary art’s capture of world attention with the rise of new movements and energies within China since the 1980s.

However from the vantage-point of more than three decades of evolving engagement with China, it can be argued that the transformed buildings, specialised skills, resources and civic presence of Australia’s leading museums and state galleries today can be traced in part to the paradigm-changing years when the outstanding impact of the ‘first’ great Chinese Exhibition occurred in Australia.

Bernice Murphy is National Director, Museums Australia, and has had ongoing contacts with museum colleagues in China through exhibition programs and related events since 1977. In recent years she has taken leave and visited China several times to present papers at museum forums organised by the Chinese Society of Museums, and participated in museology training programs (notably organised by Fujen University, Taiwan, at Shanghai Art Museum, January 2003) – as part of honorary service to museums internationally through ICOM.

Citation for this article, Bernice Murphy, ‘Australian museums and China since 1975: An exhibitions history encompassing a transformation in capabilities’, Museums Australia Magazine, Canberra, Vol.19 (Issue 1), September 2010, pp.40-48.

left: Catalogue cover of Mao Goes Pop: China post-1989 (Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2 June--15 August 1993). Cover includes image of a painting by Shanghai artist, Yu Youhan, The Waving Mao (1990). Curatorial adviser and catalogue editor, was Dr Nicholas Jose, former Cultural Counsellor in the Australian Embassy, Beijing. Bernice Murphy (then MCA Chief Curator), and Janet Parfenovics (General Manager) travelled to China in 1990 to work with Dr Jose, and a group of contemporary Chinese artists, teachers and writers, in preparing this landmark project for the MCA Sydney. The exhibition later moved on in a repackaged version to become the first major showing of the emerging Chinese avant-garde in the USA.

20. The need for climatecontrolled environments in museums and galleries, without which quality loans cannot be negotiated with foreign lenders to stage high-impact exhibitions, has been one of the most persistently effective levers stimulating capital works commitment by successive governments for decades. Such arguments moved progressively from the physical handling and presentation of exhibitions to improved public amenities needed to respond to rising public interest in museums, as focal-points of cultural experience and social interaction yearround.

21. Edmund Capon et al, Qin Shihuang: terracotta warriors and horses, op.cit., 1982.

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Ensuring visibility: two institutions presenting their collections.

Book Review – Trans-Tasman monographs compared Anne Kirker

T

wo new ‘focus-on-collections’ books published recently are the product of an art gallery in New Zealand (in Dunedin) and a combined museum and gallery (in Hobart) that are among the earliest established collecting institutions in this part of the world. 1848 is the year that the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG) was formally established, out of the collections of the Royal Society of Tasmania, while the Dunedin Public Art Gallery (DPAG) was founded some forty years later in 1884, out of the Otago Art Society.

Both of these monographs are comprehensive, have good ‘shelf-life’ and are infinitely absorbing. The visionary ambition and considerable efforts that went towards ‘nailing’ these institutions into place cannot be underestimated, and the histories of each process are detailed in the opening chapters of the respective volumes. Each account describes, with photographic records (which are now prized items themselves), the personalities involved, presenting the exterior and interior views of the various civic buildings entailed.

This overview highlights, in Dunedin’s case, several shifts of the facility required to make the institution more accessible to the heart of the city; meanwhile in Hobart’s case, there is a focus on the original stone building in a colonial capital, and the pacing of its successive extensions. In the Tasmanian study furthermore, the narrative includes the museum’s complex of historic buildings on the same site, all now encompassed by the evolution of TMAG. With almost 800,000 objects to care for and with a far broader collecting mandate than other museums in Australasia (with the exception of Te Papa/Museum of New Zealand, and to a lesser extent, the Museum and Gallery of the Northern Territory, in Darwin), TMAG has the challenge of combining scientific collections, social history, and not least, the development of the fine arts. New Zealand’s Dunedin Public Art Gallery, on the other hand, has been able to luxuriate in housing a smaller collection, one that is more homogenous in representing the visual arts and those works that are most closely allied.

Both institutions historically, however, were colonial products of hard-earned endeavour by local philanthropists and culturally minded residents intent on fostering education and building civic pride. The two cities, Hobart and Dunedin, meanwhile have a similar appearance and feel to them – reminding us of their early development in a period when maritime trade ensured a regular traffic and cultural contacts between Australia’s south-eastern coastal capitals and neighbouring cities in New Zealand.

Hobart and Dunedin are subject to very similar weather patterns, have studious, culturally-minded citizens who care about maintaining nineteenth and early twentieth-century history in their midst, are understated in their dress (or outrageous in a seriously determined way), and in fact are temperamentally close cousins. The fact that ‘Dunedinites’ call

Collection: Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery [Matthew Baker ... [et al.]; copy editor: Caroline Mordaunt; photographer: Simon Cuthbert]; (Hobart: Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, 2007), 206 pages, hardback, ISBN 978-0-9775334-2-8.

