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Museums Aotearoa and Museums Australia invite you to our first joint conference. Crossing cultures and disciplines, the three day conference will explore the relevance and sustainability of museums and galleries now and in the future, and the ways we can be of social, cultural and ecological value. The conference will include a full program of events, activities and extended tours, with a strong emphasis on the cultures of the Asia-Pacific region. Image credit: Lisa Reihana, in Pursuit of Venus [infected], 2015, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o T채maki, gift of the Patrons of Auckland Art Gallery, 2014 (still from panoramic video interpretation of 1804 French scenic wallpaper Les Sauvages De La Mer Pacifique)
Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 24(3) – Autumn 2016 7
Contents
In this issue Museums Australia National Council 2015—2017 President's Message. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 From the Director. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Indigenous Australia: Enduring Civilisation and Unsettled Encounters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
president
Frank Howarth PSM (Former Director, Australian Museum, Sydney) vice-president
Richard Mulvaney (Director, Queen Victoria Museum & Art Gallery, Launceston) treasurer
Margaret Lovell (Company Secretary and HR Director, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra)
Working on the line: The art of Jonathan Jones. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
secretary
Victorian Collections finding their home in Trove . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
members
Dr Mat Trinca (Director, National Museum of Australia, Canberra) Carol Cartwright (retired) Head, Education & Visitor Services, Australian War Memorial, Canberra)
Digital demise!. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 Fashion in theory and in museums practice: Debrief on a conference in Canberra. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Book review: Narrating Objects, Collecting Stories. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 Book review: Cultural Heritage and Prisoners of War: Creativity Behind Barbed Wire. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
Suzanne Davies (Director, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne) Timothy Hart (Director, Public Engagement, Museum Victoria, Melbourne) Dr Lynda Kelly (Head of Learning, Australian National Maritime Museum, Sydney) Suesann Vos (Sponsorship and Marketing Manager, Abbey Museum of Art and Archaeology, Caboolture) ex officio member
Dr Robin Hirst (Chair, ICOM Australia), Museum Victoria public officer
Louise Douglas, Canberra state/territory branch presidents/ representatives (subject to change throughout year)
COVER IMAGE: Jonathan Jones, mugugalurgarra (conceal), 2015.
ACT Rebecca Coronel (Manager – Exhibitions and Gallery Development, National Museum of Australia, Canberra) NSW Dr Andrew Simpson (Macquarie University, Sydney) NT Janie Mason (Charles Darwin University Nursing Museum, Darwin)
Museums Australia Magazine PO Box 266, Civic Square ACT 2608 Editorial: (02) 6230 0346 Advertising: 02) 6230 0346 Subscriptions: (02) 6230 0346 Fax: (02) 6230 0360 editor@museumsaustralia.org.au www.museumsaustralia.org.au Editor: Bernice Murphy Template design: Brendan O’Donnell Cover design: Selena Kearney Content layout: Stephanie Hamilton Printer: Paragon Print, Canberra
© Museums Australia and individual authors. No part of this magazine may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher. Museums Australia Magazine is published quarterly and on-line on the MA Website, and is a major link with members and the museums sector. Museums Australia Magazine is a forum for news, opinion and debate on museum issues. Contributions from those involved or interested in museums and galleries are welcome. Museums Australia Magazine reserves the right to edit, abridge, alter or reject any material. Views expressed by contributors are not necessarily those of the publisher or editor. Publication of an advertisement does not imply endorsement by Museums Australia, its affiliates or employees. Museums Australia is proud to acknowledge the following supporters of the national organisation: Australian Government Ministry for the Arts; National Museum of Australia; Museum Victoria (Melbourne Museum); Western Australian Museum; and Link Digital (Canberra). Print Post Publication No: 332582/00001 ISSN 1038-1694
QLD John Waldron (Museum consultant, Sunshine Coast, Queensland) SA Mirna Heruc (Manager, Art & Heritage Collections, University of Adelaide, Adelaide)
TAS Richard Mulvaney (Director, Queen Victoria Museum & Art Gallery, Launceston) VIC Lauren Ellis (Programs Manager, Museum Victoria, Melbourne) WA Soula Veyradier (Manager, Western Australian Museum, Perth)
8 Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 24(3) – Autumn 2016
President's Message Frank Howarth
A above:
Frank Howarth.
s I write this, speculation about budgets and election dates is getting to fever pitch. I can’t recall a forthcoming election where cultural issues were quite so prominent. We’ve had the funding cuts to the Australia Council, and creation of the more directly controlled Catalyst fund. We’ve then had industry heavyweight Michael Lynch chastising the big end of the cultural sector for its relative silence on these changes. In parallel, we have seen wider concern expressed by the collections sector, including Museums Australia, on behalf of galleries and museums — especially about the impact of Commonwealth departmental funding cuts on Trove, Australia’s only large integrator of cultural collections information. At a state level there is the widespread concern being expressed about the proposed move of Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum to Parramatta. There is significant support for more cultural facilities in western Sydney, but anger at the ‘blunt instrument’ approach of an envisaged wholesale move of a single major facility for applied arts and sciences, when a more nuanced approach underpinned by greater needs and benefits analysis might shape a better outcome. The uncertainty of elections timing is a backdrop to a review being undertaken by the Museums Australia National Council: of how it can be better structured to advocate on your behalf, as well as to deliver broader value to members in an increasingly digital world. Our current structure really emerged 22 years ago, and we are overdue for a hard look at ourselves. One change that in retrospect seems short-sighted was to remove representation of the sector’s specialist networks from the MA National Council. A number of our networks are extremely active and arguably should have a voice at the table. National Council has also established a taskforce of representatives of the art galleries sector, small and large, to ensure that we represent the needs of that part of our sector. I’ll be reporting at the Museums Australia AGM in Auckland in May on the progress of this review, and seeking members’ input to its shape and recommendations. A few key things can be extrapolated out of the present climate of uncertainty for the galleries and museums. Most obviously, we face the serious impact of funding cuts on an already poorly-funded sector. Then there is the failure of governments to recognise the key role the arts, culture and collections sector plays alongside the science and mathematics sector in fostering innovation — so sorely needed in postmining Australia. What does MA most want to see as outcomes from this year’s federal election — restoration of funding to the Australia Council and retention of the funding capacity in Catalyst for the collections sector; or changes to the Australia Council to enable it to better fund the cultural collections sector, as its counterpart
in the UK does? We want recognition of the importance of Trove, and increased funding levels for it; we also want recognition of the importance of the more regionally-based galleries and museums sector; and in particular, we want programs to enable that sector to make informed choices about how to provide digital access to the material they hold. We support the Australian Government’s innovation agenda, because we know how important the knowledge, expertise and content of Australia’s museums and galleries are to that innovation agenda. But we want to see funded recognition of that importance. Overall, we want governments and political parties to stop either ignoring the arts, culture and collections sector, or pretending that we are some sort of luxury addition to social amenities, a plaything of the rich or leftie intellectual elites. We maintain we are an essential part of the fabric of Australia: socially, culturally, educationally and economically. Treat us accordingly! [] Frank Howarth PSM National President, Museums Australia
Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 24(3) – Autumn 2016 9
From the Director Alex Marsden
A
above:
Alex Marsden.
t the recent National Council meeting in March, when we invited representatives of MA’s National Networks to join in the all-day discussion, we looked at a number of things, including possible better ways of organising who Council represents and how it operates. More of that to come later; but we also really looked at Museum Australia’s value proposition, the services and member-benefits we provide, and whether there should be a minimum level of these, no matter where in Australia you might live. Have a look at the below table — does this ring true? What do you think is missing; what could be done better or differently; and what minimum level of benefit (such as a workshop once a year, plus the online communications) would you want to receive? And on the other side, what do you want to contribute back to your MA — how can you strengthen our community and the public appreciation of museums and galleries? Please let me, the MA staff or committee in your state, or any Council member know what you think. In that vein, I’d like to briefly report on some of the tangible things we’re doing. First up: the new website and membership database. We’re really aware that our creaking old website is frustrating many people — we’re in the last stages of development and testing a new system, and hope to get it up in the next quarter. Part of the work is reviewing a lot of the old material that’s currently on the site, and either updating it or
archiving it. State branches and National Networks are also busily updating and refreshing their information. Secondly, conferences. There’s been much effort and enjoyment in working with Museums Aotearoa to plan the Museums Australasia conference in Auckland this May, and I’m delighted that so many of you are coming — it’s going to be a quite an experience! We have support from the Ministry for the Arts to ensure some Indigenous participants join the gathering, and to continue to fund a number of bursaries for the Regional, Remote and Community Museums Day that has shifted for this year to adjoin the 2016 Victorian Museums & Galleries Conference at Cowes Cultural Centre, Phillip Island (4–6 October). Finally, our national professional development pilot program is kicking off with Careers in Museums & Galleries workshops in Adelaide in July, and in Tasmania shortly afterwards. These workshops were created and delivered last year by the ACT Branch (thank you!) and we’ve used the feedback and needssurveys to update this offering in 2016. Re-using and building on the great work done by our branches, state chapters and Networks to deliver services elsewhere is a model we’ll be pursuing more and more. Cheers, and I look forward to seeing you in Auckland or at one of the many MA events around the country this year. [] Alex Marsden National Director, Museums Australia
Council’s thinking about key elements of Museums Australia’s Value Proposition Services and Benefits Conferences • National Conference • Regional, Remote & Community Day • State Branch & National Network conferences Training • Professional Development courses • Accreditation • Mentoring and Internship programs Communication • Website • Magazine • Social media connection • Jobs, News and Events Bulletins • Sectoral data • National office, branch & network expertise Benefits • Entry discounts • Insurance • Tax break
Sectoral Leadership and Advocacy
Community and Belonging
Conferences • Conferences show leadership and advocacy
Conferences • Conferences express membership of community
Training • Valued for its funded delivery of training and PD
Volunteering • Opportunities to contribute to the sector
Communication • Lobbying Government • Lobbying Institutions • Communicating public value of the sector • Communication channels — assist lobbying • Valuing and representing sectoral expertise Policy • Establishing professional best practice • Modelling and representing excellence Awards • MAPDA and MAGNA for representing sectoral excellence
Training and networking events • Establishes collectively held standards • Social events • Informal mentoring Communication • All channels encourage people to feel connected • Communication channels promote belonging Networking • Collegiate knowledge sharing Recognition • Enhances visibility and promotes career mobility
10 Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 24(3) – Autumn 2016
The National Museum’s interaction with the British Museum through two contrasting Indigenous exhibitions
Indigenous Australia: Enduring Civilisation and Unsettled Encounters
Ian McLean
1. https://www.britishmuseum. org/about_us/the_museums_ story/general_history.aspx 2. Indigenous Australia: Enduring Civilisation was presented at the British Museum, London, 23 April – 2 August 2015. 3. Encounters was shown at the National Museum of Australia, Canberra, 27 November 2015 – 28 March 2016.
