Humanities Research Journal Series: Volume VIII. No. 1. 2001 · The National Library of Australia’s First 100 Years, 1901–2001 Vol. 8 No. 1, 2001 ISSN: 1440-0669. 1 A t the beginning

Contents

1 Caroline Turner Editorial: Tomorrow’s Museums

5 Iain McCalman Museum & Heritage Management in the New Economy

17 Dawn Casey Case Study: The National Museum of Australia

25 Elaine Heumann Gurian What is the Object of This Exercise?: A Meandering Exploration of the Many Meanings of Objects in Museums

37 Howard Morphy Seeing Aboriginal Art in the Gallery

51 Paul A. Pickering Conserving the People’s History: Lessons From Manchester and Salford

59 Dorreen Mellor Arterfacts of Memory: Oral Histories in Archival Institutions

68 Future Shots: Prominent Australians Share Their Thoughts on Museums of the Future

71 Ralph Elliot Book Review: Remarkable Occurences, The National Library of Australia’s First 100 Years, 1901–2001

Vol. 8 No. 1, 2001 ISSN: 1440-0669

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At the beginning of the twenty-firstcentury museums worldwide are coming

under increasing scrutiny as public institu-tions. They are taking on new roles and usingnew means of communication with audiences.Two volumes of Humanities Research — thisissue for 2001 and the first volume for 2002 —will be devoted to this subject. The Human-ities Research Centre and the Centre forCross-Cultural Research at the AustralianNational University are both vitally conerned

with the future of museums as cultural heritageinstitutions and are both involved in researchprojects and partnerships with museums and cul-tural institutions, nationally and internationally.

Museums in our contemporary globalisedworld are far more than repositories of the his-tory of “nations” or single national narratives.They reflect culture in its broadest sense anddiverse community concerns as well astransnational ideas. Their mission statementsare as much concerned with education as with

editorial:tomorrow’s museums

CAROLINE TURNER

An aerial view of the new National Museum of Australia on Canberra’s Acton Peninsula.Source: Ashton Raggatt McDougall, Robert Peck von Hartel Trethowan. Architects in Association

contents 3/3/03 5:07 PM Page 1

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Humanities Research Vol. 8 No. 1, 2001

preserving objects. The move away from thetraditional focus on objects (artefacts, docu-ments, books and art works) of significance toindividuals and societies is a theme taken upby Elaine Gurian in her seminal article in thisvolume. More and more, however, as othercontributions in this volume indicate, muse-ums and other heritage institutions such aslibraries, have also become forums for publicdebate, broadly based classrooms, memorialsand places of mourning, sites of social interac-tion and creative encounters, and even zonesof spiritual experience and places for healingof community trauma. Old and new technolo-gies are generating new ways of seeing andexperiencing. The new inclusiveness in manymuseums of minorities, especially Indigenousgroups, and the presentation of multiple perspectives and issues of controversy offernew directions for the future.

Thus museums today can be seen as criticalto a nation’s understanding of itself in thefuture, of potential enormous significance tosubaltern groups within societies and to human-ity as a whole. New types of museums and her-itage sites have emerged, including those, suchas ecomuseums, which emphasise sustainableeconomic development for local communities,cultural tourism sites to share natural andmaterial heritage with visitors, or “keepingplaces” for objects sacred to Indigenous cul-tures which cannot be shared with others. Insome museums today the emphasis is on pre-serving the culture of a particular group, inother cases it is multifocussed inclusivenessand in yet other cases the concept is of envi-ronment or heritage belonging to all humanbeings (i.e. the debate over the destruction ofthe Afghan Buddhas). A redefinition of thefunctions of museums to include contributionsto cultural survival and revival of subalterngroups as well as dominant ones, poses newand complex questions for those charged withadministering these institutions. Some of thesecritical questions are reserved for our 2002 vol-ume, which also has a special focus on newdevelopments in museums in the Asia-Pacificregion.

The modern museum is a by-product ofsocial changes which saw private collectionsopened to public use and the creation ofnational museums. The Louvre, one of thefirst modern museums, is an example of amuseum as a national focus for bringingtogether a nation’s history in times of greatsocial change. Its early collections embraced,not only those of the former Kings, but collec-tions of material from buildings, memorials,churches destroyed in the Revolution andwere magnificently, if controversially, aug-mented by the imperial conquests ofNapoleon and colonial expansion. Althoughostensibly a museum devoted to all humancivilisation, it was ultimately the nationalmuseum of France. In the US, the circum-stances of the eighteenth-century revolution-ary war against Britain necessitated preservingknowledge of the nation’s birth and thecommunication of “core” values, resulting inalmost a national obsession with museums ofhistory. The national parks commemoratingnineteenth century Civil War battle sitescompleted from the 1930s to the 1960s are anexample of national mourning and healing bycommemorating the bravery of both sides inone of the most bitter of civil war conflictswhich sometimes literally pitted brotheragainst brother. What the battlefield parkstended to ignore in this equation was the issueof human slavery and it has been left to morerecent US museum developments, includingAfro-American museums to fill this gap.

In Australia, science, history and naturalhistory museums, libraries and art galleriesdeveloped in each of the nineteenth centurycolonies as part of initiatives to create a“civilised” society. National museums havebeen largely a product of the second half of thetwentieth century and we lacked a nationalsocial history museum until the opening of thenew Museum of Australia in March 2001. TheAustralian War Memorial in Canberra, thenational consolidation of a deep need formemorialising the sacrifices of war was, likethe “Digger” memorials put in place in everysmall town after the first World War, a com-


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CAROLINE TURNER Tomorrow’s Museums

munity response to incredible trauma. Untilthe opening of the new National Museum ofAustralia, the War Memorial could indeed bedescribed as the national history museum forAustralians. Interestingly this was a concept ofnation forged in international conflict, begin-ning with Gallipoli. It is still one of the mostvisited museums in Australia. The newNational Museum is more focussed onAustralia’s domestic history.

In Australia today, museums, art museums,heritage organisations, libraries and archivesare facing considerable challenges. They maybe valued contributors to society, includingthrough knowledge enhancing research andcultural tourism, but they are also expected toraise varying proportions of their own revenueand to justify what they do in quantitativeterms related to the national economy. Theyare also part of new attitudes to culture in thiscountry and must address new approaches tohistory. Iain McCalman and Dawn Casey discuss some of the challenges in importantcontributions to this volume, first delivered ata major summit on Australia’s future convened by the Academies of Humanitiesand Social Sciences. In this volume alsoHoward Morphy, Paul Pickering, DoreenMellor and Ralph Elliott, together with a variety of Australian museum professionals, discuss critical issues for the future of museumsas well as new approaches to culture and history and to researching and communicatingknowledge.

While museums have always needed to beresearch based institutions, one controversyemerging today in Australia is whether theeconomic pressures and programmingchanges, including an emphasis on new tech-nology, are eroding the research base. Does itmatter if “curators” become “content develop-ers” — probably not but if research is not donethen obviously the intellectual core of the

museum and its educational authority isdiminished. Tomorrow’s museums will reflect,one hopes, new partnerships between muse-ums, universities and other educational institutions. Some partnerships, and theirscholarly and popular results, are described inthis volume, and suggest ways forward.

Museums in Australia today are more andmore presenting and examining issues of con-troversy — two, or more, sides to a story espe-cially that of Indigenous contacts withEuropeans. What is going on in Australianmuseums today may be a redefinition ofAustralian culture and society. Australianmuseums reflect what has been occurring inthis country for the last fifty years. Many aredeveloping programs which interact with verylarge numbers of people and many, includingthe National Museum of Australia, emphasisethe personal stories of ordinary people. Thereis more emphasis on women, on preserving theenvironment, on Indigenous issues, and onthe rich variety of migrant experiences that gointo the make-up of our multicultural society.Undoubtedly, this points to a redefinition ofAustralian culture and society. The wideningcommunity involvement in museums todaycan, as Dawn Casey, Director of the NationalMuseum of Australia puts it, promote partici-pation amongst those sections of the commu-nity “… who have typically been excluded oralienated by conventional participation andcommunication processes.” Nevertheless, aswe know, cultural interaction is not always onequal terms. A new conservatism has emergedtowards history in some museums overseas andsimilar pressure may be exerted here. Let ushope that the new inclusiveness in museumsin the late twentieth and early twenty-firstcenturies does not suffer a reaction with thesubsequent return of less nuanced nationalnarratives which, in the process, excludemany from the story.


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Introduction: CulturalHeritage — Public Good andEconomic Agent

There is no disputing that museums, artmuseums, heritage organisations, and

archives are valued highly in Australia.However much lobby groups or governmentsmight disagree about what constitutes worth-while cultural heritage and about how thatheritage should be presented, there is broadconsensus about its importance to nationalpsychic health. In a climate of diminishingstate provision for public culture, we have justwitnessed a major investment by theCommonwealth Government in a newNational Museum of Australia.

This kind of investment derives from abipartisan appreciation of the value of cultur-al heritage organisations as agents of publicgood. Major cultural heritage organisations(CHOs) are seen by most governments as nec-essary to modern democracy. They enable amulti-ethnic population of citizens to partici-pate in evolving new senses of national iden-tity out of a diversity of experiences, valuesand traditions. There is a realisation across thespectrum of Australian politics — witnessedin the Centenary of Federation celebrationsaround the country — that our population hasdiffering historical heritages, and that theseheritages must be retrieved, cherished, andrenegotiated if we are to maintain Australia asa cohesive democracy with an appropriatelyhealthy sense of civility and social respons-ibility.

Yet the very governments that fund theseinstitutions as agents of public good underval-ue them as agents of economic growth. Likecultural institutions more broadly, CHOs arestill seen predominantly as part of a worthybut essentially hobbyist and elitist publicly-funded ‘welfare’ sector, or as a ‘natural’ by-product of human society that requires noconscious planning or stimulation. Above all,governments and economic planners havefailed to appreciate CHOs as dynamic contrib-utors to the new information-based, globally-influenced, knowledge economies of the twenty-first century.

Global knowledge economies are generallydefined by their focus on performance in threeseminal areas: education, research and devel-opment, and information and communica-tions technologies. Collectively, these areascomprise the OECD-defined index for invest-ment in knowledge.

MUSEUM & HERITAGE MANAGEMENTIN THE NEW ECONOMY

IAIN McCALMAN

an address to THE HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES SUMMIT

26-27 JULY 2001, Canberra

The Humanities and Social Sciences Summit

was held at the National Museum of Australia,

26-27 July 2001. It was convened to provide a

platform for public discussion on the role of

the humanities and social sciences in today’s

economy. The Summit was sponsored by the

Higher Education Division of the Department

of Education, Training and Youth Affairs, and

was convened by the Academy of the Human-

ities, Academy of Social Sciences, Dean of Arts,

Sciences and Humanities and the Business

Higher Education Round Table. Further info at

http://www.anu.edu.au/cce/humanities

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The Commonwealth Government’s recentinnovation plan, ‘Backing Australia’s Ability’,seeks to institute comprehensive and long-term policies to stimulate our development asa global knowledge economy capable of competing in the markets of the future. Manyof the proposals in the innovation action planare excellent. It is impossible to underestimatethe importance of stimulating new skills, ideasand commercial initiatives through researchand development alliances between universi-ty, government and private industry. But whyhas this process been confined to science andtechnology? By implication CHOs are viewedneither as productive industries in need ofresearch and development nor as sources ofintellectual innovation and experiment onwhich our future competitive knowledgeeconomy will depend.

‘Backing Australia’s Ability’ singles outbiotechnology and agribusiness as crucialnodes for research and development invest-ment, but says nothing, for example, aboutencouraging the growth of cultural and socialinformatics in the knowledge society of thefuture. Cultural informatics encompasses thehuman application of the information revolu-tion. It is defined as the interdisciplinary studyof information content, representation, tech-nology and applications, and the methods andstrategies by which information is used inorganisations, cultures and societies. In theUnited States, Canada and Europe, culturalinformatics is a burgeoning field for govern-ment, university and private industry invest-ment.

Museum and heritage management hasbeen in the vanguard of developing this newknowledge form. In the United States, Europeand parts of Asia, CHOs are fast integratingwith information management systems to gen-erate both theoretical and applied innovationsin cultural informatics. This is manifested innew degree programs, expert conferences, andresearch collaborations with heritage institu-tions, technology industries and universities.Australia has also achieved a great deal, butwithout conscious investment we will soon no

longer be in a position to participate in build-ing this new knowledge matrix of the future.Our economic competitors are not making thesame mistake.

Take the relevant examples of Britain,Singapore and New Zealand, where similarprocesses of policy-making for innovation areunder way. In the British Government’s GreenPaper, ‘Culture and Creativity’, stress is laid on‘the key role that culture and creativity play inthe government’s educational and industrialpolicies’. ‘Culture and Creativity’ acknowl-edges the importance of the cultural sphere asa sector of the economy that continues toexperience vigorous growth in Britain andthroughout the globe. But it also recognisesthat cultural research and development con-stitutes an essential catalyst of future innova-tion: ‘creative talent will be crucial to ourindividual and national economic success inthe economy of the future’.

It is a truism that a spirit of innovation andexperiment is difficult to inculcate. Otherwiseeveryone would do it. Recent research inSingapore identifies the neglect of the human-ities as the ingredient hampering an otherwisehighly sophisticated knowledge society fromtaking a lead in innovation. Investment in science and technology alone has failed togenerate the intuitive, pluralistic and multi-dimensional modes of thinking necessary totwenty-first-century innovation.

Historians and economists have longdebated what it was that gave British societythe innovatory psychology to trigger the firstindustrial revolution in the mid-eighteenthcentury. Most scholars now agree that, what-ever else was involved, the open, critical spir-it that sprang out of Nonconformist religiousand educational culture played a crucial rolein shaping the first industrial generation ofentrepreneurs and inventors. In short, cul-ture, science and technology were part of aholistic mix, without which intellectual com-bustion would not have occurred.

No wonder, then, that Tony Blair assertedin his stunningly successful recent electioncampaign: “For too long arts and culture have

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stood outside the mainstream, their potentialunrecognised by government. That has tochange, and … it will … In the twenty-firstcentury, we are going to see the world increas-ingly influenced by innovation and creativeminds. Our future depends on creativity.”

1. Museums and Heritage organ-isations as Culture Industries

Recognition that culture is big business, isnot new; neither is it new to point out thatchanging patterns of consumption and risingreal incomes are fostering a growth in demandfor cultural goods and services through theindustrialised world. But it is worth reaffirm-ing this basic economic case in the more specific context of museum, art museums, andheritage organisations.

Attendances

First we need to note that there are a lot ofthese cultural heritage institutions: research ofthree years ago shows that there were thenmore than 1700 such public institutions acrossAustralia. Moreover, these institutions took

an enormous diversity of forms outside themore familiar ones of museums, art museums,and archives, including historical themeparks, science and technology centres, housemuseums, memorial and commemorativeinstitutions and interpretation centres.

Plenty of people visit them. TheAustralian Bureau of Statistics survey of atten-dance at Selected Culture/Leisure Venues inApril 1999, indicated that total attendance atmuseums is in excess of sixteen million peopleper year and the figure is slightly higher for artmuseums. Around 20 per cent of the Aust-ralian population aged fifteen and over hadvisited a museum at least once in the previous year, and among these is a very highpercentage of school age children — the consumers and innovators of the future.

Tourism

The figures of Australian museum atten-dance climb to between 60 and 70 per centwhen international tourists are polled, a vital-ly important economic indicator given thattourism is now the world’s largest industry.Around 700 million people travel the world

IAIN McCALMAN Museum & Heritage Management in the New Economy

Portrait of Captain James Cook by John Webber(c1752-1793), oil on canvas. Collection: NationalPortrait Gallery, Canberra. Purchased 2000 by theCommonwealth Government with the generousassistance of Robert Oatley and John Schaeffer.Photo: David Reid.

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every year and economists predict that at thepresent rate of growth this figure will reach astaggering 1.6 billion people by 2020.Moreover, it is relevant to note that cities andregions containing world heritage listings arethe most popular tourist destinations.

Last year more than 600,000 people visitedthe Australian War Memorial in Canberra,and the figures are on target to exceed thatconsiderably this year. Similarly, official estimates of likely attendance at the newNational Museum of Australia fell far short ofactual attendance figures which are over450,000 already (figures as at 26 July 2001).

Even considered on a more modest localand regional scale, museum and heritage insti-tutions constitute an astonishing source ofactual and potential economic vitality forcommunities, councils, businesses and touristbodies. Arresting the decline of the bush hasto be among our most serious national con-cerns. Local museum and heritage activity canprovide additional sources of communityincome and employment, diversify vulnerableeconomies, and strengthen local identity andmorale.

Research undertaken in 2000 on three his-torical mining towns, Maldon in Victoria,Burra in South Australia, and Charters Towersin Queensland, showed that visitors spent$102-164 each day in the towns and surround-ing regions, adding $2-4.5 million to theannual gross regional product. Or, to takeanother relevant example, income generatedin Australia last year from the sale ofAboriginal crafts, many of which were chan-nelled through museum and heritage outlets,was in excess of $200 million.

Civic Infrastructure

Museums and heritage organisations arealso a key element of the hidden infrastructurethat gives modern cities a competitive edgewhen seeking to attract international busi-nesses to locate and relocate. This is one rea-son that Singapore funds them generously andthis presumably lay behind the thinking ofNew South Wales Premier Bob Carr in 1997

when he announced a ten-year plan to posi-tion Sydney as a major intellectual and artscentre. Under Premier Kennett Victoria alsoembarked on an unprecedentedly high level ofexpenditure on museums, art museums andCHOs. Such cities become places where thosewith the highest disposable incomes want tolive and to raise their children.

Education Industries

Culture industries, particularly the muse-um and gallery sector, play a vital educativerole in establishing the mutual cultural under-standings and connective tissues for develop-ing international trade and business markets.Schools in Queensland have for some timefostered the teaching of Asian languages as acore part of the curriculum in order to under-pin consumer and business relations of thefuture. Likewise, the Asia-Pacific Art Triennialat the Queensland Art Gallery has drawn manythousands of Queenslanders into new under-standings and connections with modern Asiansocieties and cultures. Conversely, the inter-national reputation of this Triennial exhibi-tion and festival as the premier global forum ofmodern Asian art has brought a new respectfor and understanding of Australia throughoutthe Asia-Pacific region.

Global and Regional Markets

Our economic competitors have shownthemselves well aware of cultural heritageactivities as agencies of long-term social diplo-macy and trade development, which is whycountries such as Sweden, France, Holland,Portugal and Belgium are investing heavily inrebuilding heritage in Asia, especially SouthEast Asia, Vietnam and East Timor. Disturbingly,Australia’s relative disregard of the impor-tance of cultural heritage diplomacy in favourof engagements motivated by short-term orinstant trade benefits, has produced a situationwhere we are being sidelined from such her-itage initiatives. A new Europe-Asia Leaguefor cultural heritage has recently been found-ed that explicitly excludes Australia. It alsoseems likely that the UNESCO proposal to

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build a new national museum of East Timorwill be undertaken in cooperation withPortugal rather than Australia. An undervalu-ing of the role of heritage in rebuilding com-munities and nations could lead us to squanderthe good will that has been built up throughother forms of aid and diplomacy.

2. Cultural Heritage organisa-tions: Innovation and the Neweconomy

The fact that a number of CHOs inAustralia have managed to become key sites ofinnovative research and development in spiteof a disadvantaged funding climate highlightsthe folly of excluding them from the enhancedbenefits of government research and develop-ment programs such as ‘Backing Australia’sAbility’. Of course, museums and heritageorganisations have long possessed some spe-cialised research dimensions, but these havegrown and diversified as CHOs have movedbeyond their traditional roles as collectors,preservers, and custodians of material cultureinto interpreters, teachers, and popular dis-seminators of diverse cultural products.

Mapping the Character and Needs ofHeritage Consumers

For a start, CHOs have had to pioneerresearch into the nature of museum publics.Proposed museum exhibitions are now sub-jected to intensive preliminary consultationand trial among cross-sections of the public,using a variety of polling techniques and com-parative international research data. Publicly-funded heritage organisations have to justifytheir existence and measure their successthrough their ability to attract mass audienceswithin a highly competitive leisure economy.This has forced them to develop sophisticatedcalibrations of the ethnic, age, class, gender,and religious characteristics of their potentialaudiences, as well as understandings of thecommunicative processes needed to reach andretain them. This type of research has becomepart of the body of disciplinary theory andpractice that must be absorbed by modern

museum and heritage professionals. It is cus-tomarily published by heritage organisations,in collaboration with university researchers,through the medium of scholarly presses, on-line publications, specialist journals and thelike.

Research into Communicative andLearning Processes

As interpreters, as well as preservers, ofheritage significance, CHOs have also had todevelop theoretical and applied researchexpertise into how these diverse audiencesexperience and process heritage informationand images. CHOs are in the business of hav-ing constantly to discover and tell stories inways that appeal to consumers alreadyschooled in sophisticated information process-es. As a result CHOs have become vital com-ponents of the educational infrastructure ofmodern industrialised countries. By compari-son with most educational institutions theirremit is also exceptionally wide. They mustreach and retain audiences from the veryyoung to the elderly, from those with tertiaryqualifications to those with none at all, fromthose who speak English as their first languageto those who do not, from internationaltourists wanting instant histories to specialistlocal audiences looking for reflections of theirparticular experiences.

Social Applications for InformationTechnologies

CHOs find themselves at the forefront ofdeveloping human uses for new informationand multimedia technologies, particularly inthe customising of software applications andthe development of useful content for thesetechnologies. Today, the collections of muse-um, libraries and heritage organisations arelikely to be digital as well as material, andtheir audiences may live thousands of milesfrom the physical space where the institutionis located. Web portals, narrow and broadbandbroadcast facilities, and video, film and printproductions have become as important as thedisplay cabinets of old. Partnerships with


The South Seas Project is funded by aStrategic Partnership with Industry Researchand Training grant (SPIRT) and is a collabo-ration of scholars, curators and techniciansfrom the ARC Special Research Centre forCross-Cultural Research at the ANU, theAustralian Centre for Science, Technologyand Heritage in Melbourne, and the NationalLibrary of Australia. These researchers aredeveloping a networked hypermedia ency-clopaedia of ocean voyaging and cross-cultur-al encounter in the age of Enlightenment thatat the same time disseminates via the internetthe library’s unique manuscripts, maps andvisual materials on the Pacific voyages ofCaptain Cook. In the process, researchershave had to pioneer new forms of softwareapplication capable of generating stable andreliable standards of documentation and ofabsorbing future data increases without dam-aging the overall coherence and integrity ofthe project. The result will be both a highlyinnovatory educational product and a set ofinformation tools that can be applied to a widevariety of other hypermedia uses.

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industries and university researchers to gener-ate new methods of communicating their stories have become commonplace.

A few examples:

The Discovery Centre of the CSIRO, thePowerhouse Museum in Sydney and theNational Museum of Australia have collabo-rated with advanced computing specialistsfrom the Australian National University’sSuper Computer facility to develop new muse-um applications for the virtual reality immer-sion system known as ‘The Wedge’, designedand built at the ANU. The National Museumcollaboration, for example, has produced thebrilliantly creative ‘kSpace’, where childrenfrom six to fourteen are encouraged tocreate cities or motor vehicles of the future.After designing their prototypes on a series oftouch screens, children can see their inven-tions projected in a dazzlingly colourful 3Dvirtual reality theatre. This innovative projecthas also been linked into national and stateeducational curricula in a way that demon-strates the dynamic integration of the culturalheritage and educational sectors.

