VOLUME 9, NUMBER 1 JULY 2004

In August 2003, it wasdiscovered that theGrainger Museum was

suffering the indignity ofsubstantial rising damp. Nodamage had been done to thecollections, but due to themagnitude of the proposedremedial work required tosolve the moisture problem, itwas considered appropriate torelocate the entire collection toalternative storage venues.

The often mammoth taskof moving the contents of adomestic house can createextraordinary tension andanxiety for the occupants. Theproject of relocating more than150,000 items of highlysignificant cultural materialgenerates headaches that areunique and seemingly neverending.

Unlike shifting thecontents of a house, it is notappropriate to wrap themuseum collection in oldnewspaper and stack theresultant bundles in boxes

salvaged from the localsupermarket.

The Grainger Collection’sfirst relocation from New Yorkto Melbourne in the 1940s and1950s in steamer trunkspacked with straw, woodshavings and paper pulp seemscrude by today’s standards.Acid-free enclosures fabricatedfrom polypropylene plastic,calcium carbonate-bufferedcardboard, supported withurethane-ether foam werepurchased. Fragile items arenow housed in boxes custom-made to support vulnerabledetails. At least three pieces ofthe Museum’s 400–500 yearold Mamluk pottery collectionhad already been broken (andsubsequently mended)sometime in the 19th century,therefore packaging thatprovides multi-point supportwas designed for thisrelocation.

Safe passage for anartefact like the Museum’sorchestral Erard harp can only

THE UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE LIBRARY JOURNAL • 2004 7

Grainger Museum staff assess materials in the collection whileBeethoven looks on.

Carefully packed items from the Grainger collection awaitrelocation.

The scruffy piece of machine-made paper displaying three tiny sketches of a male head had been folded, obscuring the

following inscription: ‘Debussy by Blanche. Dieppe. Summer 1902’. Presumably the paper had been folded for many years

or the art work would not have languished at the bottom of a box of unidentified works-on-paper.

The inscription was written by the composer Percy Grainger who was introduced to French Impressionist composer, Claude

Debussy, by the society painter, Jacques-Emil Blanche. Though far from ‘masterworks’, the tiny drawings provide

documentary evidence of the meeting of the three artists.

This discovery has been one of a number of recent finds generated by the relocation of the Grainger Museum collections.

Secret Signs and Sleeping Portraits BY BRIAN ALLISON

And it is this process ofappraisal and documentation,undertaken within aconcentrated timeframe by thesame staff, that has deliveredunexpected gains — notably,greater levels of understandingconcerning the collection andby extrapolation, greaterinsights into the PercyGrainger ‘story’.

Published Graingerbiographies, the recent featurefilm Passion and Grainger’sautobiographical writings,present controlled and editedversions of the composer’s lifestory. When Museum staff areforced to investigate theminutiae of the collection: tolist and catalogue overlookeditems, and make connectionsbetween hitherto unrelatedartefacts, a fuller narrative ofthe artist’s life is revealed.

Carol Campbell, aspecialist in textileconservation, was engaged toprepare the costume collectionfor relocation. During theprocess of assessing each item(and there are in excess of 900pieces) she began to notice avery subtle idiosyncraticlabelling system presumablyinstigated by Grainger himself.Certain items of clothing andtextile accessories display atiny machine-made tag sowndiscreetly into each individualfabric item’s folds. The whitecotton tags are inscribed with‘MORS TID’, in a cursivescript, mechanically producedin red thread.

A call to the University ofMelbourne’s School ofLanguages resulted in theinscription translated from theDanish as ‘Mother’s Time’.Percy Grainger’s almostobsessively close relationshipwith his mother is no secret,

hand-sown red cotton — againpositioned discreetly — withindecipherable symbols thatare almost calligraphic innature. Was this the frenziedact of a recently bereaved son(Grainger’s mother, sufferingthe final stages of syphilis,died through suicide in 1922)marking his mother’s clothes

yet until now, this act of

veneration, or perhaps part-

fetish, in the definitive sense

of the word, has not been

documented.

What is more intriguing,

however, is the discovery that

certain costume items have

been embellished with loosely

8 THE UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE LIBRARY JOURNAL • 2004

be guaranteed if the instrumentis literally suspended within athree dimensional woodenframe.