I
There were a lot of white walls in [the British Museum] and if it was my choice I would prefer to see a jigsaw puzzle of paintings from all the different countries covering all the walls. (Wukun Wanambi, statement, Unsettled, National Museum of Australia, 2015).
t’s a revealing paradox: modernity is a museum culture, deeply invested in the past. The British Museum (BM), which claims to have been ‘the first national public museum in the world’[1] — and therefore the first truly modern museum — opened its doors in 1759. Since then similar institutions have proliferated: every nation state needs a national museum in which to justify its existence, just as it needs a constabulary to patrol its narratives. For 60,000 years Indigenous Australian heritage has been preserved in rock art and Dreaming
sagas enacted in songs and dance conserved in the intangible memories of innumerable minds. The modern museum, however, needs a different order of things for its narratives. Thus it began collecting formerly ephemeral items. This stimulated their manufacture and also gave them an importance they didn’t have previously. In re-imagining Indigenous heritage in modernity’s language of ‘material culture’, this heritage was effectively modernised. Very little of such material culture from before 1850 exists, let alone exists in Australian museums. The richest holdings are in the BM. These rare and rarely seen things are the basis for two recent innovative exhibitions: Indigenous Australia: Enduring Civilisation,[2] which opened at the BM during the northern summer of 2015, and Encounters,[3] last summer’s exhibition at the National Museum of Australia (NMA). The modern museum has evolved considerably over the centuries, and never more dramatically
Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 24(3) – Autumn 2016 11
left:
than in the past two-to-three decades, but it is yet to seriously challenge the sensibility of traditional museum display, which leaves an artworld aficionado like myself restive. I yearn for something like the clear and unobtrusive lighting and the minimal design aesthetic of the recent exhibition of Aboriginal shields at Yiribana (Art Gallery of New South Wales),[4] which accentuates their sculptural and decorative aspects. Liberated from the glass cages and theatrics of museum display, these beautiful shields speak to our senses. Shaping the museological innovations of Enduring Civilisation and Encounters, however, were quite different forces, much more political than aesthetic. While the material in these exhibitions provides the narrowest of windows onto Indigenous heritage — its temporal footprint is a minute fraction of its longevity — and was at the time of collection ephemeral to the culture and its heritage, both the museum and the descendants of its original producers now covet it. This is because the museum’s epistemology lends these few and often not very imposing things a lost ancestrality that provides a future redemption for both the Australian nation state and its Indigenous subjects. Both exhibitions, which had their genesis in an MOU between the two museums following a curatorial staff exchange in 2011, were built around a core gathering of contact material from the BM, and developed in tandem through extensive crossinstitutional research. The scholarship and vision of the project set a benchmark for future museology. While the BM had a deep interest in the project, the research was very much an Australian enterprise. It included an Australian Research Council grant to the Australian National University and extensive community consultations mainly undertaken by an Australian team. As well, the curators and scholars involved in each exhibition’s rationale and catalogue essays were mainly Australian. However, the deep implications of British imperialism in the project made it appropriate that each exhibition had as its patron Charles Mountbatten-Windsor, better known as Prince Charles. Watercolourist, art collector and student of anthropology, archaeology and history at Cambridge University, he had, as we shall see, some
pertinent insights into what was at stake in each exhibition. The intimate relationships between the museums were on full view. Encounters aptly described itself as a sister exhibition of Enduring Civilisation. Yet despite their shared genealogy, these were very different exhibitions. Leaving aside the contrasting settings — chaotic central London and neo-classical Georgian architecture for the BM; open lakeside country and zany postmodern architecture for the NMA — and focusing instead on the exhibitions’ phenotypes or look, it is hard to believe they shared the same gene pool. Enduring Civilisation, perched under the big BM dome, was like a buzzing brain straining with information. It did the heavy lifting from an academic perspective. Encounters, stretched out in the belly of the reptilian-like NMA, seemed more accessible and emotive. There was freedom to play and imagine. Squeezed into the BM gallery’s labyrinthine rooms, Enduring Civilisation seemed to have many more pieces than Encounters. In fact Encounters had nearly twice the number, even without many of the rare contact objects in Enduring Civilisation. Compensating for this lack in the NMA were contemporary works from communities responding to those contact objects. Furthermore, the dark cave-like interior of Encounters held these objects — some 300 of them — with considerable ease, in part because of the baroque lighting. While brighter and more evenly lit in Enduring Civilisation, these generally small, brownish, early contact artefacts had difficulty competing visually with the large, colourful contemporary artworks — especially the acrylic Western Desert paintings — jammed next to them. While I found the gallery space of Encounters rather busy, its individual displays were more clearly grouped and pleasing to look at. Additionally, with its fish-trap tunnel feeding us into the exhibition, neatly spilling on either side like two halves of the brain, Encounters provided a simple navigable space. The tunnel transported us to the far end and the star exhibit: the shield that Captain Cook’s marines supposedly shot through as they met resistance upon first landing at Botany Bay in 1770. In an inspired piece of theatre, the dark oval shield was silhouetted against a large backlit photograph of Botany Bay. A
'Encounters with Explorers'. Installation view from Encounters: Revealing Stories of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Objects from the British Museum, National Museum of Australia, Canberra. bottom left:
Ian McLean.
4. Murruwaygu: following in the footsteps of our ancestors was shown at the Yiribana Gallery (Art Gallery of NSW), Sydney, 28 Nov 2015 – 21 Feb 2016.
12 Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 24(3) – Autumn 2016
The National Museum’s interaction with the British Museum through two contrasting Indigenous exhibitions
top:
'Encounters with Cook' installations showing the shield that Captain Cook’s marines supposedly shot through as they met resistance upon first landing at Botany Bay in 1770. From Encounters.
Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 24(3) – Autumn 2016 13
One outcome of such unpacking has been Indigenous involvement in museum culture at all levels. In this spirit the British Museum invited several Indigenous contemporary artists to work in its archives ... Encounters included this work in a parallel exhibition called Unsettled, which was presented more in art gallery than museum mode.
5. The text was a quote from Don Christophersen, a ‘Muran’ man – the Muran (Maung) being a language group from the Cobourg Peninsula in western Arnhem Land. 6. Encounters: Revealing Stories of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Objects from the British Museum, catalogue (Canberra: National Museum of Australia, Canberra 2015), p.33.
pinhole of light playing through a hole in the shield drew you in. Encounters did not have to negotiate the crosstown traffic of large, bold contemporary artworks. While it had a surfeit of signage and copious well-lit large photographs — mostly landscape views — the latter lent a sense of outside space that countered the gallery’s cave-like ambience. In gesturing towards the living world beyond the museum, the objects on display attained a sense of place, though also accentuating their sense of entombment in the gallery’s dark interior, mere shadows of their former selves. This cut two ways. If Encounters repudiated the myth of terra nullius by showing the emplaced culture that the colonists couldn’t see in the country, for purists the photography’s romantic sensibility — exemplified in the depiction of Eucalyptus bush that framed the exhibition’s entrance — is a classic trope of terra nullius, made famous in colonial art the world over as the alibi of the West’s manifest destiny. Re-appropriated into discourses of Indigenous identity it sends mixed messages, but ones we Australians have been negotiating at least since Albert Namatjira reworked the Western landscape aesthetic for his own ends. This mixing was a central theme, emblazoned in a large wall text as you exited the exhibition:
You have to listen to both versions: the Indigenous version of our history and the non-Indigenous version of our history, because they’re both telling the truth, but they’re both not the same story.[5] The difference between the exhibitions was more than cosmetic or sibling rivalry. Prince Charles got to the heart of the matter. Encounters, he said, ‘could not be more important in forging a path to greater understanding and, ultimately, to reconciliation for all Australians.’ On the other hand, Enduring Civilisation, at the centre of the former Empire, had more universal and ennobling obligations. The Prince hoped that its celebration of this ‘extraordinarily rich culture ... which has endured for tens of thousands of years’, would inspire us ‘to regain that sense of reverence for land, country and the natural world which is so much part of the innate wisdom of all indigenous communities around the world’. Charles’s hope that Encounters would contribute to ‘reconciliation for all Australians’ deftly transferred the Crown’s misdemeanors to Australians. Peter Yu, the Chair of the NMA’s Indigenous Reference Group, seemed to sense this, diplomatically speaking of the museum’s role in meeting ‘the broad need to reconcile the legacy of the British Crown’s settlement of Australia’.[6] In Yu’s mind, the museum needed to address issues of repatriation. The repatriation of artefacts collected during the colonial era has become
14 Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 24(3) – Autumn 2016
The National Museum’s interaction with the British Museum through two contrasting Indigenous exhibitions
above:
'Encounters with collectors and exhibitions'. Installation view from Encounters showing Vernon Ah Kee, cantchant (shield) 2015 (detail, reverse view), depicting the artist’s great-grandfather, George Sibley. Collection: National Museum of Australia. Courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane.