‘kSspace’ at the National Museum of Australia. Photo: George Serras © National Museum of Australia 2001

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A systematic series of information andmultimedia research and development proj-ects are also under way in a new Consortiumfor Research and Information Outreach(CRIO), which brings together a complemen-tary synergy of museum curators, informationexperts and researchers from the NationalMuseum of Australia, the Australian NationalUniversity, and the Australian Institute ofAboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies.One of the first fruits of this collaboration, aninnovative CD Rom application called Peopleof the Rivermouth, will be displayed at thissummit. It presents complex anthropologicalresearch into kinship patterns and customarylife of an aboriginal community at Maningridain Arnhem Land, in ways that impart vivid,multi-sensual viewer understandings. Itsunique multimedia template will be used todevelop a further range of ‘virtual exhibitions’centred on the origins and development ofspectacle, multimedia and special effects inEurope, Australia and Asia.

Urban and Rural Civic Environments

A different type of applied research projectis being pioneered by the Institute of CulturalResearch (ICR) in Sydney. Combiningresearchers and experts from the University ofWestern Sydney, the University of Technol-ogy, Sydney, and the Migration HeritageCentre of New South Wales, the ICR hasdeveloped collaborations with a variety of cul-tural heritage institutions and local govern-ment agencies to enrich the social life andstimulate the civic infrastructures of Sydney’snewer migrant communities and precincts.

One of these, undertaken with the ArtGallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), isdeveloping an exhibition of Asian religious artand culture in close consultation with localmigrant communities in the inner West ofSydney. Innovative in its combination of com-munity and scholarly expertise, the exhibitionalso works to attract visitors from outside con-ventional museum constituencies.

A second ICR project, ‘Generate’, workswith the Migration Heritage Centre and the


Powerhouse Museum to explore how youth ofMiddle Eastern and Asian backgrounds evolvetheir sense of identity within contemporarypopular culture. As well as helping to counter-act disabling negative values and perceptionsof ethnic migrant youth, this project developsa series of practical youth training andemployment outcomes.

A similar series of research and develop-ment heritage collaborations at the Universityof South Australia aim to reinvigorate eco-nomic and civic infrastructure in rural SouthAustralian towns and communities. TheUniversity’s Australian Architecture Archiveand History Research Group are involved in aseries of projects with local museums and heritage organisations to develop visitors cen-tres and architectural innovations for BrokenHill and for Aboriginal communities atWarburton. They are also undertaking her-itage surveys for the towns of Woomera, EdenPark and Mitcham.

Cultural Researc\h Precincts

One aim of such projects is to build, inareas where cultural and civic infrastructure isrelatively thin, a new type of blended culturalresearch precinct. This seeks to link universi-ties, CHOs, and tourist and other businesses soas to create research and entertainment con-sortia. Out of these institutional clusters, neweconomic and culturally dynamic synergies arebeing generated. Research experiments andproductive economic and social outcomes aretreated as mutually interactive. Tourismbecomes a magnet to other activities.

Decades ago, the social wastelands ofLondon’s Financial City area in the East Endand Docklands were revitalised by building aseries of cultural and heritage institutions asnodes of new economic and cultural activity.Goldsmiths University, the Maritime Museumat Greenwich, the Museum of London and theBarbican cultural complex now routinely jointogether in a series of economically and cul-turally productive relationships. Tourism andits penumbra of service industries now flourishin the district.

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Screens from the CD-Rom application ‘People of the Rivermouth’.

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Most Australian cities have evolved suchcultural research precincts quite unconscious-ly in areas where CHOs and Universities hap-pen to be physically contiguous, particularlywhen these locations are also attractive totourists. Networks of cultural institutions,businesses and university research bodies clus-ter together around Circular Quay in Sydney,along the south riverbank of Brisbane andMelbourne, along the Torrens River near theUniversity of Adelaide and in the Freemantledocklands of Western Australia.

Most recent of such precincts is the ActonPeninsula in the ACT, where this summit istaking place and a national research cluster isbeing consciously developed. Here we findcolocated such institutions as the NationalMuseum of Australia, the Australian Instituteof Aboriginal and Torres Strait IslanderStudies, ScreenSound Australia, the LearnedAcademies of Science, the Social Sciencesand the Humanities, and the ANU’sHumanities Research Centre, Centre forCross-Cultural Research, Asia Pacific Schoolof Economics and Management and newNational Europe Centre. This dynamic clusterof heritage, teaching and research bodies isbeginning to work together, on the pattern ofthe Smithsonian on the Mall in WashingtonDC, to develop a series of intermeshed researchand development initiatives that will generateinnovatory research, mount joint educationaland training programs, and attract a variety oftourist constituencies. One aim will be to disseminate this research to national publicsthrough electronic and broadcasting portals,and to attract private investment capital intothe area so as to stimulate further innovation.

International Research andDevelopment Initiatives

CHOs have also shown themselves acutelyaware of the need to look outwards beyondAustralian national horizons to engage inintellectual collaborations, exchanges and dia-logues of an international and transnationalkind. It is a truism that the building of newknowledge economies in the future must be


done in concert with the explosive forces ofglobalisation.

Museums, art museums and CHOs havelong cultivated international relationshipsthrough their need to negotiate internationalloans and exchanges, to repatriate or share keycultural heritage items, and to collect items ofnational heritage that have been dispersedabroad.

In the past decade, however, an awarenessof the need to develop international linkagesfor the pursuit of research has led to a muchmore systematic and integrated process ofinternational dialogue and cooperationbetween universities and CHOs. The linchpinof this process has been the internationalConsortium of Humanities Centres andInstitutes (CHCI), administered from HarvardUniversity under the directorship of ProfessorMarjorie Garber. This US-based but interna-tionally focused organisation gathers togethera huge network of university humanities cen-tres, private funding foundations and CHOs.Membership includes the Getty, Smithsonian,Field, and Huntington Museums, and theFord, Getty and Rockefeller Foundations. TheCHCI coordinates information exchanges,develops joint policy initiatives, brokersnational and international collaborations, andlobbies government and funding bodies.

In 1999, on the initiative of the ANU’sHumanities Research Centre, assisted byGriffith University and the Queensland ArtGallery, the CHCI convened its annual conference in Brisbane, the first time it hasgathered outside the USA. Building on thesuccess of this meeting, an AustralianConsortium of Humanities Centres andInstitutes, has been founded to develop inter-national and national research, funding andteaching collaborations between universityand public CHOs.

Already this has produced several collabo-rative global R&D projects. One of the mostambitious will link the Humanities ResearchInstitute for all ten campuses of the Universityof California in the USA, with James CookUniversity, the Humanities Research Centre,

Conclusion

In the new global, information-based,knowledge economies of the future, the abili-ty to be innovative both in generatingresearch and applying it for social use is moreimportant than at any other time since theonset of the first industrial revolution in thesecond half of the eighteenth century. Yet thepsychic and intellectual properties that gener-ate a creative, innovative, and critical cultureduring times of bewildering social and techno-logical change remain elusive.

The governments of Britain, Singaporeand New Zealand, to take examples of clearrelevance to Australia, have recently stressed sprecious pioneering spirit of innovation.Australia needs it.

IAIN McCALMAN

AcknowledgementsMy thanks to Lindy Shultz, Christine Clark andCaroline Turner for their help in researching and

preparing this paper.

References

Agenda for the Knowledge Nation: Report of theKnowledge Nation Taskforce (Canberra: ChifleyResearch Centre, 2001).

Australian Bureau of Statistics, Attendance at SelectedCultural Venues, Australia, Apr. 1999, Cat. No. 4114.0(Canberra: ABS, 1999).

Australian Bureau of Statistics, ‘Culture andRecreation: Centenary Article - Accounting forAudiences in Australian Museums’, in Year BookAustralia, 2001, (Australia Now series) (Canberra:ABS, 2001).

Australian Bureau of Statistics, Culture and Recreation:Museums and Art Museums, (Australia Now series)(Canberra: ABS, 1999).

Australia Council, ‘The Arts in Australia: SomeStatistics’ (internet resource, 2001 -http://www.ozco.gov.au/resources/snapshots/statistics.html).

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ANU, and the National Museum of Australia.The project ‘Peoples and Places’ proposes tofocus on urgent common problems of environ-mental heritage in rainforests and deserts ofLatin America, the United States andAustralia. Such global collaborations and rela-tionships not only gather new sources ofexpertise and funding for Australia’s nascentknowledge economy, but enable us to keep inthe forefront of the breathtaking pace ofchange within global information environ-ments.

Integration of Science, Technology andCultural Heritage Research

It is typical of such collaborations also,whether national or international, that nosharp distinction is drawn between cultural,scientific and technological research. Theabove initiative, for example, has alreadyengendered linkages with the Rainforest andReef Cooperative Research Centre in Cairnsand Townsville, as well as a variety of ANUfaculty involved in arts, computing, forestry,geology and resource management research,and, of course, with the full spectrum of scien-tific, cultural and environmental curatorialstaff of the National Museum of Australia.

The report of November 2000,‘Knowledge, Innovation and Creativity’,commissioned by the Ministry of ResearchScience and Technology in New Zealand,stressed that innovation and creativity arecomplex social and cultural processes thatcannot be achieved without close arts-sciencelinkages and convergences. The idea thatinnovation and creativity can be fostered in asociety by cordoning off the cultural from thetechnological and scientific spheres was seenas both unrealistic and myopic. The reportstates, “One sign of this convergence is theincreasing use of ‘creativity’ in scientific andtechnological contexts; another is the use of‘industry’ and ‘product’ in arts contexts.”

15

‘Backing Australia’s Ability: An Innovation ActionPlan for the Future’, executive summary (internetresource, 2001 - http://www.innovation.gov.au/iap/policy_launch/templates/brochure.doc).

Conference Proceedings 2000: Heritage Economics,Challenges for Heritage Conservation and SustainableDevelopment in the 21st Century (Canberra: AustralianHeritage Commission, 2001).

Mark Considine, et al., The Comparative Performance ofAustralia as a Knowledge Nation: Report to the ChifleyResearch Centre (Canberra: Chifley Research Centre,2001).

The Hon. Dr D.A. Kemp, Knowledge and Innovation: APolicy Statement on Research and Research Training(Canberra: AusInfo, 1999).

Gillian Koh and Ooi Giok Ling, State-Society Relationsin Singapore (Singapore: Institute of Policy Studies andOxford University Press, 2000).

Leisure and Change: Implications for Museums in the 21stCentury (Sydney: Powerhouse Publishing, 2000).

National Museums: Negotiating Histories: ConferenceProceedings (Canberra: National Museum of Australia,2001).

New Zealand. Ministry of Research, Science andTechnology, ‘Knowledge, Innovation, and Creativity:Designing a Knowledge Society for a Small,Democratic Country’ (internet resource, 2000-http://www.morst.govt.nz/publications/humanz/Humanz.htm).

Reference Group for the Australian Academy of theHumanities, Knowing Ourselves and Others: TheHumanities in Australia into the 21st Century, Vol. 3:Reflective Essays (Canberra: Australian ResearchCouncil Discipline Research Strategies, 1998).

Margaret Seares, ‘National Press Club Address’ (inter-net resource, 2001 - http://www.ozco.gov.au/issues/events/pressclub.html

Successful Tourism at Heritage Places: A Guide forTourism Operators, Heritage Managers and Communities(Canberra: Australian Heritage Commission, 2001).

David Throsby, Economics and Culture (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2001).

C. Turner, J. Webb and R. Devenport, (eds), Beyondthe Future:The Third Asia-Pacific Triennial ofContemporary Art (exhibition catalogue) (Brisbane:Queensland Art Gallery, 1999).

Caroline Turner, (ed), Tradition and Change:Contemporary Art of Asia and the Pacific (Brisbane:University of Queensland Press, 1993).


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Today’s case study is provided by the newNational Museum of Australia, a museum

which is not only a showcase for Australiancultural and environmental history, but also aresearch base and centre of excellence. About450,000 visitors have passed through the exhi-bitions since March, but while they may spendhours exploring the subject matter of TangledDestinies or Nation or Horizons, they only seethe surface. There is very much more goingon behind the scenes, including collectioncare, professional consultancies, future plan-ning and research, which the general publicnever see. And yet it is research in particularwhich underpins the content and the qualityof the visitor experience as well as the broadrange of the Museum’s work.

Why do we have museums? The tradition-al definition describes a permanent institu-tion in the service of society which acquires,conserves, researches, communicates andexhibits material evidence of people and theirenvironment.1 However a more realistic ques-tion might be: why do we have a NationalMuseum of Australia — most especially now,in an era of restricted Commonwealth expen-diture on cultural institutions of all kinds?

The answers are quite interesting. Theobvious one, of course, is to commemorate theCentenary of Federation with an appropriateand lasting expression of national history andidentity. But in addition to the chance toexploit that very fortunate anniversary, therewas the realisation that funding of nationalcultural institutions is a sound investment.

The outcome is not just job creation andtourist income — though they do provide asignificant and measurable economic returnon investment — but also a profound contri-bution to the evolving discussion of nationalhistory and identity, the place of Indigenouspeoples in a pluralistic settler society and theaspirations of present day Australians for thefuture.

National museums are always, in part, anation building exercise and national govern-ments are mindful of their potential impact onpublic discourse. Today I also hope to showyou that the government’s investment in theNational Museum of Australia has given us anumber of other assets, many of them plannedin advance but some arising incidentally fromthe development process, which we intend toexploit for our own and the national good.

But let me return to the Museum’s officialrole as anticipated by the National Museum ofAustralia Act 1980.

The functions of the Museum are: * To develop and maintain a national collec-

tion of historical material; * To exhibit historical material from the

national historical collection; * To exhibit material in written form or in

any other form relating to Australia or to aforeign country;

* To conduct, arrange for or assist in researchinto matters pertaining to Australian history; and

* To disseminate information relating toAustralian history and information relatingto the Museum and its functions.

CASE STUDY: THE NATIONAL MUSEUMOF AUSTRALIA

KEYNOTE ADDRESS FROMTHE HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES SUMMIT

26-27 JULY 2001, Canberra

DAWN CASEY


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Dawn Casey walks through the Main Hall of the National Museum of Australia during its con-struction. Photo: Fairfax.


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DAWN CASEY Case Study: The National Museum of Australia

The Museum shall use every endeavour tomake the most advantageous use of thenational collection in the national interest.2

So — we must collect, care for and displayheritage material, create exhibitions, researchAustralian history and disseminate the results.While based in Canberra, we must also remainmindful of our national obligations. And inthe real world of 2001, we must do all of theabove with a strictly finite set of resources:human, financial and technological.

Fortunately the Museum’s brief but intensedevelopment phase left us in March 2001 witha number of valuable assets.

First and foremost is the building itself,which I suspect has added its own chapter ofdaring innovation to the history of Australianarchitecture. Our choice of the Alliancingmethod for its construction was also a worldfirst for a building project of this size. I believethat Alliancing has now so successfullydemonstrated the value of an integrated teamin achieving cost, time and quality targets anda ‘no dispute’ culture, that it is likely tobecome a trend in Australia’s constructionand other industries.

Other assets or resources which we nowenjoy and intend to use as we plan our futuredevelopment are as follows: people, technolo-gy, and partnerships. Let me tell you some-thing of our aspirations in the fields ofresearch, innovation and outreach and howwe intend to put those resources to good use inthe future.

One of the very great pleasures of theMuseum development process was the chanceto work with a number of wonderful people,expert advisers prominent in many academicfields — and I am pleased to recognise some ofthem in the audience today. Their contribu-tion to our great re-telling of the nationalstory not only ensured that the Museum’sapproach was detailed, balanced, richlydiverse and based on sound scholarship, butalso left us with a group of good friends andrespected colleagues whose advice we certain-ly hope to use in the future.

The diversity of specialist contributionswas far greater than any of us expected at thestart and encompassed a number from the sci-ences as well as the humanities. My head ofResearch and Development, Dr Mike Smith,has observed that to develop just one exhibi-tion, Tangled Destinies, we commissioned atvarious stages the work of an economic histo-rian, an archaeologist, a lexical cartographer, abio-geographer, a geo-morphologist and cul-tural geographer, as well as specialists in thehistory of natural history, the history of sci-ence, and the history of ethnography. Truly anoutstanding example of cross-culturalresearch.

Among the Museum’s human resources Itherefore include the many external adviserswho helped create the Museum’s content andwho in many cases have a continuing rela-tionship with us, and also of course theMuseum’s staff. It takes an enormous range ofskills to run a museum, and I am pleased to saythat we have acquired a correspondingly diverseand talented staff with expertise in everythingfrom visitor service and children’s programs tomultimedia technology and commerce.

I mentioned technological resources asanother major asset which we intend to buildon in the future. Based on the infrastructurewe already have and that which we intend toacquire, in this field the sky is definitely thelimit.

The National Museum’s recent StrategicReview of Communications Technologies andInformation Management recognises that newinformation and communication technologiesoffer the Museum important opportunities asan educator, a research institution and aleisure venue for the general public. The useof new communications media on-site, andthe off-site distribution of museum contentthrough broadcasting, narrowcasting and theInternet, can strengthen our role not just as arepository of artefacts but as a source of knowl-edge and information for many audiences,including those who may never visit ActonPeninsula at all.


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Our challenge in the next years will there-fore be to use information communicationtechnologies effectively to create and main-tain a position in the very competitive infor-mation market. We will use these technolo-gies to extend our professional practice acrossthe spectrum: research of all kinds, collectionsacquisition and management; the interpreta-tion of objects and historic events for differentaudiences, the presentation of knowledge ininteresting and user-friendly ways, and thecapacity to support and illustrate debatesabout contemporary issues.

We are already well placed to meet thesechallenges. If you have seen the rest of themuseum you will know that we have a rotatingaudio-visual theatre called ‘Circa’, a three-dimensional animation sequence downstairsin ‘kSpace’, a programmable Optiwave screen

in the Main Hall, and a number of interactivemultimedia exhibits and databases throughoutthe public spaces. When it is not being usedfor conferences, this Visions Theatre also runsa digital video program based on historic filmfootage. The Museum’s web site providesanother medium through which virtual visi-tors can explore our collections, exhibitionsand multimedia resources and more is beingadded as the web site evolves and expands.

In the next few years we intend to main-tain a leading position in information andcommunication technology by continuing toinvest in technology infrastructure on ActonPeninsula and dramatically increasing ouroutreach potential. These are some of theoutcomes we hope to see:

* Targeted technology — that is, servicesintended specifically for some of our priori-ty audiences. These would include schoolstudents up to Year 12, who frequently havegood classroom access to information tech-nologies and are keen to exploit any inter-esting sources which can deliver curricu-lum needs. Then there are adult Internetusers who like to browse for information orentertainment options and on-line shop-ping, and subject specialists who wantaccess to our collections or databases.

* Broadcasting — we aim to carry out web-casting immediately, and after furtherdevelopment explore other broadcastmedia to create innovative, specialist pro-gramming, perhaps in co-production withsuitable partners.

* Collections management — we intend toacquire an industry standard digital collec-tions management system which can com-bine acquisition, treatment, storage andexhibition records, images and intellectualproperty information for all items in theNational Historical Collection.

* Digitisation — the continuing large scalecreation of digital copies of collection itemsor exhibition support material, particularlythose in which the museum has intellectu-al property.

Image of the programmable Optiwave Screenin ‘kSpace’ at the National Museum ofAustralia. Photo: George Serras © National Museumof Australia 2001


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* Central media repository — an integratedcentral repository to include all digitalimages, audio and video sequences whichwill have many uses, including off-sitedelivery of Museum programs.

* e-Business — the capacity to deliver onlineretail facilities in order to enjoy the benefitsof efficiency, public profile and income gen-eration.

* Collection support strategies — the acquisi-tion of digital images, audio and video tosupport or complement the interpretationand historical significance of key collectionitems. The historic video footage associat-ed with the ABC broadcast van is an obvi-ous example.

In addition to acquiring and managing itsown technology applications, the Museum hasalready been involved in a number of creativebusiness partnerships whose work can be seenthroughout the exhibition areas.

The amazing welcome space leading intothe Gallery of First Australians in which life-size dancers appear on the walls, and the pro-gram reacts to the footprints of visitors passingthrough the space, was created in collabora-tion with the CSIRO and of course the per-formers, Bangarra Dance Theatre.

‘kSpace’, an installation which encouragesyoung people to design a city and transportsystem of the future in which their own facesappear, was devised in collaboration withANU computer specialists.

The electronic ‘big map’ of Australia onwhich visitors can call up a variety of interac-tive programs was developed in collaborationwith CDP Media and Massive Interactive ofSydney.

We call these ‘muscle media’ — powerfulmedia — and their impact on visitors can beseen on any day of the week. They areimmensely attractive, and crowds usuallygather to see the programs run through theirpaces or to take their turn in ‘driving’ theinteractive controls. And of course they havealso become showpieces for our business part-ners, who are now able to point to them as

examples of what is possible in a museum con-text when you merge the power of technologywith the power of the human imagination.

Another partnership about to be exploitedfor a variety of useful outcomes is a three-wayrelationship between the Museum, theMurray-Darling Basin Commission andCharles Sturt University.

Picture this: an innovative collaborationbetween a major natural resource manage-ment organisation, the Museum, and theCentre for Rural Social Research at CharlesSturt University, in which each of the partnersmaintains parallel goals, while involving ruralcommunities in a number of associated pro-grams and voluntary initiatives.

Among many other outcomes, this projectintends to consider a number of essentialquestions:

The ‘big map’ at the National Museum ofAustralia. Photo: George Serras © National Museum ofAustralia 2001



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* How can community participation in natu-ral and cultural resource initiatives be acti-vated and maintained?

* How can such participation be made mean-ingful to the participants themselves?

* How can the diversity of the communitieswithin the Murray-Darling Basin be recog-nised, valued and reflected in such partici-pation?

* How can participation be promoted amongstthose sections of the community who havetypically been excluded or alienated byconventional participation and communi-cation processes?

* How can the power imbalances and the lim-itations of articulation and social skills beovercome?

The National Museum and the Murray-Darling Basin Commission share an agendafor increasing public participation in theirrespective programs — natural resource man-agement and the preservation and communi-cation of Australian history. The researchexpertise of the Centre for Rural SocialResearch in social research, rural communitiesand participation will then be required toanswer the key questions. Most importantly,this project recognises that the goal of activat-ing communities and individuals to supportnatural resource management involves anengagement with local cultural heritage — itcannot be imposed from outside. That iswhere the notion of a partnership becomes soparticularly appealing — the need for organis-ers to draw on expertise and experience acrossvery different fields.

I find the potential of this project particu-larly exciting — and once again, I would liketo point out that it is only possible now that acultural institution with the very wide ranginginterests of the National Museum exists toprovide an essential link in such partnerships.Government investment in a museum hasgiven rise to the potential for a variety ofresearch and development projects of endur-ing value.

So — what now lies ahead for theMuseum? What are our aspirations for thefuture?