Aucklanders ‘jaffas’ and their counterparts in Hobart refer to the rest of Australia as ‘mainlanders’ speaks volumes about a self-defining resistance persisting even today, when citizens feel distant from so-called ‘centres’ that define their relationship. Yet it is for this reason that it is important for such enlightening books to appear, when visitor numbers in smaller institutions are inevitably more contained than for their counterparts in Sydney, Melbourne, Wellington or Auckland.

Collection: Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (2007) and Beloved: Works from the Dunedin Public Art Gallery (2009) ensure that the important collections of these two rich institutions, vital to the cultural history of their host cities, are brought into a new focus. In addition to providing an overview of local collecting history, they give visibility to items that are significant nationally and often internationally. Because of the heterogeneous collections in the Tasmanian capital, Collection has needed to address many subject areas: Indigenous Cultures, Botany and Zoology, Social History, Fine and Applied Arts from Australia and elsewhere in the world; yet it also provides a window onto a vast collection of historical documents and ephemera, and not least, an apt focus on Antarctica and the Southern Ocean.

Since I am a specialist in the visual arts (although with a considerable interest in other areas of museum collecting), my comments will concentrate on this field. A sample of a few acquisitions under the fine arts’ aegis that have been selected for the Hobart volume include photographs by John Watt Beattie from the 1830s, Thomas Bock’s watercolour portraits of Van Diemen’s Land Aborigines as well as their depiction by John Glover in oil paintings of the same period – which may nag our consciences through recontextualising knowledge today but are

50 Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 19 (1) – September 2010

Ensuring visibility: two institutions presenting their collections.

Beloved: Works from the Dunedin Public Art Gallery [Robyn Notman and Lynda Cullen]; (Dunedin: Dunedin Public Art Gallery, 2009), 268 pages, hardback, ISBN 0-908910-58-4.

nonetheless luminous and individualistic works.

There are also, of course, Benjamin Duterrau’s resonant paintings that record first contact between Europeans and the Tasmanian people, which culminate in the extraordinary work, The Conciliation, of 1840. A favourite artist of the late Joan Kerr’s, Louisa Anne Meredith, is meanwhile represented by a humorous watercolour of anthropomorphised frogs – a work called A Cool Debate, of c.1891.

Predictably, there are British paintings that as a ‘school’ form the largest group of international works in not only Hobart’s collection but also Dunedin’s – as well as virtually all the art museums in Australasia established during the colonial period. William Strutt, Edward Poynter and other Victorian masters therefore make a strong appearance. Australian-born artists accordingly gain attention in the modern period, with representations of Grace Cossington Smith, later Sidney Nolan, a wonderful Russell Drysdale painting, Snake Bay at night of 1959, and Justin O’Brien’s The Annunciation of 1973-74. The more contemporary arena is sampled with works by Bea Maddock (one of Tasmania’s greatest artists) and Raymond (Ray) Arnold (born in Melbourne, but long based in Hobart and more recently Queenstown).

To my mind, an unfortunate choice of cover image for Hobart’s Collection adheres to a nineteenth-century emphasis in presenting the institution’s presence today. This is contrasted by a different institutional self-presentation when turning to Beloved: Works from the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, which favours a lively design, presenting magnified ‘porthole’ details of a range of collection items. Will TMAG always position

itself as chiefly honouring a distant past, enthralling though that may be? Perhaps the fillip that comes from ‘reinvention’ through a completely new building for a collecting institution (as in the case of Dunedin) makes it easier to bound forwards. However this may not yet be the desire of the Tasmanian museum and gallery, given that it remains the premier state institution, with vast holdings and including many items collected very early, covering such broad disciplinary bases. However issues of affirmative purpose and vantage-point towards the present are important for all museums and galleries today – and these questions merit reflection at crucial moments of self-presentation, as this volume projects.

What is clear in the very title of the Dunedin book – ‘BELOVED’ – which is rendered in red capital letters and stretches across the cover between the rows of ‘porthole’ collection details, is that the institution seeks to communicate its engagement with vital, contemporary times. Undoubtedly it is much easier for this gallery to take such a stance, in comparison with TMAG, since the number of works in the New Zealand collection is much smaller (though not divulged precisely); the collection is confined to the visual arts, and most works have been acquired in the mid- to late- twentieth century. Highlights in Dunedin include Florentine master Zanobi Machiavelli’s Madonna and Child, a tempera on panel of 1452-53; a fine painting by Claude Lorrain; the usual swag of English seventeenth- and eighteenth-century portraits (notably by Joshua Reynolds and Henry Raeburn); excellent engravings and etchings from the works on paper holdings; Worcester porcelain; a number of ukiyo-e prints; and finally the survey reaches the early New Zealand colonial watercolourists, George O’Brien and J.B.C. Hoyte. With the introduction of these last two, I note that there is no differentiation between nationalities in any of the entries. They are ordered not by ‘school’ but by date.