7. Thanks to Margo Neale, Senior Curator and Principal Indigenous Advisor to the Director at the NMA (though she did not curate Encounters). 8. John Morton, ‘Consigned to Oblivion: People and Things Forgotten in the Creation of Australia’, in Paul Turnbull, and Michael Pickering (ed.), The Long Way Home: The Meaning and Values of Repatriation (New York: Berghahn Books in association with National Museum of Australia Press, 2010), 96–113 at 97. 9. Ibid., at 96.
a means for museums to further the political project of reconciliation between Western and Indigenous peoples. In this respect the choice of the Prince as patron was an astute chess move, effectively placing the Crown at the centre of any repatriation or reconciliation process. Nevertheless, the Prince — and we might therefore say the Crown — threw the responsibility of reconciliation upon Indigenous Australians: on their ‘generosity’ in ‘sharing’, through the exhibition, ‘their rich cultural heritage, experience and views’. They, it seems, are the lead reconciliators for the Australian nation. Are we then to assume, as the Prince seemed to, that these objects belonged to Indigenous Australians and not the BM? Indeed, these questions are impacting on museum terminology, a sure sign of shifting paradigms. ‘Objects’, I am told, are now being re-classified as ‘belongings’.[7] The Prince’s statement caught the tone of Encounters, which was not so much an exhibition
of first-contact objects as the encounters with these objects by present-day descendants of their makers. Thus there was no hegemonic curatorial voice. Instead Indigenous voices, and faces, dominated the exhibition. At its entrance was a televised but personable welcome to country by local elders on a large screen, and throughout further commentary from innumerable Indigenous Australians. Cynics might dismiss such exercises as a ‘white redemption ritual’ — ‘the project through which the [postcolonial] nation refounds itself through the appropriation of Aboriginality’.[8] There is more than a grain of truth in this, but as John Morton goes onto argue, Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians are caught in a shared destiny in which the actions of each is imbricated with the other. The politics of repatriation is even more a black redemption ritual — part ‘of a more general reassignment of power to Indigenous Australians’.[9] Nor is repatriation/ reconciliation a straightforward exercise. Kim
Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 24(3) – Autumn 2016 15
10. Kim Akerman, You Keep It – We Are Christians Here : Repatriation of the Secret Sacred Where Indigneous World-Views Have Changed , ibid., 175–82. 11. Paul S. C. Taçon and Susan M Davies, ‘Transitional Traditions: 'Port Essington' Bark-Paintings and the European Discovery of Aboriginal Aesthetics’, Australian Aboriginal Studies, July/2 (2004), 72–86. 12. This is inferred. Ian Coates, a lead curator and initiator of Encounters, pointed out to me that the label correctly states: ‘The oldest Aboriginal bark paintings known to exist come from Port Essington’; however neither the exhibition nor the catalogue mentioned the controversy over the dating of this painting, or that all other Port Essington barks were collected well after the settlement had been abandoned. 13. http://www.theguardian.com/ australia-news/2016/feb/10/ battle-for-bark-art-indigenousleaders-hail-breakthrough-intalks-with-british-museum
Akerman’s report on repatriation in WA since the 1970s shows that little is clear-cut, as it is no longer possible to disentangle white from black, or at times secret from public. There is no pure or clear ground on either side to which we can return.[10] If the title Encounters implies that its real subject is the fault line between black and white Australia, where, you might ask, are white voices? Like the Stolen Generation report (1997), Encounters takes the first step in the accepted procedure of reconciling historical trauma, which initially is to provide a platform for the aggrieved to speak to the perpetrators or their descendants, thereby breaking an official silence around transgression and trauma. The reconciliation process addressed here is firstly among Indigenous people and their experience of a traumatic encounter. The more apocalyptic this encounter, the more overwhelming is the sense of loss for its descendants, and thus the more intense their longing for the associated objects. On the other hand, for those who still have their language and know their cultural practices, seeing these artefacts generally affirms the continuity of their beliefs; but it could also tap a simmering anger. Jane Christophersen asked rhetorically: ‘What if our people had gone over there and got the Queen’s crown and brought it back?’ John Bugi Bugi was less moved by the project: ‘We don’t sit around making stone axes no more. We can go to Bunnings and buy a steel one, or get a chainsaw. We’re not living in the past, we’re in today.’ Both were interviewed because their ancestors had been drawn to the failed Port Essington settlement (1838–49) on the Cobourg Peninsula in western Arnhem Land. While cross-cultural relations at the settlement were at first tense and sometimes violent, before long trade became the norm. This lubricant of cross-cultural encounters is generally how various things found their way to the BM. In the 1840s the Iwaidja, Maung, and others living on the Cobourg Peninsula didn’t need Bunnings. The Port Essington blacksmith made them steel spearheads — an important currency of exchange at the time — and they had probably previously traded steel implements from Macassan traders. The most interesting artefact from Cobourg Peninsula
in Encounters was a bark painting, reminiscent of the Kunwinjku and Iwaidja barks collected in the mid-twentieth century. Enduring Civilisation had two examples; but the BM, which did not catalogue them until 1967 and 1973 respectively, is unsure of their provenance. The date of ‘before 1868’ given in the Encounters catalogue, which is from the BM, is controversial. More likely, it has been argued, they were collected in the 1870s[11] — a moot point, but it might mean that it is not the oldest bark artwork known to exist, as Encounters implies.[12] This privilege would then go to a far more controversial work in the exhibition, the Dja Dja Wurrung bark etching (in which images are drawn into blackened bark sheets) made in the mid-1850s. After failing in 2004 in the Victorian state’s courts to have it and other bark works seized as BM loans in a current exhibition and repatriated, now, in Encounters, a wall text quotes Gary Murray, a present-day leader of the Dja Dja Wurrung, pleading: ‘So we beg the British Museum to return our cultural materials.’ Recent press reports suggest that progress on this matter is being made.[13] Perhaps pathos rather than full frontal attack will prove the better tactic. Unlike Enduring Civilisation, Encounters does not delve too deeply into the legal challenge of the Dja Dja Wurrung, let alone the origins of the bark etching. In a more laconic fashion, it highlights opinions of some Dja Dja Wurrung representatives in short wall texts and filmed interviews. A good sounding board, but it shies away from analysis: Have a voice but don’t ask too many questions. This national trait, perhaps the secret to Australia’s comparative tolerance, might also be the most pragmatic starting point for some resolution of these difficult matters. As its title suggests, Encounters — an encounter is here a meeting with difference — was geared to a central issue of the Australian political agenda: negotiating the fundamental differences that founded the nation. By contrast, the title Enduring Civilisation gestures to the longevity of Indigenous Australia but also to the responsibility of the BM to ensure that the artefacts of civilisation endure: its responsibility to care for and ensure the most erudite attention is given to them. Thus the catalogue for Enduring Civilisation is a loquacious scholarly tome
16 Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 24(3) – Autumn 2016
The National Museum’s interaction with the British Museum through two contrasting Indigenous exhibitions
above:
Installation shot from Unsettled. Jonathan Jones' mugugalurgarra (conceal). Photo: George Serras, National Museum of Australia.
above:
'Encounters in New Settlements'. Installation view from Encounters.
that assumes the objectifying voice that Encounters eschews, and analyses the historical contexts and moral consequences of early encounters between British colonisers and Indigenous Australians. As ‘a museum of the world and for the world’, another key objective of the BM is to manage the often-conflicting demands of the local and the universal. This is the other achievement of Enduring Civilisation. I like to think that the aforementioned legal challenge to ownership of some obscure bark works in its collection was the BM’s incentive to mount Enduring Civilisation, and thereby unpack what it means to be guardians (rather than owners) of world culture. One outcome of such unpacking has been Indigenous involvement in museum culture at all levels. In this spirit the BM invited several Indigenous contemporary artists to work in its archives. Except for two works, unlike Encounters their art was incorporated into Enduring Civilisation and
its catalogue. Encounters by contrast included this work in a parallel exhibition called Unsettled: Stories within[14], which was presented more in art gallery than museum mode. As would be expected, some of the artists took a militant position towards the modern museum. According to Jonathan Jones, his installation, mugugalurgarra (conceal), ‘attempts to deconstruct the contextual framework that defines museum collections’ and especially ‘the inadequacies of anthropology’.[15] In an iconoclastic gesture, but obviously with the full cooperation and participation of the museum, various readymade ethnographic objects sourced from the NMA were wrapped in pages torn from Robert Brough Smyth’s seminal two-volume tome, The Aborigines of Victoria: With Notes Relating to the Habits of the Natives of other Parts of Australia and Tasmania (1878), and displayed in a vitrine originally from the Institute of Anatomy. Observe: the Aboriginal artefacts have been overwritten by
Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 24(3) – Autumn 2016 17
14. Unsettled: Stories within, National Museum of Australia, Canberra, 27 November 2015 – 28 March 2016. 15. http://www.nma.gov.au/exhibitions/ unsettled/jonathan_jones 16. Duchamp’s colleague and fellow Dadaist, Man Ray, made the first wrapped object: 'Enigma of Isidore Ducasse', 1920. 17. Hal Foster, 'An Archival Impulse', October, 110/Fall (2004), 3–22. 18. http://www.nma.gov.au/exhibitions/ unsettled/wukun_wanambi
References Akerman, Kim (2010), You Keep It – We are Christians Here : Repatriation of the Secret Sacred where Indigneous Worldviews Have Changed , in Paul Turnbull, and Michael Pickering (ed.), The Long Way Home: The Meaning and Values of Repatriation (New York: Berghahn Books in association with National Museum of Australia Press), 175–82. Foster, Hal (2004), An Archival Impulse , October, 110 (Fall), 3–22. Morton, John (2010), Consigned to Oblivion: People and Things Forgotten in the Creation of Australia , in Paul Turnbull, and Michael Pickering (ed.), The Long Way Home: The Meaning and Values of Repatriation (New York: Berghahn Books in association with National Museum of Australia Press), 96–113. Taçon, Paul S. C., and Susan M Davies (2004), Transitional traditions: 'Port Essington' bark-paintings and the European discovery of Aboriginal aesthetics , Australian Aboriginal Studies, July (2), 72–86.
Western text, their Aboriginality interned within a Western knowledge system. Such a didactic reading misses what is obvious to anyone vaguely conversant with contemporary art: the work’s inheritance in Jones’s favoured ancestral stamping ground — 1960s and 70s post-formalist conceptualism. Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Wrapped Coast (1969) — the first in a series of Kaldor Art Projects of which Jones is the most recent recipient — roused an emerging generation of conceptualists in Australia. To postcolonial minds, the one million square feet of white fabric covering the coastline near where Australia was first invaded would seem to be an obvious political allegory, especially since it was made at a time of growing Indigenous activism and land rights. However, this conceptualist unfurling at a pivotal site of rupture was purely accidental. If this chance alignment of disconnected histories makes such a retro-surrealist gesture even more telling, Christo and Jeanne-Claude avoided allegorical readings of their work. Jones, on the other hand, can’t resist the allegorical impulse: he is an appropriation artist par-excellence. What these very different artists share is their commitment to the universal act of concealment as a form of revelation. Each reveals the underlying form of what their wrappings conceal while simultaneously enhancing its mystery, thus elevating them to the reified domain of art.[16] Ironically, for those who know their anthropology, this is reinforced by Jones’s wrapping, as Smyth’s book was the first to claim that Aboriginal art was fine art, inspiring European critics to advocate for Indigenous art’s fine art qualities. Jones’s deconstruction thus produces a neat, if ironic, reconciliation. No wonder contemporary art’s archival turn has been accused of fostering collusion with the enemy — or at least with the official archive — even when the artist adopts an explicitly critical stance.[17] Whatever way mugugalurgarra is read, it proposes a symbolic (rather than actual) repatriation of museum objects. The latter is also the case with the works of Julie Gough, Elma Kris and Judy Watson, for whom the museum seems to be a welcome site of creative collaboration focused on breathing new life into these
objects (a symbolic act of repatriation), rather than a point of protest. However, the other artist in Unsettled, Wukun Wanambi, did not play the politics of repatriation. He conceived his residency at the BM as an opportunity to celebrate his vibrant Yolngu heritage, as if colonialism was a distant memory and there was nothing to repatriate. Echoing Prince Charles’s comments, Wukun said: My history keeps building up. My identity is stronger. It is not dying. The more I share the stronger I get. I feel good sharing Yolngu madayin (sacred law) into English culture … I enjoyed meeting Prince Charles [at the BM] and it was great that he came to open the exhibition.[18] [] Ian McLean is Senior Research Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Wollongong. He has published extensively on Australian art and particularly Aboriginal art within a contemporary context. His books include How Aborigines Invented the Idea of Contemporary Art (2011; 2nd ed. 2014), White Aborigines: Identity Politics in Australian Art (1998), and The Art of Gordon Bennett, with a chapter by Gordon Bennett (1996). Text citation: Ian McLean, ‘Indigenous Australia: Enduring Civilisation and Unsettled Encounters’, in Museums Australia Magazine, Vo. 24 (3), Museums Australia, Canberra, Autumn 2016, pp. 10-17.