The costume and textilecollection has requiredsubstantial repackaging andpreventive conservationmeasures. Some of the silkcostumes, for example, havenot stood up well to theravages of time. In pastcenturies silk fibres wereweighted with metallic salts;unfortunately, this processaccelerates the deterioration ofthe fibres until they weakenand ‘shatter’. Some costumeand textile items requireinternal and external supportsystems, others are rolled orstored flat.

If a box of householdarticles goes missing in transitfrom House A to House B,most families wouldphilosophically accept that thiswas just an added cost to thefinancial drain of movinghouse. Museum staff, inaddition to guarding againstbreakages, are responsible fortracking the entire collectionduring relocation. Thisassumes that all Museum itemsare catalogued and thusidentifiable.

Over the past eightmonths, Grainger Museumstaff have been engaged infast-tracking the process ofelectronically cataloguing thecollection. In some instances,catalogue entries are thebriefest single-line description.More significant itemsmotivate research and finerdetailed documentation. Whathas been achieved in eightmonths, would, within normalprograms, have taken two tothree years.

Examples of the 'Mors Tid' inscription, discovered during therelocation of the Grainger collection, here sewn into a cotton tagand written on a brush.

The Grainger Museum costume collection includes haute coutureclothing purchased overseas by Grainger and his mother.

as an aide-mémoire for a laterformal labelling project, ordoes it have a more obscuremeaning?

Following Rose Grainger’sdeath her son self-published alavish, limited edition booktitled Photos of Rose Grainger.

In the introduction he wrote a

chronology of her life andmentioned:

About 1894

Received from her son, as a

birthday gift…several of his

compositions presented in an

elaborately decorated cover

or bag sewn by him and

consisting of cardboard, lace,

THE UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE LIBRARY JOURNAL • 2004 9

scrapwork, kitchen curtains,

part of a stocking, small stars

of silver paper, etc.

After reading this excerpt,Campbell solved the ongoingriddle of a wild patchworkdesign — a collage worthy ofan abstract expressionistpainter — that had floated onthe surface of the GraingerCostume and Textilescollection for some yearswithout ever being placed inan appropriate home.Grainger’s fascination withexperimental costume designmay have started at age twelvewith the fabrication of thissimple, but very unorthodoxbag.

Further scrutiny of the‘Unidentified Works-on-Paper’box led to the identification ofa simple, elegant pencilportrait of a young girl. Onceremoved from its glassineenclosure, a registration orcatalogue number was clearlyvisible. Foreign to today’scataloguing systems, theinscription appeared to be oneof Grainger’s inventory marksused to track the firstrelocation of the Museum’sartefacts. After retrieving hishand-written inventory fromthe Museum’s archive, thedrawing was identified as aportrait of Gerda Larsen,daughter of Knud Larsen(1865–1922), celebrated artistand member of the RoyalDanish Academy.

Grainger and his entouragemet the Larsen family whileholidaying on the wild Jutlandcoast in northern Denmark.The two families continued tomeet on holidays with theGraingers sitting for variouspencil sketches andwatercolours (the Museumholds six works by Larsen). In

a letter to his mother dated 13September 1909, Graingerstates:

‘Fancy, Knud Larsen did a

nay not-bad drawing of me

yesterday…and his elder girl

Gerda, the less lovely one,

draws simply ravishingly.’

The echoes of the firstGrainger relocation projectreverberate through thistemporary period of instabilitywith at times, ironiccircularity. As this has been a‘preserve all — discardnothing’ museum, many of theoriginal crates, steamer chestsand boxes (some with woodshavings still intact) were keptand are now being cataloguedand packaged as significantartefacts, when in the 1940sand 1950s they wereconsidered purely vessels fortransporting importantmuseum objects.

The Grainger Museum isan autobiographical museumand the original relocation wasundertaken by its namesake.Given that Percy Grainger wastotally untrained andinexperienced in the appliedscience of museology, thesuccessful listing, packaging,and relocation of the preciousevidence of his creative life,half way around the world byvarious cargo vessels, was anextraordinary achievement —that in a sense, humbles thepresent relocation project.

Brian Allison is the Curator,Grainger Museum, at theUniversity of Melbourne.

The inventive bag that the child Percy Grainger made for hismother.

One of the original cardboard boxes used by Grainger totransport his belongings from New York to Melbourne.

While the Grainger Museumbuilding is closed, interestedresearchers may access thecollection through the SpecialCollections Reading Room atthe Baillieu Library.