In brief: *To continue to delight and inform our

on-site visitors;*To build and exploit our influence as a

major interpreter of Australian history;*To maximise the use of information tech-

nologies for the use of specialist off-siteaudiences;

*To become an acknowledged lead player inthe knowledge economy;

*To better manage heritage collections; and*To continue developing our skills base both

internally and through strategic alliances.

I have already mentioned our commitmentto work with evolving new technologies, todevelop the potential of assets such as ourBroadcast Studio and our web site. TheMuseum development process included theinstallation and testing of a sophisticatedtechnical infrastructure based on multimedia.That infrastructure now supports interactivemultimedia programs throughout theMuseum, but it is only a beginning.

Although we have developed highly suc-cessful schools programs here on ActonPeninsula, we now hope to reach out with ourwebcasts to all classrooms with Internetaccess, or children working at home with theirparents. We want any Internet user to feelencouraged to explore our online resourcesand take away whatever they need in terms ofinformation, research materials or perhaps justentertainment. Our ambition is to be knownas a reliable and authoritative source for anyenquirer, whether their need is images toaccompany a school project or in-depth infor-mation contributing to a research paper orthesis.

We are also a member of the Consortiumfor Research and Information Outreach set upby the ANU. The Consortium involves thehumanities, social science and environmentalscience sectors of the ANU and brings togeth-er in a formal relationship leading multimedia


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researchers to enhance the use of digital com-munication technologies by cultural institu-tions. Our physical proximity to the ANUand its Centre for Cross-Cultural Researchmakes the proposed sharing of facilities, infra-structure and even staff particularly easy.

Our chief ambition for the future is tomake the National Museum a familiar and valued part of Australia’s cultural landscape. Ibelieve that the Museum’s influence will grow,in the sense that our innovative way of presenting history will be considered worthyof imitation. We have positioned ourselves a little differently from other museums and arealready recognised for a popular and unusualapproach to social and natural history, basedon sound scholarship. This means challengesahead as we try to stay competitive in a market already well supplied with leisurechoices in general, and quality museums inparticular. However we have started out withgratifyingly large visitor numbers and very


high visitor satisfaction levels, and I am confident that we can sustain this very posi-tive trend.

As many of you know, it took successiveAustralian governments a very long time toproceed from the Pigott Report of 1975 to theestablishing Act of 1980 and finally the builtMuseum of 2001. It will now be our duty aswell as our pleasure to prove that such a majorinvestment of public resources was well made,and will lead on to public benefits both foreseeable and not yet guessed at, well intothe future.

DAWN CASEY

Endnotes

1 Paraphrased from the International Council ofMuseums definition (see http://www.icom.org)

2 Paraphrased from Section 6 (see http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/nmoaa1980297/)


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Why did the Serbs and Croats shell eachother’s historic sites when they had so

little ammunition and these were not militarytargets?” I routinely ask my museum-studiesgraduate students this question when I lecture.“To break their spirit”, is always the instanta-neous answer. Museums, historic sites, andother institutions of memory, I would contend,are the tangible evidence of the spirit of acivilised society. And while the proponents ofmuseums have long asserted that museums addto the quality of life, they have not understood(as the graduate students did when confrontedby the example of war) how profound andeven central that ‘quality’ was.

Similar examples reveal the relationshipbetween museums and ‘spirit’ in sharp detail.Why did the Russians proclaim, one day afterthe Russian revolution had succeeded, that allhistoric monuments were to be protected eventhough they most often represented the hatedczar and the church? Why did Hitler andStalin establish lists of acceptable and unacceptable art and then install shows inmuseums to proclaim them while sending theformerly acclaimed, now forbidden, art to storage? Why did the Nazis stockpile Jewishmaterial and force interned curators to catalogue and accession it, intending to createa museum to the eradicated Jews? Why, whenI was in the rural mountains of thePhilippines, was I taken to hidden closets thatserved as museums, curated by tribal members,holding the material of the tribe’s immediatepast, secreted from the dealers who were offer-ing great sums for the same material?

In adversity it is understood, by antago-nists and protagonists alike, that the evidence

of history has something central to do with thespirit, will, pride, identity, and civility of people, and that destroying such material maylead to forgetting, broken spirits, and docility.This same understanding is what motivatescultural and ethnic communities to createtheir own museums in order to tell their stories, in their own way, to themselves and toothers.

Yet neither the museum profession nor itssibling workers in the other storehouses of col-lective memory (archives, libraries, concerthalls, and so forth), makes (nor, I would con-tend, understands) the case clearly about itsinstitution’s connectedness to the soul of civiclife. In cities under duress you can hear thecase being made better by mayors and gover-nors. Dennis Archer, the mayor of Detroit,said recently while being interviewed on theradio, ‘Detroit, in order to be a great city,needs to protect its great art museum, theDetroit Institute of Art.’ It was Archer and hispredecessor, Coleman Young, who champi-oned and underwrote the latest incarnation ofDetroit’s Museum of African AmericanHistory. And it was Teddy Kolik, the fabledformer mayor of Jerusalem, who was the chiefproponent of the creation of the IsraelMuseum (and who placed one of his twooffices within the building). Mayors know whymuseums are important. Citizens, implicitly,do too. A recent survey in Detroit asked peo-ple to rate the importance of institutions totheir city and then tell which they had visited.The Museum of African American Historywas listed very high on the important list andmuch lower on the “I have visited” list. Peopledo not have to use the Museum in order to

WHAT IS THE object OF THIS EXERCISE?A MEANDERING EXPLORATION OF THE MANY

MEANINGS OF OBJECTS IN MUSEUMS

ELAINE HEUMANN GURIAN

“

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brilliant play, are necessary but alone are notsufficient. This essay points out somethingthat we have always known intuitively: thatthe larger issues revolve around the storiesmuseums tell and the way they tell them.When parsed carefully, the objects, in theirtangibility, provide a variety of stakeholderswith an opportunity to debate the meaningand control of their memories. It is the owner-ship of the story, rather than the object itself,that the dispute has been all about.

This essay suggests what museums are not(or not exactly) and, therefore, continues thedialogue about what museums are and whatmakes them important, so important that people in extremis fight over them.

WHAT IS AN OBJECT?

“Ah, but we have the real thing”, museumprofessionals used to say when touting theuniqueness of their occupation. When I beganin museum work, in the late 1960s and early1970s, the definition of museums always con-tained reference to the object as the pivotaround which we justified our other activities.1

Although there were always other parts of thedefinition, our security nonetheless lay inowning objects. With it came our privilegedresponsibility for the attendant acquisition, itspreservation, safety, display, study, and inter-pretation. We were like priests and the muse-ums our reliquaries.

The definition of objects was easy. Theywere the real stuff. Words were used like‘unique’, ‘authentic’, ‘original’, ‘genuine’,‘actual’. The things that were collected hadsignificance and were within the natural, cul-tural, or aesthetic history of the known world.

Of course, real had more than one mean-ing. It often meant ‘one-of-a-kind’, but it alsomeant ‘an example of’. Thus, artworks wereone-of-a-kind, but eighteenth-century farmimplements may have been examples. Thingsmade by hand were unique, but manufactureditems became examples. In the natural historyworld, almost all specimens were examples buthad specificity as to location found. Yet some

assert its importance or feel that their tax dol-lars are being well spent in its support.

The people who work in museums havecollectively struggled over the proper defini-tion and role of their institutions. Their strug-gle has been, in part, to differentiate museumsfrom other near relatives — the other store-houses of collective memory. The resultingdefinitions have often centred on things — onobjects and their permissible uses. I believethe debate has missed the essential meaning(the soul, if you will) of the institution that isthe museum.

OBJECTS ARE NOT THE HEART OF THE MUSEUM

The following discussion will attempt tocapture that soul by throwing light on theshifting role of museum objects over time. Itwill show how elusive objects are, even as theyremain the central element embedded withinall definitions of museums. This essay will alsopostulate that the definition of a ‘museumobject’ and the associated practices of acquisi-tion, preservation, care, display, study, andinterpretation have always been fluid andhave become more so recently. Objects didnot provide the definitional bedrock in thepast, although museum staff thought they did.I will show that museums may not need themany longer to justify their work.

But if the essence of a museum is not to befound in its objects, then where? I proposethat the answer is in being a place that storesmemories and presents and organises meaningin some sensory form. It is both the physicali-ty of a place and the memories and stories toldtherein that are important. Further, I proposethat these two essential ingredients — placeand remembrances are not exclusive to muse-ums. And, finally, I contend that the blurringof the distinctions between these institutionsof memory and other seemingly separate insti-tutions (like shopping malls and attractions) isa positive, rather than negative, development.

Not meaning to denigrate the immenseimportance of museum objects and their care,I am postulating that they, like props in a

27

could also be unique — the last passengerpigeon or the last dodo bird. Objects fromboth categories, unique and example, wereaccessioned into the collections. Museumsowned the objects and took on the responsibili-ty of preserving, studying, and displaying them.

Yet even within these seemingly easy cate-gories there were variations. In assertinguniqueness (as in made-by-hand), specificauthorship was associated with some objects,such as paintings, but not with others, mostespecially utilitarian works whose makers wereoften unknown. Some unique works werethought of as ‘art’ and some as ‘craft’; withsome notable exceptions, art was individu-alised as to maker but craft was not. This prac-tice, which is now changing, made it possibleto do research and mount shows of the work ofparticular artists in some, but not all, cultures.

WHAT ARE COLLECTIONS?

In the early 1970s the AmericanAssociation of Museums (AAM) establishedan Accreditation Commission. As its mem-bers deliberated, they discussed whethergroups of living things could be called collec-tions and whether institutions that so ‘collect-ed’ should be classified as museums.Heretofore, ‘museums’ were conserving thingsthat had never been, or now were no longer,alive. The field debated if the living things inbotanical gardens, fish in aquaria, or animalsin zoos were ‘collections’; if so, were thoseinstitutions, de facto, museums? It was decidedthat, yes, at least for funding and accreditationpurposes, they were museums, and the livingthings they cared for were likewise to beregarded as collections, and hence objects.2

Yet there were other institutional reposito-ries that cared for, protected, preserved, andtaught about ‘objects’ but were not calledmuseums nor necessarily treated by museumsas siblings. Archives and libraries, especiallyrare-book collections, were considered relatedbut not siblings even though some museumcollections contain the identical materials.There were also commercial galleries and

private and corporate collections that wereconsidered by museum professionals to be dif-ferent and outside the field, separated suppos-edly by an underlying purpose. A legal distinc-tion of ‘not-for-profit’ was considered anessential part of the definition of a museum. Itwas clear that while objects formed the neces-sary foundation upon which the definition of amuseum might rest, they were not sufficient inthemselves.

CAN NON-COLLECTING INSTITUTIONS BEMUSEUMS?

The Accreditation Commission of theAAM next sought to determine if places thatresembled collections-based museums but didnot hold collections (i.e. places like not-for-profit galleries and cultural centres) were, forpurposes of accreditation, also museums. In1978, they decided that, in some instances,galleries could be considered museumsbecause, like museums, they cared for, displayed, and preserved objects even thoughthey did not own them. Ownership, therefore,in some instances, no longer defined museums.

There was also the conundrum brought tothe profession by science centres and chil-dren’s museums, mostly of the mid-twentiethcentury. Earlier in the century, these placeshad collected and displayed objects, but bymid-century children’s museums and sciencecentres were proliferating and creating newpublic experiences, using exhibition materialthat was built specifically for the purpose andomitting collections’ objects altogether. Howwere these ‘purpose-built’ objects to be consid-ered? They were three-dimensional, oftenunique, many times extremely well made, butthey had no cognates in the outside world.Much of this exhibit material was built todemonstrate the activity and function of the‘real’ (and now inactive) machinery sittingbeside it.

The Adler Planetarium, applying to theAAM for accreditation, also caused the AAMto reconsider the definition of a museum. The

ELAINE HEUMANN GURIAN What is the Object of this Exercise?

28


planetarium’s object was a machine that pro-jected stars onto a ceiling. If institutions reliedon such ‘objects’, were these places museums?Had the profession inadvertently crafted a def-inition of objects that was restricted to thosethings that were created elsewhere and werethen transported to museums? That was notthe case in art museums that commissionedsite-specific work. Certainly the murals of thedepression period applied directly to museumwalls were accessionable works of art—an easycall! Portability, then, did not define objects.

In 1978, the Accreditation Commission ofthe AAM, citing these three different types ofnon-collections-based institutions (art cen-tres, science and technology centres, andplanetariums), wrote specific language foreach type of museum and, by amending its definition of collections for each group,declared these types of organisations to be ...museums! They elaborated: ‘The existence ofcollections and supporting exhibitions is con-sidered desirable, but their absence is not dis-abling...’.3 In response, many museums setabout creating more than one set of rules —one for accessioned objects, and another forexhibitions material — and began to under-stand that the handleable material they usedin their classes (their teaching collections) shouldbe governed by a different set of criteria as well.

Nevertheless, there were often no easy dis-tinctions between the handleablity of teach-ing collections’ objects and those othersdeserving preservation. The Boston Children’sMuseum loan boxes, for example, created inthe 1960s, contained easy-to-obtain materialabout Northeast Native Americans. But bythe 1980s, the remaining material was retiredfrom the loan boxes and accessioned into thecollections because it was no longer obtain-able and had become rare and valuable.

Even purpose-built ‘environments’ have,in cases such as the synagogue models in theMuseum of the Diaspora in Tel Aviv, becomeso intriguing or are of such craftsmanship thatthey, decades later, become collections’objects themselves. So, too, have the exhibi-tions created by distinguished artists, such as

parts of Charles and Ray Eames’s exhibitMathematica: A World of Numbers and Beyond.

Dioramas were often built for a museumexhibition hall in order to put objects (mostlyanimals) in context. These display techniques,which were considered a craft at the time theywere created, were occasionally of such beau-ty, and displayed artistic conventions of real-ism (and seeming realism) so special, thattoday the original dioramas themselves havebecome ‘objects’, and many are subject topreservation, accession, and special display.The definition of objects suitable for collec-tions has, therefore, expanded to include, in special cases, material built for the museum itself.

WHAT IS REAL? IS THE EXPERIENCE THE OBJECT?

In the nineteenth century, some museumshad and displayed sculptural plaster castingsand studies. The Louvre and other museumshad rooms devoted to copies of famous sculp-tures that the museum did not own. The orig-inals either remained in situ or were held byothers. People came to see, study, and paintthese reproductions. They were treated withthe respect accorded the real thing. For a longtime, museums and their publics have felt thatthough there were differences between the‘original’ and reproductions, both had a placewithin their walls.

Similarly, reconstructed skeletons ofdinosaurs have long appeared in museums.They usually are a combination of the bones ofthe species owned by the museums plus thecasting of the missing bones from the samespecies owned by someone else. Sometimesmuseums point out which part is real andwhich is cast, but often they do not. ‘Real’,therefore, takes on new meaning. Curatorsrecognise that the experience of seeing thewhole skeleton is more ‘real’, and certainlymore informative, than seeing only theauthentic, unattached bones that do not addup to a complete or understandable image.

Likewise, multiples or limited editionswere always considered ‘real’ as long as theintention of the artist was respected. Thus, thefact that Rodin and many others authorised

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the multiple production of some pieces did notseem to make each one any less real or lessunique. The creation of additional, thoughstill limited, copies, using the same etchingplates, but after the death of the artist, causedmore problems. But often, while acknowledg-ing the facts of the edition, such works alsohung in museums and, if the quality was good,were accessioned into their collections.

IS THE IMAGE THE OBJECT?

The twentieth century’s invention of newtechnologies has made multiples the norm andmade determining what is real and what thatmeans much more difficult. While originalprints of movies, for example, exist, it is themoving image that the public thinks of as theobject rather than the master print of film.Questions of authenticity revolve around sub-sequent manipulation of the image (e.g.colonisation, cutting, or cropping) rather thanthe contents of any particular canister.

Printed editions with identical multiplesare considered originals, and become morevaluable, if signed; unsigned editions are con-sidered less ‘real’ and certainly less valuable. Insuch cases one could say that the signature,rather than the image, becomes the object.Photographs printed by the photographer maybe considered more real than those using thesame negative but printed by someone else.With the invention of digital technology,many identical images can be reproduced atwill without recourse to any negative at all. Sothe notion of authenticity (meaning singular-ity or uniqueness) becomes problematic asimages indistinguishable from those in muse-ums are easily available outside the museum. Itis the artist’s sensibility that produced theimage. It is the image itself, therefore, that isthe object.

IS THE STORY THE OBJECT?

Of the utilitarian objects of the twentiethcentury, most are manufactured in huge quan-tities and therefore could be termed ‘exam-ples’. Which of these objects to collect often

then depends not upon the object itself but onan associated story that may render one ofthem unique or important.

The objects present in the death camps ofthe Holocaust were, in the main, created foruse elsewhere. There is nothing unique in thephysicality of a bowl that comes fromAuschwitz-Birkenau. These bowls could havebeen purchased in shops that sold cheap table-ware all over Germany at the time. However,when the visitor reads the label that says thebowl comes from Auschwitz, the viewer,knowing something about the Holocaust,transfers meaning to the object. Since there isnothing aside from the label that makes thebowl distinctive, it is not the bowl itself but itsassociated history that forms importance forthe visitor.

DOES THE CULTURAL CONTEXT MAKE THEOBJECT?

As Foucault and many others have writ-ten, objects lose their meaning without theviewer’s knowledge and acceptance of under-lying aesthetic or cultural values. Withoutsuch knowledge, an object’s reification evenwithin its own society cannot be understood.Often the discomfort of novice visitors to artmuseums has to do with their lack of under-standing of the cultural aesthetics that the arton display either challenges or affirms.

By accessioning or displaying objects, thecreators of museums exhibitions are creatingor enhancing these objects’ value. Further,society’s acceptance of the value of museumsthemselves likewise transfers value to theirobjects. When museums receive gifts orbequests from a major donor’s holdings, theyare inheriting — and then passing on — a setof value judgments from someone who isessentially hidden from the visitor’s view. Aparticular aesthetic pervades such museumsbecause of the collections they house and thecollectors who gave the objects in the first place.

This issue of values determining choicecomes into sharper focus when museums beginacquiring or presenting collections from cul-tures whose aesthetic might be different.


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When installing a show of African material inan American art museum, should the curatorshow pieces based on the values inherent inthe producing culture (i.e., focusing on theobjects that attain special aesthetic value withinthat culture), or should the curator pickobjects that appeal more to the aesthetic of hisor her own culture? This question, the sourceof much debate, arises when museums attemptto diversify their holdings to include workscreated by a foreign (or even an assimilated)culture quite different from that which pro-duced the majority of their holdings. Forexample, the selection of which African orLatino art to accession or show has to do notwith authenticity but with quality. The notionof quality has been sharply debated betweenthe scholar within the museum and the peo-ples representing the culture of the maker. Sothe question becomes: who selects the objectsand by what criteria?

In material created by Indigenous artists, thenative community itself sometimes disagreesinternally as to whether the material is native orbelongs to a modern tradition that crossescultural boundary lines. Some within thenative population also argue about thebirthright of the artist; blood quantum, tradi-tional upbringing, and knowledge of the lan-guage sometimes have considerable bearing onwhether artists and their creations are consid-ered native. In such cases, the decision aboutwhat is quality work that should be housed ina museum may have little to do with theobject itself and more to do with thegenealogy of the producer.

WHAT IF YOUR STORY HAS NO OBJECTS ORDOES NOT NEED THEM? IS THE ABSENCE OFOBJECTS THE OBJECT?

Most collections were created by wealthypeople who acquired things of interest andvalue to themselves. The everyday objects ofnon-valued or subjugated peoples were usuallynot collected. Often the people in the lowesteconomic strata could hardly wait to exchangetheir objects for those that were more valued,giving no thought, at the time, to the preser-

vation of the discarded material. So it goes formost peoples during their most impoverishedhistorical periods. Accordingly, their museumsmust choose among a narrow band of choices— do not tell that part of their history, recre-ate the artefacts and environments, or useinterpretative techniques that do not rely onmaterial evidence.

The Museum of the Diaspora in Israel,struggling with this issue more than twenty-five years ago, decided to tell the completestory of five thousand years of Jewish migra-tion without using a single authentic artefact.It elected to create tableaux that reproducedphysical surroundings in an illustrative man-ner based on scholarly research into pictorialand written documentation of all kinds. Themuseum did so because its collection could notaccurately or comprehensively tell the story,and a presentation of settings that appeared‘like new’ honoured the history of Jewishmigration more than an assortment of haphaz-ard authentic artefacts showing their age andwear. The experience, wholly fabricated butthree-dimensional, became the object. It pre-sented a good public experience, many argued,but still did not qualify as a ‘museum’.Ultimately, this total re-creation was acceptedas a highly distinguished museum. TheMuseum of the Diaspora also presentedmovies, photos, and recordings in a publiclyaccessible form, arguing that a comprehensivepresentation required material that was non-artefactual.

The U.S. African-American and NativeAmerican communities have suggested, in thesame vein, that their primary cultural trans-mission is accomplished through oral lan-guage, dance, and song — vehicles that areephemeral. Their central artefacts, or objects,if you will, are not dimensional at all, andmuseums that wish to transmit the accuracy ofsuch cultures, or display historical periods forwhich material evidence is not available, mustlearn to employ more diverse material. It maybe the performance that is the object, forexample. And the performance space mightneed to be indistinguishable from the exhibit

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hall. As museums struggle to do this, onebegins to see videos of ceremonies and hearaudio chanting. Such techniques, formerlythought of as augmentation rather than coreinterpretation, have increasingly taken on therole and function previously played by collec-tion objects.

Even in museums like Cleveland’s Rockand Roll Hall of Fame or the soon-to-be-opened Experience Music Project, it is thesound and performance of the artists that isthe artefact much more than the stationaryguitar that, say, Jimi Hendrix once used.Indeed, musical instrument archives at theBoston Museum of Fine Arts and other placeshave long struggled with the proper presenta-tion of their ‘artefacts’. ‘Silent musical instru-ments’ approaches an oxymoron.

HOW IS THE OBJECT TO BE PRESERVED? IS THEOBJECT TO BE USED?

The museum, in accepting an object for itscollection, takes on the responsibility for itscare. In doing so, collections managers followrules organised for the safety and long-termpreservation of the objects. Climate control,access restrictions, and security systems are allissues of concern to those who care for objects.Institutions devoted to music or performancetransform the notion of collections and cer-tainly the notion of preservation, becausewhile it is true that most things are preservedbetter when left alone, some musical instru-ments are not among them. They are pre-served better if played, and so, for example atthe Smithsonian’s Museum of AmericanHistory, they are.

Likewise, many native people have suc-cessfully argued that accessioned materialshould be used in the continuance of ceremo-ny and tradition. Artefacts, rather than beingrelinquished to isolated preservation (and los-ing their usefulness), are stored in trust wait-ing for the time when they must again be used.In the 1980s, when native people from a spe-cific clan or group asked for an object to beloaned for a short-term use, this was a radicalnotion for most natural history museums. That

request now is more common and oftenaccommodated. For example, at the end ofthe 1980s, the Dog Soldiers of the NorthernCheyenne requested their pipe, which theSmithsonian’s National Museum of NaturalHistory holds, and used it in their ceremonies,after which it was returned to the museum.