18 Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 24(3) – Autumn 2016
Indigenous culture and evolving creativity
Working on the line: The art of Jonathan Jones
Wally Caruana Shields and other objects in collections are gifts; gifts from our ancestors left to aid us on our new journeys and to become the springboard for many contemporary practices and understandings.
T
hese words formed Jonathan Jones’ artist’s statement accompanying his installations in the exhibition Unsettled: Stories within[1], at the National Museum of Australia. The exhibition was conceived as Indigenous artists’ response to the Encounters[2] exhibition at the Museum, which was built around a selection of historical objects on loan from the British Museum. The exhibitions ran concurrently in adjacent spaces. Jones’ statement encapsulates the essence of his practice as an artist, curator, researcher and art historian. He draws on his inherited knowledge of Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi traditions to create his own work, but he also mines museum collections to inform his art, and as part of an ongoing research project into the history of the art made by Aboriginal men in south-eastern Australia.
Tangentially, if not more directly, Jones’ investigations and research also call into question the historical and contemporary role of the museum. In this introductory text, and a subsequent article for the MA Magazine, I will describe the scope of Jonathan Jones’ art, his interventions in many aspects of museum practice, and his curatorial agenda that — understood together — provide the basis for establishing a more encompassing and richer Koori art history, which is his heritage. The focal points of Jones’ research are the shield and the line. He is undertaking an extensive investigation of the designs and patterns etched into the surfaces of the two major traditional forms of shield in the southeast: the broad shield and the narrower parrying shield. The number of extant shields provides a large body of objects from which Jones, who is working in collaboration with Carol Cooper at the National Museum, can recognise regional stylistic differences based on the shapes of shields and the designs they carry. A detailed study of the designs drawn into their surfaces reveals, according to Jones, ‘the region’s unique and continuing use of the line as an artistic device’.[3] Jones’ research sources include early anthropological and historical literature on Aboriginal
top:
Jonathan Jones, Untitled ( fort), 2015. Installation as part of Unsettled: Stories Within, National Museum of Australia, Canberra. Photo: George Serras.
above:
Wally Caruana.
right:
Shields from Australian collections. Installation view from Murruwaygu: following in the footsteps of our ancestors, Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney. Photo: Mim Sterling, AGNSW. far right: Unknown maker, Shield, 19th Century. Natural earth pigment on wood. Max Ernst Collection, purchased 1985. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Unsettled: Stories within, National Museum of Australia, Canberra, 27 November 2015 – 28 March 2016.
Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 24(3) – Autumn 2016 19
1. Unsettled: Stories within, National Museum of Australia, Canberra, 27 November 2015 – 28 March 2016.
societies of the southeast; nineteenth-century photographs of Aboriginal people with their artefacts; and most informatively, Jones’ own ever-increasing portfolio of life-size drawings of the designs on individual shields held in museum and art gallery collections. A close study of these designs provides Jones and Cooper with the ability to recognise individual hands. For example, the exhibition Murruwaygu: Following in the footsteps of our ancestors[4], curated by Jones recently at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, included two shields by none other than the celebrated nineteenth-century Aboriginal artist William Barak. In assembling works for the exhibition, Jones had compared one previouslyunattributed shield in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia with a shield known to be by Barak in the Museum of Victoria collection. The extraordinary similarity of the designs and the manner of their execution — the nature of the engraved line and of the adze mark — rendered the attribution of the Gallery’s shield unequivocal.[5] Attributions, even when the identity of the maker is unknown but the hand is recognisable,[6] function on familial, social and art historical levels. The process makes direct links between people living today and
their ancestors; it counters stereotypical perceptions of the collective nature of traditional society at the expense of the individual, and provides a level of provenance that leads to connoisseurship and an art historical record. Murruwaygu was constructed by Jones along the lines of the structural elements that form the basis of his research. The exhibition incorporated conceptual and historical frameworks based on the binary kinship patterns of south-eastern societies where each moiety — Eagle and Crow — is divided into four sections or subsets. Accordingly, the exhibition was divided into four generational sections reflecting four stages in Koori art history, each of which contained a pair of artists/art forms. In Jones’ terms the stages within this recent transmission of tradition are as follows: the classic or pre-contact makers of broad and parrying shields; William Barak and Tommy McRae as the leading Koori masters of the late-nineteenth century; selftaught artists who represent the re-emergence of Koori art in the latter half of the twentieth century — Roy Kennedy and Harry J Wedge; and professional or art-school-trained Koori artists of the contemporary era — Reko Rennie and Steaphan Paton. Or, as Uncle Stan Grant preferred to label the sections in
2. Encounters: Revealing Stories of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Objects from the British Museum, National Museum of Australia, Canberra, 27 November 2015 – 28 March 2016. 3. ‘Following the line: Establishing southeast artists’ practice’, a paper delivered by Jonathan Jones at Aboriginal Artists of the Nineteenth Century: A celebration, a symposium held at the National Museum of Australia on 30 September 2014 to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the publication by Oxford University Press of Andrew Sayers’ seminal text on nineteenth-century Aboriginal artists. See http://www.nma.gov.au/ audio/transcripts/Abor_art/NMA_ Jonathan_Jones_20140930.html 4. Murruwaygu: following in the footsteps of our ancestors was shown at the Yiribana Gallery (Art Gallery of NSW), Sydney, 28 Nov 2015 – 21 Feb 2016. 5. William Barak’s descendant Aunty Joy Murphy-Wandin, a senior Wurundjeri elder, approved the attribution on seeing the two shields side-by-side. 6. Murruwaygu contained a number of groups of shields, each recognisably made by one unnamed artist.
20 Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 24(3) – Autumn 2016
Indigenous culture and evolving creativity
Wiradjuri: the familial ‘mumala, babiin, wurrumany, warunarrung’ (grandfather, father, son, grandson)’,’[7] reflecting the cyclical nature of kinship that evokes a neat symmetry between the drawn line and lineage Jones’ methodology incorporates four distinct but interrelated strands. • First, there is his hands-on research of museum collections, where his renditions of designs and shapes provide an understanding of pictorial structures and the intricacies of designs, as well as an appreciation of formal and aesthetic qualities. To date he has studied several major collections including those of the National Museum of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria, the Australian Museum, the Koorie Heritage Trust in Victoria, and the British Museum in London. • Second, there are curated exhibitions and interventions such as the reinstallation of the shield collection at the Australian Museum. • Third, there are collaborations with Aboriginal communities on art projects such as Kulata Tjuta (Many Spears), involving Willy Kaika Burton, Hector Burton and other senior Amata men, and collaborations with individual Indigenous artists.[8] • Finally, there are Jones’ own free-standing or sitespecific creative works. Each strand of Jones’ work indicated above is informed through consultation with traditional owners and local Aboriginal elders. In a subsequent article to this, I will review a number of individual works by Jonathan Jones. Meanwhile I will conclude this introduction to his work practices and their wider implications and methodology with a reading of one major installation that he presented in Unsettled, which opened in late2015 at the National Museum of Australia mugugalurgarra (conceal), consists of a series of historical vitrines borrowed from the Institute of Anatomy that contain boomerangs, shields, spears, clubs and other artefacts from the National Museum’s collection; these objects are presented wrapped in
Jonathan Jones’ mugugalurgarra (conceal) questions the role of the museum as a keeper of cultural artefacts — the ‘gifts from our ancestors’ — and the manners in which these ‘gifts’ are variously interpreted, communicated to the museum’s public, and reconnected with the descendants of their makers.
the pages of an original 1878 edition of the seminal anthropological text, The Aborigines of Victoria, by Robert Brough Smyth.[9] While Smyth’s and other early published sources are irreplaceable historical records, Jones is acutely aware of the tendency of such texts to ossify the societies and cultures that are the subject of their study; and thereby to pre-determine how museum objects are understood — to the point
left:
Installation view from Murruwaygu. Reko Rennie, No Sleep Till Dreamtime, 2014, birch plywood, metallic textile foil, synthetic polymer paint, diamond dust, gold leaf, 310 x 1030 cm. Art Gallery Society of New South Wales Contempo Group 2014. © Reko Rennie. Photo: Mim Sterling, AGNSW. bottom left: Installation view from Murruwaygu. Steaphan Paton, Cloaked combat, 2013, bark, carbon fibre, plastic, synthetic polymer paint . National Gallery of Victoria, Yvonne Pettengell Bequest, 2013. © Steaphan Paton, courtesy Anna Pappas Gallery, Melbourne. Photo: Mim Sterling, AGNSW. right:
Installation view from Murruwaygu showing the two shields by Barak in the foreground. Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney. Photo: Mim Sterling, AGNSW. bottom right:
Jonathan Jones, mugugalurgarra (conceal), 2015. Installation as part of Unsettled: Stories within, National Museum of Australia, Canberra. Photo: George Serras.
Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 24(3) – Autumn 2016 21
7. Jonathan Jones, personal comment to the author, 21 February 2016. 8. Kulata Tjuta was exhibited at the Art Gallery of South Australia as part of the Adelaide Biennial Dark Heart in 2014, and a second iteration was commissioned by the Gallery for Tarnanthi, Festival of Contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art in 2015. Also in 2015, Jones collaborated with Bidjigal/Eora elder and senior artist Aunty Esme Timbery on Shell Wall, a seven-storey installation on the façade of the Alexander Building (designed by Andrew Andersons of PTW) at Barangaroo in Sydney. 9. Robert Brough Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria: With notes relating to the habits of natives of other parts of Australia and Tasmania, Melbourne: John Ferres, Govt. Printer, 1878. 10. See Jones’ statement on mugugalurgarra (conceal), 2015, at http://www.nma.gov.au/exhibitions/ unsettled/jonathan_jones
where Koori people feel disenfranchised of their own heritage when encountering it presented in the museum context of scientific study.[10] Jonathan Jones’ mugugalurgarra (conceal) questions the role of the museum as a keeper of cultural artefacts — the ‘gifts from our ancestors’ — and the manners in which these ‘gifts’ are variously interpreted, communicated to the museum’s public, and reconnected with the descendants of their makers. [] Wally Caruana is an independent curator, art historian, valuer and consultant specialising in Indigenous Australian art. From 1984 to 2001 he was the first curator of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art collection at the National Gallery of Australia. He is the author of Aboriginal Art, published by Thames and Hudson in the World of Art series, now in its third edition. Citation: Wally Caruana, ‘Working on the line: The art of Jonathan Jones’, Museums Australia Magazine, Vol. 24(3), Museums Australia, Canberra, Autumn 2016, pp. 18-21.
22 Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 24(3) – Autumn 2016
Victorian Collections and Trove working together
Victorian Collections finding their home in Trove
Catriona Bryce and Belinda Ensor
I
n January 1980, Ethel May Punshon, 98 years young, received a certificate of appreciation from Japan’s foreign minister. A teacher by training, Ethel had the kind of varied career we think to be quite modern: she worked as a teacher with the J.C. Williamson Juvenile Opera Company; also as an artist in a photographic studio, a ladies tailor, and a radio presenter. Travels to Japan, Korea, China and Hong Kong in the late 1920s inspired an interest in the Japanese language, which she studied in evening classes at the University of Melbourne. In the 1940s she began teaching English as a second language. Known as Aunty Monty, Ethel became a matron at one of the World War 11 internment camps in Tatura, Victoria. During World War 11, Tatura in Victoria was home to prisoners of war and civilians of Italian, Japanese and German heritage, interned in seven camps around the region. During the course of the war these camps held up to 8,000 people. The history of the camps, and the stories of individuals like Ethel, are collected in museums like the Tatura Irrigation and Wartime Camps Museum. This museum holds a unique collection that reflects the life and history of the area. The museum became one of the first of Victorian Collections’ museums to contribute their records to Trove.
Victorian Collections and Trove Trove is a discovery service built and maintained by the National Library of Australia. Trove helps people find and use resources relating to Australia. Much more than a search engine: Trove brings together content from libraries, museums, archives and research organisations into one easy search interface. Trove began collaborating with Victorian Collections in 2014, making a small number of Victorian Collections items ‘discoverable’ through Trove. From that humble beginning of linking just over 2,000 records describing objects in collections, the two services are now sharing nearly 20,000 records from 17 organisations. The records are coming from some wonderful and diverse collections. The Tatura Irrigation and Wartime Camps Museum has offered us wonderful objects, such as a paua shell butterfly brooch from Camp 3, Tatura, where German families where interned as enemy nationals. If you’re a knitter or just interested in the development of the Australian wool industry, the National Wool Museum in Bendigo has a remarkable knitted nativity scene. It also has copies of letters from Sir Joseph Banks to King George III, which discuss the sheep industry of the day. Meanwhile the Cyril Kett Optometry Museum has an opthalmotrope, a model that illustrates the movement
of the muscles around the eyes. Trove’s raison d'être is making access to Australia’s unique collections happen. The partnership with Victorian Collections is an important part of making that possible.
We want more There are more than 60 thousand records in Victorian Collections, provided from 375 organisations, and representing the depth and breadth of the Australian story. There are benefits for both information seekers and participating organisations to have records included in Victorian Collections and Trove. As Ethel’s story demonstrates, placing collection objects in their historical context links them with other objects, and provides an accumulating wealth of enriched meaning. A story can start with just one record, and after a little keyword-searching, further pieces may fill in the picture. Tatura’s collection, for instance, can be discovered alongside the collections of organisations such as the Australian War Memorial, and the richness of their stories can be expanded upon in Trove’s digitised newspapers. Instead of being faced with the ‘giant haystack’ of possible links that is the Internet, people interested in Australian history and culture can come to one authoritative portal to begin their information journey. They can start in Trove and along the way end up finding your collection. For an organisation, having records in Trove provides wide exposure — 65,000 people per day search Trove. They find records in Trove and are directed to the organisation’s page in Victorian Collections, to the organisation’s website, and in many
from top: First World War Letters of James McDonald & James William Pumfrey addressed to Miss Ida Rutherford, from the collection of RSL Victoria – Anzac House Reference Library and Memorabilia Collection.
Catriona Bryce. Belinda Ensor. Trove website.
Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 24(3) – Autumn 2016 23
Collections removes many of the technical and financial barriers faced by small organisations when it comes to sharing their collections online. Meanwhile collecting organisations are supported to do what they do best, which is to continue to interpret and tell the stories of their communities. Online audiences can now freely explore collections that previously might have been accessible only through a physical visit, if at all.
Changing the way we collect and collaborate
left:
Earthenware peacock, known as the Loch Ard Peacock, which was found amongst the cargo of the shipwreck of the Loch Ard, from the collection of Flagstaff Hill Maritime Village. right:
Two young Japanese women demonstrating traditional cultural practice whilst living at Tatura Internment and Wartime Camps during the Second World War, from the Collection of Tatura Irrigation & Wartime Camps Museum.
cases to the building (or museum) housing a specific collection. Trove meanwhile is indexed by all the major search engines. Trove can also provide statistics to demonstrate the increased traffic to a particular website. And inclusion in Trove provides that crucial context of a switch-point to networks of wider relationships, as already mentioned.
Why join us? Victorian Collections’ aggregating functionality makes it easy for Trove to incorporate community content into Trove searches. The partnership between Trove and Victorian Collections represents a true democratisation of collections in Australia, where all digitised collections, whether large or small, can comfortably sit side-by-side and collectively unlock local, state and national stories. Community collecting organisations can fill in the spaces often left by the large collecting institutions in Australia, and add new voices of our shared history. Inclusion in Victorian Collections and Trove allows these collections to find new and more diverse audiences online. Victorian Collections supports non-traditional collecting organisations such as RSLs, school archives, sporting clubs and multicultural groups; and all of these organisations can gain access to existing professional development already offered to small, volunteer-run museums. Accessibility is key to the celebration and elevation of the collections of medium-sized museums and community collecting organisations. For many small organisations, the path to sharing their collections online is a steep learning curve, or it might even seem impossible. However through workshops and ongoing phone contact and face-to-face support, Victorian
For a collection, inclusion on Trove does mean more inquiries, more offers of donation, more requests for images and information, and more online engagement. But it also means more enhancement of items’ provenance data through feedback from users; and more partnerships, collaboration, borrowing and lending between organisations through their collections’ enhanced visibility. Trove facilitates a stronger unity, greater accessibility, and a further step towards a truly inclusive single gateway for audiences to explore our nationally distributed collection. It also provides all of us the opportunity to recognise the work and achievements of community collecting organisations, and to appreciate the hundreds of thousands of volunteered hours spent documenting and caring for our material culture by communities. We urge any Victorian collecting organisations to get in touch with the Victorian Collections team for assistance in sharing their collections through Trove, and organisations outside of Victoria to get in touch with Trove directly, using the Contact Us link on any page in Trove. []
More information How to get your collection in Trove http://help.nla.gov.au/trove/content-partners Trove blog https://www.nla.gov.au/blogs/trove Tatura Irrigation & Wartime Camps Museum https://victoriancollections.net.au/organisations/ tatura-irrigation-wartime-camps-museum#about Victorian Collections https://victoriancollections.net.au/ Belinda Ensor is an historian who makes films. She has worked for Museums Australia (Victoria) since 2012 as Manager of the Victorian Collections project and as a Culture Victoria Content Producer. Catriona Bryce is a librarian at the National Library of Australia. Catriona manages marketing and communications for Trove and Libraries Australia. Citation: Catriona Bryce & Belinda Ensor, ‘Victorian Collections finding their home in Trove’, Museums Australia Magazine, Vol. 24(3), Museums Australia, Canberra, Autumn 2016, pp. 22-23.
24 Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 24(3) – Autumn 2016
Digital-versus-print magazine trends for cultural organisations
Digital demise!
above:
Brendan Atkins. Photo by Claire Atkins/Arty&Leo.
right:
Print magazines: effective marketing tools for museums and galleries. Photo by Joy Lai/State Library of NSW.
Brendan Atkins
A
ccording to 'eighties group The Buggles, video killed the radio star, but has digital killed print magazines? Far from it, say editors in Australian cultural institutions. ‘Look magazine is an essential part of the Art Gallery Society of New South Wales' infrastructure’, says its editor, John Saxby. ‘It began as a way of delivering information about events, but we also see it as a way of building and fostering the community of members through their connection to the Gallery.’ At the State Library of NSW, editor Cathy Perkins says SL magazine is an exclusive benefit of membership. ‘It gives Friends of the State Library something tangible and is a way of featuring stories on our vast collection.’ Look and SL are both well established, but a relative newcomer is Story magazine, launched in 2015 by the Queensland Performing Arts Centre, QPAC, in Brisbane. ‘It's the evolution of what used to be the six-monthly highlights program that primarily had a marketing focus’, says QPAC's strategic director, Rebecca Lamoin. ‘The key strategic reason for having a
magazine is our strong learning agenda — Story aims to increase arts literacy with our audiences.’
Why digital? ‘Strategy’ is a word often missing from cultural institutions, where rising costs and shrinking budgets are placing renewed pressure on print editions. For example, in recent years the Australian Museum and MAAS Powerhouse have cut their quarterly members magazines to biannual editions. And in February this year, the National Library of Australia announced it is ceasing production of its quarterly magazine in response to federal government budget cuts. Unfortunately, cutting costs also cuts communication and engagement with audiences. By comparison, smaller institutions like Sydney University Museums have been able to maintain their quarterly print editions and sustain a deeper level of engagement with their closest supporters. Digital publishing seems an attractive solution to the problem of rising costs and budget cuts, but few Australian cultural institutions have produced anything other than EDMs (electronic direct mail) and PDF (portable document format) versions of print
Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 24(3) – Autumn 2016 25
There's renewed appreciation for beautifully printed products...sales of niche and specialist publications are rising and the permanence of the print aesthetic continues to be valued by readers.
top to bottom:
Editor of SL magazine, Cathy Perkins. Photo by Joy Lai/State Library of NSW.
