Museums Australia Magazine 23(1) Summer 2015

vol 23 (1) summer 2015 $15.00

Museums Australia

EXPLORE #MA2015

MUSEUMS AUSTRALIA NATIONAL CONFERENCE Sydney 2015 21-24 May • It has been a decade since the last Museums Australia National Conference was held in Sydney.

• A lot has changed in recent times in terms of the nature of the work done in museums and galleries and the associated operating environment.

• The remote and regional day will be held at the Australian National Maritime Museum at Darling Harbour 21st May. • The timing of the conference aligns with two key signature Sydney events, the launch of Vivid and the Sydney Writers Festival, the conference is part of Vivid Ideas 2015.

• Sydney is Australia’s largest and most exciting city, the museums and galleries sector has much to both celebrate and debate concerning the future.

• The conference will attract close to 1000 participants many of whom will be keen to immerse themselves in the cultural life of the city.

• The conference will be wrestling with radical propositions around collections, the agency of people, and the spaces where the two meet under the title Message ≠ Medium: # a _cultural _ cacophony.

• A greatly expanded “creative industries” trade show designed to engage new audiences is being developed.

• We are planning a high profile public event and many smaller cultural experiences that only Sydney can offer.

• The conference will demonstrate the museum and gallery sector’s agility in facing the challenges and opportunities of new technology and changing socio-cultural and economic expectations.

• This will not be a standard Museums Australia conference, there will be valuable professional development and some outstanding Sydney social events.

• It will be a high quality conference event that strongly engages students and young emerging professionals and generates a significant social media footprint.

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Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 23(1) – Summer 2015 7

Contents

In this issue Museums Australia National Council 2013—2015 top: middle: bottom: left: right:

President’s Message. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Our digital stuff: Rethinking cultural storage and retrieval in a fast-moving world. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Breaking out in Carnamah: Virtually transforming physical limits. . . . . . . . . . . 13 The ‘white cube’ changes colour: Indigenous art between the museum and the art gallery. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Museum leadership: An international training experience. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 One man’s trash is another man’s treasure: Australian political ephemera. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 Iconic Frenchmen invade Swanston Street: Hugo and Gaultier exhibitions in Melbourne . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 Renewing a great regional museum and visitor attraction: Flagstaff Hill Maritime Village, Warrnambool. . . . . . . 37 ICOM Australia Awards 2015. . . . . . . . . 39 The new Murray Network of MA: Crossing state borders, networking regionally. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

president

Frank Howarth PSM (Former Director, Australian Museum, Sydney) vice-president

Richard Mulvaney (Director, Queen Victoria Museum & Art Gallery, Launceston) treasurer

Suzanne Bravery (Independent museum consultant) secretary

Dr Mat Trinca (Director, National Museum of Australia, Canberra) members

Dr Andrew Simpson (Macquarie University, Sydney) Carol Cartwright (Former Head, Education & Visitor Services, Australian War Memorial, Canberra)

Padraic Fisher (Director, National Wool Museum, Geelong) Peter Abbott (Manager, Tourism Services, Warrnambool City Council, Victoria) Pierre Arpin (Director, Museum & Art Gallery of the Northen Territory, Darwin) Rebekah Butler (Executive Director, Museum & Gallery Services Queensland, Brisbane) ex officio member

Dr Robin Hirst (Chair, ICOM Australia), Museum Victoria public officer

Dr Don McMichael CBE, Canberra

COVER IMAGE: William Baker, Kylie Minogue, Virgins (or Madonnas) collection, Immaculata gown.

Jean Paul Gaultier Haute couture, Spring¬Summer 2007, Net lace dress with large patterned embroidery and white linen cut-outs.

Image courtesy National Gallery of Victoria and Jean Paul Gaultier.

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 Design: Brendan O’Donnell & Selena Kearney Print: 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 and Department of the Environment; National Museum of Australia; Museum Victoria (Melbourne Museum); Western Australian Museum; and Link Digital (Canberra).

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

state/territory branch presidents/ representatives (subject to change throughout year)

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) 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 Jo-Anne Cooper (Manager, Grainger Museum, Melbourne) WA Soula Veyradier (Manager, Western Australian Museum, Perth)

8 Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 23(1) – Summer 2015

President’s Message

Frank Howarth

Year in review: Museums Australia 2014

F above:

Frank Howarth.

or me, 2014 was a pretty momentous year.

Leaving the Australian Museum after 10 years was a significant transition tinged with sadness and some sense of achievement too. But one big upside of that change was the ability to give more time to Museums Australia (MA) and to work for the whole museum and gallery community, and 2014 was a busy year for MA. The very successful National Conference in Launceston in May set the tone: sell-out attendance, great speakers and discussions, and a chance to meet many of MA’s members in more social surroundings.

A big credit to the organising committee, led by the irrepressible Richard Mulvaney, and to the hospitality of our Tasmanian colleagues.

From my perspective, two significant issues dominated national discussions amongst the collections sector peak bodies. The first was the increasing concern about some items held in some Australian gallery collections that appeared to have been illegally exported from their country of origin, with falsified provenance. The media coverage of these disclosures indicated genuine community concern about the ethics of museum and gallery acquisitions, and flagged the need for more consistent and rigorous approaches to provenance checking.

Credit then to the Commonwealth Ministry for the Arts, under Sally Basser’s leadership, for not just compiling a set of cultural collection acquisition guidelines, but for involving the sector in commenting on and adding to the draft guidelines. The resulting Australian Best Practice Guide to Collecting Cultural Material, published by the federal Government in October, is a very useful and necessary tool for all parts of the collections sector.

The second issue is a more pervasive, challenging, and (potentially) very rewarding and beneficial one. That is the intersection of our sector with very rapid and extensive change in the digital world.

It’s for good reason that the boom in hand-held digital devices and in social media is referred to by futurists as a disruptive technological change. I’m even more confident now in saying that digital (in all its manifestations) will change our sector more than anything ever has. The challenge is in managing that change! A key step in looking at how our sector is adapting to digital was the report released in September 2014 called Innovation Study: Challenges and Opportunities for the Australian Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums Sector, compiled

by the Australian Centre for Broadband Innovation, CSIRO, and the Smart Services CRC. The report has become known as the GLAM report. The final document reflected extensive consultation with the bigger end of the GLAM sector, and credit in particular to one of the report’s authors, Chris Winter, for that.

The report (available through MA’s website) has had extensive comment, and suffice it to say here that it showed that there are areas of significant digital innovation in parts of the GLAM sector, which is good; but on the downside, it also highlighted that there is not nearly enough collaboration across the GLAM ‘silos’, and that digital innovation is patchy and not well coordinated. This has triggered significant and ongoing discussion within the sector, and with government. MA is playing a key role in those discussions, and I expect a lot to happen in this space in 2015. In particular, I am very keen to ensure that the benefits of digital innovation are available to the smaller and more regional parts of the collections sector, and if at all possible, that government assistance is focused on achieving that.

I do want to acknowledge that one of those islands of innovation has been created by our very own MA Victoria branch, in conjunction with Museum Victoria and Arts Victoria, in the form of Victoria Collections, a website and tool for smaller and less traditional parts of our sector to use to make their collections digitally accessible. A great initiative that may well be taken up in other parts of Australia.

As I mentioned above, I’ve had more time this year to see something of the richness of our sector, and a highlight of that was attending the South East Queensland Small Museums conference hosted by Redlands Council earlier this year. The depth and breadth of the material we hold, and the stories we can tell, always surprises me; and the dedication of the many volunteers who make much of this possible is inspiring.

So what will 2015 bring us? Digital will continue to be an area of focus, as I mentioned above.

Unfortunately government cutbacks at all levels are likely to continue, but on the brighter side, there is more generosity from philanthropists now than ever before. The competition for that generosity is keen, but our sector can deliver many of the community benefits sought by those philanthropists.

More specific to MA are two issues close to the minds of MA members. The first is the ongoing question of whether or not there should be a more national focus on accreditation: of institutions and/or of individuals in the sector, and also training courses.

In parallel with this is the ongoing review of museum

Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 23(1) – Summer 2015 9

left: Victorian Collections <victoriancollections.net.au/> bottom left:

Australian Best Practice Guide to Collecting Cultural Material, 2014. bottom right: Innovation Study: Challenges and Opportunities for the Australian Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums Sector, 2014..

standards. Both matters will take a lot of discussion, but we must reach a view on them during 2015.

The second issue is around how MA might better represent the interests of the visual arts and galleries part of the sector. The founders of MA deliberately chose the word ‘museum’ for the name to reflect the all-inclusive meaning of museum in the northern hemisphere; but for a range of reasons MA has arguably drifted away from representing the specific interests of the public galleries part of the collections sector. This is something I will focus on working with the MA National Council to rectify during 2015.

MA is a complex and widely spread association, and that it works so well is a credit to both the elected member representatives on the National Council and the State and Territory Branch Presidents/ representatives. Big thanks are also due to the professional staff of MA led by National Director Bernice Murphy and the team in the National Office, Laura Miles and her colleagues in the MA Victoria office, and Robert Mitchell and team in the MA WA office.

I look forward to meeting many more MA members in 2015, and seeing you all at the National Conference in Sydney in May. It promises to be very good indeed! []

Frank Howarth PSM National President, Museums Australia

10 Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 23(1) – Summer 2015

Digitising platforms and future pathways to our human heritage

Our digital stuff: Rethinking cultural storage and retrieval in a fast-moving world

above:

Ross Harley.

right:

Sol LeWitt Wall Drawing #1136. LeWitt left behind detailed instructions that today enable galleries to realise his art for exhibition: anytime, anywhere, any place.

Ross Harley

P

reserving humanity’s history and art conjures up images of archaeological sites and rare creative works to be touched only with white gloves. But we also need to urgently come to terms with the fragility of our digital records of the past 30 years.

It’s not quite Dr Who’s TARDIS. But an experimental new human-scale digital browser does come with some of the exploratory benefits of time travel. By standing ‘within’ the wrap-around search tool and reaching left or right, the user can home in on a particular period of world history, then selectively enter an area of interest to locate digitally-preserved objects, images and exhibits from the past.

This kind of remote-access, customised user experience currently under development at UNSW makes snaking our way on foot through endless museum galleries filled with dusty glass cases, clutching pamphlets or audio guides to interpret exhibits, seem rather quaint.

So too does the making of history and art with today’s digital tools. We can and are using crowd sourcing to locate an unprecedented range of historical documents, objects, records, images and oral histories; and we can – and are – making art in all kinds of new mediums, from gaming platforms to ‘augmented reality’, which open up extraordinary virtual user experiences.

In the foreseeable future, new technological platforms and rapidly evolving creative technologies will mean that visitors to galleries, libraries, archives and museums might not even have to leave home if they choose not to. Nor will the viewing public

even need to know what they are looking for; just as music apps can suggest bands we might like but haven’t heard of, there’s no reason why history or art experiences can’t be prompted in much the same way.

The revolution in the way we document, collect, curate and exhibit the material history of humanity ­— our vast collections of ‘stuff’ — is already well underway. We can be certain it will dismantle, or at least profoundly disrupt, millennia of human hoarding.

On an immediate personal level, think of how those lovingly compiled photo albums that documented and preserved important family histories are being put aside in favour of digital folders, now groaning with thousands of images that we probably haven’t even sorted.

At the other end of the scale, consider the changing context of the world’s museums and galleries, our repositories of human knowledge, of humanity’s achievements and failures — in fact of virtually every aspect of the minutiae of human existence. Digital imaging, storing, discovery and sorting tools are opening museum collections up to audiences we haven’t previously imagined.

We could be standing on the brink of a fabulous new era of ubiquitous access to the world’s intellectual, historical and creative treasures – or at least their digitised cousins. However, what lies ahead is not yet clear. For all the unprecedented opportunities, there are some apparent pitfalls and many more unknowns.

Every society collects for an infinite range of reasons that are inextricably linked to our ideas, values and cultures, and even our psychological needs.

The head-hunters of Borneo, for example, carefully preserved and displayed their enemies’ heads as physical evidence that local warriors had not just

Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 23(1) – Summer 2015 11

left:

Prof. Sarah Kenderdine (UNSW), demonstrating the 360-degree data browser and virtual tour of caves at Dunhuang’s Mogao UNESCO World Heritage site (the ‘Caves of the thousand Buddas’) on the old Silk Route, China.

defeated their adversaries but had also ‘acquired’ their strength. Europe’s aristocracy in turn ‘acquired’ many cultural artefacts of non-European cultures (the ramifications of which we feel to this day), storing and displaying them in settings that were ultimately transformed into the modern-day museum.

It is not just what we collect, sort and display that has meaning. It’s how we link those items together; and how, why and where they are shown. The idea that museums and art galleries should be accessible to all only dates back to the eighteenth century, when the educational, cultural and entertainment values of public collections were first recognised.

But today’s major museums, galleries, and even libraries only ever have a tiny fraction of their vast collections on display (often as low as 0.5%). We have simply accumulated too much stuff. So most of it never, or only occasionally, makes its way out of the storage vaults. We rely largely on knowledgeable, specialist curators to choose and display items in a meaningful way.

However the ability to create vast data-banks with digital versions of the world’s collections – and the capability to easily search those collections using new remote-access tools — now promises unparalleled opportunities for us all to view and understand much more of the world’s art and cultures than previously possible.

Take the newly opened digital visitors’ centre serving north-western China’s extraordinary Dunhuang Mogao Caves — a UNESCO World Heritage site incorporating 492 lavishly decorated temples on the old Silk Route, within which 1,000 years of cave art is still preserved.