Now, native museums and, less commonly,some general museums that hold native mate-rial accept objects into their collections withthe express understanding that they will beloaned out and used when needed. The notionof a museum as a storehouse in perpetuity has,in these instances, evolved into the museumas a revolving loan warehouse. A long-stand-ing and easily understood example predatesthis relatively new development. The CrownJewels of the British monarchy, which are dis-played in the Tower of London, are worn bythe monarch when he or she is crowned. Andso it has been for many centuries.

WHOSE RULES ARE USED FOR OBJECT CARE?

There are other fundamental rules of col-lections that are successfully being challengedworldwide by native people’s involvement.Collections care has been predicated on thebasic notion that objects are inanimate.Though some objects were once alive, theynow are no longer, and most had never beenalive. Thus, collections-care policies proceed-ed from the assumption that objects should bepreserved in the best manner possible, avoid-ing decay from elements, exposure, and use.Protective coverings and storage cases weredesigned to do just that. Extremes in the expo-sure to light and temperature, and all mannerof pest infestation, were to be avoided. Butwhen the museum was recognised to be nei-ther the only nor the absolute arbiter of itsmaterial holdings, accommodation to thebeliefs of the producers of the materials ortheir descendants became necessary.

These beliefs often included a lack of dis-tinction between animate and inanimate.Thus, spirits, mana, fields of power, and lifesources could live within an object regardlessof the material from which it was made. And


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that being so, the care for these living things,it was argued, is, and should be, quite differentfrom the care of dead or never alive things. So,for example, bubble wrap, while an excellentprotector of objects, does not allow for breath-ing or ‘singing and dancing at night’. Thoseworking with native populations in good faithhave come to respect native understanding oftheir own objects and now provide for theappropriate life of the object. Some objectsneed to be fed, some need to be protected fromtheir enemies, some need to be isolated frommenstruating women. Collections are nolonger under the absolute province of the pro-fessional caregivers. Storage facilities thataccommodate the native understanding oftheir objects require new architectural designsthat allow for ceremony for some and isolationfrom the curious for others.

WHO OWNS THE COLLECTIONS?

This change in collections use and carealters the notion of the museum as owner of itscollections and opens the door to multiple def-initions of ownership. These new definitionshave far-reaching implications. If tribal com-munities can determine the use, presentation,and care of objects ‘owned’ by museums, canthe descendants of an artist? Can the victimsor perpetrators of a war event? In the recentSmithsonian National Museum of Air andSpace Enola Gay exhibition controversy, itwas the veterans who flew the plane and theirWorld War II associates who ultimately con-trolled the access to, presentation of, andinterpretation of the object. Ownership orlegal title to an object does not convey thesimple, more absolute meaning it did when Ibegan in the museum field.

The notion that if you buy something froma person who controlled it in the past, then itis yours to do with as you wish is clearly underredefinition in a number of fields. What con-stitutes clear title? Under what rules doesstolen material need to be returned? What isstolen, in any case? Do the Holocaust victims’paintings and the Elgin Marbles have any-thing in common? The issue is so complex and

varied that countries forge treaties to try todetermine which items of their patrimonyshould be returned. Similarly, museums incountries like New Zealand, Canada, andAustralia have developed accords that, insome cases, give dual ownership to collections.Museums and the native populations thenjointly control the presentation, care, andeven return of the objects, or museums giveownership to the native populations, who, inturn, allow the museum to hold the objects intrust. Ownership has developed a complexmeaning.

IF I OWN IT CAN I HAVE IT BACK, PLEASE?

Some of this blurring of ownership beganwith native people maintaining that someitems should not be in the hands of museumsregardless of their history. That this would beclaimed for human remains held in collectionswas easy to understand. Almost all cultures dosomething ceremonial and intentional withthe remains of their people, which, in almostall instances, does not include leaving bodiesfor study in boxes on shelves. So when nativepeople started to call for the return of theirancestors’ remains, there was an intuitiveunderstanding of the problem in most circles.This, however, did not make it any easier forthe paleontologists and forensic curatorswhose life work had centred on the access tothese bones, nor for the museum-goer whosefavorite museum memories had to do withshrunken heads, mummies, or prehistorichuman remains. The arguments that emanat-ed from both sides were understandable anddifficult to reconcile. It was a clear clash ofworld views and belief systems. To the curatorsit seemed that removal of human remainswithin museum collections would result in theunwarranted triumph of cultural tradition andemotionalism over scientific objectivity andthe advancement of knowledge.

As it turned out, the Native AmericanGrave Protection and Repatriation Act(NAGPRA)4 made clear that NativeAmerican tribes had rights to the return oftheir sacred material and to their ancestors’

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remains and associated grave goods, regardlessof the method by which museums hadacquired the material. However, the emptyingof collections into native communities, as pre-dicted by the most fearful, did not happen.Rather, museums and native communities,working together in good faith, moved into aneasier and more collegial relationship, asbetween equals. In most cases, the objectsreturned are carefully chosen and returnedwith due solemnity. Some tribes have chosento allow some forensic samples to be saved, orstudied prior to reburial, and some have rein-terred their ancestors in ways that could allowfor future study should the native communitywish it.

NAGPRA struck a new balance betweenthe world view of most museums and theirstaff (which endorsed a rational and scientificmodel of discourse and allowed for access to asmuch information as could be gathered) andthe spiritual interests of traditional nativepeoples. A variety of museum practices werebroadened, and visitors began to see the inter-pretation of exhibitions changed to includemultiple side-by-side explanations of the sameobjects. For example, Wolves, an exhibitioncreated by the Science Museum of Minnesota,presented scientific data, native stories, con-servation and hunting controversies, andphysiological information together in anevenhanded way. An argument for multipleinterpretations began to be heard in naturalhistory museums whose comfort level in thepast had not permitted the inclusion of spiri-tual information in formats other than anthro-pological myth.

HOW OLD IS AN OBJECT?

The scientific dating of artefacts used inreligious practices often holds little relevanceto the believers. When an object such as theShroud of Turin, for example, is carbon datedand shown to be insufficiently old, the prob-lem of writing its museum label becomes com-plex. An object held in Te Papa, the Museumof New Zealand, was returned to an iwi (tribe)that requested it, with all the solemnity and

ceremony appropriate. So too went records ofits age and material composition, at variancewith beliefs held by the Maori people. But if,as the Maori believe, spirit or mana migratesfrom one piece to its replacement (renderingthe successor indistinguishable from its moreancient equivalent), then what relevance isthe fact that dates or materials are at variance?The object’s cultural essence is as old as they say.

Similarly, when restoration of landmarksincludes the replacement of their elements (asis routinely the case in Japanese shrines), thelandmark is said to be dated from its inceptioneven though no material part of it remainsfrom that time. That does not upset us. Soeven something so seemingly rational and his-torical as dating is up for interpretation.

THE OBJECT IS OFF-LIMITS. IT IS NONE OFYOUR BUSINESS

Museums, even in their earliest incarna-tions as cabinets of curiosities, were availableto all interested eyes or at least to those all-owed to have access by the owners of the cab-inets. In fact, part and parcel of conquest andsubjugation was the access to interesting bitsof the subjugated. This assumption that every-thing was fair game held currency for a longtime. Though the notion of secret and sacredwas also understood (for example, no one butthe faithful could enter Mecca), this conceptdid not attach to museums nor to the holdingsthereof. If a museum owned it, the visitorscould see it if the curator/staff wished them to.

So it came as a surprise to some curators thatcontemporary native peoples began to makedemands on museums to return not only humanremains but material that was sacred and oncesecret. Accommodations negotiated betweenthe museums and the native people sometimesled to agreements to leave the material in themuseum but to limit viewing access. Thenotionthat one people, the museum curators, wouldvoluntarily limit their own and others’ access tomaterial owned by museums came initially as ashock to the museum system. But under theleadership of sympathetic museum and nativepeople and, further, under the force of NAG-


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PRA, museums began to understand that all materi-al was not to be made available to all interestedparties.

It was the beginning of the ‘It is none ofyour business’ concept of museum objects. Itheld that the people most intimately concerned with and related to the materialcould determine the access to that material. Inmany cultures sacred ceremonies are open toall, and the objects in use are available for

view in museum settings, but that too maychange. For example, in Jewish tradition,Torahs once desecrated are supposed to be dis-posed of by burial in a prescribed manner. Yetsome of these are available for view, mostnotably at the United State HolocaustMemorial Museum. There may come a timewhen such artefacts are petitioned to beremoved for burial even though the statementthey make is powerful.

Te Marae, Courtesy Te Papa, Museum of New Zealand.

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WHO SAYS ALL OBJECTS NEED TO BE PRESERVED

Ownership is not always an issue; some-times it is the preservation of the object itselfthat needs examination. Museums have felttheir most fundamental responsibility extend-ed to the preservation of the object, yet inreturning human remains to the earth, arte-facts are being intentionally destroyed. Thatwas difficult to reconcile for those trained inpreservation. Even more difficult was thebelief that not all things made by hand wereintended to be preserved; perhaps some shouldbe allowed to be destroyed. The Zuni war godspreserved by museums were returned to theZuni tribe when it was successfully proven thatthese could only have been stolen from gravesites. But even more difficult was the Zuni’sassertion that these objects were created toaccompany the dead, and that preservation ofthem was therefore anathema. The war godswere returned to the Zuni, who watched overthe gradual decay of these objects as theyreturned to the earth. In effect, the Zuni wereentitled to destroy the objects that the muse-ums had so carefully preserved.

The notion of preservation has, therefore,also been blurred. Museum personnel began towrestle with the notion that all people do nothold preservation of all objects as a universalgood. The Tibetan Lamas who create exquisitesand paintings only to destroy them laterwould certainly understand this.

THE OBJECT SPEAKS

I would be remiss if I did not also acknowl-edge the power of some objects to speakdirectly to the visitor, for example, in the sen-sual pleasure brought about by viewing uniqueoriginal objects of spectacular beauty. But thenotion that objects, per se, can communicatedirectly and meaningfully is under muchscrutiny. The academicians of material cul-ture, anthropology, history, and other fields areengaged in parsing the ways in which humansdecode objects in order to figure out whatinformation is intrinsic to the object itself,what requires associated knowledge gleaned

from another source, and what is embedded incultural tradition.

In some ways, it is because of this parallelcontemporary inquiry into the ‘vocabulary’ ofobjects that I can inquire into the object’schanging role in the definition of museums.

WHAT ARE MUSEUMS IF THEY ARE LESS OBJECT-BASED?

Museum staff intuitively understand thatmuseums are important — an understandingthat the public shares. However, especially forthe public, this understanding does not alwaysrevolve around the objects, though objectsare, like props, essential to most museums’purposes: making an implicit thesis visible andtangible. The nature of the thesis can rangefrom explanation of the past to advocacy for acontemporary viewpoint to indication of pos-sible future directions — in each case through amedium that presents a story in sensory form.

Museums will remain responsible for thecare of the objects they house and collect, butthe notion of responsibility will be, and hasalready been, broadened to include sharedownership, appropriate use, and, potentially,removal and return.

The foundational definition of museumswill, in the long run, I believe, arise not fromobjects, but from ‘place’ and ‘storytelling intangible sensory form’, where citizenry cancongregate in a spirit of cross-generationalinclusivity and inquiry into the memory of ourpast, a forum for our present, and aspirationsfor our future.

Coming back to definitions, the current defi-nition of museums used by the AccreditationProgram of the AAM encompasses all muse-ums and no longer separates them by cate-gories. Museums, in this definition, “... presentregularly scheduled programs and exhibits thatuse and interpret objects for the public accord-ing to accepted standards; have a formal andappropriate program of documentation, care,and use of collections and/or tangible objects ...”5

For the visitor, it is the experience ofsimultaneously being in a social and often celebratory space while focusing on a multi-


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sensory experience that makes a museumeffective. Virtual experiences in the privacy ofone’s home may be enlightening but, I think,are not part of the civilising experience thatmuseums provide. It is the very materiality ofthe building, the importance of the architec-ture, and the prominence that cities give tomuseum location that together make for theaugust place that museums hold. Congregantspace will, I believe, remain a necessary ingredient of the museum’s work.

The objects that today’s museums respon-sibly care for, protect, and cherish will remaincentral to their presentations. But the defini-tion of ‘objectness’ will be broad and allow forevery possible method of storymaking. Thesemore broadly defined objects range from hardevidence to mere props and ephemera. I hopeI have shown that objects are certainly notexclusively real nor even necessarily ‘tangible’(even though the AAM uses that word). For itis the story told, the message given, and theability of social groups to experience it togeth-er that provide the essential ingredients ofmaking a museum important.

Museums are social-service providers (notalways by doing direct social-service work,though many do that), because they are spacesbelonging to the citizenry at large, expoundingon ideas that inform and stir the population tocontemplate and occasionally to act.

Museums are not unique in their work.Rather, they share a common purpose with ahost of other institutions. We need museumsand their siblings because we need collectivehistory set in congregant locations in order toremain civilised. Societies build these institu-tions because they authenticate the socialcontract. They are collective evidence that wewere here.

ELAINE HEUMANN GURIAN

This paper first appeared in Daedalus,‘America’s Museums’ issue, Vol 128, No. 3,

Summer 1999, pp. 163-183. Reproduced by permission.

Endnotes

1 ‘For the purposes of the accreditation program of theAAM, a museum is defined as an organized and per-manent non-profit institution, essentially educationalor aesthetic in purpose, with professional staff, whichowns and utilizes tangible objects, cares for them,and exhibits them to the public on some regularschedule.’ American Association of Museums,Museum Accreditation: Professional Standards(Washington, D.C.: American Association ofMuseums, 1973), p. 8.

2 ‘ ... owns and utilizes tangible things animate andinanimate.’ Museum Accreditation: ProfessionalStandards, p. 9.

3 An art centre ‘utilizes borrowed art objects, cares forthem and maintains responsibility to their owners ...[its] primary function is to plan and carry out exhibi-tions.’ American Association of Museums, MuseumAccreditation: Professional Standards, p.12. A scienceand technology centre ‘. . . maintains and utilizesexhibits and/or objects for the presentation andinterpretation of scientific and technological knowl-edge.... These serve primarily as tools for communi-cating what is known of the subject matter. . . .’American Association of Museums, MuseumAccreditation: Professional Standards, p. 12. A plane-tarium’s ‘. . . principal function is to provide educa-tional information on astronomy and related sciencesthrough lectures and demonstrations.’ AmericanAssociation of Museums, Museum Accreditation ... ,p. 11.

4 Native American Grave Protection and RepatriationAct (25 U.S.C. 3002).

5 American Association of Museums, A HigherStandard: The Museum Accreditation Handbook(Washington, D.C.: American Association ofMuseums, 1997), p. 20.

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Introduction

One of the great embarrassments confronting the art world in the post-

colonial context is the recent history of theexclusion of much of the world’s ‘artistic’ production from the hallowed walls of the fineart galleries of the West (Sally Price’s ‘civilisedplaces’).1 One might ask: how was it that itwas excluded for so long and who is to blame

for keeping all this art out? However, ratherthan attributing blame, it is much more inter-esting to analyse the historical process of itsinclusion. The excluded objects became differ-ent after they were included not because theirvery inclusion magically changed their status,but because the fact of their inclusion reflectschanges in Western conceptions of what art is.The process of inclusion has involved three

seeing aboriginal art in the gallery

HOWARD MORPHY

Ramingining Artists, The Aboriginal Memorial 1987-88. Natural pigments on wood, heights from40 cm to 327 cm. Collection: National Gallery of Australia. Reproduced by kind permission.

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significant factors: the critique of the conceptof ‘primitive art’, an associated change in con-ceptions of what can be called ‘art’, and anincreased understanding of art as a commodi-ty. Those factors have operated in conjunctionwith global political and economic processeswhich in some contexts have empowered theagency of Indigenous artists. In this paper Iwill outline my theoretical argument and thenapply it briefly to the Australian context,reflecting on the history of the inclusion ofAboriginal art in galleries of fine art and thesignificance of that change in the discourseover Aboriginal art.

The anthropology of art seems at times tohave been squeezed between — and distortedby — two myths: the myth adhered to by theart market, and by some art curators, thatsomehow an anthropological approach toIndigenous art created its otherness and sepa-rated it from Western art works; and theanthropological myth that classifying works as‘art’ imposed a Western categorisation uponthem. These myths have a number of contin-uing echoes in practice: for example theemphasis in art galleries on displaying works asart, with the minimum of information lest itprovide a distraction to the viewer, contrast-ing with the greater concern with informationin ethnographic museums. This opposition hasbeen reinforced at times by disciplinary battlesover public spaces, by Indigenous and ethnicpolitics, and by the desire to be on the rightside of the colonial/post-colonial divide. Inpart it has been maintained by the desire ofthe disciplines involved to emphasise theirdistinctiveness in order to maintain their sep-arate identities and sources of funding. Thismotivation to maintain a structural divisionprovides a clue to the ahistorical nature of thedebate and the ever-present desire to layblame for an unacceptable history on a rival:the art gallery can feel threatened by theethnographic museum, the anthropologist bythe art historian.

The myth concerning the role of theanthropologists in the creation of otherness ofprimitive art has no historical basis. Indeed in

the Australian case anthropologists haveplayed a major role in the process of includingAboriginal art within the same generic cate-gory as other people’s art, and there is evi-dence that anthropologists have played a sim-ilar role elsewhere. This is not to argue that allanthropologists were participants in theprocess. For much of the twentieth centuryanthropology neglected art. Non-Western artand material culture were associated withethnographic museums and some museumcurators were indeed unsympathetic to thecategorisation of objects in their collections asart objects. I would argue, however, that theirposition was often motivated by a desire toincrease the understanding of the significanceto the producers of the objects in their collec-tions. Many museum curators and anthropolo-gists viewed the inclusion of non-Europeanobjects in the art category as a license for mis-interpretation, through the imposition of uni-versalistic aesthetic concepts and in the cre-ation of difference at the level of meaning andsignificance.

‘Primitive art’ was viewed by modernistcritics and connoisseurs as formally dynamic,expressive, challenging and incorporablewithin the Western canon; as to its meaning itexplored the primeval depths of human spiri-tuality and sexuality. It was this demeaningand ill-informed categorisation of objects as‘primitive art’ that alienated anthropologistsfrom the art connoisseurs and signified the gulfbetween their discourses.2 It is ironic, yetinevitable, that for many years anthropologistsand connoisseurs of Indigenous art foundthemselves on opposite sides of the art/artefactdivide. The recent challenge mounted to thecategory of primitive art by anthropologistsand art historians, such as Coote, Shelton,Errington, Philips, Marcus and Myers, Priceand Vogel3 has allowed museum anthropolo-gists to reincorporate the concept of art within their theoretical discourse and mayforeshadow a bridging of the divide betweenthe anthropological and art worlds.

Part of the process of incorporating artwithin the theoretical discourse of anthropol-

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HOWARD MORPHY Seeing Aboriginal Art in the Gallery

ogy is the development of definitions that arecross-cultural and that distance the conceptfrom its Western historical baggage. An exam-ple of such a definition is one I producedmyself: art objects are ‘objects having seman-tic and/or aesthetic properties that are used forpresentational or representational purposes’.4 Iam not concerned at this stage to defend thisparticular definition. Any cross-cultural definition of art, just as in the case of a cross-cultural definition of religion, magic, genderor kinship, is part of a discourse that shifts theterm in the direction of broad applicabilitywhile still maintaining connections to its previous place in academic discourse. Therecent history of the world biases epistemolo-gy towards Western definitions, but the chal-lenge of anthropology is in part to separateconcepts from a particular past, as for example,in anthropological definitions of religionwhich have moved away from Christianitywithout excluding it. Cross-cultural defini-tions are as much concerned with time as withspace: hence a cross-cultural conceptualisa-tion of art must allow the analyst to encompass the fact that conceptions of arthave changed in the last 400 years of Westernart practice and history as much as they differcross-culturally. As a consequence the sets ofobjects that get included under the rubric artchange continually over time.

However in relegating Western based definitions of art to their place in a typology ofpossible definitions, it would clearly be naïveto neglect the impact that Western cultures —and their definitions — have had on globalprocesses in recent centuries. The materialculture of Indigenous societies has beenchanged as they have been incorporated with-in wider global processes. However thoseprocesses of articulation and transformationare highly complex — both the incorporatedand the incorporators are changed thereby.5

Changing definitions of art are a microcosm ofthese larger processes. The increased under-standing of the role of the commoditisationand trade of material culture, including art,has been a partner to the critique of the ‘prim-

itive art’ paradigm in bringing art back intoanthropology. Graburn puts this succinctlywhen he writes:

We now realise that practically all theobjects in our ethnographic collectionswere acquired in politically complex multi-cultural colonial situations. Furthermorewe can state unequivocally that unless weinclude the socio-political context of pro-duction and exchange in our analyses wewill have failed in our interpretation andunderstanding.6

To this I would only add a corollary: thatmaterial culture — however it enters the dis-course of art — is an important source of evi-dence, for anthropologists, to better under-stand the social conditions and historicalinteractions of the time of their production.

Art or ethnography a false opposition

Aboriginal art is included today in the collections of every major art gallery and artmuseum in Australia, and is one of the world’smost visible art forms. Its inclusion within thecategory of fine art is no longer challenged inAustralia, though elsewhere in the world thiscan still be the subject of controversy.7 It iseasy to forget how recently this process ofinclusion happened. Aboriginal art was barelyrecognised as a significant art form until the1950s and it was not until the 1980s that itbegan to enter the collections of mostAustralian galleries, or gain widespread recog-nition as a significant dimension of Australianart.8 However it is also important not to over-state the lateness of its arrival on the worldstage. In 1964 Ronald Berndt was able towrite:

Australian Aboriginal art is becoming bet-ter known these days, or at least morewidely known, than ever before. Once itwas relegated to the ethnological sectionof a museum, and treated along with theartifacts and material culture of other non-literate peoples. Now it is not unusual to

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find such things as Aboriginal bark paint-ings taking place alongside European andother examples of aesthetic expression.And because they rub shoulders with allforms of art, irrespective of cultural origin,the inference is that they are being evalu-ated in more general terms: that there isnot only wider appreciation of Aboriginalendeavour in this respect, but that it is,almost imperceptibly, taking its place inthe world of art. ... Fifteen years ago few ofus would have envisaged this meteoric risein popularity, within Australia and over-seas.9

It is often said that Aboriginal art firstentered an Australian gallery of fine art in1959, with the acquisition by the Art Galleryof New South Wales (AGNSW) of majorworks from the Tiwi artists of Melville andBathurst Islands and the Yolngu artists ofYirrkala in north-east Arnhem Land. Whilethis is an oversimplified account, neverthelessthis gift remains a significant and perhaps, inhindsight, even transforming event. Theworks were acquired by Tony Tuckson, DeputyDirector at the AGNSW in association withStuart Scougall, an orthopaedic surgeon witha passion for Aboriginal art.10 One of the waysin which this event has been interpreted is asshattering the anthropological paradigm. Forexample the curator Terence Maloon puts thisposition clearly when he states of TonyTuckson: ‘In the role of Aboriginal art experthe had to take an opposing position to theanthropologists who to put it crudely, general-ly argued for the radical dissimilarity of allthings traditionally Aboriginal to all thingstraditionally European’.11 According toMaloon this enabled Tuckson to lay the foun-dation ‘for the earliest public collection to beacquired for aesthetic rather than ethnograph-ic reasons’.12 Maloon here echoes Tucksonwho wrote: ‘Appreciation of Aboriginal arthas widened immeasurably because the gener-al public and the artist have been given agreater opportunity to see it as art, not as partof an ethnological collection.’13 However in

phrasing it ‘crudely’, arguing in effect thatanthropologists have failed to recognise thecross-cultural nature of art, Maloon oversim-plifies the issues involved.