Editor of Look magazine, John Saxby. Photo by Felicity Jenkins/Art Gallery of NSW.
magazines. An exception is the Art Gallery Society of New South Wales, which three years ago was the first Australian cultural institution to produce an iPad app version of its magazine. So it is a surprise to find that January's Look for iPad edition was announced as the last. ‘It's important to have a digital presence, especially for sharing content,’ says Saxby, ‘but the iPad app just hasn't worked for us. The take-up was very small, making unit costs higher than print.’ It's a similar story across the commercial magazine sector, which five years ago rushed to get aboard the digital train, says Richard Lindley, CEO of Realview Technologies: When the iPad appeared, publishers thought, “Wow, this is a white knight, this is going to save us and everyone is going to read magazines on their iPads digitally”. So they went off and created all these fancy apps with jumping, spinning, digital interactivity. And then about two years in they realised that the costs, time and resources to produce that kind of material were too much for the return. There just wasn't the uptake by people who wanted that experience, and were willing to pay for it — and that's the key!
Replicas So how can galleries and museums adapt their communication strategies to keep friends and members onside? Software from companies like Realview and Issuu produces digital replicas of print editions for online distribution and archiving. The resulting files (or flipbooks) can include useful features, with hyperlinks, search functions, photo
galleries and embedded video. A drawback is that readers need to work hard to read the text, with lots of zooming, splinching and clicking their way around a page layout designed for print, not screen, use. All that is now changing, reports Lindley, as digital readers put away their iPads and pick up their smartphones: ‘That's where everyone is consuming their online content. If you catch the train or the bus, try and spot the person who's reading a piece of paper.’ It's also the basis for Realview's latest product offering. ‘We take the print pdf and we pull it apart into articles, so it's much more easily consumed and more easily distributed’, says Lindley. ‘Once you get it into that format, it's just data, text and images, so you can put it back together in any number of ways and send it off to display in a way that's best for that device.’ Coupled with email and SMS distribution, the Realview model offers institutions of any size a functional and cost-effective digital magazine for mobile devices while handing publishers a valuable marketing tool. Recycling stories is a sound strategy, with many institutions re-publishing articles from their print magazines online, says QPAC's Lamoin. ‘With Story magazine, we really wanted the digital layer to be different from the print’, she says. ‘On our website, we can connect the digital content with all of our other learning and education materials.’
What readers want Replacing print with digital, as many budgetstressed managers would like to do, is sure to upset core supporters, according to a recent survey of editors in cultural institutions.
Editor of Story magazine, Rebecca Lamoin. Photo by Darren Thomas/QPAC.
26 Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 24(3) – Autumn 2016
Digital-versus-print magazine trends for cultural organisations
‘Through our reader surveys, people give us the feedback that SL magazine and the What's on are among the most important benefits of being a member’, says Perkins. Saxby agrees and notes that people are perhaps spending too much time onscreen. ‘People feel connected to this community they're a part of and they can just turn the computer off’, he says. ‘The magazine format offers a welcome break from screen time.’ He adds: ‘Our research showed that the majority of readers spend 30 minutes or more with the print edition, compared to an average minute or two with the iPad app.’ For culturally literate audiences such as gallery friends and museum members, aesthetics (what digital experts call ‘the user experience’) is crucial. It's what is driving new markets for niche magazines, says Alf Santomingo, director of specialty magazine distributor Trident. ‘There's renewed appreciation for beautifully printed products’, he says, citing literary and cultural journals The Lifted Brow and Canary Press as examples. ‘In many sectors, sales of niche and specialist publications are rising and the permanence of the print aesthetic continues to be valued by readers.’ Saxby notes that some cultural institutions are penetrating niche commercial markets with their magazines. ‘Magazines that are doing well look good and play to the strengths of print’, he reports, pointing to Bulletin (Christchurch Art Gallery), Gallery (National Gallery Victoria) and Portrait (National Portrait Gallery). ‘With Look magazine, we are now diverting funds from the iPad app to improve the print edition with better stocks, binding and editorial’, Saxby adds. So there you have it: to keep your closest supporters onside, don't just send them another email for their subscription dollars; mail them a quality print magazine, a tangible connection to your institution. Invest in it and you may even reach new markets while elevating your status and profile. To add value, send your print pdf to a digital service and receive a cost-effective, mobile-friendly version for commuting readers and social media distribution. And if you're still not convinced of print's re-ascendancy, just search YouTube for Ikea's tonguein-cheek video promoting its 2015 printed catalogue. ‘It's not a digital book or an e-book. It's a book-book’, says Jörgen Eghamer, Chief Design Güru, before listing the benefits of this ‘simple, intuitive device’: no power cable; high-definition pages; easy browsing, bookmarking and sharing...
It's the video that kills the digital star. [] Brendan Atkins is a freelance writer and editor, formerly editor of Explore, the Australian Museum magazine. This article is based on a panel discussion by the Editors in Cultural Institutions (EICI) group held at the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, in November 2015. <brendan.atkins55@gmail.com> Note: The Editors in Cultural Institutions group meets once or twice each year to discuss editing at museums, libraries and galleries. Editors bring samples of new books, magazines and online applications they have worked on, and share information about recent and upcoming exhibitions and publications. Guest speakers have included trade and museum publishers, specialists in web and exhibition text, and members who have attended overseas publishing conferences. Membership is free to editors working in cultural institutions. For more information, please contact Cathy Perkins, Editor, State Library of NSW <cathy.perkins@sl.nsw.gov.au>. Citation: Brendan Atkins, ‘Digital demise!’, Museums Australia Magazine, Vol. 24(3), Museums Australia, Canberra, Autumn 2016, pp. 24-26.
References • Realview website http:// www.realviewdigital.com • The Buggles on YouTube https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=W8r-tXRLazs • Ikea bookbook on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=MOXQo7nURs0
Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 24(3) – Autumn 2016 27
International conference report: Fashioning Museums (ANU, February 2016)
Fashion in theory and in museums practice: Debrief on a conference in Canberra[1]
Sharon Peoples
P
above:
Sharon Peoples.
1. The Fashioning Museums conference was held at the Australian National University, Canberra, 1–3 February 2016.
articipating on a subcommittee for the 2014 Museums Australia National Conference was a great learning curve. The insights gained provided confidence to apply for internal funding from the ANU’s College of Arts and Social Sciences to develop and host a small niche conference titled Fashioning Museums, which was scheduled for February 2016 in Canberra. This gathering was to explore the international rise of not only fashion exhibitions within museums but also the increasing number of museums dedicated to fashion. This rise had been noted by ethnologist, Marie Riegels Melchior (Assistant Professor in European Ethnology at the University of Copenhagen), in a 2011 conference presentation entitled ‘Fashion Museology: Identifying and Contesting Fashion in Museums’. In this paper, Riegels Melchior developed the terms 'fashion museology' and ‘dress museology’. The Australian conference meanwhile was designed in part to unpack her thesis about fashion’s changing treatment in museums as involving a movement between an object-centred focus (or dress museology) to more experiential and experimental approaches (or fashion museology). These ideas were also juxtaposed with themes and motifs drawn from the now longexpanding field of ‘new museology’. The connecting of theoretical concepts with the practice of fashion collecting and exhibition in museums opened up a rich vein for picking over during three solid days within a single connected stream of presentations at the Australian National University. Balancing theorists and practitioners through the invitation of key speakers was a daunting task. Along with Marie Riegels Melchior, other international and national specialists confronted the audience with ideas about not only what fashion does in museums, but also what museums do for fashion: for example, in papers by Dr Alexandra Palmer (the Nora E. Vaughan Senior Curator, Textiles & Costume at the Royal Ontario Museum/ROM, Toronto); Professor Jennifer Craik (author of the 1994 ground-breaking book, The Face of Fashion), and Katie Somerville (Senior Curator of Fashion and Textiles from the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne). Jennifer Craik's book spawned a rapidly growing number of books and journals directly dealing with the academic field that has become known as fashion theory. Similarly, literature on new museology, museum studies and critical heritage has also increased. Marie Riegels Melchior brings these fields together and intersects their themes in the recent
book she edited with Birgitta Svensson, Fashion and Museums: Theory and Practice (2014). Indeed a similar conference on Fashion in Museums is scheduled at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam in April 2016. Many may ask how indeed can, or does, fashion have anything to do with new museology? Answering such queries, the themes and conversations threaded through many papers underscored the ‘agentic’ capacity of fashion to ‘do’ what new museology calls for: in short, renewed public participation via new audiences; re-contextualized archives; examination of power relationships in museum productivity; and shared ‘meaning making’ through museum resources and programs accessed to wider participants than exclusively institutional actors. Most in the museums sector would claim that museums should be able to touch everyone's lives. The ‘fashion’ audience of the conference, however, would contend that most people do already style their bodies through their daily activities. Musician and producer Brian Eno has noted, in his 2014 John Peel lecture, that no one has a random haircut: When did anyone last meet or see a person who never cut their hair? everyone styles their bodies — as reported in an ABC interview in 2015.
The Australian conference was designed to unpack Riegels Melchior's thesis about fashion’s changing treatment in museums as a movement between an object-centred focus (or dress museology) to more experiential and experimental approaches (or fashion museology). When the first abstract for the fashion conference arrived at ANU, it was from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. This engendered a sense of confidence that setting off to explore these ideas had the potential to engage strong followers internationally. After a strict culling, around 25 abstracts were chosen and finally 'curated' into tight
28 Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 24(3) – Autumn 2016
International conference report: Fashioning Museums (ANU, February 2016)
conversations. This was one lesson learned from the 2014 Museums Australia National Conference. A second lesson learned was to demand that papers should not simply be 'show and tell'. In an academic context, this style of presentation tends to be less than satisfying. While understanding that cultural and educational institutions pay for staff to attend conferences, the pressures to showcase their institutional wares can lead to ‘flat’ presentations. However, when curatorial expertise, intuitions and enthusiasms are demonstrated, this is far more impressive and stimulating. This points to the core of what new museology is about: namely, critical reflections. It also raises questions as to best methods and context. How can reflective analysis successfully argue about an exhibition that is over and done with? Why not debate ideas that flow through and beyond the production mechanisms of exhibitions, and indeed reflect on the power relationships that these exhibitions, and the cultural institutions themselves, deal with? A third lesson implemented was derived from the Fashion Tales conference in Milan 2015, whereby the key speakers handed over their papers a week or two in advance to respondents; and the respondents, in turn, were charged with producing solid reflections on the main papers delivered. This arrangement
29 Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 24(3) – Autumn 2016
Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 24(3) – Autumn 2016 29
top left:
Installation, Ballet Russes: The Art of Costume (10 December 2010 – 1 May 2011), National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Installation view features costumes from The Sleeping Princess and Le Chant du Rossignol.
top right: Installation,
Shoes: Pleasure and Pain (13 June 2015 – 31 January 2016), Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
bottom left:
Installation, Dressing Sydney: The Jewish Fashion Story (October 2012—December 2013), Sydney Jewish Museum. Photo: Henry Benjamin, J-Wire.
bottom right:
Installation, Fashion Follows Form: Designs for Sitting (21 June 2014 – 25 January 2015), Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto.
over page left (top and bottom):
Installation, The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk (17 October 2014—8 February 2015), National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. over page right: Back detail, Afghan jacket, 1890-1894. Collection: Broken Hill Migrant Heritage Committee. Part of The Australian Dress Register.