With its new, immersive, interactive, 360-degree

digital gallery, the half-million or so annual visitors to the Dunhuang Mogao Caves — as well as any number of virtual visitors — can experience all that this globally significant Buddhist art site entails.

By holding up a tablet device within a darkened, ‘artificial cave’ inside the new visitor’s centre – or in an equivalent facility anywhere in the world – users can ‘peer’ into any cave they choose. Hidden digital markers beam back high-resolution images as though viewers are sweeping their gaze around the cave’s walls or roof. Meanwhile, the increasingly fragile decoration of actual caves can be selectively opened to public viewing on a rotational basis, to dramatically reduce the wear and tear caused by tourists.

Likewise a visit to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, for example, could become a unique, personally customised experience. A visitor might view a physical exhibition then use search tools to explore similar digital forms or related items in other museums around the world, while his or her companion looks at the same physical collection from a very different perspective, then heads off on an entirely different digital trail.

Just as we have become accustomed to multiple worlds of consumption — physical, online, and through what we used to call shops but now are increasingly reconceived as ‘location-based retail' — the concept of museums and galleries as solely physical repositories of history or art is radically changing.

New digital tools and platforms are also enabling us to build collections in new ways. Take the massive Europeana project that aims to collect, digitise and make freely and easily available online some 30

12 Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 23(1) – Summer 2015

Digitising platforms and future pathways to our human heritage

million or so objects, art works, records, personal diaries, documents and images of Europe’s history.

Europeana’s current First World War centenary project has linked local village histories together for the first time, by taking teams out into the community to source records and memories of human experiences of the war, then further link them together in a vast digital repository open to all.

Arguably, the result is a collection far richer and more detailed than even the finest curators could previously have hoped to build.

That’s the positive side.

However, those marble and bronze statues dating back to antiquity could prove to be our most durable historical and artistic records – unless we approach the digital promise with some caution.

Since the mid-1980s we have relied increasingly on rapidly evolving technologies with very short lifespans. In the art world we might consider video games to be one of the first iterations of a new generation of techno-art. There have since been many more iterations that depend on particular technological platforms for display, play and function.

When something is ‘born digital’, that’s often supposed to solve all the technical format and storage problems of the past. A digital file can be copied and distributed so that everyone can access it; and it is, theoretically, never lost — unlike those single copies of a precious book, painting or sculpture that could be destroyed by fire, water or war. To a certain extent this expectation is warranted; nevertheless our digital enthusiasm masks the fragility of today’s digital records, and risks overlooking the impact of the pace of technological change.

Go back for a moment to those dusty family photo albums. Are we really better off with our vast digital collections that we don’t have time or aptitude to sort, curate, or display, or that we simply can’t access anymore?

First, in terms of understanding and appreciation, ‘more stuff’ isn’t necessarily more meaningful. It’s easy to simply collect, but not to sort, because we imagine the ‘cloud’ and other networked storage resources as being infinitely large — when, of course they are actually finite resources located in huge server farms. Within a few years of its inception, for example, YouTube already hosted more material than was produced in the entire history of television. But that didn’t necessarily make it better as a cultural repository for future access.

And what about preserving what’s important today for the future? We might think we’re putting everything ‘up’ in a safe digital cloud – just like we once trusted our most precious records and endeavours on CD-ROMs. However giant IT firms are not public museums;

they have a very different stake in harvesting our collective historical records. Google and Apple are far more interested in selling us the next generation of digital platforms than worrying about whether we can access what we’ve stored on last year’s model for future retrieval. We already know that those old CD-ROMs of the 1990s are laminating and gathering dust in cupboards, rendering much of what’s stored on them useless.

Then consider the implications of ownership: every time we click to accept the conditions of use on a ‘free’ platform like YouTube, we are giving away our copyright to a private company. Many of the records of our lives and creativity from the last 30 years are now captured on proprietary platforms that effectively own that work.

The solution is either to retain entire working sets of the technology of different eras, or to constantly reformat objects, records and artworks into formats that are accessible on current generations of digital platforms – something that will be enormously expensive and time-consuming to achieve in reality.

Another option is to thoroughly document the way things were made, so they can be re-created or re-staged at a later date. Consider someone like the American modern artist Sol LeWitt – who pioneered conceptual art by arguing that the idea or set of instructions, rather than the realisation of the work itself, was what defined the artwork. His work may endure more readily than that of equally famous and influential video artists of the same period – such as Nam June Paik – simply because LeWitt left behind detailed instructions that today enable galleries to realise his art for exhibition: anytime, anywhere, any place. Video, on the other hand, is threatened as an inexorably obsolete format that has many of us in the art world scrambling to find ways to preserve it.

For today’s museums, galleries, libraries and archives, our biggest challenge is how to take up the new opportunities technology offers without being blind to the accompanying risks.

We need everything from new legislation on digital ownership and rights to new curating and collecting practices, both for individuals and organisations.

In order to ensure we don’t lose generations of digital works and creativity, but instead are able to preserve them in the museums, galleries, and cultural storehouses of the future, the time to act is now! [] Professor Ross Harley is the Dean at UNSW|Art & Design, Sydney, and the lead researcher on a number of Australian Research Council (ARC) digital cultural heritage projects.

Citation for this text: Ross Harley, ‘Our digital stuff: Rethinking cultural storage and retrieval in a fast-moving world’, Museums Australia Magazine, Vol. 23 (1), Summer 2014, pp.10­­—12.

Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 23(1) – Summer 2015 13

Something more than a museum and historical society in WA

Breaking out in Carnamah: Virtually transforming physical limits

Andrew Bowman-Bright

D top:

Virtual ticket to Carnamah's online collection.

above:

Andrew Bowman-Bright

espite the rumours, Carnamah is actually quite a small place! It is an agricultural district located approximately 300 kilometres north of Perth, in Western Australia’s Mid West region.

It’s an obscure spot – not on the coast; away from main roads; heading north; and searingly hot in summer.

The Carnamah Historical Society was founded in 1983, and as one might expect, its purpose is to collect, record, preserve and promote local history. We have established and now operate the Carnamah Museum; restored and manage the heritage-listed Macpherson Homestead; and strive to share and promote local history online. We are a community organisation with no ongoing funding, but we have a small and active membership.

We made our online debut in 2003. It was a great opportunity, but not one to be wasted on simply promoting our organisation. It was one, we decided, that should be used to help further our reach and share our history and heritage with new and greater audiences.

Jumping forward a decade: our audience has grown exponentially; we’ve made it into the National Museum of Australia; won an MA Museums and Galleries National Award (2014); and firmly placed Carnamah on the historical map. Our online content has grown, evolved and developed into our

multi-strand virtual museum, biographical dictionary, education resources, and our virtual volunteering program.

Virtual Museum: to be known and distinguished as Carnamah A few years ago, we began a project to share online some of our collection through the development of a simple virtual museum. A secondary aim was to provide the public with the opportunity to view and enjoy items not normally accessible due to their rarity, size, condition and/or location. The rationale wasn’t just to share images of objects or a catalogue, but to create a series of connected and interpreted virtual exhibitions.

The project encompassed research, interviews, the careful photographing of objects, scanning photographs, digitisation of ephemera, photographing modern-day scenes and places for contrasts, editing images, the writing of interpretative text, the construction of specific virtual exhibitions, and finally promotion through postcards and social media. This was in fact a simple approach to replicating online what you would find within a physical interpretative exhibition – bar the sole difference of providing striking and clear photographs in lieu of actual physical objects.

Photographs of objects had their visible background removed to give them an uncompromised presence on

14 Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 23(1) – Summer 2015

Something more than a museum and historical society in WA

July-August 2013 cover – relayed to 7,000 hardcopy readers around Australia and New Zealand and reaching 10,000 digital subscribers (including a history of the object and a plug for our Virtual Museum on the first page). Later in the year, CBH Group discovered and used an image from our Midland Railway virtual exhibition for the cover of their 2014 calendar. These are great physical outcomes from virtual endeavours!

Australian Curriculum Education Resources

above:

A recognisable 'artefact' from many a regional community museum. right:

May Turner's doll. Part of Carnamah's Virtual Museum and an example of the photography and post-processing undertaken to 'exhibit' the collection.

This doll belonged to May Turner, who arrived in Carnamah with her parents as a five-year-old in 1916. May kept the doll at her Carnamah home until her death at the age of 94 in 2006.

the page, and were painstakingly laid out with other images and interpretative text. The angle objects were photographed at, the side of the page they were placed on, the way they interact with adjacent objects on the page, the closeness and amount of text, margins and white space: all were strong considerations in ensuring that the conveyed stories flowed both aesthetically and logically.

Three virtual exhibitions ‘went live’ in 2011, and another six in early 2013. They take special advantage of being online by inviting comments and contributions from the public, which can then seamlessly become part of an exhibition and progressively enrich the experience for future online patrons. The exhibitions are also layered with links to other online content, especially entries in our biographical dictionary.

The project has received highly positive feedback, including many emotive responses. People have greatly valued being able so easily to discover and engage with our collection. This includes direct online visitors and others from social media, Google searches and mentions in Wikipedia articles. Exposure is a powerful force, and the project has led to an increase in both online and physical visitors.

For example, Inside History magazine used an image from one of our virtual exhibitions for their

In collaboration with Ignite Your Audience, Carnamah has created a series of Australian Curriculum resources, which are freely available to teachers and students via our website. The resources have been carefully created so they can be utilised from classrooms anywhere in Australia (with our online content), or linked to school visits in our physical museum. To our surprise, one of the teachers at our local school did both, and this meant we had an exponentially larger impact on those students.

They used our website, virtual museum and education resources over a period of two months, and then finished up with a visit to our physical museum.

Biographical Dictionary of Coorow, Carnamah and Three Springs Our virtual museum was built on the success of our first major online project, which was recently transformed to become our Biographical Dictionary of Coorow, Carnamah and Three Springs.

Through the Biographical Dictionary for the region, we capture and reference information on people from vital records, electoral rolls, post and telephone directories, rate books, minute books, newspapers, passenger lists, oral histories and hundreds of other sources. We look far beyond our own collection and frequently gather information from the holdings of local, state and national libraries, and archives more broadly.

Our Biographical Dictionary not only attracts people to our website, but is often itself the genesis for their

Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 23(1) – Summer 2015 15

The rationale wasn’t just to share images of objects or a catalogue, but to create a series of connected and interpreted virtual exhibitions.

interest. Online visitors might never have heard of Carnamah before, but discover there is a connection to their family or research topic. There is no better example than the case of the National Museum of Australia in Canberra, when it one day Googled ‘soldier settlement’. The NMA wasn’t looking for Carnamah, but there we were! – with comprehensive information available on dozens of soldier settlers and four soldier settlement estates. As a direct result, Carnamah is now featured in the NMA’s Landmarks exhibition, and is part of their book Landmarks: A History of Australia in 33 Places. Or as we like to say: that’s Carnamah and 32 others!

Over recent years, many people have deviated in their travels to pass through Carnamah as a result of a previous Google search that had led to our website.

Also valued are those who have found us online and will never visit – since at least we’ve still made it possible for a different kind of interaction with our museum and its resources.

Virtual Volunteering In 2012 we decided to give virtual volunteering a go. We put the word out on Facebook, and within a few hours had a handful of people keen to take part.

Indexing and transcription projects were started, using links to images in a Dropbox folder and to files in Google Docs. A big surprise was how much people genuinely appreciated the opportunity of taking part and being involved. We soon realised that this was something bigger than our organisation, and also a support facility sorely lacking in the hugely dispersed physical extent of Western Australia.

We applied for, and were successful in receiving a grant from the Government of Western Australia’s Social Innovation Grants Program – for a project to further develop our concept of virtual volunteering.

This provided funding over two years for research, development, trials, refinement, and the sharing of outcomes. The aims of the project are to increase the output of our organisation; to improve social inclusion; and to provide additional volunteering opportunities. To date, tasks undertaken by virtual

16 Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 23(1) – Summer 2015

Something more than a museum and historical society in WA

volunteers include transcribing, indexing, data entry, data extraction, photo editing, and online research for our Biographical Dictionary.

Carnamah has emulated the wonderful DIY History model of the University of Iowa Libraries in the US, using a blend of open-source platforms, plugins and code. The result is our Virtual Volunteering website, which has been used for many of our transcription projects and is presently being utilised by the State Library of Western Australia for the transcription of their WA Biographical Index Cards.

The last ten years have changed the face of the Carnamah Historical Society and Museum as an organisation, exponentially adapting how we interact with the wider community. Our visitors and volunteers were once limited to tourists and locals.

Today, we are sharing with and receiving help from anyone who is interested – wherever they are located.

The world just got a whole lot smaller, in a good way. [] Andrew Bowman-Bright is Virtual Curator for the Carnamah Historical Society & Museum.

Website: <www.carnamah.com.au> Citation for this text: Andrew Bowman-Bright, ‘Breaking out in Carnamah: Virtually transforming physical limits’, Museums Australia Magazine, Vol. 23 (1), Summer 2014, pp.13—16.

above:

Volunteers at Carnamah Museum.

Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 23(1) – Summer 2015 17

How is Indigenous art 'framed' in varied exhibition contexts?

The ‘white cube’ changes colour: Indigenous art between the museum and the art gallery

Margo Neale

F top:

Installation image of exhibition Utopia: the Genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye.

Photo: Lannon Harley, National Museum of Australia, 2008. above:

Margo Neale.

1. This essay follows the British convention that refers to art museums as ‘art galleries’, and to ethnographic and history museums as ‘museums’.