It could indeed of course be argued thatcertain Western definitions of art themselvesare inherently cross-cultural since they posituniversals in human aesthetic appreciation.Clearly such a view lies behind Tuckson’s posi-tion as summarised by Maloon.14 He arguesthat:

[Aboriginal] artists make their paintingswith pleasure and imagination and intu-ition. They put their feeling into whatthey do. They exercise skill and ingenuityin their use of materials; they are consider-ate of the ways their works are organisedand elaborated and are sensitive to theresulting aesthetic effect. Bark paintingsand other Aboriginal artefacts are notethnographic curiosities, but genuineworks of art. Furthermore, when non-Aboriginal people respond to bark paint-ings as art, they are prone to recognise ‘theunderlying spirit of the imagery’ (inTuckson’s revealing phrase).15

In countering Maloon’s/Tuckson’s16 thesisit is necessary to isolate two strands of argu-ment that are only loosely interconnected.The first is an essentialist view that associatesart with individual creativity, technical facili-ty, and aesthetic sensibility. The second ismasked by the phrase that bark paintings ‘arenot ethnographic curiosities’. I will addressthese issues by first stepping back in time tothe debate between Tuckson and RonaldBerndt that is the initial reference point ofMaloon’s argument. The debate occurs in thepages of Berndt’s edited book AustralianAboriginal Art which was published to accom-pany an exhibition of the same name curatedby Tuckson. A ‘reading between the lines’reveals that the book reflects a heatedexchange between the two over howAboriginal art should be exhibited, appreciat-ed, and understood.17

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Tuckson certainly believed that there issomething universal about the character of artobjects that makes it possible to evaluate themin isolation from their cultural and socialbackground. He wrote: [there is] “an underly-ing unifying quality in art that resides in avisual sense of balance and proportion, butalso an underlying spirit of their imagery ...[makes it possible] for us to appreciate visualart without any knowledge of its meaning andoriginal purpose”,18 (emphasis in the original).In a weak sense there is nothing unremarkableabout this position. It is undeniably the casethat ‘Western art appreciators’ can make aes-thetic judgments about works they knownothing about; the question remains who isincluded in the ‘us’, and are there differencesin the bases of ‘our’ evaluations? Berndt writ-ing in the same book acknowledged thatTuckson was at least partially right: that theappreciation of the aesthetics of Aboriginalart did attract the attention of the viewer:“however, we have attempted to go a little far-ther — to cross over the limits of our own cultural frontiers, and to see something of thebroader significance of Aboriginal art”.19 ButBerndt thought that Tuckson pushed the argu-ment just a little too far:

Tuckson’s contention is based on the uni-versality of all art, irrespective of prove-nance. It is important for us to know hereexactly what this means. The culturalbackground is not, here seriously takeninto account; the function or use of theobject or painting, even the identity of theartist, may be completely unknown. ... Itsdecorative qualities, its design, its treat-ment its overall appeal, are what matters;we like its lines its curves its sense of bold-ness, its balance and so forth. We are eval-uating it in our own idiom, within a climate of our own aesthetic traditions.20

While Berndt probably accurately assessesthe core of Tuckson’s position, Tuckson21

acknowledged the importance of what hereferred to as the ‘work of the ethnologist,

archaeologist, and anthropologist’ and in theexamples that he analyses does indeed useethnographic data.

In essence Berndt is arguing that althoughit is possible to appreciate works purely on thebasis of form, this appreciation is only partial,and is biased towards the values of the viewingculture. Following from this I would argue thatwhile people can thus obviously appreciateany work of art through the lens of their ownculture’s aesthetics, just as they can appreciatethe aesthetic properties of found objects, theymust realise that this is precisely what they aredoing. They must not be under the illusionthat they are experiencing the work as a mem-ber of the producing culture would. The fail-ure to provide the background knowledge nec-essary to interpret the object in relation to theproducers culture can then be challenged bothon moral grounds and on the grounds that itimpoverishes the interpretation.

The counter-argument to this challenge iscovered by Maloon’s statement that barkpaintings ‘are not ethnographic curiosities’.While he provides no explanation of what hemeans, his underlying premise is that, as worksof art, they should not be positioned solely oreven primarily as sources of information aboutthe way of life of another culture. From thisperspective art is a celebration of commonhumanity, and too much context distracts theviewer. Indeed he suggests that the ‘spirituali-ty’ that lies behind Aboriginal art is bestrevealed when it is viewed as art. This secondsuggestion poses the greatest challenge to ananthropological perspective on art, since itdeems irrelevant the particular cultural mean-ings associated with objects. The anthropolog-ical perspective would not deny that thesearch for human universals and for categoriesthat can be applied cross-culturally is perfect-ly compatible with a recognition of culturaldifference. But the recognition of cultural dif-ference requires that those categories be dis-tanced from particular Western culturalassumptions. Maloon’s/Tuckson’s universalsare in fact not universals at all but the expres-sion of values of a particular (and indeed today


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unrepresentative) European art world. Thedebates that raged over Rubin’s Primitivismexhibition generated similar debates in whichit was argued that key assumptions of the ide-ology underlying European modernism alien-ated the art from the societies that producedit. Bernhard Lüthi, for example, wrote:

Rubin’s love of modernism is based on thefact that it took Western art beyond themere level of illustration. When Rubinnotes that African, Oceanic or Indian arti-sans are not illustrating but conceptualis-ing, he evidently feels he is praising themfor their modernity. In doing so he alto-gether undercuts their reality system. Bydenying that tribal canons of representa-tion actually represent anything, he is ineffect denying that their view of the worldis real.22

Interestingly if we adopt a universalisticaesthetic perspective it is difficult to under-stand why the art world was so tardy in recog-nising the value of Aboriginal art — a valuewhich appears to lie in its formal appearanceunmediated by cultural knowledge. It seemsunjust to attribute to anthropologists a signifi-cant role in the failure to recognise its univer-sal attributes unless of course their attentionto meaning was too much of a distraction. Itwas Australian artists and curators who so sin-gularly failed to draw attention (to paraphraseMaloon) to the ‘[exercise of] skill and ingenu-ity in their use of materials; [or the fact that]they are considerate of the ways their worksare organised and elaborated and are sensitiveto the resulting aesthetic effect.’ IndeedMargaret Preston,23 one of the few Euro-Australian artists who showed an interest inAboriginal art until the 1950s, wrote at timesas if the simple asymmetric geometry that shefound so vital is almost the accidental productof a simple mind and faulty technique! Shelater modified her view. By way of contrastpraise that issued from the pen of the anthro-pologist Baldwin Spencer foreshadowedTuckson’s own (a fact that Tuckson clearlyacknowledges):

Today I found a native who, apparently,had nothing better to do than to sit quiet-ly in the camp evidently enjoying himself... he held [his brush] like a civilised artist... he did the line work, often very fine andregular, with much the same freedom andprecision as a Japanese or Chinese artistdoing his most beautiful wash-work withhis brush.24

However from Tuckson’s point of viewSpencer’s involvement with Aboriginal artmay have symbolised the very problem that hewas trying to address. While Spencer was ableto see the aesthetic dimension of Aboriginalart and responded to it in terms of universalcharacteristics of form, the paintings in hischarge remained in the National Museum,and absent from the walls of the National

Cover photograph of ˆThe Adelaide Review, No. 23, 986,illustrating the curator’s intention to exhibit the toas as art.

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Gallery of Victoria. The paintings were part ofa comprehensive ethnographic collectionwhich included material culture objects ingeneral, and thus the art was lost in theethnography. It was not seen by others as artbecause of where it was housed and how it wasexhibited.

The theory of a universal aesthetic is inter-twined with a theory of viewing that opposesthe art gallery to the museum. In this theoryworks of art should be allowed to speak forthemselves. Thus they need their own spacefor contemplation, and though their meaningand impact will be affected by their relation-ship to adjacent works, and to the hang as awhole, it is desirable that the act of viewingshould take place in space as uncluttered aspossible by supplementary information. Whilethe density of hangs varies, as does the amountof information provided, these broad princi-ples apply in art galleries around the world.Museums, on the other hand, are oftendefined in opposition to art galleries as placeswhere objects are contextualised by informa-tion, by accompanying interpretative materi-als, by dioramas, and by being seen in associa-tion with other objects. I think that it is desir-able to distinguish the Western concept of‘seeing things’ as art from the presumption of auniversalistic aesthetic and indeed to separate‘seeing things’ as isolated or decontextualisedobjects from ‘seeing things’ as art.

The real problem with Maloon’s/ Tuckson’sposition, apart from its circularity, is thatWestern viewers come to an art gallery alreadyladen with information and experience thatcan be applied to already familiar works ofEuropean art. This information will have beenacquired from seeing works in quite differentcontexts: not only the gallery walls, but also inpublications and films, as reproductions, andso on. It is a conceit of a particularly narrowband of Western art theory and practice thatthe appreciation and production of art hasnothing to do with knowledge of its particularart history. For Indigenous art to be seen onequal terms with Western art it requires morethan the right to an isolated space. The view-

er must also have some access to its historyand significance. Nigel Lendon has shownthat, in viewing eastern Arnhem Land barkpaintings, knowledge of the social and cultur-al background of the works enhances theviewer’s appreciation of them:

The interpretation of these paintings maybe compared to how the viewer mightunderstand Western religious or politicalart, or the world of allegory. In that casewe expect both the viewer and the artistto bring to the exchange a prior knowl-edge of the social and mythic space of thenarrative, or at least a recognition of thewider reality to which the image refers.25

Yet it is also undeniable that understand-ing the form of the paintings can provide deepinsights into culture and cognition.

Seeing a work as art is also quite compati-ble with seeing it as something else, and view-ing an object in isolation does not of itselfmake it into an art object. However placingobjects in isolation, as in an art gallery, or insets, as in ethnographic displays, has at timescreated the space for discourse over whethersomething is or is not an art object. Andbecause art has been so inextricably intercon-nected with the market, the dialogue has beenentangled both in an economic and in a cultural value-creation process. The SouthAustralian Museum’s exhibition in 1986 ‘Artand Land’, provides an excellent example ofthe discourse over Aboriginal art as art. It alsoillustrates just how challenging Tuckson’saction was, nearly twenty-five years earlier,when he installed Aboriginal art for the firsttime in the AGNSW. ‘Art and Land’ was anexhibition of toas from the Lake Eyre region ofCentral Australia. Toas were direction signsthat marked where people had gone but theywere also engaging and diverse minimalistsculptural forms. On this occasion anthropol-ogist Peter Sutton and historian Philip Jonesdecided to exhibit the objects not as ethnog-raphy but as art, by the simple expedient ofgiving them their own space in a well lit


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display with a minimum of accompanyinginformation. The protagonist who took themto task was an art historian, Donald Brooke,who argued that the way they were displayedin itself was a form of appropriation, since itcontradicted the intention of the producers.26

Although adopting a different and, on the surface, opposite position from Tuckson,Brooke too appears to have been bound by the categories of his own culture. The acceptanceof art works into the Western gallery contextis not simply a belated recognition of theiruniversal attributes. It can be a far more radical step that challenges the Western category itself and shifts the definition of art:exhibiting toas as art was part of that process.That is why the inclusion of non-European artcontinues to generate such opposition: itinsists on a different kind of art history thatthreatens to disrupt pre-existing values. At thesame time Jones and Sutton provided, throughthe accompanying book,27 and in the debatesthat surrounded the exhibition, more contex-tual information on toas than had been avail-able until then. As Luke Taylor pointed out inreviewing the debate the error is in the polarisation of views: in seeing works either asart or ethnography.

Our theory of art should not divorce theanalysis of aesthetic forms from a consider-ation of social context; the form of thework is a crystalisation of those values.Rather we should investigate the culturalsetting of the artist’s aesthetic experienceand how this relates to the form of theworks and also address the ways such artis-tic forms engender aesthetic responses inmembers of other cultures who view theworks.28

A short history of inclusion

If Aboriginal art had its advocates, such asBaldwin Spencer and Margaret Preston, earlyon, how was it that it remained neglected bythe Western art world for so long? There is nosimple explanation. Much Aboriginal art wasuncollectable either because it was secret or

because it existed in temporary form as bodypainting, sand sculpture, or ceremonial con-struction. While museum collections werecrowded with Australian weapons, Aboriginalcultures seemed to have produced few figura-tive carvings or masks, the items that hadgripped the imagination of sectors of theEuropean art world. However this perceptionmay have been reinforced by the evolutionist’seye. Aborigines as hunters and gatherers wereseen to represent the lower rungs of the evolu-tionary ladder. Fine art, thought to be a char-acteristic of high civilisation, was not antici-pated and hence remained unseen. It may alsobe the case that, in formal terms, muchAboriginal art fell outside the kinds of thingsincluded within the nineteenth centuryinventory of types of art. For example a toacomprising a hunk of pubic hair stuck into aball of white clay on the top of a pointed stickwas unlikely to have been acceptable as a workof art in Victorian-era Australia. MuchAboriginal art could however more easily findits place in the later slots created by conceptu-al art, minimalism, performance art and evenabstract expressionism. While almost by defi-nition ‘primitive art’ provided something of achallenge to existing categories, there werefew Aboriginal artworks that did not pose amajor challenge. Interestingly, in focusing onbark painting Maloon has chosen works thatare most analogous to a fairly standardWestern art form — that of pictorial represen-tation.

While anthropologists may have beencomplicit in the nineteenth century in con-tributing to the image of hunter-gatherer soci-ety as representative of a pre-art, primitivelevel of social organisation, they were also atthe forefront of the challenge to such a view.Indeed it was anthropologists in associationwith a few artists and curators who, beforeWorld War II, pushed for the recognition ofAboriginal art, and who, in the case ofLeonard Adam and Ronald and CatherineBerndt were the first to attribute works toknown individuals. And according toMaloon29 it was at an exhibition organised by

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the Berndts in David Jones art gallery inSydney in 1949 that Tuckson first encoun-tered Aboriginal art, and it was in a book edit-ed by Ronald Berndt that Tuckson wrote hismajor article on the aesthetics of Aboriginalart. Moreover it was not for nearly anotherthirty years that other galleries joined theAGNSW in adding Aboriginal art to theircollections.

Just as it began to gain limited recognitionin the 1950s Aboriginal art had to face anoth-er challenge, this time to its authenticity. Thiswas felt to be threatened with contaminationby contact and trade. While rejecting the cat-egorisation of Aboriginal works as primitive,many anthropologists were allied with theprimitive art market in assigning a primary

value to those works made before the influ-ence of European colonisation. In particularthere was a tendency to reject art produced forsale. As Ruth Philips writes of NativeAmerican art:

...the scholarly apparatus that inscribes theinauthenticity of commoditized wares [is] acentral problem in the way that art historyhas addressed Native art. The authenticityparadigm marginalises not only the objectsbut the makers, making of them a ghostlypresence in the modern world rather thanacknowledging their vigorous interven-tions in it.30

In the 1950s Australia was viewed as acountry whose Indigenous inhabitants hadbeen long colonised despite the fact that thefrontier had only been extended to much ofArnhem Land and parts of central Australia inthe decades either side of World War II.Almost from first contact bark paintings wereviewed with suspicion by ethnographic muse-ums and art galleries alike, and relatively fewwere collected by museums in Australia andoverseas during the 1950s and 1960s.31

Collections made by Kupka and Scougal werenotable exceptions. Indeed this attitude thatauthenticity is allied to isolation, that charac-terised the views of some anthropologists, givesa superficial weight to Maloon’s arguments.

Perhaps because Aboriginal art had neverbeen a major token in the ‘primitive art’ mar-ket there was less resistance to the inclusion ofart made for sale in the fine art category when,eventually, the breakthrough came. The prim-itive art market needed to limit its products inorder to keep the market price high; also itsvalues rested on the difference betweenEuropeans and the romanticised primitiveother who was tamed and, in a sense, devaluedthrough contact with civilisation. Betweenthe 1940s and 1980s Aboriginal art movedfrom the non-art to the art category almostwithout passing through the stage of beingconsidered as primitive art. Aboriginal artbecame art partly through the process of its

A Toa. Parakalani: To the plain which remindedKuruljuruna of his own, or his father’s (Parakarlana) baldhead. Kuruljurna camped here with his men for some time.White knob=plain. Top=hair representing Parakarlana orKuruljuruna. Diyari 215 mm. Collection: South AustralianMuseum.

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commercialisation. Because so many forms ofAboriginal art are the temporary product ofperformance — body paintings, sand sculp-tures and ground drawings, string construc-tions and fragile headdresses — or sacredobjects, in making works that could be soldAboriginal craftspeople clearly produced artefacts whose form was influenced by inter-

action with the market. The designs on barkpaintings were the same as those produced asbody paintings, coffin lids, bark huts and containers or hollow log coffins — but inbeing painted on bark they were being pro-duced for outside consumption. Similar considerations apply to the transfer of centralAustralian designs to acrylic paintings on can-vas, though in this case no-one could imaginethat they were a pre-European product.Anthropologists who worked on art such asBerndt and Mountford, in making foundation-al collections of art in ‘new media’, were oftenwithout realising it integral to these processesof incorporating Aboriginal cultural produc-tion within the new market economy.However in doing so they were only reflectingthe agency of Aboriginal people themselves,who used art as a means of persuading outsiders of the value of their way of life aswell as a means of earning a living in the post-colonial context.

Aboriginal art has also been fortunate inthat at the time when interest in it was devel-oping, the categorisation of Indigenous art asprimitive art was under challenge. The 1970sand 1980s have seen a breakdown of categories within Western art in general as thehegemony of the Western canon has comeincreasingly under challenge, from non-Western and Indigenous arts. This challengehas led implicitly to a shift in the definition ofwhat art is and in who defines what is art.

‘Contemporary Aboriginal art’ emerged asa category in Australia during the 1970s and1980s.32 Initially it included paintings whichchallenged the ‘primitive art’ category becauseof the dynamic nature of the art and the con-temporaneity of the artists. Previously theonly slot allocated to such work was the deval-ued category of ‘tourist art’. The new categoryincluded art from all regions of Australia, withthe proviso that the works were in continuitywith Aboriginal traditions, and thus part of atrajectory that stretched backwards to the precolonial era. It included the art of ArnhemLand — an art whose genesis was independentof European traditions. The category came

Shield from Murray River, Victoria. Collection: PittRivers Museum, Oxford. Photo: Malcom Osman.

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into being partly because Aborigines assertedthe contemporary relevance of their art in theAustralian context. It was their contemporaryart, it influenced white Australian art and inturn was influenced by the post-colonial context of its production. Aboriginal art, too,represented dynamic and diverse traditions,and for those who were prepared to see, it wasan avowedly political art. The category alsocame to include the acrylic art of the Westernand Central Desert.

The ‘Aboriginal Australia’ exhibition of1981 which travelled to the State art galleriesof Victoria, Western Australia, andQueensland was a major expression of thisnew and more inclusive category. In additionto bark paintings, Western Desert acrylicpaintings and sculptures from Cape YorkPeninsula and Melville and Bathurst Islands,it included decorated artefacts from all overAustralia. It also found a place for string bagsand basketwork which challenged the accept-ed division between art and craft. Most inno-vatively, perhaps, it included watercolours byNamatjira, paintings by William Barak, anddrawings by Tommy McRae.

The ‘Dreamings’ exhibition that touredthe USA in 1988-89 before returning to itshome gallery in Adelaide was in direct conti-nuity with ‘Aboriginal Australia’, although itsagenda, to show the works as contemporaryAboriginal art, was even more explicitly articulated. ‘Dreamings’ emphasised the commercial context of much of the art anddrew attention, especially in the catalogue, toIndigenous perceptions of the art as opposedto Western aesthetics. It also included a fargreater proportion of works from the WesternDesert than did ‘Aboriginal Australia’, reflect-ing the degree to which that art was beginningto attract global interest. The exhibition ofWestern Desert acrylics and bark paintingsfrom Arnhem Land together as equal membersof the contemporary Aboriginal art categorywas potentially very challenging to the conceptualisation of the avant-garde. WesternDesert paintings were a newly developed artform employing European materials, and they

apparently changed rapidly over time; thesepaintings thus became unproblematicallyavant-garde. Bark paintings, which used mate-rials and techniques that were independent ofEuropean art, had been accepted into the oldcategory of primitive art. Yet as art objectsthey and Western Desert acrylics occupied analmost identical position, and both were relat-ed directly to Indigenous iconographic traditions. Such Aboriginal art seemed to besimultaneously ‘primitive’ and ‘avant-garde’.As Jean-Hubert Martin pointed out, “If [con-temporary] Aboriginal artists do produce workof recognized value, then the categories reigning in our institutions are in dire need ofrevision.”33

The development of ‘contemporaryAboriginal art’ as a category rescued someIndigenous art from being marginalised ordevalued but it sowed the seeds for a differentkind of marginalisation. In the 1970s, whenthe art of the north and the centre was begin-ning to achieve recognition, the Aboriginalart of south-east Australia was still unrecog-nised. There the illusion that Aboriginal artbelonged to a past that was separated fromcontemporary life was easy to maintain. It wassimply a facet of the continuing invisibility ofAboriginal people from the south in the con-sciousness of most white Australians until themiddle of the twentieth century. Aboriginalart had gone just as Aboriginal people were‘fading away’. The near-prehistoric art of theearly to mid-nineteenth century gained someacceptance, but the art of the twentieth cen-tury and contemporary Koori art remainedunrecognised, hidden as part of what W. E. H.Stanner called ‘the great Australian silence’.

However, Aborigines in south-eastAustralia had continued to produce art andcraftworks and a few, such as Ronald Bull,gained a limited reputation as artists. But theywere in a difficult position, like Namatjiraonly more so. They found themselves posi-tioned either as producers of tourist art, whichwas negatively viewed as a contaminated formof primitive art, or if their art was influencedby, or indistinguishable in formal terms from,


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contemporary Western art then what theyproduced was taken as a sign of their assimila-tion. ‘Aboriginal Australia’ pushed at theboundaries of these categories by includingworks by William Barak and Tommy McRae.But more significantly the emergence of thecategory ‘contemporary Aboriginal art’ andthe positioning of Arnhem Land bark paint-ings and Western Desert acrylics within itbrought the contradictions of exclusion andMartin’s ‘need for revision’ closer to home.This was implicitly recognised in the‘Dreamings’ exhibition. Even so, while thecatalogue included reference to the contem-porary art of southeast Australia the exhibi-tion itself did not.

In the 1970s and 1980s many Aboriginalpeople in south-east Australia began to devel-op as artists while simultaneously and confi-dently asserting their Aboriginality. Most weretrained not in the remote bush or desertregions of central Australia but, like many oftheir white contemporaries, in the art worldsand art schools of urban Australia. What wastheir relationship to other Aboriginal artists?What was the relationship betweenAboriginal art and other contemporaryAustralian art? The paradoxes multipliedwhen non-Aboriginal contemporary artistssuch as Tim Johnson and Imants Tillers bor-rowed Aboriginal motifs for their own work.Tim Johnson even participated withAboriginal artists in the co-production ofpaintings. Was a piece of Western Desert artcontemporary Australian art when TimJohnson painted some of the dots? Was it‘Australian’ as opposed to ‘Aboriginal’ even ifit was formally indistinguishable from otherWestern Desert pieces? If it was classifiable asavant-garde could it no longer be Aboriginalart? And if it was avant-garde then weren’tAboriginal artists working in other avant-garde styles equally producers of Aboriginalart?