2 Fashion Follows Form: Designs for Sitting was held at the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, 21 June 2014 – 25 January 2015.
opened up the range of discussion for the audience in a much more considered way. As this was an untried strategy in preparing our conference, the idea was limited to Dr Anne Farran (Head of Fashion at Curtin University, WA) responding to Alexandra Palmer; and myself responding to Marie Riegels Melchior. While, demanding, the strategy proved worthwhile. Writers on fashion theory have been dealing with elitism in fashion over the last twenty years. While commissioning a Dior dress for a museum collection, such as at the ROM Toronto, might seem to be the height of elitism, what Palmer did was to show through a short film the input required from a constellation of workers during fashion production. She noted also that they were surprised and touched to be included in the film. This was contrasted by the ROM’s ground-breaking 2014 exhibition, Fashion Follows Form: Designs for Sitting,[2] which showcased the work of Canadian designer Izzy Camilleri, who designs a revolutionary line of fashionable and functional clothing for the growing demographic of men and women who use wheelchairs. The exhibition won the Richard Martin Exhibition Award by unanimous decision, with one of the jurors referring to the exhibition theme as one of ‘social justice and human rights’ (ROM 2015). The ordinary clothing of one woman was explored by Dr Alice Payne, a designer and lecturer in Fashion
at Queensland University of Technology. Her research involves the curation and exhibition of a vernacular fashion history comprising untold stories, unseen images, and garments that normally would be discarded. The Beaudesert Collection is a compilation of garments collected over sixty years by an ‘ordinary’ woman from an Australian regional area. It was learning through the seeming ‘ordinariness’ of these objects that made for a rich paper. It was difficult to engage an Indigenous voice throughout the planning stages for the conference. However the decision to call upon a white anthropologist with long experience of working with women in Indigenous communities, Dr Louise Hamby (Research Fellow at the School of Archaeology and Anthropology, ANU), provided a highlight. Hamby challenged the largely ‘fashion’ audience to reconsider the historic fashioning of the indigenous body through fabric usage in Australian Indigenous communities. She reframed textiles such as Macassan batiks, missionary cloth bags, and striped and checked off-cuts, demonstrating how these became constituents incorporated within ceremonial dress. Nevertheless these objects were rarely collected by museums, since they were not considered as ‘authentic’ Indigenous practices. Louise Hamby provided convincing analysis that pointed not only to the gaps in museum collections, but also rejections in
30 Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 24(3) – Autumn 2016
International conference report: Fashioning Museums (ANU, February 2016)
the mindset of collectors. What is curatorial knowledge? was the title for a session shaped by Dr Sally Gray (Visiting Scholar in Cultural History at UNSW Art & Design, Sydney), Roger Leong (Senior Curator at the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Sydney) and Laura Jocic (PhD Candidate in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne). This trio of papers teased out the work of fashion curators and showcased the nexus between theory and practice. While a session on the fashion blockbuster exhibition — or what had been framed by Riegels Melchior within fashion museology — attracted the most abstracts, Paola di Trocchio’s paper focused on how to look at fashion in a museum through the 2014 NGV Melbourne exhibition, The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk.[3] While the blockbuster generally brings in large numbers, marketing analysis has shown that this generally involves recurrent appeal to the same audience (and one that is demographically weighted to an affluent population), as well as perpetuating the elitism of fashion. The session on embodiment proved to be a climax of the last day. Erica de Greef (PhD Candidate in African Studies, and Research Fellow with the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative, University of Cape Town) examined the problems of utilising white mannequins and display figures at the Iziko Museums. This was followed by a co-authored paper by Glynis Jones and Melanie Pitkin (both curators at the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Sydney) on curating cross-cultural sensitivities in the development of the travelling exhibition, Faith, Fashion and Fusion: Muslim women’s style in Australia. [4] Hilary Davison (dress and textile historian and curator of fashion and decorative arts) rounded off the session with her paper on Fashioning the Body: The Pleasure Gardens at the Museum of London. This grouping of papers reflected the enactment of new museology through fashion museology, as well as reflecting the nexus of theory and practice. What became apparent from the conference is that in order to understand fashion in museums and its impact on audiences, very specific visitor studies are required. These studies need to press beyond postcodes and ask more searching questions about audience engagement – for example: What do visitors experience in fashion exhibitions? What are they thinking? And what, if anything, are they learning? Can putting oneself into another’s shoes, or imagining wearing haute couture, alter one’s knowing or identity? Understanding what fashion ‘does’ performatively will help to better guide the direction of the future
deployment of fashion in museums – and avoid the trend of programming fashion in museums as ‘just a fashion’. [] Dr Sharon Peoples is lecturer in Museums Studies at the Australian National University, Canberra. Citation: Sharon Peoples, ‘Fashion in theory and in museums practice: Debrief on a conference in Canberra’, Museums Australia Magazine, Vol.24(3), Museums Australia, Canberra, Autumn 2016, pp. 27-30.
MORE ON FASHION IN MUSEUMS AUSTRALIA MAGAZINE 3 The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk (17 October 2014—8 February 2015), National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Reviewed in Museums Australia Magazine: Suzanne Bravery, ‘Iconic Frenchmen invade Swanston Street: Hugo and Gaultier exhibitions in Melbourne’, Museums Australia Magazine, Vol. 23 (1), Summer 2014, pp.31-36.
Powerhouse Museum, ‘The Australian Dress Register: Garments and costume animating social history’, Museums Australia Magazine, Vol. 21(3), Museums Australia, Canberra, Autumn 2013, pp.23–26.
4 Faith, Fashion, Fusion: Muslim women’s style in Australia (5 May 2013—14 July 2013), Powerhouse Museum (Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences), Sydney.
Roslyn Sugarman, ‘Dressing Sydney: The Jewish Fashion Story’, Museums Australia Magazine, Vol. 21(3), Museums Australia, Canberra, Autumn 2013, pp.27–32.
References
Robert Bell, ‘Theatre, fashion and costume at the National Gallery of Australia’, Museums Australia Magazine, Vol. 21 (3), Museums Australia, Canberra, Autumn 2013, pp. 33–36. Katie Somerville and Danielle Whitfield, ‘The Australian Fashion and Textiles Collection at the National Gallery of Victoria’, Museums Australia Magazine, Vol. 21 (3), Museums Australia, Canberra, Autumn 2013, pp. 37–38. Suzanne Bravery, ‘Hollywood Costume: Cinema memory enhanced in the digital age’, Museums Australia Magazine, Vol. 22(2), Museums Australia, Canberra, Summer 2013, pp.10–13. Suzanne Bravery, ‘Iconic Frenchmen invade Swanston Street: Hugo and Gaultier exhibitions in Melbourne’, Museums Australia Magazine, Vol. 23 (1), Summer 2014, pp.31-36.
1. ABC The Music Show (2015) podcast Brian Eno http://www.abc.net.au/ radionational/programs/musicshow/ biran-eno's-john-peel-lecture/7022154 2. Marie Riegels Melchior (2011), ‘Fashion Museology: Identifying and Contesting Fashion in Museums’, Mansfield College, Oxford, 22-25 September 2011. 3. Marie Riegels Melchior and Birgitta Svensson, (2014) Fashion in Museums: Theory and Practice London: Bloomsbury. 4. ROM (2015) https://www.rom. on.ca/en/exhibitions-galleries/ exhibitions/fashion-follows-form
Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 24(3) – Autumn 2016 31
Narrating objects, collecting stories
Book review
above:
Janie Mason.
S. H. Dudley, A. J. Barnes, J. Binnie, J. Petrov and J. Walklate (eds), Narrating Objects, Collecting Stories, (London & New York: Routledge, 2012), 304 pp. hardback, ISBN: 978-0-415-69271-7. RRP: £90.
Janie Mason
M 1. Bruno Latour & Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (Thousand Oaks: Sage USA, 1979); Michael Callon, ‘Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St Brieuc Bay’, in J. Law (ed.) Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1986), pp.196-223.
uch of this book originated as presentations at a 2008 conference, ‘Material Worlds’, hosted by the University of Leicester, UK. It was a celebration of the contribution of Susan Pearce to museum studies, material culture studies and archaeology, and her achievement gains a more enduring tribute in the form of this publication. It is another edition in the Routledge ‘Museums Studies’ series. Writers and researchers from diverse disciplines explore methodological and theoretical approaches to material culture with stories of objects, collections and collectors. From varied perspectives, they seek new meanings and values for objects and collection processes and analyse objects and their stories, making connections between persons and things.