2. The then Director of the National Museum of Australia, Andrew Sayers, has an art curatorial background.

rom about the 1980s, the protocols of public art galleries and museums began to intersect. One hundred years earlier, these museums were established to authenticate the differences between European civilisation and Indigenous cultures. Like heaven and hell, they were two very different domains: one reserved for those who would inherit the earth, its large well-lit white walls showing-off the splendour of its art; and the other designated for those doomed races, their savage practices displayed like relics in glass cases and crowded in dark interiors like hastily gathered loot.

In the last thirty years there has been a revolution in museology around these differences.

Today Indigenous art is displayed in both major art galleries and museums, and often in similar ways.

[1] Sometimes the same exhibitions appear in each

venue. Not long ago, the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) and the Museum of Victoria (MoV) jointly curated a major exhibition of Papunya Tula paintings, Tjukurrtjanu: Origins of Western Desert Art (NGV, 30 September 2011—12 February 2012). Exhibited initially at the NGV in Melbourne, it later toured to the Musée du quai Branly in Paris (9 October 2012– 20 January 2013) where, despite the ethnographic display of the French museum’s own diverse cultural collections, the Papunya paintings from Australia were generously spaced on well-lit white walls.

In 2013 the exhibition, Old Masters: Australia’s Great Bark Artists, was shown elegantly at the National Museum of Australia (NMA) in a style that conforms to the connoisseurship curatorial model of modernism, with its ‘white cube’ attributes of minimal context and dominant curatorial direction over minimal Indigenous agency. This was unusual among any of our non-art museums today, and certainly for the NMA.[2] A number of visitors thought the

18 Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 23(1) – Summer 2015

How is Indigenous art 'framed' in varied exhibition contexts?

left: Installation image of exhibition Papunya: Out of the Desert. Photo: Lannon Harley, National Museum of Australia, 2007.

exhibition might reside more comfortably in an art gallery.

By comparison, the Melbourne Museum had earlier developed a hybrid museum and art gallery exhibition in collaboration with Melbourne University’s Ian Potter Museum of Art in 2009, utilising the Donald Thomson collection and entitled Ancestral Power and the Aesthetic: Bark Paintings and Objects — where both the ancestral and the aesthetic were presented with meaningful resolution. Here the various objects, historic contexts and stories were pertinently melded and brought into creative dialogue, and Indigenous community engagement was high. Clarity, connectedness and context prevailed. This jointly created exhibition was later installed comfortably in a number of city and regional art galleries and museums when it went on tour.[3] Similarly, in 2005, the art exhibition Colour Power: Aboriginal Art post-1984 from the NGV had taken up residence in the history-focused First Australians Gallery at the National Museum of Australia, causing consternation and raised eyebrows. What has been happening across these varying exhibition projects and sites?

The short answer involves understanding of the increasingly peripatetic nature of Aboriginal Art across sites and categories. The longer answer relates to the liberation and vocalisation of Indigenous

agency, stimulated by decades of political agitation for Indigenous rights, and backgrounded by a global postcolonial disposition surrounding all issues of cultural representation.

The recent curation of Indigenous art has confounded conventional museological practices in Australian museums and fine art galleries, and found a new presence in both. A well-known early example of this categorical dilemma was Tony Tuckson’s 1959 negotiation of a collection donation (by Dr Scougall) to the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW).

This enabled the long-term presentation of a group of Pukumani poles from the Tiwi Islands, which attracted the oft-quoted remark, ‘[T]heir rightful place is in a museum.’[4] However in 1988, following a showing in the Biennale of Sydney, there was hardly a murmur when 200 hollow log coffins were acquired for the collection of the National Gallery of Australia (NGA), as a memorial to Aboriginal deaths during two centuries of colonisation. Another example of category contests occurred with curator and academic Vivien Johnson’s inability to place the now highly sought-after Western Desert canvases in public collections in the early 1980s. They were constantly ‘rejected by art galleries as too ethnographic, and by museums as not ethnographic enough’.[5] Since then,

3. The exhibition toured to six venues throughout NSW, VIC, TAS and NT, which included regional, territory and city art galleries, a museum, and the main (combined) museum in Darwin, MAGNT. 4. Margo Neale, Yiribana. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Collection (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1994) p.13.

5. Vivien Johnson, quoted in Diana Streak, ‘Papunya’s Dream Images’, The Canberra Times, Panorama, 1 December 2007, p.4.

Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 23(1) – Summer 2015 19

6. Nicolas Peterson, Lindy Allen and Louise Hamby (eds), The Makers and Making of Indigenous Australian Museum Collections (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2008), p.6.

7. http://www.iconophilia.net/ronsspeech/.

8. Rover Thomas and Trevor Nickolls represented Australia in the Australian Pavilion in Venice in 1990; and Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Judy Watson and Yvonne Koolmatrie in same Pavilion in 1997.

9. Ron Radford made both this and the previous point, in 2010, on a panel of which I was also a member. The paper was delivered at an Australian Academy of Humanities symposium, presented in Adelaide, 19 November 2010.

10. Simon Wright and Michael Eather, ‘Some other way: MJN and Campfire Group’; exhibition catalogue, Fireworks Gallery, Brisbane 2000 (np).

An exhibition of Michael Jagamara Nelson’s work used his quote as the title for the showing at the Brisbane City Gallery, Queensland, in 1999.

11. Nicholas Thomas, Possessions: Indigenous Art/Colonial Culture (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), p.220. See also Howard Morphy, Becoming Art: Exploring cross-cultural art (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2008).

Morphy states that ‘formal appearance unmediated by cultural knowledge’ has moral implications (p.184).

Anthropologist Ronald Berndt and artist Tony Tuckson had also argued over such points in the 1960s.

12. The old story that to provide information beyond ‘vital statistics’ with contemporary works of art reduces them to ethnography no longer holds sway with the advent of iPads and O systems (MONA) – if it ever did!

13. Terry Smith, Thinking Contemporary Curating (New York: Independent Curators International, 2012), p.151.

however, Aboriginal paintings from the central and northern deserts have found a place in both.

The ontological slipperiness of Indigenous art gives rise to institutional debates that confuse, confound and redefine not only the art itself but also the places in which it resides. While western cultural institutions have often suffered an identity crisis in relation to the correct placement of Indigenous material, Indigenous people generally have not shared any such dilemma.

It’s not our identity crisis.

Where the contemporary art world has generally considered ‘the story’ to be a distracting scaffold, the museum world has been overly invested in the authenticity of Indigenous stories, usually mediated by anthropologists, to the point that when an aesthetic emphasis was given to these storytelling objects it often disqualified them from holding historical status. The last two decades of the twentieth century witnessed strong contests in the field of exhibitions of Indigenous art: Central to the rise of Aboriginal art [in the 1980s] was the effort by many outside anthropology to wrest it from anthropologists, and the ethnographic museum, and locate it inside the gallery.[6] One of the first to do this was Bernice Murphy, who included three large Western Desert paintings in Australian Perspecta 1981, when inaugurating a biennale of contemporary Australian art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney. Some objected that the ‘spiritual’ desert works were contaminated by their close proximity to the colour-field abstract paintings of David Aspden, falsely framing them in terms of Western abstract art values. Others had a contrasting concern: that the detailed ethnographic interpretations (reproduced from the catalogue) that were wall-mounted above their museum labels – unlike works elsewhere in the exhibition – ‘othered’ the work as culturally distinct and ‘tribal’. This dichotomy continued to challenge curators and institutions over the following decades, and is at the core of this story.

As recently as 2010, at the opening of the Indigenous galleries at the NGA, then Director, Ron Radford, still caught up in these old plotlines, declared that ‘The galleries are ... consciously and unapologetically designed for the permanent collection of Indigenous art, not for anthropology’.[7] This point was already anachronistic. It is now well over two decades since five Aboriginal artists, across two occasions (1990 and 1997), were selected to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale – arguably the most prestigious contemporary art event in the world.

There have also been notable Indigenous inclusions in innumerable international biennials and triennials since then, which reflects its well-established position

as contemporary art[8]. This apparent boxing at shadows would seem to be a case of not letting the truth get in the way of a good story – the ongoing story believed by some that art galleries continue to be the sole discoverers and saviours of Aboriginal art. This attitude expressed by Ron Radford is also the apparent justification for the lack of context accompanying Indigenous work, seemingly on the basis that to contextualise is to make it ethnographic and thus diminish its value as art.[9] The downside of this thinking is to deny the rights of artists to have their stories heard – which for most is a primary purpose in making art. As Michael Jagamara Nelson put it in 1999, ‘[W]ithout the story, the painting is nothing’.[10] The removal of cultural context also denies audience access, promotes western elitist attitudes, and reinforces the stereotype of us as a people being mystical and unknowable.

The impact of allowing the imposition of western disciplinary categories and institutional values on our cultural production, without discernment (or intervention), risks a form of assimilation according to anthropologist and cultural historian Nicholas Thomas. Thomas has observed that: [T]hose who declare their progressive stance … and an interest in cultural difference … in fact only acknowledge the work that is most consistent with the space and time of the art world ... close to their own aesthetic and theoretical values.[11] It is similarly misguided to consider an emphasis on the aesthetic form of Indigenous objects as somehow diminishing of their cultural or historical value.

Rather, it is when art gallery exhibitions and museum exhibitions both acknowledge the place of cultural context and find different ways of transmitting story that the boundaries between art and ethnography blur, and as such are not confined to any particular site.

Some good examples of this development have already been found in exhibitions such as Ancestral Power and the Aesthetic: Bark Paintings and Objects (Ian Potter Museum of Art at the University of Melbourne, 10 June—23 August 2009); Papunya Painting: Out of the Desert (National Museum of Australia, Canberra, 28 November 2007—3 February 2008); Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route (National Museum of Australia, 30 July 2010 —26 January 2011); and string theory: Focus on Contemporary Australian Art (MCA, Sydney, 16 August—27 October 2013).[12] These exhibitions were mostly displayed in darkened spaces. With the advance of the decolonising curatorial model, the white cube changes colour.[13] Such concerns, and others, were provocatively addressed in 1996 by the Brisbane-based Campfire Collective, with its artistic intervention entitled All stock must go!, shown at the Second Asia-Pacific

20 Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 23(1) – Summer 2015

How is Indigenous art 'framed' in varied exhibition contexts?

top: middle: bottom: left: right:

14. See Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Paris, 1998; English edition, 2002).

15. Margo Neale, Cultural Brokerage in the Aboriginal StockmarketInstallation Art as Social Metaphor, Present Encounters. Papers from the conference, The second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery & Griffith University, 1996, p. 76.

16. As the inaugural Indigenous art curator at Queensland Art Gallery, and a member of the local Indigenous community, I was a participant in the creation of this work. Consistent with ‘dismantling hierarchies’, I was the ‘black insider’ of the white institution, joining the ‘outsiders’.

17. Both responses were given to me at each institution.

Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT2), at the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane. Campfire’s mission of artistic self-determination included a challenge to prevailing art/artefact/kitsch categories,[14] as used to define and confine us, when in fact Aboriginal art is neither, but both – thus the institutional challenge.

Furthermore, Campfire Collective challenged ‘us and them’ attitudes by enacting the reality of shared influences, in visual collaborations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists, unknowingly engaging in what Nicolas Bourriaud has referred to as relational agency. Propelled by political satire with a large dose of Aboriginal agency, this performanceinstallation piece of 1996 defiantly located itself in the intersection between the art gallery and the museum.

The work was described as a cattle truck with a mob of ‘blackfellas’ selling art from the ‘back of a truck’[15] when installed outside the entrance of QAG. We were

invited in, but chose to stay out.[16] We were ‘at’ but not ‘in’ the state gallery. This self-marginalisation was so successful that it took a decade for the work to find its way eventually inside, and become part of an institutional collection.

Despite the fact that All stock must go! was suitable for inclusion in an international triennial of contemporary art at QAG, it was rejected for acquisition by the then Assistant Director on the basis that it was ‘not the kind of thing we collect but better suited to a museum’. A decade later it met a similar reaction from the NMA, which declared that it was ‘better suited to an art gallery’.[17] Whilst the work was still considered unsuitably artistic and metaphoric rather than original and authentic by some at the NMA, its strong historic narrative and urban voice eventually got it over the line, with a debut showing at a museum achieved in the exhibition 70% Urban, in NMA’s Gallery of First Australians, in 2007.

Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 23(1) – Summer 2015 21

left:

Campfire Group (with Director Doug Hall as serving boy) in the Boardroom at Queensland Art Gallery , 1996, catalogue photo for installation ‘All Stock must go!’, Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Courtesy Fireworks Gallery. middle: right: Campfire Group installation, ‘All Stock must go!’, Queensland Art Gallery, Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, 1996.

Since the 1980s, the politics of contemporary art in Australia have ‘wrested’ Aboriginal art from anthropology across to the art gallery, subjecting it in the process to the ‘white cube’ formalist display and reception applied to Western art. Whilst this removed Aboriginal art from the stigma of primitivism, it also subjected it to the tropes of modernism that are used to rebadge Aboriginal art as contemporary art.

It might have seemed a good idea to compare Western Desert painting to Western abstraction (with minimal text, as if this would alone prove its contemporaneity), but it became a double-edged sword. At the very moment when Aboriginal art was subject to contemporary paradigms of modernism, modernism was already outmoded. In the 1960s and 1970s, western contemporary artists turned away from modernism in favour of land, conceptual, spiritual and performance art. By the 1980s, post-conceptual practices had moved well beyond the aesthetic regimes of modernism and into the post-colonial models that emerged strongly in the 1990s.