The apparent paradoxes arise becauseWestern art history creates pigeonholes. Ittends to allocate individual works to singleart-historical spaces, failing to recognise the

fuzzy nature of the boundaries between stylis-tic categories and the multiplicity of influ-ences on a particular artist’s work. The solu-tion forced by the nature of contemporaryAboriginal art was the recognition both of itsplural nature and of the consequences of thisplurality for Western art-historical theory.

Conclusion

The current moment provides a good opportu-nity for a rapprochement between art histori-cal and anthropological approaches to art.The challenge to the old presuppositions ofthe Western art world, including the anthro-pological critique of the concept of primitiveart, has created art worlds that are far morecomplex and heterogeneous than their prede-cessors, less subordinate to the developmentalsequences of European-American art. Oncenon-Western arts were only thought to have ahistory at the moment of their discovery bythe West. Such a view is no longer tenable.Art history must, as a result, be reinvented toreflect the diversity of world arts and makesense of the apparent chaos. This is not as rad-ical a proposal as it may seem. Indeed contem-porary art curation has long taken for grantedthe existence of knowledge of the history andsignificance of objects included in exhibitions,without which it is impossible to make senseof changes in the artistic record. Many of thevariations in the Western canon can only beexplained when related to the wider contextof the objects’ production: why the works ofthe artists of the voyages of discovery paidsuch attention to details of geology, environ-ment and climate, what motivated the impres-sionists to develop a new paradigm, the role ofcolour theory in Seurat’s pointillism, thecubist rejection of representational art, and soon. The anthropological endeavour of under-standing difference as well as similarity is onethat gives agency to the artists who made theworks and allows their intentions and motiva-tions to be reflected in the histories of theirworks that are produced. An anthropological-ly informed art history is needed to providethe historical, art historical, social and cultur-

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al information, not only for those artistic traditions where background cannot be takenfor granted but, it could be argued, for theWestern art tradition as well.

HOWARD MORPHY

This is based on a paper given at the 2000 confer-ence of the American Anthropological Association inSan Francisco, at a session convened by RussellSharman on ‘The state of the anthropology of art’. Iwould like to thank the discussant Nelson Graburn forhis comments. I’d like to thank Margaret Tuckson whoput me in touch with Richard McMillan, whose UNSWthesis proved invaluable. Nigel Lendon provided stimu-lating comments on the paper and corrected some of theerrors. Christiane Keller provided some useful refer-ences and Katie Russell provided some valuable back-ground research. Frances Morphy helped develop thestructure of the argument and improved the clarity ofexpression.

Endnotes

1 Sally Price, Primitive Art in Civilized Places (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1989).

2 James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988).The chapter titled ‘Histories of the Tribal and theModern’ provides an interesting discussion of theseissues though his eventual collapse of the oppositionbetween museum anthropologists and primitive artaesthetes into an ‘anthropological/aesthetic objectsystem’ oversimplifies the dynamics of the discourseand diverts attention away from the issues that divid-ed them.

3 Jeremy Coote and Anthony Shelton (eds),Anthropology, Art and Aesthetics, Oxford Studies inthe Anthropology of Cultural Forms (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1992); Shelly Errington, ‘WhatBecame of the Authentic Primitive Art’, in CulturalAnthropology 9(2) (1994), pp. 201-226; Ruth Philips,Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native American Artfrom the Northeast, 1700-1900 (Seattle: University ofWashington Press, 1998); George Marcus and FredMyers (eds), The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art andAnthropology (Berkley: University of California Press,1995); Sally Price, Primitive Art in Civilized Places(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); SusanVogel (ed), Art/Artifact (New York: Centre forAfrican Art, 1988).

4 Howard Morphy, ‘The Anthropology of Art’ in TimIngold (ed), Companion Encyclopedia to Anthropology(London: Routledge, 1994), p. 655.

5 For a relevant discussion see Nicholas Thomas,Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture andColonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge: HarvardUniversity Press, 1991).

6 Nelson Graburn, ‘Epilogue: Ethnic and Tourist ArtsRevisited’, in Ruth Philips and Christopher Steiner(eds), Unpacking Culture: Art and Commodity inColonial and Postcolonial Worlds (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1999), p. 345.

7 In 1997 for example there was controversy over theexclusion of some categories of Aboriginal art fromthe art fair in Basel. David Throsby, ‘But is it Art?’,in Art Monthly Australia (Nov. 1997), p. 32, wrote tothe chairman of the committee saying that letting inrecognisably Indigenous artworks from Australiawould open up the floodgates to primitive, tribal, andfolk art from around the world. Interestingly TraceyMoffatt’s work was exhibited with great success atthe same fair. The following year an even more heat-ed debate broke out over the exclusion of a numberof Arnhem Land artists from the Cologne art fair, seeJohn McDonald, ‘Black Ban: All They Want is a FairGo’, in Sydney Morning Herald, 29 September 1998.

8 Australian Perspecta (Sydney: Art Gallery of NewSouth Wales, 1981).

9 Ronald M. Berndt, ‘Epilogue’ in Ronald. M. Berndt(ed), in Australian Aboriginal Art (Sydney: UreSmith, 1964), p. 1.

10 Richard McMillan, ‘The Drawings of TonyTuckson’, (unpublished M. Arts Theory Thesis,UNSW, 1997), documents the process of the acquisi-tion of the collection and shows it as the result of acomplex process of negotiation between the Gallerystaff, in particular Tuckson and the director HalMissingham, the Board of Trustees and the donor orsponsor Scougall himself. As Nigel Lendon pointedout to me the Indigenous works were still includedunder the rubric ‘Primitive art’ at the AGNSW untilthe 1980s.

11 Terrence Maloon, Tuckson and Tradition, PaintingForever: Tony Tuckson (Canberra: National Gallery ofAustralia, 2000), p. 14.

12 Maloon, Tuckson and Tradition, Painting Forever,p. 14.

13 Anthony Tuckson, ‘Aboriginal Art and the West-ern World’, in Ronald M. Berndt (ed), AustralianAboriginal Art (Sydney: Ure Smith 1964), p. 63.


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14 It is precisely the particular form of such universalsthat explains why Bourdieu, in Pierre Bourdieu,Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), is sodetermined not to engage in aesthetic discoursewhen considering judgements of distinction, and whyGell, in Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: andAnthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1998), argues so passionately for an aesthetic rela-tivism that eliminates the aesthetic altogether as across-cultural category.

15 Anthony Tuckson, ‘Aboriginal Art and theWestern World’, p. 63; Terrence Maloon, Tucksonand Tradition, Painting Forever: Tony Tuckson, p. 14.

16 I use this formulation Maloon/Tuckson in placeswhere it is difficult to know whether the views repre-sented are ones shared by Maloon and Tuckson orare simply Maloon reporting his understanding ofTuckson’s position. The confusion may be a sign ofjust how well Maloon represents Tuckson’s arguments.

17 Indeed Richard McMillan’s 1997 UNSW thesisThe Drawings of Tony Tuckson, reveals a heatedexchange between Tuckson and Ronald andCatherine Berndt over publication of Tuckson’schapter in the book. Reading further between thelines one can’t help thinking that the somewhatinterventionist editorial style adopted by the Berndt’shelped to polarise the debate and make the protago-nists’ views seem more opposed than in fact theywere.

18 Anthony Tuckson, ‘Aboriginal Art and theWestern World’, p. 63

19 Berndt, ‘Epilogue’, pp. 71-2.

20 Berndt, ‘Epilogue’, p. 71; my emphasis.

21 Tuckson, ‘Aboriginal Art and the Western World’,p. 68.

22 ‘The Marginalisation of (Contemporary) Non-European\Non-American Art (as reflected in theway we view it)’, in Bernhard Lüthi (ed) Aratjara:The Art of the First Australians, (Dusseldorf:Kunstammlung Norrhein-Westfalen, 1993) p. 23; Inwriting a history of this particular period one is con-scious of the fact that one is dealing with a codedlanguage in which the use of words like conceptual isfar removed from their ordinary language meaningand position the author in a particular way. Tucksonstresses that non-Western art is conceptual ratherthan representational, and clarifies his view with aquote from Golding, ‘The Negro sculptor tends todepict what he knows about his subject rather thanwhat he sees’. Without agreeing with the presupposi-tions about Negro art, this perspective should on thesurface be compatible with an anthropological inves-

tigation. The difference may be that the anthropolo-gist wishes to establish first what the artist knowsabout the subject of his painting by placing art with-in a context of cultural knowledge and establish therelationship between knowing and seeing, whereas aparticular modernist world view sees that knowledgeas being communicated directly through the artitself.

23 Margaret Preston, ‘The Application of AboriginalDesign’, in Art and Austalia, 31 March 1930, pp. 44-58.

24 W. Baldwin Spencer, Wanderings in Wild Australia, 2volumes (London: Macmillan, 1928), p. 793.

25 Nigel Lendon, ‘Visual Evidence: Space, Place andInnovation in Bark Paintings of Central ArnhemLand’, in Colonising the Country, special issue ofAustralian Journal of Art,12, 1995, p. 60.

26 This exhibition provides a well documented con-tested arena for most of the issues discussed here.Luke Taylor’s ‘The Aesthetics of Toas: A Cross-Cultural Connundrum’, in Canberra Anthropology11(1), 1988, provides an excellent discussion of themain theoretical issues concerns and Peter Sutton,‘Unintended Consequences’, in The Interior, 1 (2),1991, pp. 24-29, provides an extended summary ofthe debate from his perspective.

27 Philip Jones and Peter Sutton, Art and land:Aboriginal Sculptures from the Lake Eyre Region(Adelaide: South Australian Museum, 1986).

28 Luke Taylor, ‘The Aesthetics of Toas: A Cross-Cultural Connundrum’, in Canberra Anthropology11(1), 1988, p. 96.

29 Maloon, Tuckson and Tradition, Painting Forever,p. 14.

30 Ruth Philips, Trading Identities: The Souvenir inNative American Art from the Northeast, 1700-1900(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998), p. x.

31 see Howard Morphy, ‘Gaps in Collections andSpaces for Exhibition—Reflections on theAcceptance of Aboriginal Art in Europe andAustralia’, Aboriginal Art in the Public Eye, ArtMonthly Australia Supplement (1992), pp. 10-12.

32 The analysis which follows is drawn from HowardMorphy, Aboriginal Art (London: Phaidon Press,1998).

33 Jean-Hubert Martin, ‘A Delayed Communication’,in Bernhard Lüthi (ed), Aratjara:The Art of the FirstAustralians (Dusseldorf: Kunstammlung Norrhein-Westfalen, 1993), p. 33.

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The closest that Margaret Thatcher comesto an admission of failure in her volumi-

nous political memoirs concerns her efforts topromote history as a subject for school children. Ironically, however, one of theacknowledged legacies of the Thatcher years,a by-product of the transformation of theBritish economy from manufacturing to services under her stewardship, is the prolifer-ation of museums and historical precincts thatpepper the countryside from New Lanark toWigan Pier. Although Mrs Thatcher would beunlikely to approve of the subject matter, forthose interested in ‘history from below’ thereare many lessons to be learned from recentefforts at the conservation of the people’s history in the heartland of Britain’s nineteenth-century industrial landscape.Manchester and Salford offer a vision of themuseum of the future that is worthy of emulation.

During the morning of Monday, 16 August1819, large numbers of people began to gatherin St Peter’s Fields, Manchester, for a publicmeeting that was advertised to commencelater that day. The purpose of the meeting wasto demand extensive reform of the Britishpolitical system, in particular universal manhood suffrage and annual parliaments,and many of the crowd had come to hear theseprinciples expounded by the leading radicalreformer of the day, ‘Orator’ Henry Hunt. Bynoon a crowd estimated at about 60,000 hadassembled. As each new group of protestersarrived the cheering was renewed for the sen-timents displayed on their many banners andflags: ‘Liberty and Fraternity’, ‘Hunt andLiberty’, ‘Universal Suffrage and AnnualParliaments’, and ‘No Corn Laws’, the latter a

reference to the tax that institutionalised highbread prices to buttress the wealth and powerof the land-owning aristocracy. For all thatthe cause was a serious one the numerouscolourful banners, bands of music, and thepresence of many families gave the occasion inprospect an unmistakably festive air.1

Overlooking St Peter’s Fields from thewindow of a hotel, however, a group of nerv-ous magistrates viewed the scene as anythingbut festive. Alarmed by reports of secret radi-cal ‘drilling’ in the surrounding hills, and tormented by the largely apocryphal tales ofspies and agent provocateurs, the magistratesdecided that the scene ‘bore the appearance ofinsurrection’ and determined to arrest Hunt.In the surrounding streets contingents ofYeomanry Cavalry, Hussars and SpecialConstables lay in wait to assist in the execu-tion of the warrant.

Hunt arrived to tremendous cheering atabout 1.00 pm and began to address the mas-sive crowd from the hustings that had beenerected. As he began to speak the DeputyConstable of Manchester was ordered to servehis warrant and he, in turn, requested militarysupport before setting foot among the protest-ers. The first force to arrive were theYeomanry Cavalry — part-time soldiers,including many who had no cause to love theradicals — who charged into the peacefulcrowd near the hustings with sabres drawn.Hunt was arrested, his famous ‘White Hat’ ofLiberty smashed by the truncheon of a SpecialConstable. In the melee fifteen people losttheir lives — the first victims were a womanand her child — and more than four hundredwere injured, many seriously.2

CONSERVING THE PEOPLE’S HISTORYLessons from Manchester and Salford

PAUL A. PICKERING

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Instantaneously British public opinion waspolarised by the massacre of ‘Peterloo’ — aterm coined by a radical journalist that clever-ly combined the location with the fact thatthe meeting had taken place on the fourthanniversary of the battle of Waterloo. Whilethe Tory-dominated Parliament passed a voteof thanks to the cavalry for their ‘patrioticconduct’, outraged citizens from all over thenation protested at the arbitrary attack onmembers of a peaceful crowd. No event inrecent or remote history was more importantfor subsequent generations of radicals andreformers. For supporters of the largest work-ing-class movement of the 1840s, theChartists, this was evident in innumerableways, from the monument erected by subscrip-tion in Manchester in commemoration of‘Orator’ Hunt, to the scores of ballads andpoems that celebrated courage and perpetuat-ed a sense of indignation.

“How valiantly we met that crew, Ofinfants, men and women too, Upon the plainof Peter-loo”, ran the opening stanzas of a pop-ular satire composed by the fictional Sir HugoBurlo Furioso in 1819, “And gloriously didhack and hew, The d[amne]d reforminggang...” For many years after the inns andpubs of working-class Ancoats reputedlyechoed to the strains of “With Henry HuntWe’ll Go, We’ll Go” on a Saturday night.3

The Peterloo Massacre is better rememberedfor its association with the movement formanhood suffrage, but leading middle-classreformers saw it differently. The ManchesterFree Trade Hall, home of the archetypal mid-dle-class pressure group of the 1840s, theAnti-Corn Law League, was erected, in part,as a “cenotaph raised on the shades of the vic-tims” of Peterloo.4

Peterloo did not pass beyond the realm ofliving memory until late in the century. Evenin the 1880s there were a dozen or so ‘PeterlooVeterans’ in the village of Failsworth, a fewmiles from central Manchester, who met intheir local Liberal Club surrounded by thebanners they had carried on that tragic daymore than sixty years before.5 By this time,

however, there were already signs thatPeterloo’s talismanic place in British historywas beginning to wane. In 1888 on the sitewhere, in 1842, 30,000 Chartists had wit-nessed the laying of the foundation stone, amere handful of protesters watched the HuntMonument being demolished to be sold-off asscrap building material.6 By the end of thetwentieth century the transformation wascomplete. Despite Mrs Thatcher’s support forthe study of history in schools, albeit aGradgrind-like preference for ‘facts’ ratherthan ‘interpretation’,7 the level of historicalknowledge and understanding in the generalcommunity is low. A recent survey completedduring the sixtieth anniversary of the Battle ofBritain, for example, showed that 10 per centof Britons aged eighteen to twenty-fourbelieved that it had occurred in 1815 and afurther 11 per cent thought it had occurred in1066. Not surprisingly ‘Peterloo’ is now a for-gotten episode.8

No student of nineteenth-century Britishpolitics is surprised that Peterloo occurred inManchester, a city characterised by abrasiveclass values and the centre of what manyworking people regarded as the ‘White slavery’of the burgeoning factory system. Manchesterwas ‘the workshop of the world’ that amazed orterrified contemporaries with Thomas Carlyleperforming the typically Promethean role ofupholding both extremes in his famous refer-ences to a “Sooty Manchester” which was“every whit as wonderful, as fearful, unimagin-able, as the oldest Salem or Prophetic City”.9

For most of the first half of the nineteenthcentury at least, the city seethed with discon-tent against a backdrop of poverty, squalor andenvironmental spoliation that was the scandalof the age. It is thus appropriate that a sus-tained attempt to rescue the memory ofPeterloo, and the history of working people ingeneral, is taking place in Manchester andSalford.

In August 2000 the Pump House People’sHistory Museum in Manchester displayed itslatest acquisition: a truncheon snatched fromthe hands of a Special Constable on St Peter’s

53

PAUL A. PICKERING Conserving the People’s History

Fields 181 years earlier.10 Passed down fromgeneration to generation in a shoe box bymembers of a local family, the truncheon nowtakes its place alongside other artefacts fromthe massacre that are displayed in one of morethan twenty galleries in the museum. Locatedon the banks of the river Irwell in the heart-land of what was industrial Manchester themuseum is funded principally by theAssociation of Greater ManchesterAuthorities and Manchester City Council.

As the only British museum dedicatedexclusively to working class history the PumpHouse combines exhibitions of seminalepisodes in political history — from Peterlooand the campaign for a free press to theGeneral Strike of 1926 and the creation of thewelfare state by the first majority LabourGovernment after 1945 — with ephemera

relating to popular leisure from the Beatles toAssociation Football. A co-op shop is recreat-ed as is the kitchen of leading Manchester suf-fragette, Hannah Mitchell. The devotion ofconsiderable space to popular culture, in particular football, is appropriate: a reminderthat modern Manchester is best known, not asthe centre of a global cotton industry (nowlong since ended) or for its ‘School’ of economists (also in decline) but for its belovedRed-Devils.

As Frank Bongiorno has pointed out, thetone of museum’s galleries is sympathetic butnever Manichean.11 Given that the museum islocated in the converted Pumping Stationthat provided Manchester with hydraulicpower until the 1970s, a visitor might expectto find more industrial history (machinery)although this is the principal fare of the near-

Dreadful Scene at Manchester, 1819. Published by J.Evans and Sons, 42 Long LaneWest, Smithfield, 27th August,1819. Note the women on the platform in front of a banner of the Female [Political] Union of Royston.

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by Museum of Science and Industry. Thespace that is given to Manchester’s industrialheritage makes no pretence at any form of thatscientific detachment that characterised somecontemporary comment on the condition ofnineteenth-century Manchester (and stillcharacterises the displays at the museum’smore grandiose and conventional neigh-bour).12 The Pump House offers engaged his-tory; an evocation of the past that might havemeant something to a leading local Chartist,James Leach, who described “the bitterestcurse” as the “hissing, whizzing, jumping,thumping, rattling, steaming and stinking fac-tory”.13 The Pump House also unashamedlypursues an educative mission, the success ofwhich is exemplified by the acquisition of the

Peterloo truncheon. The local woman inwhose family it had remained knew vaguelyfrom her parents — as they had learned it fromtheirs — that it was associated with an impor-tant event in Manchester history, but it wasonly during a visit to the Museum that it wasidentified as a prized relic of Peterloo.14

The Pump House is part of a larger institu-tion, the National Museum of Labour History,that was relocated to Manchester fromLondon in the late 1980s. The main ArchiveCentre is located in Princess Street in a build-ing that, having been, successively, aMechanics’ Institute and home of the inaugu-ral meeting of the Trades’ Union Congress in1868, is most appropriate for its present pur-poses. As the principal national centre for the

A Peterloo Medal.Reproduced in F.A. Burton,The Story of Peterloo,Manchester, 1919.

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study of material relating to the history ofworking people it boasts an impressive collec-tion: from the papers of the Chartists, HenryVincent and Bronterre O’Brien and leadingLabour figures such as Keir Hardie and RobertBlatchford, to an impressive array of organisa-tional records from the Industrial Women’sOrganisations (1913-1971) and the SocialistSunday School Movement (1907-1971) to theNational Union of Railwaymen Reports andProceedings (1894-1972) and the Central andPolitical Committee Minutes of the BritishCommunist Party (1930-1991). The collec-tion is growing apace with regular acquisitionsof the papers of recently retired or deceasedstalwarts of the Labour movement such asMichael Foot, John Smith and the irascibleleft-wing Liverpool MP, Eric Heffer.15 Thecontrast to the recent difficulties faced by the comparable Noel Butlin Archives at the Australian National University is self-evident.16

What has put the National Museum ofLabour History on the cutting edge in thestudy of history from below has been the col-lection, documentation and conservation ofpolitical and trade banners (some of its collec-tion are displayed at the Pump House). Fewhistorians have given much attention to theinscriptions and pictorial representations onthe banners and flags carried in demonstra-tions and parades,17 but their importance inpopular politics was evident to radicals andthe authorities alike. It was no accident thatPeterloo commenced with the command tothe Yeomanry Cavalry to ‘have at their banners’, and, as one of the victims, SamuelBamford, vividly recalled, the contest forthem continued throughout that fateful day in1819.18 Those Peterloo banners that survivedwere regarded as sacred relics and often tookpride of place among the banners and flagscarried by the local Chartists.19

Since its move to Manchester the Museumhas applied professional conservation stan-dards to banners and has now built a collec-tion of 360, the largest of its kind. In 1997 theMuseum applied to the British Heritage

Lottery Fund to support these efforts in theconservation of the nation’s banners — estimated at £10,000 for an average banner —and received funding for a major national survey as a preliminary step. During 1998-9the National Museum’s banner survey identi-fied over 2500 banners extant (not includingmilitary insignia) which represents an unparalleled resource for the study of people’shistory.20

The efforts of the National Museum andthe Pump House also have a valuable adjunctacross the Irwell in Salford. Located in a lateVictorian building, Jubilee House, oppositethe Salford Art Gallery and Museum, theWorking Class Movement Library had begunin 1961 as a private collection of books, pam-phlets and labour movement ephemera by twolocal labour movement activists, Ruth andEddie Frow, and was originally housed in theirhome in Stretford.21 By the early 1980s the‘Library’, at that time containing more than10,000 volumes, had outgrown a private resi-dence and the City of Salford offered to houseit in more suitable premises that would betterfacilitate its use by scholars and the generalpublic. Since its relocation the collection hasgrown to 25,000 books and 15,000 pamphlets,as well as an impressive range of badges,posters, photographs and archival materialunder the care of a professional librarian. Oneof the most prized artefacts in the collection isan un-presented fragment of one of the ‘mon-ster’ petitions demanding the implementationof the People’s Charter during the 1840s.22

Taken together these three premises, locat-ed within a few short kilometres of each other,possess a critical mass that has madeManchester and Salford a Mecca for the studyof the people’s history.23 Manchester, wroteA.J.P. Taylor in 1957, is “irredeemably ugly”.24

At the time Taylor’s comment must haveseemed like an epitaph: after more than a cen-tury of conjecture the story of Manchester hadreached an unhappy conclusion, a microcosmof Britain’s decline as an industrial nation anda world power. Nevertheless Manchester survived the ‘British disease’ and emerged

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from the harsh reality of Thatcherism withrenewed prosperity as a centre of finance andcommerce. It would surprise Taylor as muchas it would Carlyle that, at least in part, therebuilding of Manchester’s internationalstanding stems from the study of ‘history frombelow’. Unfortunately for students ofChartism the nationwide banner survey con-ducted from Manchester’s National Museumof Labour History failed to identify a singlesurviving Chartist banner. In the town ofYoung, on the southern New South Walessouthern tablelands, however, the visitor tothe Historical Society premises — known asthe Lambing Flat Folk Museum — can see abanner painted on a tent-flap in 1861.Bearing a Southern Cross superimposed over aCross of St Andrew with the inscription, ‘NoChinese, Roll Up’, the banner was an adver-tisement for a public meeting that presagedthe infamous Lambing Flat riots later thatyear.25 Notwithstanding the unfortunate sentiment, the banner is a possibly uniqueexample of the Chartist art form at its peak.Painted by a Scottish migrant, it is a testimo-

ny to the transfer of cultural practices and val-ues through migration. Lying in a dusty glasscase in the premises of a smallamateur society, it is essentially hidden from history. It is a reminder that the practice of‘history from below’ in Australia has producedmany works of significant scholarship butfewer landmarks of conservation.26 It toodeserves to be rescued.