Hence the compelling 1880 painting by Claude Monet, La Débâcle, gifted in 1982, sits between pages featuring works by Charles Conder and William McTaggart. Local masters who were emigrants to New Zealand in the late nineteenth century, Petrus Van Der Velden and Girolamo Nerli, are represented; and their influence on younger New Zealand artists (including Frances Hodgkins) is clearly seen in this publication.

Representation of work by Maori artists is comparatively poor; I would have expected more. There are the well-known portraits of Maori chiefs by Gottfried Lindauer, but it is not until the 1980s that contemporary Maori presence is incorporated, when Ralph Hotere appears, followed by Michael Parekowhai, Ani O’Neill and others. Of course no collection worth its salt would not include Colin McCahon, Rita Angus and Toss Woollaston, and these artists are well served.

Sculpture by Don Driver was terrific to see again, as were examples by earlier New Zealand sculptors as well as instances of the strong contemporary photography collection in Dunedin.

Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 19 (1) – September 2010 51

While I believe wholeheartedly in the need to record aspects of collections through high-quality images matched by accessible writing – qualities that both Collection and Beloved admirably share – I do have a concern, which is how to demonstrate ‘a collection in action’.

For instance, I yearned to see evidence of the adventurous curatorial projects that curator David Hansen, and after him Craig Judd, had achieved during the past decade and a half in Hobart, deploying the visual arts collection. The introduction of artists active in the contemporary sphere, in intimate dialogue with TMAG’s holdings, is something they both achieved, and photographs with captions would have provided a sense of the collection’s being of continuing relevance outside of storage, and in deployment in innovative and meaningful ways. I am sure that the same could be said for their successor in visual arts and other departments of TMAG, where special projects (not just exhibitions) using the collection would warrant at least a photograph with explanatory caption.

This would avoid the pitfall of projecting the collection as a static, historical entity that continues simply to be augmented. Whilst the augmentation process does stand for collecting as a continuing process, in our era of concerted effort to reach out to audiences with broad-based constituencies, collection books in their current form (unless they are duplicated on-line) may not find themselves in the many hands they deserve.

Some would say that records of selected exhibitions and allied events belong elsewhere – yet why so, if they are sourced in the main from the collection? Surely the history of museums and galleries that is given in the opening chapters is no more nor less important than a concluding chapter that could address how the collections have been utilised diversely over the years. This in itself would of course (like the choice of featured works) be a necessarily selective process, and stretch back over the lifetime of an institution’s existence. While it is true that annual reports cover this territory, they are not widely read or accessed by the general public.

The same point can be made of the Dunedin publication. It is as though a formula for presenting a collections survey has been adopted (and when I compare these two publications with others from not only Australasia, but elsewhere in the world, parallels are readily found). The formula is tried and true, like a neat-fitting glove. The usual schema for these publications is as follows: • The director’s overview of the museum or gallery concerned, stating the cultural value of the collections.

• An introductory chapter on the history of the institution, with photographs sourced from within the institution’s ‘archive’. Few if any of the spaces displaying collections are presented. Attention is usually confined to personalities of note, and to ‘bricks and mortar’ accounts of the institution’s development.

• The chief body of the book is devoted to single-entry selected works from relevant collections, with a good colour reproduction of each (and sometimes a detail), supported by an accompanying 200–300 word explanatory text.

• A glossary, bibliography, and usually and index, concludes the publication.

I conclude this review of two handsome books therefore by raising the issue of how to ensure that the collections they showcase evince a sense of their ‘usage,’ in delighting and educating audiences, both inspiring and challenging them. This could be achieved readily by modifying the expected format of collection surveys, to visually and textually incorporate those many ways that museums and galleries have succeeded in utilising their collections up to the present.

Dr. Anne Kirker is an Adjunct Associate Professor at the Queensland College of Art, Brisbane. She is also a freelance art consultant, curator and writer, with a long career in art museums, first in New Zealand and later in Australia, where she has been based since 1988.

Citation for this article: Anne Kirker, ‘Ensuring visibility: two institutions presenting their collections’ [Book Review – Trans-Tasman monographs compared], Museums Australia Magazine, Canberra, Vol.19 (Issue 1), September 2010, pp.50-51.

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