Ironically, the approaches of museums rather than the practices of art galleries now seem more attuned to the relational art and postcolonial practices that have captured the imagination of contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists and curators, both black and white. It is not only the museums’ practices in relation to documentation, installations and recreations that resonate, but also their anthropological focus on elements inherent in Indigenous culture – such as connection to land and environment, spirituality, ritual and ceremony.

Today, the values of the contemporary are bringing the once very different paradigms of the art gallery and museum into creative dialogue. In Australia, the dilemma of how to display Aboriginal art as simultaneously Aboriginal and contemporary was instrumental in developing the new museology of the twenty-first century. The paradigms of western modernism were not necessary to make Aboriginal art seem contemporary – it already was. [] For a fuller discussion of this topic, see Margo Neale, ‘Whose Identity Crisis? Between the Ethnographic and the Art Museum’, in the forthcoming book, Transculturation: Indigenous Contemporary Art, edited

by Ian McLean (Cambridge Scholars Publishing – forthcoming).

Margo Neale is a Senior Research Fellow, Senior Curator and Principal Indigenous Advisor to the Director at the National Museum of Australia. Margo is also an Adjunct Professor in the history program at the Australian National University's Australian Centre for Indigenous History.

Citation for this text: Margo Neale, ‘The ‘white cube’ changes colour: Indigenous art between the museum and the art gallery’, Museums Australia Magazine, Vol. 23 (1), Summer 2014, pp.17—21.

22 Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 23(1) – Summer 2015

The potential of museum leadership development in a global perspective

Museum leadership: A new international training experience

Louise Tegart

G above:

Louise Tegart

far right:

Guggenheim Bilbao featuring "Tall Tree & the Eye" by Anish Kapoor 2009.

lobal practices in arts administration are constantly undergoing profound transformations as a result of advances in technology, access to information, funding systems, management practices, and changing audiences. Working in museums in Australia, it can often seem that we focus intensely on our own situation, and if we do get the time to look at broader museum practice and trends we tend to look around regionally to our neighbours in Asia.

ILPVAM: a multi-site model for museum leadership training globally In 2014, I had the privilege of participating in an innovative new professional development program that aimed at truly global perspectives. The International Leadership Program in Visual Arts Management (ILPVAM) was developed by three institutions abroad – New York University, DeUsto University Bilbao, and the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao — and 2013–2014 offered the added spur of participation in the inaugural edition of the program.

The ILPVAM content modules combined advanced business theory and development techniques, together with the latest concepts and global trends in visual arts management and administration, to provide a rigorous, engaging educational program for experienced museum professionals.

The aims of the program were to facilitate understanding of the current competitive environment and key drivers of success in global arts industries; to strengthen the strategic vision of cultural organisations and the leadership skills required to face the challenges of the industry in the twenty-first century; and to improve decision-making skills and process through a number of learning strands. The program focused on mastering the fundamentals of arts management, including strategy and governance, financial management, marketing, fundraising, and operations. A further goal was to facilitate acquisition of an international network of colleagues, experts, and practitioners in the global arts industry, which would provide a stimulating reference group for ongoing self-development of participants after the program concluded.

The application and interview process to gain admission to the ILPVAM program was rigorous and competitive, since the program coordinators wanted the right balance of experience and diversity of candidates from different institutional and non-institutional backgrounds. The fifteen selected participants were drawn from a wide geographical catchment area: from the United States, Canada, Spain, Qatar, Mexico, Italy, Macau, Kuwait, Serbia, Ghana and Australia. I was the only Australian participant, and was fortunate to receive a grant from the Career Fund of the Australian Copyright Council to assist with costs of attendance.

The participants’ diverse professional roles demonstrated the variety of different models of visual arts management in play across the globe today: from the Head of the Axia Bank Foundation in Spain, where banks fund cultural projects; to an independent curator from Mexico, working on projects in Italy and the US; to a private Arts Foundation director from Ghana.

Unlike similar leadership programs, such as the Getty Leadership Institute program developed through several iterations since the 1980s in the USA, the unique aspect of the ILPVAM program was provided by the three different locations, and successive stages, through which the course was realised.

ILPVAM was delivered through three fiveday, intensive modules, immersing participants in three sites of innovative cultural management internationally: first in Bilbao, in September 2013; next in New York, in February 2014; and finally in Abu Dhabi, in April 2014. The international scope of the program allowed participants to experience firsthand these important and very different centres of the global arts sector, as well as receiving first-hand training from leading instructors in each region.

This open structure, and developmental time-scale, allowed ILPVAM participants to develop their ideas and learning techniques between modules, in order to return subsequently with questions derived from applied practice of earlier training. Each module had an extensive pre-reading list of articles, and assignments to be conducted between modules, as well as online discussions and exercises throughout the six-month period of the program’s realisation.

The three training modules were further shaped around the environment in which each was held.

Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 23(1) – Summer 2015 23

Realised across three distinctive cities and institutional contexts in such different parts of the world, the program ensured a highlevel learning experience around leadership.

Module 1: Bilbao The first module in Bilbao was titled Understanding the Environment: Global Trends and Strategic Vision.

Key areas of focus for this module were: Global Trends in Arts Management; Strategy and Value Creation; Sustainability as a Competitive Advantage; Mission, Identity and Institutional Visibility; Building Cultural Value and Capital; Entrepreneurship and Innovation; New Leadership Concepts: Coaching in Cultural Institutions; Art and Urban Development; Culture-Led Initiatives: Creative Industries; and Communicating with Audiences.

In order to bring these topics to life, the first day of the program (in Bilbao, September 2013) focused on the city of Bilbao and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. It is widely known that the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is the result of an unprecedented partnership between the City of Bilbao and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in New York.

More than seventeen years after its opening in October 1997, the Museum is a reality that has exceeded the most ambitious artistic and cultural expectations of its creators, and ‘the Bilbao effect’ — or the extraordinary stimulation of the urban, economic, and social regeneration of the city of Bilbao and the Basque Country — is widely known. This is sometimes rebadged as ‘the Guggenheim effect’, as other museums and city governments around the world have courted the Guggenheim to achieve similar developments through partnership with the famous New York-based museum.

However the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao was only one piece in the puzzle that provided the comprehensive cultural and economic regeneration of Bilbao in the 1990s. In an extraordinary example of

long-term strategy and leadership, the Bilbao Council spent twenty-five years enacting their comprehensive plan to improve the environment, services, transport, public art and architecture of the city.

Culture was defined in fact as one of eight priorities for the City of Bilbao, and was anchored in a broader strategy of redefinition of the city following the collapse of its industrial economy, centred on steel, in

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The potential of museum leadership development in a global perspective

the 1980s. The City of Bilbao undertook 25 significant projects over 25 years in their redevelopment strategy, utilising funding from private and public partnerships as well as state and national government funding.

Vision and consistency were key aspects of the implementation of their strategic redevelopment.

The Deputy Mayor of Bilbao, Ibon Areso, spoke to the ILPVAM group in 2013: highlighting the need for visionary, even strident leadership in the face of adversity. For example, the Bilbao museum’s council persisted against doubters and went ahead with the Guggenheim project, even after the city had unanimously voted against it, because they believed in the vision and strategy that they had developed.

Such determination paid off in eventually producing an economic impact of $330 million euros and 6,324 people in local jobs, as a result of the cultural redevelopment of Bilbao.

Director of the Guggenheim Bilbao, Juan Ignacio Vidarte, reflected on the museum as a catalyst for change and a boost to self-esteem of the city: to project a new image to the world and demonstrate that Bilbao could compete on a global scale.

Vidarte spoke of culture as a transformational tool, and emphasised the unique private and public partnerships that have allowed the museum to flourish.

The Guggenheim Bilbao has been so successful that there are now plans for a second Guggenheim museum in the northern Basque Country. The gamble has paid off in multiple directions and the success of the Frank Gehry–designed Bilbao Guggenheim Museum achieved more than perhaps any other cultural institution of its time to convince city leaders and developers worldwide that where cultural megaprojects go, economic transformation follows.

However it was the long-term strategic plan encompassing the regeneration of many parts of the city that was uniquely robust in Bilbao, and has demonstrated why other planned Guggenheim projects, as well as a great proliferation of large-scale museum projects internationally, have since failed.

For example, the Vilnius Guggenheim Hermitage project for Lithuania, originally scheduled to open in 2011, became mired in set-backs that eventually produced a public inquiry into allegations of misappropriation of funds within the municipality.

Meanwhile the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, scheduled to open in 2013, is delayed and due to open in 2017, amid ongoing protests about labourers’ rights. And the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, opened shortly after the Guggenheim Bilbao and funded entirely

by Berlin’s Deutsche Bank in whose headquarters building it opened in 1997, closed at the end of 2012.

It is not just the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum and some of its partnership-ventures that have failed to repeat the model of economic regeneration through art and new architecture in Bilbao. Failures to replicate the ‘Bilbao effect’ elsewhere have demonstrated that a singular quest for addition of a signature new building by a ‘starchitect’ does

not guarantee success. For example, the National Lottery-funded National Centre for Popular Music in Sheffield, England, which opened on 1 March 1999, received only a quarter of its projected visitors and became bankrupt in its first year of operations, closing in June 2000. The Canadian Museum for Human Rights, Winnipeg, has been through similar challenges more recently: its ambitious building design failed to achieve planned completion in 2012, and finally opened in November 2014, but $40 million dollars in excess of budget. Meanwhile the much older American Folk Art Museum, redeveloped in a new ‘signature’ building (2001) opposite the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, was unable to service its loans, forcing the museum to relocate in 2011 to its modest former home at Lincoln Square and sell its mid-town building (to MoMA as it turned out).

All these ambitious projects experienced failure and frustration, through over-optimistic development modelling.

Returning to the ILPVAM leadership program: the final two days of the Bilbao module focused on strategy, in particular the concept of strategic orchestration. Developed by charismatic lecturer Alejandro Ruelas Gossi, Professor of Strategy at Miami University, the idea of strategic orchestration mobilises concepts that provide an antithesis to contemporary management theory. Ruelas-Gossi argues contrarily that benchmarking encourages sameness; that pursuit of low-cost goals is ineffective; and that competitiveness is ultimately unproductive.

Strategic orchestration, in this counter-analysis, occurs when an organisation pursues a development opportunity not by leveraging strategic power or seeking to command all required resources but by innovatively assembling and coordinating a network of partners. While not having all resources needed initially, but being able to gather them through partnerships, strategic orchestration allows organisations actually to ‘get to market’ faster, to adapt nimbly to changing circumstances, and to lower their invested capital and exposure to risk, thereby allowing them to search out less immediately profitable but new opportunities – such as serving emerging markets, which can then grow further in future.

With such a perspective, strategic orchestration has immense potential in the domain of public-private partnerships for cultural organisations.

Ruelas-Gossi advocated not just listening to customers but understanding what they do; and not simply satisfying present customer demands but surprising them by coming up with a new value proposition. Through not focusing on competitors but expanding your value and creating a unique offer; through strengthening your strengths and re-orchestrating internal weaknesses: by these means an organisation can act effectively to create and lead new developments.

Ruelas-Gossi also outlined ten key characteristics he found in successful leaders: yhey have no Plan B; they demonstrate passion for their projects; they

Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 23(1) – Summer 2015 25

above:

Students in the ILPVAM Program visit the Queens Museum. Photo: Ann Webb.

can weather the storm of an uncertain environment; they can manage many things at once; they utilise diplomacy; they are a meaning facilitator; they are an orchestrator of combined effort; they are preoccupied with growth; they have an excellent memory; and they are obsessed with details.

Additional sessions in the Bilbao program examined the creative industries in Europe, entrepreneurship, the future of cities, sustainability, and global trends affecting museums. There were also intensive sessions provided with curatorial, exhibitions, education, and visitor services managers at the Guggenheim Bilbao, and participants were given unprecedented access to their knowledge, practices and facilities.

Other site visits after a full day of learning sessions included the 1999 Euskalduna Conference Centre and Concert Hall (designed by architects Federico Soriano and Dolores Palacios and located in a former shipyards area of Bilbao); and the Alhóndiga Bilbao cultural centre, a redevelopment in a former winery building designed by Phillipe Starck and opened in 2010. These two further local cultural redevelopments allowed us to gain back-of-house insights into the management of major mixed-use cultural facilities.

Module 2: New York Relocating from summer in Sydney to winter in New York, for the February 2014 course module, was an unforgettable experience climatically. In the worst winter week in twenty years, the ILPVAM participants reconvened after a six months gap at New York University, overlooking the magical downtown setting of Washington Square.

Module 2 focused on Leadership, Audience and Funding. It included sessions on Leadership

and Change Management; Understanding the Changing Culture Audience; Cultural Marketing and Communications; Cultural Branding and Brand Management; Innovations in Fundraising; Governance and Board Management; Strategic Alliances; Partnerships and Collaborations; Interactivity and Participation; Art Practices, Art Law and Intellectual Property Rights.

Speakers including from the Museum of Modern Art, Guggenheim, and Whitney museums, the American Federation for the Arts and New York University, diversely addressed current notions of participatory experiences, the changing needs of audiences, market segmentation, new funding models, and the impact of new technologies for cultural organisations.

Professor Mary Jo Hatch, Professor of Business at the University of Virginia and Adjunct Professor at the Copenhagen Business School and Boston College, spoke to the importance of understanding and utilising a brand: a museum leader can use leadership, management and communication principles to strengthen an organisation’s brand, and through branding effect changes in an organisation’s identity, culture, image and reputation.