PAUL A. PICKERING

Endnotes

1 See S. Bamford, Passages in the Life of a Radical (origi-nal 1839-41, repr. Oxford: Oxford University Press,1984); J. Marlow, The Peterloo Massacre (London:Rapp and Whiting, 1970); R. Walmsley, Peterloo:The Case Re-opened (Manchester: ManchesterUniversity Press, 1969).

2 E.P. Thompson emphasised the actual violence ofthe day. See The Making of the English Working Class(Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1980 edition), p. 752f.

3 Manchester Central Reference Library, newspapercuttings: Notes and Queries, 12 March 1903, pp. 182-3; Northern Star, 2 April 1842, pp. 6-7. TheRenowned Achievements of Peter-loo (Manchester,1819), was reputedly written by James Varley whose

‘Roll Up Roll Up - No Chinese’ flag. Courtesy Young Historical Society Inc.

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grand-daughter reprinted it in a novel in 1876. SeeG. Linnaeus Banks, The Manchester Man(Altrincham: John Sherratt & Son, 1876), pp. 131-2.

4 See P.A. Pickering and A. Tyrrell, The People’s Bread:A History of the Anti-Corn Law League (London:Leicester University Press, 2000), p.204.

5 P. Percival, Failsworth Folk and Failsworth Memories:Reminiscences Associated With Ben Brierley’s NativePlace (Manchester: G. Hargreaves, 1901),pp. 5-6, 27.

6 P.A. Pickering, Chartism and the Chartists in Manches-ter and Salford (London: Macmillan, 1995), p. 183.

7 M. Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (London:Harper Collins, 1993), pp. 595-6.

8 Daily Mirror, 15 September 2000, pp. 1-2. The localmuseum in Devizes, near Hunt’s home town inWiltshire, has made an effort to keep his memoryalive (see: Guardian, 24 January 1996). I am grate-ful to Alex Tyrrell for this reference.

9 T. Carlyle, Past and Present (original 1843, repr.London: Chapman & Hall, n.d. ), p. 247.

10 Media Release, Pump House People’s HistoryMuseum, 9 August 2000.

11 F. Bongiorno, ‘Heritage Report: Peoples HistoryMuseum, Manchester’, in Labour History, 76 (1999),p. 151.

12 This contrast is noted in Bongiorno’s perceptivereport.

13 Northern Star, 11 July 1840, p. 1.

14 The inspiration derived from a Peterloo relic —inthis case a sword — is a plot line in Howard Spring’sstory of the rise of a labour politician in Fame is theSpur (Collins, London, 1940).

15 The only dark cloud on the Manchester horizon isthe threat to funding for the Manchester CentralLibrary. At the time of writing (January 2001)Manchester City Council were considering optionsto reduce services at the library which has served thelocal community since 1852. For the early history ofthis institution which commenced in what had beenthe Owenite Hall of Science in Manchester see M.Hewitt, ‘Confronting the Modern City: theManchester Free Public Library, 1850-1880’, inUrban History, 27,1 (2000), pp. 62-88.

16 See T. Irving, ‘How to Save the Butlin Archives’,in Labour History, 73 (1997), pp. v-vii; J. Merritt,‘Closing Down Our Heritage’, Canberra Times, 7November 2000; Hansard (Senate), 30 October2000, p. 18613 (speech by Senator Kim Carr).

17 Notable exceptions are John Brewer, Party Ideologyand Popular Politics at the Accession of George III(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), ch.9; James Epstein, Radical Expression: PoliticalLanguage, Ritual, and Symbol in England, 1790-1850(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); GwynWilliams’ Introduction to J. Gorman, Banners Bright:An Illustrated History of the Banners of the British TradeUnion Movement (London: Allen Lane, 1973). Seealso Pickering, Chartism and the Chartists, ch. 9. LikeGorman’s, most studies of banners (in Britain andelsewhere) have tended to pursue antiquarian or aes-thetic rather than analytic objectives. See N.Laliberté & . McIlhany, Banners and Hangings: Designand Construction, (New York: Van Nostram ReinholdCo, 1966); A. Stephen & A. Reeves, Badges ofLabour; Banners of Pride: Aspects of Working ClassCelebration (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1986).

18 J. Brewer, Party Ideology, p. 182; S. Bamford,Passages in the Life of a Radical, pp. 207, 211; JamesEpstein, ‘Understanding the Cap of Liberty:Symbolic Practice and Social Conflict in EarlyNineteenth-Century England’, in Past and Present,112 (August 1989), pp. 97-103.

19 See Manchester Guardian, 26 September 1838, p. 2;Northern Star, 2 October 1841, pp. 6-7; 19 August1843, p. 3. According to Peter Percival, ‘as late as1884’ one of Bamford’s Peterloo Banners was carriedin a demonstration against the House of Lords bymembers of the Failsworth Liberal Club. SeeFailsworth Folk and Failsworth Memories, pp. 5-6.

20 See N. Mansfield, ‘Radical Rhymes and UnionJacks: A Search for Evidence of Ideologies in theSymbolism of 19th Century Banners’, unpublishedpaper, 2000, pp. 1-25. I am grateful to Dr Mansfield,Director of the National Museum of Labour History,for providing me with a copy of his paper.

21 See E & R Frow, ‘Travels with Caravan’, in HistoryWorkshop Journal, 2 (1976).

22 I am grateful to the librarian at the Working ClassMuseum, Dr Alan Kahan, for allowing me to exam-ine this document. For the importance of petition-ing see P.A Pickering, ‘“And Your Petitioners &c”:Chartist Petitioning and Popular Politics, 1838-1848’,in English Historical Review, 466 (April 2001),pp. 368-388.

23 Of note also is the establishment of the North WestFilm Archive by the Manchester MetropolitanUniversity which now has a collection of over25,000 reels of film and video tape.

24 A.J.P. Taylor, ‘Manchester’, in Encounter, 8, 3(1957), p. 4.

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archival institutions and memory

ANational Library,” according to PierreRyckmans, “is a place where a nation

nourishes its memory and exerts its imagina-tion — where it connects with its past andinvents its future”.1 It is the artefacts of mem-ory which provide the means for this connec-tion with the past, in the collections of contemporary archival institutions. Spokenviews and recollections held within theseinstitutions as recorded oral histories — moreoften in libraries, than in archives or museums— have become increasingly important as aresearch resource, and as a way of understand-ing the past and its influence on the presentand the future. More precisely than other collected items, they have become artefacts ofmemory.

Some of the most significant memories ofrecent times are at present being documentedthrough the National Library of Australia’sBringing Them Home Oral History Project,over a four-year period to conclude in mid-2002. This collection will illuminate andhonour the removal experiences of separatedIndigenous Australian children and their families, and others directly connected withthese events, which occurred over a period ofseveral generations. It is our common task toensure that these memories become collectivememories, and to reflect upon how that is bestachieved, within the archival institutions ofour times.

These institutions have generally beenidentified and organised around the artefactsin their care, and the specialised skills requiredto create access to them, and care for them.2

Public libraries were initially charged with the

custody of books and other print media, andsometimes pictorial material. Museums on theother hand, have historically fewer collectionboundaries, but developed over time — aseither specialist or generalist institutions — acommitment to the display of three-dimen-sional objects. Archives collect documents,specifically the records created by govern-ments or other organisations. Unlike libraries,as repositories for bibliographic materialalready created in its entirety, the documen-tary material in archives has been given mean-ing as it is accessioned, through an elimina-tion and arrangement process, and attempts tosecond-guess which material might be important enough to keep.

It is clear nevertheless, that boundariesbetween these different types of archival insti-tutions have always been to some extentblurred. In addition to bibliographic collec-tions, libraries have kept manuscripts andother documentary material; museums arerepositories for an infinite array of objects,which might include books and documents(and even living objects like plants and fish);and archives contain much material whichlibraries and museums might collect, includingdiaries, photographs or even three-dimension-al models. All of these institutions, despitetheir emergence as specialist collecting estab-lishments from the “undifferentiated collections of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century rulers, aristocrats and scholars”3 retainthe imprint epitomised by the Closet ofCuriosities from which the AshmoleanMuseum at Oxford originated. This collectionof John Tradescent towards the end of theseventeenth century included various objects

artefacts of memoryoral histories in archival institutions

DOREEN MELLOR

“


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related to natural history and antiquities, aswell as a library and a chemical laboratory.4

Curiosity was a favoured impetus of the peri-od, for collecting rare and exotic objects ofvarious kinds, and for expanding knowledge ofother cultures and of the past. As collectinginstitutions developed differentiated collect-ing roles, so societies developed a dependenceon these institutions, for retrieval of informa-tion and access to records.

As part of the evolving history of archivalinstitutions themselves, collections haveexpanded, accumulated and moved into theprovince of consolidated and collective mem-ory. At the same time, they have undergonevarious transformations, not only into differ-entiated and classified bodies of material andinformation, but into collections which provide references to local and contemporarylife and activity. These two aspects of museumfunction — memory and contemporary activ-ity — are linked. As the accumulated past inarchival institutions expanded to become collective memory, the community becameincreasingly interested, implicated andinvolved: the presence of the communityinevitably brings the community’s present tobear, and community activity now readilyoccurs in conjunction with that of museumsand other such institutions. The instructiveinfluence of the museum, as reformists of themid-nineteenth century conceived it, was tobring an appropriately ‘civilising’ model intothe life of the community.5 However, its pres-ent mandate is much more likely to includethe capacity to reflect, and to reflect upon, thelife of the community in which it is situated.

All forms of archival institution havetaken on display activities, making storedmaterials accessible through exhibitions andfurther blurring the boundaries establishedwith such enthusiasm during the mid-nine-teenth century6 as museums became part ofthe public sphere. Further contributing to theincreasing ambiguity of archival institutionalfunction, is the emergence of collections ofaudio, video and multimedia material, nowaccessible and retrievable, along with other

elements of collections and the researchunderpinning them, in ways never imaginedby former generations of museum or archivalworkers. Information technology and digiti-sation have revolutionised the way objects,bibliographic material, audio material or evenarchival records, can be accessed. Digitisat-ion, as Rayward has observed, “eliminatesphysical distinctions between types of recordsand thus, presumably, the need for institution-al distinctions in the management of the systems within which these records are han-dled.”7 Such questions as “What is to be collected, by whom and under what circum-stances of preservation, availability andaccess”,8 whilst not being intrinsically new,require fresh approaches in any attempt to findrelevant answers.

At the audience/user end of the spectrum,digitisation provides the opportunity to ‘createever-changing virtual “cabinets of curiosities”at will’. All collecting institutions making useof the opportunities presented by digitisationmight then be termed, for practical purposes,museums, as the original mobility and scope ofinstitutional collections is reinstated. It is amobility which implicitly welcomes the addi-tion of objects, technologies and approachesarising from contemporary frameworks ofknowledge, activity and expectation.

The notion of a collection of sound, withits overtones of ephemerality, synthesises wellwith these new dynamics. The technologywhich makes such a collection possible is a rel-atively recent arrival. It has heralded thedevelopment of oral history as a discrete disci-pline and contemporary phenomenon, andhas enabled its inclusion in collections — andalso in the displays and retrieval mechanisms— of libraries, archives and museums. Theanalogous evolutions of oral history as a disci-pline, information technology as a supportmechanism, and of the museum as a phenom-enon have come to a meeting point, or perhaps a crucible, wherein many cultural elements now have the opportunity to amalgamate.


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Oral history

Oral history — the recorded memoirs andreflections of people who become during thecourse of an interview, memoirists, narratorsor interviewees — is an increasingly validateddiscipline. Its development, along with theexpansion of oral history collections, hasoccurred in parallel with the broadening roleof museums and other collecting or archivalinstitutions. As with the conservation ofexpanding collections of three-dimensionalobjects, the safekeeping of sound archives hasdeveloped as a separate discipline, and audio-engineers in archival institutions are likely tobe as concerned with sound preservation asthey are with sound quality. Memory has beengiven a technical guise, as collections of spoken sound have accumulated, and the individual and collective memories of variouscommunities have been laid down, first onmagnetic, and more recently, on digital tape.

The significance of these collections ofspoken memoirs is far-reaching, for paradoxi-cally, memory relates to the past, but is signif-icant only for the present and the future. Ourunderstanding of the past, dependent on writ-ten and oral accounts of the time, is used toilluminate the present and the future.Anticipation, hope, desire, vision — all thesestates of projection into the future are impos-sible to experience without memory and asense of the past. Oral history collections playan important role as the keepers of memory,with the increasing diversity, size, mobilityand accompanying disjunction of contempo-rary communities. With a sense of the impor-tance the past as a presence, Ann-MariJordens, an interviewer for the Bringing ThemHome Oral History Project writes:

As an interviewer I am a conduit, allowingthe interviewee to speak to livingAustralians and those yet to be born. I aman ear for the future.9

In the context of increasingly unwieldybodies of knowledge, and complex interrela-tionships within and between communities,

DOREEN MELLOR Artefacts of Memory

the importance of communication (bothspeaking and listening) is amplified, andJordens’ ‘ear for the future’ is of particularinterest and consequence. Ronald Grele, anhistorian whose work was significant in shap-ing the methodology of the recorded interviewas it is approached today, highlights two viewson oral history — one which sees it as a way to‘flesh out the record, to get more history forthe historian’ and the other, as a way to bypassthe historian and hear the real voices of thepeople and the past — to get beyond history.Grele believed that neither view should prevail, but that the collaborative work of thehistorian and the interviewee in creating asound document should be recognised.10

During the early 1960s Allan Nevinsestablished the Oral History Research Officeat Columbia University, in the USA, to recordparticipation in the political, cultural and eco-nomic affairs of the nation, of Americans whohad lived significant lives. The outcome ofthe tape-recorded interviews conducted wasnot the same as the oral history record as it isknown today — usually an unedited mastersound recording, accompanied by verbatimtranscript. At Columbia at this time, thetapes were edited and might eventually beerased, after changes to the written material— often worked on by both interviewee andhistorian — except for a small exampleretained as an illustration of delivery andstyle.11

oral history at the National Library ofAustralia

The early development of the oral historycollections of the National Library ofAustralia were influenced by the work carriedout at Columbia University under Nevins.From 1970, interviews were commissioned (asdistinct from those initiated from enthusiastsexternal to the Library, such as Hazel de Berg)by the Library, to record the views and histories of Australians prominent in politics,journalism or the public service. The mainpurpose of these interviews was to augmentthe manuscript collection, which held the


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Through the recollection and reflectionsof those involved, government policies andpractices which resulted in the separationfrom their families of many IndigenousAustralian children, will be considered. Theextent of the dislocation which occurred, theresulting disintegration of that collectivememory linked with family and culture andlanguage, and the painful collective loss of asense of identity, are only now being realised,and the effects only now being reckoned.

The Bringing Them Home Oral HistoryProject is therefore recording the highly personal accounts of those who were directlyinvolved in separation events as children, par-ents, close family, adoptive or foster parents, aswell as the recollections of those who workedwith the children professionally. A wide vari-ety of roles were played by non-Indigenouspeople as school teachers, religious and wel-fare workers, policemen and patrol officers,hospital matrons, staff in children’s homes,and also as government administrators andpolicy makers. The range of their experiencesis extensive. Many believed they were actingin the best interests of the children involved,and tried to do their work to the best of theirability. It is important that these stories arealso heard, so that future generations under-stand the complexities of this history.

A significant aspect of this project is therole it will play in making previously inacces-sible information available to all, on the pub-lic record. Interviewees are therefore encour-aged to give permission for their interviews tobe on open access, although some interviews— or sections of them — are embargoed forparticular periods of time, where appropriate.

Some relevant recordings will be held bystate or large regional libraries as co-reposito-ries, and in appropriate community keepingplaces, if the interviewee is agreeable. Thisdistribution of tapes will ensure that the mate-rial is accessible to a much wider audiencethan if the material is held only in the nation-al capital — although it should be emphasisedthat the National Library’s stated goal is that“all Australians, at their place of choice, have

papers of significant contributors to the com-munity, and to uncover insights into impor-tant processes and events. The coordinatedestablishment of a broader based collection ofinterviews from a wide cross-section of thecommunity, recommended in the report commissioned during the 1960s by theLibrary’s then Assistant Librarian, HaroldWhite, was not to occur until the early 1980s.Finally, in 1983, a social history componentwas officially written into the Library’s collec-tion development strategy, providing a context for numbers of interviews already inthe collection, of people who did not fall intothe hitherto favoured category of ‘eminent’Australians who might have been persuadedto deposit their papers with the Library.12

the Bringing Them Home Oral HistoryProject

This new development also provided a spring-board for many other initiatives, some ofthem national in scope, such as the CulturalContext of Unemployment project whichrecorded the memories and reflection of morethan 500 unemployed people across Australia.Such a project is the Bringing Them HomeOral History Project established with an allocation of federal government funding as aresponse to the report of the Australian HumanRights and Equal Opportunities CommissionInquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal andTorres Strait Islander Children from theirFamilies. This project is arguably one of themost significant oral history initiatives to beundertaken in Australia, grappling as it does,with issues which affect all IndigenousAustralians, and which have become part ofan uncomfortable dialogue across all commu-nities in Australia, through media coverageand political action. Its scope is both broadand comprehensive, by virtue of the range ofviews to be sought, the numbers of interviewsit aims to record, the degree to which it aimsto resolve the processes inherent in recordingand archiving oral histories, and not least, theamount of funding which has been madeavailable in order to carry it through.


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direct, seamless access to print and electronicsources of information”.13 Also planned as partof making the material accessible, is a majorpublication which will include interviewexcerpts. Unlike the Human Rights and EqualOpportunities Commission Inquiry, whichmade a commitment to keeping all interviewsconfidential, this project aims to allow widecommunity access to the stories of all thosewho were personally and directly affected bythe separation of Indigenous children fromtheir families.

Bringing Them Home interviewers operateindividually in their own regions, usually farfrom the National Library in Canberra, butthe project trains and establishes support linksbetween interviewers, creating an inclusiveand cooperative network. The collaborativecontribution of technical staff, coordinators,researchers, historians and importantly, thememoirists and interviewers who interfacedirectly with them and with their unfoldingstories, is inestimable and reflects a multi-dis-ciplinary approach within the project. Thiscan be linked to Grele’s optimism in the1970s about contemporary trends in oral his-tory, in narrowing “...the gap between history,and folklore and anthropology”.14

Many Indigenous people are able todescribe so eloquently how identity and memory are interleaved, and how fracturedmemories have resulted in lost and fragment-ed families and the struggle for reclamation ofidentity. It becomes ever more apparent, asthese particular interviews unfold, thatidentity and history both live in the memory.

identity and memory

Shared memory contributes to an understand-ing of both individual and collective identity.Although it is often to strangers that life-stories are told, the unspoken memories of afamily or community group held in commonimply a shared identity, which empowers theindividual to act effectively within the con-text of the present or to plan for activity in thefuture. All action is contextual, and dependsto some degree on the past — on heritage.


Lowenthal15 refers to the growing inclusivity ofthe term ‘heritage’ and its importance inbestowing collective identity and by implica-tion, individual identity. Included in the term‘heritage’ are such intangibles as legend, language and history, and Lowenthal remarkson the worldwide similarity of concerns withprecedence, antiquity, continuity and coher-ence, despite their being expressed in distinc-tive ways by different cultures. He also pointsto the prevailing global interdependencewhich makes heritage increasingly universal,though reflecting personal or communal self-interest.

The notion of heritage and identity can belinked to the concept of commemoration, orritualising memory.16 Taking an example usedby Rosenzweig and Thelen, the battledescribed from a colonial Western perspectiveas Custer’s Last Stand, is known as an equallyheroic event by the Oglala Sioux people, andother Native Americans, as the Battle of LittleBighorn. General Custer, Sitting Bull andCrazy Horse are part of a convergent history.The divergent heritage bestowed by theiractions however, may be interdependent, butis certainly not shared.

the power of the spoken word

Some concern may be felt by the findings ofRosenzweig and Thelen, that Americans ingeneral are interested in history, especiallythat which personally affects them, or theirfamilies, but are bored by and do not trustmany of the time-honoured methods ofimparting historical information which historians have come to rely on. Far moretrustworthy than books, the local historyteacher or even the professor of history at atertiary institution, are museum displays andeyewitness accounts.17 This view was evenmore emphatically held by the groups ofNative American peoples canvassed byRosenzweig and Thielen. Here, a divergentheritage is also at work. Historians trained inthe Western scholarly tradition will tend to bemistrustful of oral accounts because they arebased on memory and coloured by personal


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Margaret Robinson with Rosemary (L) and Rhonda (R), taken in 1959 in Broome.Below: Margaret’s parents, Regina Maria Roe b. 1902 and Edward Roe b. 1900, taken in the early 1950soutside the family home in Broome WA. Photos courtesy Margaret Robinson.


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MARGARET ROBINSON — A‘BRINGING THEM HOME’ STORY

Margaret Robinson was born in 1924 inBroome, Western Australia. She wasdelivered in her family home by a doctorwho took payment in chickens or eggs asIndigenous people were not allowed to givebirth in the hospital at that time. Margaretremembers the Second World War and thebombing of Broome and can rememberbeing evacuated several times. It was dur-ing one of these evacuations that she waspicked up by Native Welfare officers andput on a plane to Perth where she wasplaced in Sister Kate’s home. She was thensent out as a domestic to work at a floristryfarm in Kalamunda. While there she wroteto her father in Broome who organised tohave her brought back home.