The first chapters, 2 to 4, discuss relationships between objects and people. A string figure usually known as ‘cat’s cradle’ becomes an object embodied with history and becoming an extension of the human body. Souvenirs of war and conflict create new dimensions of the war experience for the objects, whether for participants or those left behind. Similarly travel souvenirs of the immigrant returning to home country as a sojourner provide different aspects of the migrant experience – a different interpretation from the more usual exhibition of artefacts brought as part of the immigration process to the new country and displayed within that country’s nationalist jingoism. In the next chapters, 5 to 8, there are interesting discussions of changing contexts creating new meanings for objects. A 1938 painting by Frida Kahlo, What the Water Has Given Me, of her feet reflected and a mix of objects floating in the bathwater, is interpreted as a post-colonial map of Mexico. The changing domestic décor of São Paulo 1870-1920 is compared with the same new mechanisation that served different purposes and outcomes for the northern society of the US. In the north, machines replaced the servant and domestic space became smaller and more efficient. For the upper/middle class Brazilian housewife, servants replaced slaves but a modernising domestic space with machine and architecture demonstrated social stratification. Scottish stones with early mediaeval engraving show how museums are places of ‘contested meaning’, making connections and continuing life stories of curated objects. An analysis of ancient English and French religious ruins outlines the context and politics in the ruin-making. Whether from destruction (English reformation) or secularisation (French revolution), ruination is not the end of the story – the material signature can be found to continue a dynamic story. Discussion in chapters 9 to13 of collectors and collecting opens with advocacy for an actor-network[1] perspective to interpret the reality of objects and people with the non-human and human actors and their complex interactions in the collecting of novelty teapots. Private and public spaces of Norman Hartnell (d. 1979) and Frances Waldegrave (1821-79) are explored. For one, décor and collectables constructed and protected both his role as royal couturier and his ‘queer’ identity. For the other, they supported her created social status and made a significant political space. The personal colonial journey of Charles Bell (1870-1945) is analysed in his Tibetan collection made in a network of local knowledge on a new frontier of British India. Gender is seen as the defining factor of natural history collecting from 1880 to1914, and issues of professionalism versus amateurism,
32 Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 24(3) – Autumn 2016
Narrating objects, collecting stories
domestic hobby and public and/or private roles, as demonstrated with various case histories such as Beatrix Potter (1866-1943) and Marie Stopes, palaeobotanist before family planning advocate. Representation of objects and story-telling strategies in chapters 14 to 17 opens with an in situ reconstruction of Ghanaian furnaces and ironmaking practices, and questions whether this was as a performance or for production of iron. Competing narratives of the car are found in roadside memorials and the public museum space. Personalised, unregulated and ‘subversive’ views from the victims are told with artefacts whose meaning comes from the story in context versus the gendered technological marvels of motoring in the museum. The history of an eclectic and gendered collection through many Greek historic eras demonstrates not just an emerging Greek nationalism but also memorialises the donor, Eleni Stathatos – a private and then public demonstration of self–understanding, beliefs and interests. And incorporating the archaeological story into pre-history, anthropology contextualises a pre-history museum exhibition developed across disciplines of archaeology, anthropology and museology. The Epilogue concludes with an outline of changing western museum and gallery perceptions of Aboriginal arts, from ‘primitive art’ in craft and ethnographic collections to achieving recognition as art in Eurocentric Australian art galleries. It is a story that seems to successfully summarise the various strands of this book’s rich discussion of collectables, collectors and collections. This collection of writings makes an important contribution to museology. Above all in relating collectable, collector and collection to context and across time, it demonstrates the richness of opportunity for all the disciplines concerned in preservation of culture and heritage. To excite the visitor and provide a rich experience whether for historic site or museum building, and re-introducing known stories as well as creating new knowledge, this work argues for an interactive process for visitor, artefact, curator and museum. Often related within the theoretical thinking of the author, analyses and discussions create lively stories of a wide range of artefacts. Theoretical discussion is rarely allowed to overwhelm the exciting story of object, personalities and context. The stories told in the seventeen chapters, five
sectional introductions and epilogue are fascinating and full of historic, aesthetic, scientific and social detail. They support and challenge thinking and scholarship, now and for future directions of collections – small and large, public and private. They can assist those interested in culture and heritage to potentiate and increase the interpretative capacity of objects and collections for preservation, conservation and/or for exhibition. While this book is aimed at the museologist, it is surely also relevant for the art gallery curator. It is also significant for those interested in collecting institutions (public and private) – for the regular visitor, volunteer guide and other worker, donor, arts and heritage bureaucrat and policy-maker. With rare exception, however, the book’s chapters are just fascinating reading for the historic detail and enjoyable for this alone. [] Janie Mason is a University Fellow and Nursing Museum Curator at Charles Darwin University, Northern Territory. Citation: Janie Mason, ‘Book review: Narrating Objects, Collecting Stories’, by S. H. Dudley, A. J. Barnes, J. Binnie, J. Petrov & J. Walklate, eds. (London & New York: Routledge, 2012)’, Museums Australia Magazine, Vol.24(3), Museums Australia, Canberra, Autumn 2016, pp. 31-32.
Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 24(3) – Autumn 2016 33
War experiences illuminated through the cultural artefacts of POWs
Book review
Gilly Carr and Harold Mytum, eds., Cultural Heritage and Prisoners of War: Creativity Behind Barbed Wire (London: Routledge, 2012), 316 pp. hardback, ISBN: 978-0415522151. RRP: £90.
Cameron Auty
T above:
Cameron Auty.
he conflicts of the twentieth century led to the incarceration of hundreds of thousands of people, often for years on end. Since the dramatic events of World War 11, countless words have been written about the experiences of internees, and the individual experiences through memoir and interview are well embedded in the historical narrative. Concentration camp testimony and gulag literature form pillars of our cultural memory, and the images of the captured soldier and interned or imprisoned civilian are instantly recognisable archetypes. Drawn from papers submitted at three recent European conferences, Carr and Mytum's Cultural Heritage and Prisoners of War: Creativity Behind Barbed Wire explores modern attempts to further explore the internee experience through the lens of created cultural artefacts. This field of study combines various disciplines. Both editors are archaeologists, and other contributors include historians, sociologists and curators. The nature and provenance of the material artefacts created and preserved in camps means that surviving collections are rare and incomplete. The camp environment is not conducive to either the production or preservation of material history. Although often provided with ample leisure time, camp inmates faced powerful barriers to the creation of objects, and those that were created were often ephemeral, or all too easily lost or destroyed in the period following liberation. Cultural Heritage and Prisoners of War’s cross-disciplinary approach draws the various surviving collections together to build a cogent picture of the importance of creativity behind bars. The central argument of the collected texts is that creativity is a necessary tool of survival for the interned. Prisoners used materials at hand to create objects, ranging from medical tools to artworks. All of the objects should be seen as expressions of creativity aimed at survival, both spiritual and physical; the
prisoner uses creative endeavour, whether artistic or practical, as a means of regaining personal agency. The book presents these creative actions as part of a spectrum: Allied prisoners of war in the Pacific used bamboo and jungle plants to create rudimentary medical equipment; Japanese civilian internees in the USA engaged in ancient forms of flower arrangement to create a semblance of home life in their sparse camp barracks; and British soldiers in World War I begged and borrowed materials to print camp newspapers. The book argues that all of these actions are essentially connected, and any distinction between high art and practical tools isn’t useful in exploring captivity narratives. Investigation of the artefacts of captivity reveals the ways that limited cultural opportunities behind bars were utilised to create and maintain identity. Oliver Wilkinson, from Lancaster University, shows how British camp magazines were used to reinforce pre-captivity social structures. Most magazines were produced by officers, and class structure and dominance were expressed clearly through the choice of content and means of distribution. Similarly, German civilians interned in Britain during World War I used printed materials to link their captivity struggles to the Kulturkrieg (culture war) and Frontgeist (front spirit) prevalent in Germany during the conflict, thus empowering themselves to survive years of inaction during crisis. The book explores the importance of intangible heritage in times of captivity. Stage productions, cultural performances and the maintenance of language all contributed to the strengthening of bonds between internees, a key element of survival. Sears Eldridge, Emeritus Professor of Theatre and Dance at Macalaster College (Minnesota), presents cultural artefacts preserved from a fascinating theatre production during World War 11. While recovering from the horrors of building the Thai-Burma railway, a group of British prisoners of war in the Chungkai hospital camp in Thailand staged a production of the West-End musical comedy ‘Wonder Bar’. Struggles to create stage and sets, to find rehearsal time and to negotiate with prison authorities, provided the men with distraction and entertainment. Only a few objects survive – some photographs of the performance and a playbill; but from these and the testimonies of survivors, Eldridge is able to show that the planning and performance of ‘Wonder Bar’ and
34 Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 24(3) – Autumn 2016
War experiences illuminated through the cultural artefacts of POWs
other theatre shows was essential to survival. Camp doctors claimed that these performances were of more value than most medical interventions; in the words of one doctor, ‘a powerful form of prophylactic mental hygiene’. Meg Parkes’ article on the struggles of camp medical staff in the jungles of Asia during World War II covers the seemingly prosaic opposite end of the spectrum. Eminently practical and concerned with the immediate needs of the prisoner’s body, she shows that this was nevertheless an expression of creativity. The creation of tools from food cans and bamboo, the invention of stills to sterilise water and even ileostomy tubes made from rubber to save the worst cases of dysentery: all show the extent to which the creative process saved lives. That any of these artefacts have survived is largely thanks to the work of modern archaeologists. Other segments explore the role of gender in the creation of modern camp collections. Camp authorities often forbade any record keeping by prisoners. Diaries and letters are rare, and when extant are often heavily censored. British female internees in Hong Kong overcame these restrictions by embroidering stories, names and dates into textiles. These quilts were overlooked by guards — but as ‘women’s work’ they were beneath the notice of authorities. Sewn into everyday objects, the textiles were easily kept and moved from camp to camp, and many survived and were later handed down to family members. These now form key texts from which to read the internee experience. Similarly, British and Italian soldiers often played with notions of gender during their time as prisoners of war. Heavy investments of time and resources in the creation of female costumes for performances show the importance of maintaining notions of home. The dream of post-war freedom was stimulated by productions and publications that showed men in the camp dressed as women. Mosquito net and rice-sack ball gowns, charcoal and tapioca makeup, and black market nylons reveal the lengths the soldiers went to for authenticity. This is an in-depth and valuable addition to an important field of study. The cross-disciplinary approach opens up new avenues of discussion, and it allows the limited nature of surviving cultural heritage collections to shed new light on the internee and prisoner of war experience. Surviving objects add immeasurably to existing narratives, and in some cases can illuminate new narratives of their own. []
Cameron Auty is Victorian Collections Manager, Museums Australia Victoria, and History and Heritage Consultant, Glen Eira City Council, Victoria. Citation: Cameron Auty, ‘Book review: Cultural Heritage and Prisoners of War: Creativity Behind Barbed Wire, Gilly Carr and Harold Mytum, eds. (London: Routledge, 2012)’, Museums Australia Magazine, Vol. 24(3), Museums Australia, Canberra, Autumn 2016, pp. 33-34.
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The National Anzac Centre Albany WA Photographer Lee Grifď&#x192;&#x17E;th.
Galleries of Remembrance The Shrine of Remembrance Photographer Vlad Bunyevich.
Showcasing Australia For The Past 40 Years