Mary Jo Hatch’s model of alignment between the strategic vision, organisational culture and stakeholder perceptions of a cultural facility derives from a process of examining a number of critical gaps: the vision/culture gap, the image/culture gap, and the image/vision gap. Her ‘gap’ modelling presents a clear methodology for identifying where unresolved issues frequently lie within an organisation’s understanding of itself, and provides a path to articulating a clearer strategic direction for development. Her example of Lego, which diversified its products to such an extreme that it faced bankruptcy, was a significant case-study of how clarity of purpose and authenticity need to be the prime drivers of any organisation’s development.

Site visits in New York included the Consulate General of The Netherlands, to discuss soft power, art and diplomacy; and a further session on interactivity and participation at MoMA, led by Wendy Woon, Deputy Director for Education. We were give an overview of recent research at MoMA about participatory activities, and of MoMA’s social and multi-modal way of engaging with art by direct experience and created interventions, including activities in the museum spaces provided for groups.

One of the highlights in New York was a site visit to the recently redeveloped Queens Museum, where then-Director Tom Finkelpearl outlined his personal philosophy on leadership and the development of his museum. The Queens Museum is an outstanding example of what a regional museum can be, embracing both local and international engagement of audiences. Without understanding and embracing the local specificity of Queens, the museum would have been merely a second- or thirdtier venue for travelling exhibitions. However in the

26 Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 23(1) – Summer 2015

The potential of museum leadership development in a global perspective

context of America’s most diverse population locally, the dynamics of internationalism, globalisation, multiculturalism and the complexities of immigration were able to be engaged in the one borough adjoining Manhattan.

The Queens Museum has hired community organisers to pursue different paths of community engagement. For example, it has involved art therapists who have developed programs around autism; provided programming in multiple languages; employed community workers and artists who work off-site; and produced community festivals and public art projects. These are just some of the innovative programs that have worked successfully within a ground-breaking culture of community engagement at Queens Museum.

Module 3: Abu Dhabi Module 3, two months later, involved another extreme weather change when ILPVAM reconvened in Abu Dhabi in April 2014. This last module, titled Operating in the Global Art Sector, focused on the following components: Reinventing Operations Management; Managing People; Financial Management; Cultural Heritage; Cultural Diplomacy; Global/Local: Cultural Tourism; Developing Community and Creating Audience; Art Markets; and Re-Visioning the Visual Arts Sector.

Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates, has been the focus of a slew of media reports in the last few years about its iconic Saadiyat Island Cultural District development: entailing the building of twentynine hotels, creation of a branch campus of New York University, and construction of five major museums.

Scheduled for completion in 2016–17 are the following ‘signature’ cultural institutions: the US 800-milliondollar Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, which will be twelve times the size of the New York flagship museum; a half-billion dollar outpost of the Louvre museum, designed by Jean Nouvel; and the Zayed National Museum, designed by Norman Foster, to be the centrepiece of the Saadiyat Island Cultural District and showcasing the culture and related traditions of the United Arab Emirates.

This last venture also involves a major partnership in programming, with the British Museum engaged in organisation of major exhibitions for ZNM. The choice of architects for each of these museums has been deliberate and strategic, since each is from the country with which a major development partnership has been forged for each museum’s construction and ongoing programming.

The remarkable museum projects in Abu Dhabi provide an interesting study in the development of audiences today, as well as in the cultural potential of harnessing ‘soft power’ to convert ‘hard’ wealth available through exploitation of natural resources.

Fifty years ago Abu Dhabi was a Bedouin village whose inhabitants survived on fishing, pearl diving

and animal herding. Oil production began in the 1960s, and western oil companies financed the first paved roads, hospitals and schools. The city grew rapidly and absorbed a growing population drawn from around the world, with Emiratis today making up twenty per cent of the population and foreigners the remainder. Globalism, as evidenced in the growth of neighbouring Dubai, has demonstrated how a developing city may utilise a variety of resources and completely transform itself in a very short period.

Sheik Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahayan, son of Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahayan, who founded the country by bringing together several emirates under Abu Dhabi’s leadership in the 1970s, aims now to instil national pride in the UAE, while providing Emirati citizens with intellectual and psychological tools for living in a global society. Faced with a need to diversify beyond reliance on oil and create sustainable socio-economic sectors for the future, the way Sheik Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahayan has chosen to achieve this long-term development is by utilising art and architecture for nation-branding, through the building of world-recognised museums.

Sheik Khalifa’s cultural vision is for Abu Dhabi to be a destination of international standing, while developing twenty-first-century skills in critical thinking and problem solving, and providing career paths for Emirati citizens in future. In terms of labour, sixty percent of workers hired for the new museums will be Emiratis — an ambitious objective, as currently there are less than 20 Emiratis with training and specialisations in museums and cultural management, and foreigners at present make up the majority of the museums’ staff.

The Louvre Abu Dhabi’s curatorial strategy, through displaying objects and art both chronologically and stylistically, will explore connections between seemingly disparate civilisations and cultures around the world. The overarching museological concept is for a ‘universal museum’, transcending geography and nationality. Louvre Abu Dhabi is developing its own national collection, including Islamic art, which will be enriched by loans from French National museums including the Musée du Louvre, Musée d’Orsay, and Centre Pompidou.

The Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, by contrast, will provide a focus for modern art, concentrating on the period from 1965 to the present and showcasing the primacy of Western art, through its planned representation of key movements since the 1960s in Europe and the United States. The Guggenheim project is proving the most problematic in the curatorial approaches adopted, since there appears to be no concession towards the culture of the country in which the museum is located. Rather, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi project provides a direct import-model: of simply installing Western culture as the source of modern art’s progress, without creating local connections for its ongoing development.

However the Zayed National Museum, by contrast,

Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 23(1) – Summer 2015 27

will involve a richer conception of culture, displaying both tangible and intangible UAE heritage. It will aim to increase a sense of UAE national identity through highlighting awareness of culture’s diverse manifestations today.

Manarat Al Saadiyat is a 15,400-square-metres visitors centre, designed to bring the vision of the new island and Cultural District to life through the Saadiyat Story. The developing museums have to date been showcasing their differing concepts on the Island through a series of exhibitions — such as the Louvre Abu Dhabi exhibition, Birth of a Museum, 2014, which displayed part of that museum’s growing collection.

Each institution has also been running a program of public talks in order to develop audiences in the lead-up to their openings. While there have been steady visitor numbers engaged, these are not yet large enough to claim that sustainable audiences are being developed for the future support of these museums. The challenges ahead lie in connecting the diverse mix of cultures locally, embracing language differences, and addressing the dilemma that many museum scholars are not automatically great public communicators. Meanwhile a venture to engage the powerful world of contemporary art, Abu Dhabi Art Fair, has also been developed as a pre-museum audience development initiative — though to date this Fair falls dramatically short of the region’s more established Dubai Art Fair.

The main concern around developing audiences for the five major museums on Saadiyat Island is that there is no existing museum culture in Abu Dhabi. Bedouin traditional culture is largely focused on intangible heritage, transmitted mainly through inter-personal and oral traditions such as storytelling,

right:

ILPVAM participant Sa'id Costa, Director Visual Arts Katara Village Doha giving a tour to ILPVAM colleagues.

poetry and songs. The majority of the foreign population in Abu Dhabi meanwhile is made up of imported workers who are brought in to provide a labour-force for new construction. These groups don’t naturally provide the audiences sought as visitors for the new museums, and a critical strategic question is whether the huge cultural organisations being created can be sustained mainly through an economic modelling focused on international tourism.

The Abu Dhabi museums have also drawn the attention of international media, due to local social and labour questions concerning the treatment of the construction workers employed on the signature cultural projects. For example, the Gulf Ultra Luxury Faction (G.U.L.F.) is currently trying to raise awareness about UAE labour conditions, and this group’s activities have included an online presence as well as staging protests at New York’s Guggenheim Museum — most recently at the beginning of November 2014. G.U.L.F has also joined cause with Gulf Labor, a coalition of artists and activists who have been working since 2011 to highlight issues affecting local workers, such as the withholding of their passports, onerous debts incurred through recruitment fees, violent interrogations of alleged labour organizers, wage deception, and even deportation of labourers who protest their conditions.

Discontent with many aspects of the UAE museums’ creation is also not confined to the Middle East. There has been resistance voiced in France to the idea of exporting and ‘franchising’ a National Museum such as the Louvre. Meanwhile the Guggenheim Museum in New York has also drawn criticism for its director Richard Armstrong’s overbearing comments such as that the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi will ‘be a beacon of cultural value’ in the United Arab Emirates.

Guggenheim officials have meanwhile maintained that they believe expansion is central to their own mission and survival, and that the museum in Abu Dhabi is expected to produce significant revenues for the Solomon R Guggenheim Foundation.

For ILPVAM participants, invaluable discussion and debate about the new Saadiyat Island museums was facilitated by first-hand study and presenters from the local context. A range of speakers from the Abu Dhabi Tourism and Culture Authority, which oversees the museums, as well as by US Ambassador Michael Corbin, provided first-hand views on the role of museums in developing the future of Abu Dhabi.

Participants were privileged to take a site tour of the Louvre Abu Dhabi, and to witness Jean Nouvel’s magnificent dome being put in place. While many of the participants had conflicted reactions about the development of these new museums, it was generally agreed that the total enterprise was a courageous and commendable venture on the part of Abu Dhabi leaders to utilise culture and the arts as key drivers in developing a distinctive ‘brand’ for their nation globally.

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The potential of museum leadership development in a global perspective

ILPVAM in review The International Leadership Program in Visual Arts Management offered both global scope and enriched local knowledge of cultural institutions and changing markets today. Realised across three distinctive cities and institutional contexts in such different parts of the world, the program ensured a high-level learning experience around leadership. It provided a forum for debate, discussion, and engagement with an international network of senior practitioners and experts, and it richly expanded opportunities for international networking of all alumni afterwards.

Within the unique environments provided, participants were enabled to develop their own understanding and skills in leading and managing visual arts organisations today, in ways that were relevant and transferable back to their own contexts and organisations locally.

The key themes and connecting lessons that emerged — notably the importance of integrity and being true to your mission and values — provided linking threads through all the modules, together with cultivation of participants’ abilities to harness the best of themselves and concentrate attention on achieving clarity around purpose, goals and resources.

From my personal vantage-point, the ILPVAM program to nurture leadership in visual arts management proved an incredibly stimulating and enriching experience, and provided learning opportunities and contacts that I will continue to draw on in my ongoing work in Australia. The program confirmed that as a leader today one needs multiple skills of being nimble and articulate, being well-equipped to present key arguments for the development and management of cultural institutions, by not simply being reactive but ready to explore and instigate informed change initiatives.

Firm friendships and connections were made by the conclusion of the program in Abu Dhabi, and an additional four days spent outside the course were added onto the Abu Dhabi module – to enable visits to Qatar, and its capital Doha, on the eastern coast of the Persian Gulf, and to view various museum developments there.

The 2013—2014 ILPVAM participants are now planning on meeting in Mexico in 2015, to continue the professional development gained through this innovative program, and to extend their experience in another country and region of today’s globally developing cultural institutions and infrastructure.

Museum Leadership Program 2015 “From Vision to Reality - Ideas to Action” 4 ­­— 9 October 2015

Macquarie Graduate School of Management Sydney

Who Should Apply The Museum Leadership Program targets high-level museum professionals.

Places on the Museum Leadership Program are limited and selection is competitive.

Expressions of Interest Related Museums Australia

For further information about the Museum Leadership Program please contact Lee Scott at manager@museumsaustralia.org.au before 27 March 2015.

Magazine articles: 1.

Annette Welkamp, 'Current Gulf States projects: Internationalism and cross-cultural exchange',

More information

Museums Australia Magazine, Vol. 18 (1),

For more information on the Faculty and past MLP programs visit the Museums Australia website at www.museumsaustralia.org.au

September 2009, pp. 27-30.

2.

‘MLP 1999–2012: A far-sighted initiative elevating museum leadership capabilities in Australia’, Museums

Louise Tegart is Manager of Exhibitions at the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney.

Australia Magazine, Vol. 21(3), Museums Australia, Canberra, Autumn 2013,

Citation for this text: Louise Tegart, ‘Museum leadership: A new international training experience’, Museums Australia Magazine, Vol. 23 (1), Summer 2014, pp.22—28.

pp. 12.

Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 23(1) – Summer 2015 29

Ephemera collections and their place within larger collections

One man’s trash is another man’s treasure: Australian political ephemera

Craig Middleton

T

top:

Craig Middleton

above:

Australian Labor Party, Badge: Bob Hawke, AHM1936.

Image courtesy of the Australian History Museum.

hink about the last museum you visited. You might have arrived by public transport, which meant you bought a ticket. If you drove, maybe you paid for a parking ticket. You arrived and greeted the front-of-house team and purchased your entry ticket. If the museum offered free entry, you might have taken the site map or a flyer about the collection and its significance. In any such case you have interacted with ephemera on a basic level.

Ephemera are those materials that are transitory by nature; and the fate of these items is usually their disappearance from existence or record. That is to say that most ephemeral material is thrown away, disregarded and never thought of again. In the case of your bus tickets, museum entrance tickets or museum flyers: these are created for short-term use in large numbers. It is interesting, then, to consider that mass-produced ephemera are often the least likely to endure and the most difficult to locate after shortterm use; but that this type of ephemera is significant and worthy of collection, because such items are representative of everyday life.

Ephemera collections can be sorted into two main collection types. The first is that of an already existing collection on a specialist topic – for example, motoring history – which includes pieces of ephemera within that history, such as a 1950s driver’s licence (Clinton, 1981). This type of collection is more likely to be found in most collecting institutions that cover social history. However such ephemera are rarely on display; or if displayed at all, included only to provide background context for a more prominently presented social history.