Margaret remembers:

Margaret recalls working at the Club Hotelin Derby, her uncle and brother were alsothere. She was told her mother and fatherwere coming to collect her at 4am, so theywouldn’t get evacuated, but Native Wel-fare and Police officers came and picked herup along with another girl and put them ona plane (a DC-3) to Perth. She was fifteenyears old.

She “stayed the first night with theSalvation Army, then Sister Kate’s, then toKalamunda to the Davies’ “. She was inSister Kate’s 2-3 months and was told shecouldn’t return to Broome.

She wrote to her father while in Sister Kate’swho arranged with Colonel Gibson to gether home. He flew her home to Broome(1944) and locked her in the Hotel roomwith a guard. “Paddy Torres stayed guardbecause there were 3000 troops in Broomeat the time.”

Biographical material written by MarnieRichardson, Bringing Them Home inter-viewer.

experience. Native American historians suchas Angela Cavender Wilson18 however, pointout that the oral traditions of the Dakota peo-ple are the result of skills learnt and passed onin a disciplined way, as a task. Repetition,praise, critique and other devices were used toensure that training was rigorous, skills werelearned and accurate information was deliv-ered and archived. As Wilson says:

...the Dakota definitions of oral tradition isbased on the assumption that the ability toremember is an acquired skill — one thatis acutely developed or neglected.19

These observations may be applied — intheir own cultural context — to the oral traditions of other Native American peoplesor to the oral traditions of IndigenousAustralians. In these cultures, the function oforal traditions is not confined to the transmis-sion of history, but also to the delivery of awide range of information which might be asimportant in providing moral guidelines as inpassing on practical knowledge about foodsources.

To Indigenous Australians, the recordingof oral ‘histories’ (or memories, or personalvisions and reflections) is a highly significantactivity, which provides not only an archive,but a connection with their own definitiveways of articulating heritage. The BringingThem Home Oral History Project, particular-ly, provides opportunities for sharing collec-tive memories, and for the heightened sense ofidentity which follows. It also creates oppor-tunities for communicating with others andfor participation in a more democratised version of history.

museums of sound and memory

Those versions of history which might betermed democratised, take account of theinput of various people, not least those whohave been part of the history. Democrati-sation might also refer to the input of thosewho wish to access history — those whoappreciate the opportunity to engage actively



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with objects and their histories and createtheir own relationships with them. Bennett20

points out that unmediated contact with anobject is not possible in a museum context,and that the same interpretive layers surroundit, as might be produced by a book or a film.The artefact, according to Bennett, becomes arhetorical object as soon as it is placed in amuseum, and when viewed as part of a displayor exhibition, takes on the character of a ‘signifier’. This view of the museum and theobjects it holds may be accurate, but accordingto Rosenzweig and Thelen,21 many members ofthe public would not agree — books and filmsand history teachers are regarded by a surpris-ing percentage of the American public asunreliable filters, and objects in a museum andthe eyewitness accounts of people who wereactually present at an event provide the bestmeans possible for actually getting to the truthof the matter.

This implies that the public does notfavour layers of interpretation, although per-haps the general viewing audience is not quiteaware of how omnipresent this can be in amuseum. In a museum context however, theinterpreter/curator/selector/researcher, unlikean author, film-maker or teacher, is not onlytalking about an object, but placing it in view.The power of the object is that it has a lifeapart from its museological context, includingthe life ascribed to it by a viewer, who is anactive participant in the exchange, and mayselect — as the curator has done — whichobjects to include in their own experience of adisplay, and what meanings to ascribe to thatobject, from their own range of experiences.This is a valid activity, insofar as it remains aprivate activity — since it does not take intoaccount the very real concerns felt by those towhom an object may culturally belong, andwho may wish it to be understood in that context.

These observations bring to mind the roleof the museum as a custodian of many kinds ofmemory. Every object is infused with thememory of the person/s to whom it belongedbefore it made its way to the archive. The

memories of those who selected it for exhibi-tion and created interpretive text also becomepart of its reality, as do the memories broughtto bear by the viewer. A displayed objectserves as a tangible reminder of the journeytravelled from origin to museum display, aswell as being a reassurance to the viewer of thereality of that journey as well as its own history. As Morton points out, there are several consequences which arise from anobject-centred approach to history, the pri-mary one being that “if there are no objectsavailable, it becomes very difficult to mount amuseum display”.22

Sound collections of oral history, as non-material phenomena, may provide the sameassurance for the museum visitor that he orshe is directly in touch with experiencedhistory, as an object does. Reliance on sight asthe ‘I saw it with my own eyes’ phenomenon,is analogous to the ‘I heard it with my ownears’ confidence in oral eyewitness accounts.Both utilise senses which are of major impor-tance to individual interpretation of the dailyenvironment. The oral histories archived invarious (but usually library) collections are,like collections of objects, tips of the collec-tion iceberg stored out of sight. Oral collec-tions are more accessible however, throughbibliographic retrieval systems which havemade the information held in libraries soaccessible, and their storage facilities so trans-parent. In many ways, these collections areconstantly on display — virtual catalogueshave opened the doors and windows, allowingaudiences to see inside and make instant selec-tions. Further advances in technology willallow effortless access to online sound.

These developments will emphasise boththe similarities and differences between museums and libraries as archival institutions.Collections of sound accommodate easily tothe idea of the virtual museum. Howevermuseums are constrained by ideologies ofselection which do not apply to libraries.Libraries work under obligations and chartersto facilitate access to information held withintheir collections, and from this perspective


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may continue to be more appropriate reposito-ries for sound collections. Until further blurring and coalescing of boundaries betweenarchival institutions occurs, the virtual museum of sound and memory sits comfort-ably within its present bibliographic confines.Artefacts of memory, such as those within theBringing Them Home collection, await thisfurther diffusion of boundaries before their status as virtual objects is formally conferred.

DOREEN MELLOR

Endnotes

1 P. Ryckmans, cited in Directions for 2000-2002,National Library of Australia.

2 W. Boyd Rayward, ‘Information and FunctionalIntegration of Libraries’, in E. Higgs, (ed), Historyand Electronic Artefacts (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1998) p. 208.

3 W. Boyd Rayward, ‘Information and FunctionalIntegration of Libraries’, p. 212.


5 T. Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory,Politics (London: Routledge) p. 28.

6 T. Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory,Politics (London: Routledge) p. 2.



9 A-M Jordens, ‘An Ear for the Future’, in Gateways,no. 47, October 2000, p. 21.

10 R. J. Grele, (ed), Envelopes of Sound: The Art ofOral History (Chicago: Precedent Publishing, 1985)p. viii.

11 R. J. Grele, (ed), Envelopes of Sound: SixPractitioners Discuss the Method, Theory and Practice ofOral History and Oral Testimony (Chicago: PrecedentPublishing, 1975) p. 2.

12 B. York, ‘Impossible on Less Terms’, in P. Cochrane,ed., Remarkable Occurrences: The National Library’sFirst 100 Years, 1901-2001 (Canberra: NationalLibrary of Australia, 2001).

13 NationaL Library of Australia, Directions for 2000-2002.

14 R. J. Grele, (ed), Envelopes of Sound, SixPractitioners Discuss the Method, Theory and Practice ofOral History and Oral Testimony (Chicago: PrecedentPublishing, 1975) p. 3.

15 David Lowenthal, ‘Identity, Heritage and History’,in John R. Gillis, Commemorations, The Politics ofNational Identity (New Jersey: Princeton UniversityPress, 1994) p. 43.

16 Roy Rosenzweig & David Thelen, The Presence ofthe Past, Popular Uses of History in America (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1998) p. 166.

17 Roy Rosenzweig & David Thelen, The Presence ofthe Past, Popular Uses of History in America, p. 21.

18 Angela Cavender Wilson, ‘Power of the SpokenWord’, in D. Fixico (ed), Rethinking American History(Albuquerque : University of New Mexico Press,1997) p. 113.

19 Wilson, ‘Power of the Spoken Word’, p. 113.

20 T. Bennett, The Birth of the Museum, p. 146.

21 T. Bennett, The Birth of the Museum, p. 146.

22 A. Morton, ‘Tomorrow’s Yesterdays’, in R. Lumley,The Museum Time-Machine: Putting Cultures onDisplay (London & New York: Routledge, 1988) p.131.


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future shots

Betty Churcher, aoformer director, art gallery ofwestern australia, former director,national gallery of australia

“I’m not sure what the art museum of thefuture will become, but I do know that I hopeit never ceases to be a place of private discov-ery and contemplation. I believe that themore transitory and electronic our worldbecomes, the greater will be our need forobjects of lasting value. Palpable objects thatare prepared to sit quietly on a wall or on afloor and speak to us with their own voiceacross time and space.”

andrew sayers,director, national portrait gallery,chairman, advisory board for thehumanities research centre

“The greatest challenge for museums inthe medium to long term future is sustainabil-ity. Around the world, museums are undertak-ing larger and more complex building projects;virtually every major gallery and museum hasrecently seen major additions, or these areplanned. Yet these buildings create their owndemands. At the same time, running costs aredramatically increasing, yet money is notbeing spent on running costs at a rate com-mensurate with capital expansion. Museumsare about collections and ideas — buildingsare important, too, but it is essential that theright balance is maintained and the core val-ues which sustain museums are not put underimpossible pressures by over-investment inbricks and mortar.”

Sir Robert MayPresident, The Royal SocietyChairman Emeritus, Natural HistoryMuseum, London

“Yesterday’s museums tended to be — mar-vellously but simply — treasurehouses or cab-inets of curiosities. Whether art galleries, ormuseums of science or natural history, theinterpretive material was usually minimal.Today’s museums (with a few exceptions) aimto educate, using the objects on display to tella story about our past, or about how the natu-ral world works. Unfortunately, these storiesare too often presented as wisdom to bereceived, and sometimes even preached as ser-mons which force-fit today’s values onto thedifferent realities of yesterday. I hope thattomorrow’s museums will go beyond the bestof today, using the objects to provoke ques-tions, with guidance that is open-ended ratherthan a closed answer. Increasingly, this will behelped by moving beyond the Gutenberg style— text on a panel — to add information andquestions in the style of computer games, andin other imaginative ways, which will engagecontemporary audiences of younger people.

I end on a paradoxical note, based on dis-cussions and experience in the NaturalHistory Museum in London. Despite what Ihave just said, I have great personal affectionfor the Victorian clutter of the cabinets ofcuriosities. So the real challenge for tomor-row’s museums may be to blend a demoticidiom suited to the realities of the TV/com-puter/internet age, with nooks and crannieswhich preserve some of the crowded displaysthat have so much appeal to a certain kind ofscholarly mind. No easy trick.”

prominent australians share their thoughts on museums of the future


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FUTURE SHOTS

Carol scott, President of MuseumsAustralia and evaluations manager,Powerhouse museum, sydney

“Museums in the future will be facing sig-nificant challenges. Firstly, they will be exam-ining the impacts of technology on interpreta-tion and the place of the object. Will ‘bytes’of information and networked paradigmsbecome substitutes for linear narratives andstories? What will be the significance of theobject in a world where less distinction ismade between the simulated and the authen-tic? Secondly, the museum of the future haswork ahead of it with regard to maintainingaudiences. In a post modern world, theincreasing pace of life is favouring fun andentertainment over leisure that requires intel-lectual commitment. And museums, accus-tomed to being patronised by the numerousand affluent generation of baby-boomers, willbe encountering an emergent generation thatis less numerous and less willing to accept thetranscendent authority of the museum.Finally, the issue of the repatriation of cultur-al material to communities and individualswill be a compelling concern. All of thispoints to a re-negotiation of relationships withcommunities and stakeholders and a re-posi-tioning of the place of the museum in society

.

margo neale, director, gallery offirst australians, national museumof australia

“The museum is an eighteenth-centuryconcept and this is the twenty-first century.This apparent dichotomy will have to beaddressed by museums of the future. Do westill need museums? If so, why and what sort ?

Regardless of how futuristic, virtual andconceptual the museum of the future may lookand feel, and how many bells and whistles ithas, it would be a mistake to confuse thesenew modes of delivery with content and disre-gard the traditional visitors’ changing expec-tations and the basic human need for contem-plation, reflection and enlightenment. InsteadI see the tools of new technologies, not as ends

in themselves but tools to be exploited, toenhance and expand the museums’ pluralisticroles, the imaginative dimension and themulti-sensorial.

Museums will be compelled, by an increas-ingly sophisticated, insatiable and educatedaudience to expand their functions and deep-en and broaden the knowledge base. Just asshops lining one street in linear progressionhave been replaced by shopping malls thatoffer a total, more immersive experience, frombeauty and health to retail and entertainment,the museum of the future, I believe, will combine many of the functions of the tradi-tional museum, art gallery and university withcontemporary needs. That is, alongside asense of worship by a congregation of peoplein cathedral-like spaces and the leisure of thepark or garden as before, there will also be asense of the cultural keeping place of ancientand living traditions, the engagement ofpenny arcades, theme parks and festivals. Akind of one-stop shop. I see the beginnings ofall this at the NMA where joint scholarlyprojects with universities are underway andwhere museum spaces are being used for criti-cal contemporary debates broadcast to thenation alongside ‘yowie’ picnics.

Accountability on all fronts, in particularcontent and delivery, will be high. And onlythose who can address the popular with thescholarly, the object with the experience, thefun and fantasy with the profound, the sacredwith the secular and a sense of the spiritual,will survive in the highly competitive marketahead. The idea of ‘either - or’ and thatthings have to one way or the other is out-moded and bound for the dustbins of history.

From an Indigenous perspective and aminority position, I hope the museums of thefuture increasingly become sites of negotia-tion. Places where multiple histories are toldby diverse voices and stories have no end. Aplace where contradictions are allowed toexist, hard questions are posed without quali-fication, answers are debated and conclusionsare forever rubbery. And most of all wherethese practices are considered normal and


city only positioned in different parts of theglobe but having the same overall populationprofile. Toronto has more Italians, Melbournehas more Greeks but they all have the wholeworld represented in their population andtherefore their institutions tend to be going inthe same direction.

People are always asking why museums arebeing built at the rate they are and why is thepublic investing hundreds of millions andsometimes billions of dollars in these newmuseums. In that sense I think they representculturally neutral space in an environmentwhere the renegotiation of identity is an ongo-ing process. We look at social models such asthe American ‘melting pot’ and all thoseprocesses are still at play. The whole require-ment is for every individual to identify whothey are in the world and to what group theybelong and what is the positioning of thatgroup in the social, economic world and political world.

So museums of social history or historicalmuseums even natural history museums, comeinto play and in this they are there as a forum,as a market place of ideas. But as a place ofrenegotiation of individual and group identi-ties they form an appropriate kind of place forthat to happen.”

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expected and not resisted by a reactionarymainstream as sacrilege. A time when onedoes not even have to talk about these ideas inthe same sentence as the word ‘future’.

‘Encounters’ and ‘people’ will hopefullyremain the keystone of all future museums,value-added over time. The museum mustalways be a place of encounters. Encountersbetween cultures, between disciplines andbetween technologies. Encounters with andbetween objects. Encounters between peoplefrom all walks of life and as the new NationalMuseum’s logo states, encounters between yes-terday and tomorrow.”

george macdonaldCEO Melbourne museum(an extract of an interview withdr Amareswar Galla)

“I think in many ways we are dealing witha new form of culture that has not been givenfull recognition, which I call the ‘distributedmetropolis’. It is just not the global village,that village model does not fit. We are in ametropolitan society that has a manifestationaround the globe and that’s the part of societythat is growing most rapidly. These cities aremade up of elements from every part of theglobe, every population is represented. I thinkof Toronto and Melbourne as being the same

future shots (cont’d)


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Etymologically, a ‘library’ is a bookseller’sshop; for Chaucer it was a place “in which

I put bookes”; today it is a building or roomcontaining collections of books, periodicals,and sometimes films and recorded music’. Butfor Joan Kerr in her chapter on ‘StrangeObjects’ in this elegant book, the NationalLibrary of Australia contains “a rich treasuretrove of three-dimensional objects”, includinga nineteenth-century copper kettle, Sir RobertMenzies’ uniform as Lord Warden of theCinque Ports, ‘boring’ inkstands used 100years ago by the Department of ForeignAffairs, and a death mask of Vance Palmerwith a chipped nose.

Such objects occasionally formed part ofcollections sold or given to the NationalLibrary, and several chapters are devoted tothese. Nicholas Thomas gives an admirable

account of the remarkable literary and pictori-al archive of the New Zealand-born art dealerand collector Rex Nan Kivell, which is one ofthe Library’s most prized possessions. JohnFerguson and Edward Augustus Petherick,very different characters, as Graeme Powellavers, collected invaluable Australiana,including the first printed book on ‘TerraAustralis’. But it is James Cook’s ‘EndeavourJournal’, the Library’s MS 1, which, “in num-ber and in sentiment, is the foundation docu-ment of the National Library of Australia”, asGreg Dening proclaims in his lively opening chapter.

Starting life in 1901 as the Common-wealth Parliamentary Library with oneRemington typewriter, the National Librarybecame an independent statutory authority in1968, but already in 1902 books relating ‘in

REMARKABLE OCCURENCESTHE NATIONAL LIBRARY OF AUSTRALIA’S FIRST 100 YEARS

1901-2001

BOOK REVIEW BY RALPH ELLIOTT

The National Library ofAustralia, with a Henry Mooresculpture in the foreground.Photo reproduced by permissionof Canberra Tourism & EventsCorporation.


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any way’ to Australia were being acquired. Itwas the start of a century of diligent pursuit ofmanuscripts, papers, letters, books, maps, pictures, on behalf of the steadily maturinginstitution we cherish today.

Peter Cochrane, editor of this book, tells ofthe Library ‘Becoming National’. By 1928 itpossessed two typewriters and one of itsrenowned founding fathers, Kenneth Binns,called it the ‘National Library’ and managedto obtain special grants from Parliament topurchase not only Cook’s ‘Endeavour Journal’but the Ellis Rowan paintings of flowers andbirds and the Hardy Wilson collection of OldColonial architectural drawings — all for£13,000. Tim Bonyhady devotes his chapter tothese collections, accompanied, as indeed isthe whole book, with some superb illustra-tions, although the aureate captions are ratherhard to read.

There is one name that crops up irrepress-ibly throughout this fascinating history, that ofHarold White, one of the famed Seven Dwarfsof Canberra, whom John Thompson aptlydescribes as “when roused, this diminutiveman was unstoppable”. I can myself testify tobeing cornered on quite a few occasions at hishospitable Red Hill home, while Haroldexpounded on his vision for his Library and hisinsistent methods of achieving it.

White’s pertinacious pursuit of the Vanceand Nettie Palmer papers is a typical example,as well as what remained of KatharineSusannah Prichard’s papers after the tantalis-ing burning of so many others, remindingThompson of that other ritual burning of hispapers by the aged Thomas Hardy in his garden at Max Gate in 1919. John Thompson,himself for twenty years a senior member ofthe Library staff, also mentions HaroldWhite’s wife Elizabeth, his staunch supporterin all his tireless endeavours on behalf of theNational Library. She, too, deserves to beaffectionately remembered.

White succeeded Kenneth Binns in 1947as National Librarian, as he styled himself,although this fitting title was regrettablychanged to Director-General. He took a par-

ticular interest in politicians and, as StuartMcIntyre writes in his excellent chapter ‘TheLibrary and the Political Life of the Nation’,White’s “epistolary courtship” of politicians,active or retired, “was constant and insistent”.There were of course other claimants, like theNational Archives, just as other items covetedby the Library found their way to other insti-tutions in Canberra. Thus ScreenSoundAustralia, the former National Film andSound Archive, now houses the classic 1919film ‘The Sentimental Bloke’, whose rescue bythe Library’s Film Division is traced by PeterCochrane with appropriate photographs.

For too long the Library’s accumulatingtreasures were stored haphazardly in mostunlikely places: boxes in a grain store at therailway station, films in the nurses’ quarters atthe old hospital premises on the site of theAustralian National University, with serialsstored in the morgue, and other items in theold laundry. Eventually the splendid buildingby Lake Burley Griffin, strikingly photo-graphed by Damian McDonald, was built andceremoniously opened.

Along with his contemporaries CliffBurmester and Courtenay Key, Harold Whitebusily promoted the development of strongerAsian collections in the Library, as DavidWalker narrates. White himself visited librari-ans and scholars in various Asian centres andpersuaded Sydney Wang at Taipei to join theNational Library, which he did in 1964. Whilesome scholars regretted the Library’s movefrom the traditional European and Americancultural heritage towards Asia, the opportuni-ty to build a world-class Asian Collectionproved irresistible, not least with such acquisi-tions as the Yetts Chinese collection and theLuce collection dealing largely with Burma.

One of the Library’s major undertakings is‘The Oral History Collection’, another ofHarold White’ brainchildren, established in1970, which, as Barry York writes, is now a34,000-hour sound collection, including thepioneering recordings made by the intrepidHazel de Berg on her ancient metal and bake-lite tape recorder, one of Joan Kerr’s ‘Strange


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Objects’. The Collection includes music, folk-lore recordings, as well as interviews withAustralians from all walks of life, conductedby a select group of interviewers like TerryColhoun, formerly of the ABC, of whoseinterlocutory skills I was made personallyaware. The Library’s ‘Bringing Them Home’oral history project, designed to collect andpreserve a range of stories from IndigenousAustralians and others involved in the processof child removal, has so far recorded inter-views with more than 200 individuals. It isscheduled to be completed in 2002.

It remains to mention other aspects ofWhite’s design to systematically collect andpreserve ‘material of all kinds illustrating thelife and development of the Australian peo-ple’, as described in this book. Hence the well-researched and illustrated chapters by HelenEnnis on the Photographic Collection and byRobyn Holmes on ‘Musical Dialogues’, withits tributes to the well-known music critic andantiquarian bookseller Kenneth Hince andthe distinguished musicologist AndrewMcCredie. Suzanne Rickard writes on theMap Collection, which includes a 1535 edition of Ptolemy’s Geographia, with its suggested existence of Australia as ‘TerraIncognita’, as well as a lively account of the

Book Review — Remarkable Occurences

legendary Daisy Bates mapping Aboriginalplaces in situ from the Nullabor Plain to theKimberley, maps now being used in connec-tion with Aboriginal land claims. By the endof the twentieth century the National Libraryof Australia possessed over 600, 000 maps, 2500atlases, and over 800, 000 aerial photographs.

In the final chapter, ‘The Network and theNation’, Paul Turnbull looks at the NationalLibrary’s increasing reliance on new technolo-gy. This development, closely watched byinterested and sometimes highly criticalobservers, has not been without hiccups. Butthe fine achievement of the Library’s manydistinguished and devoted directors and staff,and its active body of Friends, live on, and thereader closes this book confident that under itspresent Director-General, Jan Fullerton, thevision of that young cadet cataloguer of 1923,Harold White, will remain alive and fruitful asthe National Library of Australia enters uponits Second Century.

RALPH ELLIOTT

Remarkable Occurrences: The National Libraryof Australia’s First 100 Years 1901-2001.

Edited by Peter Cochrane. National Library of Australia 2001. 283 pp.

ISBN 0 642 10730 0. $59.95.


Documents

Humanities Research Journal Series: Volume VIII. No. 1. 2001 · The National Library of Australia’s First 100 Years, 1901–2001 Vol. 8 No. 1, 2001 ISSN: 1440-0669. 1 A t the beginning