The second type of collection is that of what Leslie Shepard has coined ‘Street Literature’ (Shepard, 1973).

This type of collection enables us to take a look back through social history, focusing on specific ephemera that were used to educate and inform the everyday person through mass communication, and often street communication. Such collections include posters, proclamations, tickets, ballot papers and various other forms of related ephemera.

Museum collections that incorporate printed ephemera, or even focus solely on such material, are generally more common in the United States. This could be due to the fact that the US is highly focused on celebrating its history in the education of American citizens; and more attention was paid generally to American history in the nineteenth century (Lewis, 1976) than Australians usually paid to their own history.

Ephemera collections can often be underrated or misunderstood in our history collections and displays, but that is not to suggest that they do not exist. On

the contrary, the Australian state libraries and other specialist collecting institutions in Australia do collect ephemera, but generally do not commit corresponding energies to their use or active interpretation in exhibitions. More active interpretation of ephemeral items needs to be addressed by Australian institutions that collect such material.

Political ephemera Political ephemera provides a unique perspective into Australia’s social life and political landscape: the rise and fall of policies, issues, parties and careers (National Library of Australia).

Items of political ephemera form a unique category of ephemera, encompassing many different forms of transitory material that have inherent connections with specific political contexts – that is, the everyday materials and objects, fleeting by nature, used for election campaigns and political purposes. Material such as posters, buttons, speeches, ballot papers and tickets are all significant forms of political ephemera.

This sub-category of ephemera also encompasses other objects that may be retained from the full range of political action and protests, such as a variety of signs, slogans and hand-made or printed items.

Political ephemera also embrace a rich variety of transient materials, from the textual to the visual, relating to innumerable political issues and agendas defining party campaigns.

Campaigns can include multiple forms of expression such as speeches, correspondence, cartoons, prints, stickers and other realia dealing with aspects of the environment, women’s rights, trade matters, and countless other politically driven issues. It is important however to understand that political ephemera are not limited to elections or political party propaganda. For this reason defining political ephemera becomes a challenging task, as it incorporates many diverse collection media and areas and may be elusive in its placement within a broad permanent collection.

Nevertheless, Australian political ephemera collections do exist within many institutions in Australia. The Directory of Australian ephemera collections: a listing of institutions and individuals in Australia collecting ephemera (Robertson, 1992) proves the extent of such collecting activity: providing an index of institutions and individuals in Australia that house ephemera collections. Although this publication is now slightly outdated, it remains the most comprehensive of its kind. This important resource was published by the State Library of

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Ephemera collections and their place within larger collections

NSW, a front-runner in the collection of ephemera in Australia. The Directory highlights the broad extent of ephemera collections in Australia and indicates that they remain important enough to document as a special category. However a general absence of theoretical consideration and comparative understanding around the importance of Australian ephemera collections is possibly a chief factor in the scarcity of interpretation of current material held in dispersed institutions across the country.

The future Ephemera collections of many types, and political ephemera collections more specifically, provide significant historical records and information about the way in which Australia’s many social worlds and groups have functioned around the important processes of political engagement and activism.

How-to-vote cards, for example, are vital records of candidates, parties, and the configuration of choices offered in any electoral campaign. Similarly, political posters – today often referred to as core flutes – are important documents of socio-cultural information as well as political communication, accompanied as these items are by party campaign slogans or a variety of ‘pitches’ by individual candidates. Through the

documentation of such slogans it is possible to retrace significant issues surrounding a specific election process and outcomes.

The posters and flyers highlighting major political events in Australian history stand witness to the continued existence of some of the most enduring political issues that have shaped our nation’s shared consciousness, and to the transformations of many people’s collective ambitions and susceptibilities throughout that evolution. Political ephemera, for this reason, are important to Australia’s heritage and identity, and it is not only the responsibility of political parties but also collecting institutions to preserve such materials – and for museums and galleries to interpret and exhibit them subsequently as part of our social history and collective heritage.

Without active interpretation of such ephemera, much of Australia’s political development and social context might be lost in other translations, or simply lost from the material record entirely. That is to say, the wider context of social history would be poorer without the collecting and interpretation of everyday transitory materials that reflect our political and social interactions.

Hindsight is a double-edged sword that makes a researcher, like me, think about the flyers he should not have thrown away. For this reason it is important for the Australian history and heritage industries to provide a platform for the more active interpretation and preservation of ephemeral material. Furthermore, in an age of commodity disposal and digital precedence, where ephemeral material becomes more fleeting than ever in its often momentary forms of appearance, it is even more vital to ensure alertness and protection of the records of our social history through collection, preservation, documentation and interpretation of the transitory evidence of our evolving social consciousness. [] Craig Middleton, trained in Museum Studies at Macquarie University, is an early-career museum professional with an interest in the interpretation of transitory material. He is currently resident Foyer Gallery Curator at Carclew, SA, and actively participates in curatorial projects with the Art Gallery of South Australia and History SA. Citation: Craig Middleton, ‘One man’s trash is another man’s treasure: Australian political ephemera’, Museums Australia Magazine, Vol.23 (1&2), Museums Australia, Canberra, Spring & Summer 2014, pp.29—30.

left top: Australian Labor Party, Advertising, 1993, 15.0 x 7.5 cm, AHM460. Image courtesy of the Australian History Museum. left bottom: Liberal Party of Australia, Our Aims, 19851989, Sydney, 21.0 x 10.0 cm, AHM5166. Image courtesy of the Australian History Museum.

References Clinton, A., 1981, Printed Ephemera: Collection, Organisation and Access, Clive Bingley, London.

Lewis, J., 1976, Collecting Printed Ephemera, Studio Vista, London.

National Library of Australia, Federal Election Campaigns, https://www.nla. gov.au/ephemera/federal-electioncampaigns Robertson, A., 1992, Directory of Australian ephemera collections: a listing of institutions and individuals in Australia collecting ephemera, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney.

Shepard, L., 1973, The history of street literature: the story of broadside ballads, chapbooks, proclamations, news-sheets, election bills, tracts, pamphlets, cocks, catchpennies and other ephemera, Newton Abbot: David and Charles.

Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 23(1) – Summer 2015 31

Two international blockbuster exhibitions augmented locally in Melbourne

Iconic Frenchmen invade Swanston Street: Hugo and Gaultier exhibitions in Melbourne

right: The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk at the National Gallery of Victoria.

Photo: Brooke Holm.

above:

Suzanne Bravery.

Suzanne Bravery

I 1. Victor Hugo: Les Misérables— From Page to Stage (State Library of Victoria, Melbourne, 18 July—9 November 2014).

2. The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 17 October 2014—8 February 2015).

n October I viewed two exhibitions in Melbourne at state-owned collecting institutions a kilometre apart.

Victor Hugo: Les Misérables—From Page to Stage was about to close at the State Library of Victoria[1], while The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk[2] had just opened at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV).

These two exhibitions were primarily drawn from collections in overseas museums, but each included an Australian contribution and connections, and both projects were the result of extensive planning and collaboration. Considered together, each explored the particular influence of a single French man: one a writer, philosopher and artist in the nineteenth century; the other a fashion designer of the past four decades. Reflecting an increasingly strong trend in presentation of large exhibitions today, both incorporated strongly interactive experiences and settings to lead visitors on an informative journey through their respective ‘worlds’.

Victor Hugo: Les Misérables—From Page to Stage It may seem unusual for the State Library, rather than the Arts Centre Melbourne, to present a unique exhibition based on the Cameron Mackintosh blockbuster musical, Les Misérables – until you recall that the musical is only the most recent incarnation of the best-selling eponymous novel by Victor Hugo.

Meanwhile the exhibition was co-curated by Tim Fisher, seconded to SLV from Arts Centre Melbourne, and Anaïs Lellouche, who previously worked for the Centre Pompidou at Metz. For such an important venture, SLV employed a theatre designer, Anna Cordingley, as exhibition designer.

A new stage production in town provided the opportunity to offer audiences access to the important ’back story’: not only of Hugo’s novel but also of its author and the political and social context of his work. It also presented a chance to draw upon the remarkable collections of Melbourne’s State Library, supplemented by some other critical loans in this didactic display.

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In an exhibition space earlier reserved for local and state stories – but now used to accommodate some major exhibitions of international and Australian material (illuminated manuscripts; rare Library holdings and precious books) in the SLV’s more active programming – the first section of Les Misérables used traditional museum techniques such as low lighting for framed works on paper, displayed on grey walls.

By the time of my visit, Hugo’s centre-piece autograph manuscript, lent from the Bibliothèque nationale in France, had been replaced by a digital copy. So I missed the level of excitement associated with viewing the original object. However there was still much to view and enjoy in this immersive exhibition experience.

In the foreword to the catalogue, State Library CEO Sue Roberts reported that the exhibition had been curated to draw together the two themes of Australians’ love affair with musical theatre, with Melbourne widely recognised as the historical centre, together with the city’s world distinction as a UNESCO City of Literature.

Curated to take ‘our visitors...on an extraordinary literary journey...giving them a colourful theatrical experience’[3] the project had secured partnerships with Sir Cameron Mackintosh and collaborators in Australia, and drawn loans and support from significant collecting institutions in France, including from the historic resources of the two Maisons de Victor Hugo, located respectively in Paris and Guernsey (Hugo having retreated to the Channel Island for a period of political exile under Napoleon 111). The SLV paid expansive tribute to its major institutional partners abroad: Not only have they lent us examples of Hugo’s extraordinary literary and artistic mastery, they have provided unstinting professionalism and intellectual encouragement to our curators, and we are indebted to them.[4] This multi-faceted project also enabled important insights into the complex process of producing such a musical as Les Misérables.

Les Misérables began its journey from novel to musical in 1978, when a Paris-based lyricist, Alain Boublil, viewed the Lionel Bart film Oliver! and perceived strong similarities between Dickens’s famous pickpocket, the Artful Dodger, and the streetwise figure of Gavroche created by Hugo.

Boublil subsequently wrote the lyrics, and songwritercomposer Claude-Michel Schönberg the music, for what would become a hugely popular piece of musical theatre. An English version produced by Cameron Mackintosh was launched in London in 1985, and by 2014 the ‘25th Anniversary production’ (originating in Cardiff in 2009) had assured the show’s status as the world’s longest-running musical.

Extensive research of the resonant context in which Hugo compiled his epic novel was evident in the diverse historical records presented: excerpts from his letters; staged photographs of the author in his

‘exile’ seascape of Guernsey (shown with his back turned to France); evocative photo-images (some extremely rare items from the SLV collection and never previously exhibited), together with etchings (loaned from the NGV) of Paris both before and after Haussmann’s massive slum demolitions of mediaeval precincts and street-widening to create the grand boulevards of the nineteenth century.

Powerful close-ups of this traumatically disrupted urban-scape populated by the bewildered and dispossessed give way to broad, empty, tree-lined streets and handsome mansions of a wealthy industrial middle class. Society’s poor have been moved to the periphery. Audiences were also introduced to Hugo’s dramatic sepia pen-and-ink renditions of the changing social landscape, and scribbled word-sketches for some of the characters in his vast novel developed over many years.

Numerous adaptations of Les Misérables on stage and small and large screens, on radio and in animation, provided materials for the second section of the exhibition, which also included staged photographs of the characters. There were scripts, scores and costumes from theatre productions, and from the most recent film version featuring Australian stars Russell Crowe and Hugh Jackman.

A progression of the exhibition’s narrative through ‘Les Mis’ in world-cinema, providing free screenings of excerpts from foreign-language adaptations of the

above left:

Les Misérables

by Victor Hugo, New York, Classics Illustrated no. 9, 1950, State Library of Victoria.

above:

Les Misérables 'Cosette' advertising flyer, Sydney, 1989, Cameron Mackintosh Archive, London, ©1986 CMOL.

right: Victor Hugo. Image courtesty of the State Library of Victoria. far right:

Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, vol. 1, 1845–1862, manuscript, Bibliothèque nationale de France.

3. Sue Roberts, in Victor Hugo: Les Misérables From Page to Stage, op.cit., Foreword, p.vi.

4. ibid.

Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 23(1) – Summer 2015 33

central story, celebrated the universal themes of the original novel. This section incorporated feature-film selections alongside rare scripts, scores, designs and posters from the 1985 English theatre production. In a slow and steady transition from black-and white-to colour, the viewer was exposed to, and educated about, the development of both photography and moving-image genres. Although located in a particular time and context, advertising material in many community languages demonstrated how viewers globally have related to the universal characters and powerful nature of the central story.

Located in an awkward space between two buildings, the final section of Les Misérables encouraged the viewer to participate in the musical directly, by offering vignettes of the ‘back stage’ areas of preparation – including costumes, wardrobe and dressing-rooms – as the materials and props inviting a first-person entry into the ‘Les Mis’ repertoire. Dressups and sing-alongs to pre-recorded music, provided on a makeshift stage with a large-screen background, lent themselves to ‘selfies’ featuring back-stage access, with all areas set up to incorporate the grand walls of the State Library as the local nineteenth-century backdrop for this drama, with tricolour fabric bunting cascading from the first floor above.

The total project incorporated a meld of intellectual rigour, both national and international and public and private partnerships, as well as elements of sheer fun and interactive participation. This is a difficult partnership: to appeal to all elements of a visitor experience and to all visitors, with only a little stumbling from researched and original historical material to a recreation of stage experience. Full marks to the Library for this effort.

There was a clear delineation between the serious

components and the dress-ups and experiential dimensions of the exhibition. However all were curated with an experiential emphasis for audiences.

The difference between the still photographs shown of nineteenth-century Paris and those drawn from the cinema were obvious. And although visitors were invited to cloak themselves in the costumes of the musical and sing the very hummable tunes, the historical transportation to a time of extreme poverty, discrimination, social turbulence and revolution, was made stronger and more immediate through the contemporary documentary images and evidence of Hugo’s life and autograph text.

A series of public programs accompanying the exhibition focused on community singing; tales from behind the curtain of earlier Australian stage productions, with actors reminiscing; a festival celebrating Victor Hugo; guided tours, the exhibition catalogue, and a tailored school-visits program for primary and secondary schools.

The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk South of the Yarra at NGV International, The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier occasioned another exploration of a French life, creative inspiration, and vast mainstream impact in a project that leapt dramatically into the twentieth century, with vibrant translations in today’s overlapping worlds of high couture and street-style.

In the strong tradition of costume and textile exhibitions presented at the National Gallery of Victoria, the work of contemporary international designer Jean Paul Gaultier is in many ways the latest stand-out in a rich NGV tradition of both collecting

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Two international blockbuster exhibitions augmented locally in Melbourne

and exhibiting fashion.

The current Asia-Pacific-wide itinerary collaboration has drawn together staff of the National Gallery of Victoria; the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts director Nathalie Bondil; initiator and developer of the exhibition, curator Thierry-Maxime Loriot; and the ‘Maison Jean Paul Gaultier’. Promoted as ‘the visionary world of the couturier’, the NGV presentation again incorporates ‘value-adding’ local material not presented at the other major tour venues in Montreal, London or New York. Melbourne has enabled ‘Gaultier’s world’ with recent haute couture, ready-to-wear items, and pieces highlighting the ‘Australian connections’ of Kylie Minogue, Nicole Kidman and Cate Blanchett.

This discursive overview and retrospective of Gaultier as a designer exposes the viewer to both the personal and public journeys of the fashion designer as ‘creative artist’, exploring his colourful, experiential and sometimes confronting designs and imagery. The exhibition also highlights some current questions about the mission of a public gallery in the rising vogue for exhibitions of fashion. The broad public appeal and pleasure these shows provide is an obvious imperative. However some precarious distinctions arise around fame and powerful commercial forces when contemporary fashion designers migrate from catwalk to museum; and whether such attention and resources would be given to the first exhibition, for example, of an aspiring young designer.

Located in the Gallery’s major touring exhibition space on the Ground Floor of NGV International — near the entrance and adjacent to the museum store for maximum exposure and retail connections — the Gaultier show is clearly a ‘coup’ in the Melbourne Gallery’s longer-term objective of repositioning itself as a popular venue able to command much broader local as well as visiting audiences. The exhibition provides an immersive, and in some ways fantastical experience, which cleverly interconnects experiences of costume, context and inspiration as it unfolds.

The show is carefully designed to lead the viewer visually from the smart ticketing area on arrival, into the first of seven thematically arranged and appropriately decorated immersive rooms or sensory boxes. It transitions artfully from black-and-white to colour in Gaultier’s costume; and in genres from a modest day dress to a more transporting garment for adult late nights.

Quotes on the walls reinforce the idea of this clothier as (celebrity) artist, contextualising him through Andy Warhol’s statement of 1984: ...the way people dress today is a form of artistic expression. Art lies in the way the whole artist is put together. Take Jean Paul Gaultier what he does is really art.

By implication the work of an artist should be interpretive, individual and creative, using fashion as a form of expression and making it a celebration of both popular appeal and diversity.

A major component of the exhibition’s interpretation is provided through the 32 custommade mannequins, utilising blue screen backgrounds and high-definition audio-visual projections (presented with texts in French). This is surprising.

With a schedule including three major Englishspeaking venues it seems remiss not to provide recordings in the (English) language of the venues, or at least to offer printed translations.

Celebrities have lent their faces and voices for

above:

William Baker, Kylie Minogue, Virgins (or Madonnas) collection, Immaculata gown, Jean Paul Gaultier Haute couture, Spring¬Summer 2007.

Net lace dress with large patterned embroidery and white linen cut-outs. Image courtesy National Gallery of Victoria and Jean Paul Gaultier.

Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 23(1) – Summer 2015 35

this project, including Gaultier himself, and the celebrity connection is a consistent, repeated and key sub-theme in the exhibition — whether including Pop visual artists such as Andy Warhol or Pop singing icons such as Madonna (the historical and the contemporary female versions of the exhibition’s celebrity subject). Gaultier seems to have established, and now be sustaining, his credibility in the larger world that ‘matters’: the world of cross-over between individual authorship and popular cultural influence, and the global zone of greatest impact where commissions are likely to be stimulated, through radiating celebrity connections.

Gaultier’s intention is to reveal that beauty is to be found everywhere. Yet his is a highly controlled vision. He worked in the houses of Pierre Cardin and others before achieving his first solo show in Paris in 1976. And he has expanded his skills in areas where a specialist costume designer rather than an haute couturier would normally be employed: in music, dance and the cinema, including costumes for Peter Greenaway’s 1989 celebrity film, The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover.

The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk is arranged thematically.

THE ODYSSEY provides an introduction to the couturier’s universe and Gaultier’s trademark themes.

Sailors, mermaids, and religious iconography set the tone. Gaultier’s earliest design (1971) is exhibited here for the first time. It also features stage costumes worn

by Beyonce, as well as Oscar Awards dresses created for Catherine Déneuve and Marion Cotillard.

THE BOUDOIR reveals the designer’s fascination with lingerie and corsetry, from his childhood teddy bear ‘Nana’ wearing the first cone bra in the early 1960s, to designs for women’s and men’s couture and ready-to-wear lines, and for Hermes — where Gaultier was creative director from 2003 to 2010. Gaultier’s dramatic conical bras and bold-coloured intricate and reworked corsets are featured, in general designed to enhance and distance women as objects of desire: his sharp cones, designed both to attract and repel the viewer, were made for Madonna’s 1990 Blonde Ambition world tour, and used again for her MDNA tour in 2012.

PUNK CANCAN features the contrasting styles and themes Gaultier has blended throughout his career, from Parisian classicism and elegance to London punk. Parisian icons and symbols, such as the beret and Eiffel Tower, are melded with the imagery of the Pigalle quarter. London’s tattooed punks, wearing latex, leather, lace and fishnet, take on new meaning — as ironic symbols of elegant, convention-defying power. This room features the chiffon-camouflage dress – 312 hours in the making for Sarah Jessica Parker — worn at the 2000 MTV Movie Awards.

A catwalk mock-up with figures on a rotating stage, and incorporating front-row seats for a join-in audience, enables visitors to experience some of the excitement of a haute couture fashion show.

SKIN DEEP shows how Gaultier creates clothing that has the character of a a second skin, sometimes through trompe l’oeil effects that give the illusion variously of nudity, a flayed human body, a skeleton, or tattoos.

METROPOLIS showcases Gaultier’s collaborations with a variety of artists: film-makers; famous French choreographers; and pop icons such as Tina Turner and Lady Gaga. Borrowing from the emerging sounds of New Wave in the 1970s, Gaultier explored the fields of high technology and science fiction. Since his first pieces of electronic jewellery and the HighTech collection of 1979, he has used a variety of contemporary fashion fabrics not previously deployed for the catwalk, including vinyl, lycra and neoprene.

URBAN JUNGLE is where cultural influences from around the world are synthesised to form a new aesthetic integrated into haute couture. Gaultier mixes multi-ethnic influences—Bedouin, orthodox Jewish, Chinese, flamenco, Russian, Bollywood and Nordic—in what he sees as the urban jungle of today’s world.

MUSES presents the outcome of the couturier’s aim to create a new ideal of beauty: beyond the established codes of fashion and society, and celebrating difference by removing all boundaries of body size, skin colour, age, religion or sexuality. This could so easily be a mish-mash of disparate elements, but reads as another way of exploring mixed styles of traditional dress in an experimental manner.

Whilst it is pleasing that the NGV’s presentation includes an Australian Muses section highlighting Gaultier’s relationship with local Australian fashion, movie and music icons — including Kylie Minogue, Nicole Kidman, Gemma Ward and Cate Blanchett wearing his costumes — it is nevertheless disappointing that not even one of these international celebrities is featured in other venues, as is the case with American actor, Sarah Jessica Parker.

The mid-week audience I joined was noticeably composed of women of ‘a certain age’ and demographic: many seemingly early retirees exposed to ideas not usually familiar in the programming of a state collecting institution. Interesting layering had clearly been achieved, through a broad span of genres, from peep-shows and the demi-monde frisson of tight corsets through to celebrity and high fashion.

Interesting issues about museums today as vehicles of social encounter and transformation are highlighted through this exhibition’s presentation and impact. Does the museum context make it safe to introduce audiences to challenging contents and

top:

Jean Paul Gaultier, Lascar dress, Les Indes galantes (Romantic India) collection, haute couture, Spring-Summer 2000. © Patrice Stable/Jean Paul Gaultier. Image courtesy of National Gallery of Victoria.

above:

Jean Paul Gaultier and Australian supermodel Andreja Pejic, on the eve of the opening of his exhibition at NGV, Melbourne.

Photo: News Limited.

36 Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 23(1) – Summer 2015

Two international blockbuster exhibitions augmented locally in Melbourne

imagery beyond their everyday existence? Does the context re-process normally unacceptable images as acceptable, and even elevate them to ‘high art’? Was Gaultier’s main impulse here to provide immersive experiences within the charged walls of the NGV, or to maximise the opportunity to reinforce the image of the clothier as artist?

Clues to the character of Gaultier appear early in the show — in the photograph presenting him as an ingénue. Outwardly, Gaultier’s face is strongly made up, artificial, with bottle-blonde hair and highly stylised. This sets a tone for the exhibition as a whole: Gaultier’s creations are highly designed and controlled, whilst also exuberant and the opposite of controlled (except for the much-used motif of formregimenting corsets). In fact there are many highly structured pieces.

Gaultier loves black-and-white for outerwear, but also deep, rich colours as well — especially for underwear, and for restrictive clothing such as corsets. Details of components are important – such as the characteristics of embroidery, lace, contrasting fabrics and textiles.

Gaultier relishes contrasts. His approach to fashion is deliberately contradictive. His creative ideas are hidden underneath an often highly regulated surface.

This exhibition is a controlled and stylised exploration of what lies beneath his final forms, and what has influenced the clothier’s art, drawn from often highly charged conservative imagery and human experience — for example, the power of religious iconography first encountered as a child, through the Catholic imagery of Mary Immaculate.

Themes from this exhibition have informed the accompanying public programs designed to make connections with local festive events such as the Melbourne Cup. They also offer opportunities for return visits stimulated by Friday-night live performances transforming NGV into a late-night destination venue for entertainment, incorporating access to the exhibition combined with live music, a bar and food. There are education programs, publications and French dining on offer, as well as merchandise inspired by Gaultier: orchestrating a general celebration of ‘all things French’. Meanwhile opportunity is taken to include designs from Australian-based designers — also offered for sale.

Both of these elaborately curated and presented exhibitions have utilised highly-charged original and supporting objects to explore the creative output of one person. Props and technology have been used to enable the most passive viewer to interact directly with the key themes of subject and narrative, while also drawing visitors out of their comfort zone, encouraging the confidence of each to engage with the

exhibits and better understand their meaning.

Gaultier’s declaration, that ‘to conform is to give in’, could be applied equally to the character of Victor Hugo, whose strength of social perspective and publicly declared political critique caused his exile to Guernsey, where his most famous literary portrait of the times, Les Misérables, was written.

Both these creative ‘artists’ are excellent subjects for exploration. Each has strong and unusual stories to tell – for which a broad audience is essential to the success of their work. Each of these temporary exhibitions has been designed to be educative and informative, as well as ingeniously produced and broadly appealing, whether using the Library’s more traditional, dependable display and interpretation methods, or the Gallery’s more innovative and (as expected) more contemporary content and cultural style.

The curatorial approaches behind each these exhibitions, and the powerful public personae of their French male subjects, are all products of their time and place – and for a short time, they shared a single urban avenue in a major city in Australia. [] Suzanne Bravery is a museums and cultural heritage consultant with extensive experience in curating and managing all aspects of house museums. She is currently Senior Curator at North Sydney Council. Suzanne is the Treasurer of Museums Australia.

Citation for this text: Suzanne Bravery, ‘Iconic Frenchmen invade Swanston Street: Hugo and Gaultier exhibitions in Melbourne’, Museums Australia Magazine, Vol. 23 (1), Summer 2014, pp.31-36.

above:

The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 17 October 2014—8 February 2015).

Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 23(1) – Summer 2015 37

Flagstaff Hill Maritime Village, Warrnambool, redevelopment

Renewing a great regional museum and visitor attraction: Flagstaff Hill Maritime Village, Warrnambool

Peter Abbott

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top:

Warrnambool Garrison.

Image courtesy Flagstaff Hill Maritime Village.

middle:

Peter Abbott.

bottom:

Flagstaff Hill Steam Packet Inn. Image courtesy Flagstaff Hill Maritime Village.

ince 1974, Flagstaff Hill Maritime Village (FHMV) has been the primary tourism and cultural heritage attraction for Warrnambool and the Great Ocean Road travellers in south-west Victoria. Over the past four decades almost three million people have explored the dedicated museum and our maritime village complex built around the state-heritage-listed Lady Bay Lighthouse and 1887 Warrnambool Garrison area – displaying life in a key nineteenth-century port and town on Victoria’s southern coast.

The success of FHMV is a credit to the vision of the Warrnambool citizens who helped make it a reality, and the hundreds of staff and volunteers who have ensured it remains an enduring feature of the region and an important economic driver for the city.

Winner of many tourism, community and museum awards, the site encompassing 40 buildings and spread over 10 hectares has developed from a formerly overgrown, disused precinct to become a vibrant part of the Warrnambool community. In 2014 the site celebrated 40 years of continuing development and recognition of our region’s rich maritime and social history.

Like all museums and heritage attractions, ongoing review of the Maritime Village site’s products and guest experiences is vital to its continuing success.

Many years of targeted effort in ensuring FHMV was recognised as a regional asset had been well spent. This included ensuring the site was noted in regional and state tourism and cultural plans, along with building local engagement with the precinct.

Whilst such lobbying often seems an endless process, it ultimately maintains awareness that the site is an important economic asset as well as an integral part of the culture of the city.

Local support remains strong, with good levels of localised membership as well as maintaining a high local media profile to support the museum element of our site. Obtaining Museums Australia accreditation (MAPS) has been an important part of building our local credibility as being more than ‘a site for tourists’.

The site currently operates daily with a museum, outdoor village area, state heritagelisted Lady Bay Lighthouses and Warrnambool Garrison, accommodation in the original Lady Bay Harbourmaster’s home as well as the Garrison Camp area. By night the Shipwrecked Sound and Laser Show operates, recounting the last voyage of the clipper ship, Loch Ard, with a multi-media experience using the beautiful village as an evening backdrop.

An on-site restaurant, tearooms and small tavern ensure that the complex offers visitors a wide range of experiences.

In 2012, Warrnambool City Council (WCC) instigated a strategic review of the site’s use, in response to changing visitor trends and increased operating costs the site experienced due to a decline in visitors following the GFC and its broad effects on the leisure and tourism industries. Funding for a new strategic plan was obtained through Regional Development Victoria, Tourism Victoria, and a local bequest.

In April 2014, the WCC committed to pursue funding for the redevelopment of Flagstaff Hill, to shape success for the next 40 years. The proposed

38 Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 23(1) – Summer 2015

Flagstaff Hill Maritime Village, Warrnambool, redevelopment

first stage of the redevelopment included an upgrade of the Shipwrecked Sound and Laser Show; reconfiguration of the FHMV reception facilities to include a Visitor Information Centre; consolidation of the boat fleet and an upgrade of the wharf area to make it safer and more accessible.

Warnambool City Council allocated $1 million towards Stage I of the redevelopment, and on 19 September 2014, Premier Denis Napthine announced a State Government supporting grant of $1.95 million towards the project.

Why redevelop the site?

Investment in the site will sustain the important tourism and cultural attractions provided by the Maritime Village complex for the Warrnambool and Great Ocean Road tourism region. FHMV is listed as a key heritage and cultural tourism asset for the region in the Regional Development Australia— Great Ocean Road World Class Destination Plan and other regional and state plans. Its redevelopment is critical in maintaining a prime tourism attraction that has enormous benefit for the Warrnambool region’s economy.

Flagstaff Hill Maritime Village – some key data When regional heritage bodies or museums seek major upgrade of their facilities, it is crucial to draw on vital data about the value of a facility in social and economic terms. The following data have been vital to the case for the Flagstaff Maritime Museum Village redevelopment: • FHMV adds $2.9 million to the Warrnambool economy annually; • Over 5,000 students complete the FHMV education programs annually; • The Visitor Information Centre caters for 200,000 visitors annually, over the counter, online and by phone; • Since 2003, more than 300,000 people have experienced the Shipwrecked Sound and Laser Show, operated nightly to generate additional bed nights for Warrnambool, with 42% of guests surveyed reporting that the show influenced their decision to stay in Warrnambool that night; • Based on Tripadvisor reviews, FHMV is the highest-ranked paid attraction provided on the iconic Great Ocean Road experience for travellers and tourists;

• FHMV was used as part of the movie set for the forthcoming film, Oddball. Based on the true story of Warrnambool's Middle Island Maremma Project, which uses maremma dogs (famous for guarding Italian sheep) to guard the Little Penguin colony locally, FHMV staff care for the dogs throughout the year, again reinforcing FHMV as central to life in Warrnambool

Tourism and the Warrnambool economy Tourism’s estimated contribution to the Warrnambool economy includes the following data: • 745 jobs or 6% of Warrnambool employment; • $138.9 million in gross revenue earned locally; and • $38.2 million in wages and salaries, or 4% of total wages and salaries in Warrnambool.

These are powerful statistics that have supported Flagstaff Hill Maritime Village’s case for redevelopment, both locally and at state level, to ensure the complex continues to develop and meet the changing expectations of visitor experiences today. [] Peter Abbott is Manager Tourism Services, Flagstaff Hill, Warrnambool City Council, Victoria. <www.flagstaffhill. com>; <www.visitwarrnambool.com.au> Citation for this text: Peter Abbott, ‘Renewing a great regional museum and visitor attraction: Flagstaff Hill Maritime Village, Warrnambool’, Museums Australia Magazine, Vol. 23 (1), Summer 2014, pp.37—38.

above:

Flagstaff Hill Maritime Village. Image courtesy Flagstaff Hill Maritime Village.

Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 23(1) – Summer 2015 39

Honouring colleagues who have performed outstanding service internationally

ICOM Australia Awards 2015

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above right:

The glass globe sculptures were commissioned

by ICOM Australia from Sydney-based master glassmaker Benjamin Edols, and were created at the Canberra Glassworks.

Photo: Roger Garland.

he next round of the ICOM Australia Awards for International Relations was launched in December, along with a new streamlined name: the ICOM Australia Awards.

The program, established in 2006 and managed by the Australian National Committee of ICOM, provides two awards — one to an individual and one to an institution — for outstanding projects that have strengthened international exchange between museums and the Australian sector.

The ICOM Australia Awards, promoted throughout Australian and international organisations, have become a very good way of profiling and celebrating what Australian museums and colleagues can achieve in collaboration with our overseas neighbours. The Awards are announced each year at the Museums Australia Annual Conference Dinner, with the presentation to each recipient of an inscribed glass globe commissioned through the Canberra Glassworks and created by Australian glass artist Ben Edols.

Eligible projects for the Awards can be drawn from any field of museum practice, including collection management, exhibitions, museum management, audience development, marketing, research, sponsorship, education, training, or professional development. The scope is limited only by our museums’ creativity and initiative in realising welldesigned opportunities for international exchange.

The Awards are open to Australian individuals, museums or partner organisations. Nominees must be members of ICOM, or be currently or formerly employed by institutions that are ICOM members.

Nominations can come from industry peers, and selfnominations will also be accepted. The application process is not onerous: the focus is on a two-page summary of the project's vision and achievements.

Over the years there have been many outstanding awardees. The inaugural institutional award was made to Questacon, for its collaborative initiatives with science centres in the Asia-Pacific region.

Other institutions to be recognised have included RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, for its commitment to presenting the work of international art, craft and design in Australia; the Cultural Heritage Centre for Asia and Pacific, Deakin University, for its lamp and temples project focusing on collection management; the Powerhouse Museum for its exhibition Spirit of jangin: treasures of Korean metal craft, presented in collaboration with the National Museum of Korea; and the Australian Museum for its exhibition Rituals of seduction: birds of paradise, presented in

conjunction with the University of Goroka and other PNG cultural agencies.

Individual awardees have included Will Inveen of Questacon, for his contribution to international relations through science education, exhibitions and awareness programs; Ron Vanderwal of Museum Victoria, for his work in the Pacific Region, particularly in Fiji and with the Fiji India diaspora in Australia; Bernice Murphy for her contribution to the ongoing work of ICOM and the ICOM Ethics Committee; and Robin Torrence for her lifetime’s achievement as a researcher in archaeology and material culture, including exchanges between Papua New Guinea and Australia. A full list of past awardees is included below, and indicates the depth of expertise and commitment to international activity that we have in the Australian museums sector.

Our most recent awardees (in 2014) were the Western Australian Museum for its collaborative project with the National Research Institute of Maritime Cultural Heritage in South Korea. As part of this program the two institutions undertook joint research and skill-sharing with a focus on underwater excavation and materials conservation. Professor Robyn Sloggett, from the University of Melbourne, was meanwhile presented with the individual award for her sustained contribution in fostering museum conservation practice between south-east Asia and Australia.

The quality of all the projects and personal service recognised by the ICOM Australia Awards demonstrates the tremendous amount of work

40 Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 23(1) – Summer 2015

Honouring colleagues who have performed outstanding service internationally

being done by museums and individual colleagues in the international arena. ICOM Australia warmly encourages institutions and individuals to consider nominating for the forthcoming Awards program in 2015.

Details and nomination forms are available on the ICOM Australia website at http://icom.org.au.

Applications are due in late February. []

Individual Awards 2007: Will Inveen, Questacon, Canberra 2009: Dr Ron Vanderwal, Museum Victoria, Melbourne 2009: Bernice Murphy, MA National Director,

Chair, ICOM Ethics Committee (2005-2011).

2010: Daniel Thomas AM, Emeritus Director, Art

Gallery of South Australia 2011: Vinod Daniel, Chair AusHeritage 2012: Professor Amareswar Galla 2013: Dr Robin Torrence, Australian Museum, Sydney 2014: Professor Robyn Sloggett, University of Melbourne

Institutional Awards 2007: Questacon (National Science and

Technology Centre), Canberra 2009: RMIT Gallery, Melbourne 2010: Cultural Heritage Centre for Asia and the

Pacific, Deakin University 2011: Australian Museum, Sydney 2012: Powerhouse Museum, Sydney 2013: Museum Victoria, Melbourne, and JSW Foundation 2014: Western Australian Museum, Perth

top:

Professor Xiaolin Ma (Deputy Director, Henan Administration of Cultural Heritage), Associate Professor Robyn Sloggett (Director, The Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation, University of Melbourne), Mrs Gan Lan. Photo taken at the Henan Museum, May 2014.

bottom:

Excavating shipwrecks in the waters near Taean, Korea: Jon Carpenter (Maritime Archaeological Conservator, Department of Materials Conservation, Western Australian Museum) working with the South Korean Maritime Archaeology team in 2011.

Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 23(1) – Summer 2015 41

MA members collaborating regionally and spanning state borders

The new Murray Network of MA: Crossing state borders, networking regionally

above:

From left: Bridget Guthrie, Albury Library Museum; Bernadette Zanet, Bonegilla Migrant Experience; Elizabeth Morgan, Corowa Federation Museum; Karen Wenke, Jindera Pioneer Museum; Patrick Watt, Burke Museum and Beechworth Historic Precinct; Marita Albert, Upper Murray Historical Society.

Marita Albert

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tate borders in Australia have often been the subject of division and confusion, and the museums sector has not been excluded from these dilemmas. There are a number of collecting institutions that span the Murray River around the Albury-Wodonga area, with interconnecting policies that include collecting and display of information and artefacts from both Victoria and New South Wales. Both Museums Australia (Victoria) and Museums & Galleries NSW have provided great support and information for these bodies; but frustratingly this is often dependent on where the main collecting institution is located within state and civic jurisdictions, not the interconnected cultural histories and regional areas through which their collections may have been formed.

A group of forward-thinking individuals from some of these border organisations recently decided to try something new, to facilitate and increase collaboration between the museums and historical societies that span the Murray in their region. At an inaugural meeting during an event in Albury in September

2014 — convened to determine the level of interest in establishing a cross-border Museums Australia group for ongoing collaboration — there were 32 people gathered, collectively representing 20 organisations interested in the potential of this new formation.

An interesting historical reflection is that this ‘regional alliance’ movement was initially spearheaded at Corowa, in days when the border issues were already confusing. Today, the Federation Museum in Corowa is participating in a renewed effort of cross-border collaboration!

There was clear consensus achieved in Albury that those present were keen to establish a Murray Network affiliated with Museums Australia. This group would, amongst other objectives, encourage sharing of both resources and visitors; provide opportunities for formal networking, sharing and mentoring; and also tap into the resources encompassed by two neighbouring state-sourced groups reaching out to work more collaboratively on common cultural heritage issues for their region.

Direction was given to establish a steering committee formed initially by six people, sourced from each of the Local Government areas of Albury City, Wodonga, Greater Hume, Indigo, Towong, and Corowa. Acknowledging the many volunteerrun organisations within the designated boundary for the new Network regionally, it was decided that the fairest make-up of the committee would be if its members equally represented three funded museums and three volunteer-run museums.

The breadth, depth and variety of the museums now represented in the new National Network is remarkable in such a concentrated area, with many organisations holding outstandingly significant items of ‘national heritage’, together with unique collections representing diverse local histories. The potential ahead for more proactive sharing and expansion of both the capabilities and capacities of these existing groups within a new regional network is very exciting.

Many of the museums and collections in the new Network are community- and social historybased organisations. Following below are just a few examples of the Murray Network member organisations.

The Man From Snowy River Museum in Corryong, for example, is a totally volunteer-run museum, open seven days a week, and housing an extensive collection. The Museum proudly displays Jim Simpson’s POW rug — a unique object hand-knitted

42 Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 23(1) – Summer 2015

MA members collaborating regionally and spanning state borders

A group of forward-thinking individuals from some of these border organisations recently decided to try something new.

above:

Items of significance from the Murray region. From top to bottom: Jim Simpson's POW rug from Man From Snowy River Museum in Corryong; a pram on skis, part of the Man From Snowy River Museum's extensive ski collection; gramophone from Jindera Pioneer Museum; printing press from Corowa Federation Museum.

by local farmer J.O. Simpson whilst he was a prisoner of war in Germany in WW2, and featuring a map of Australia complete with all state coatsof-arms. The same museum also has a remarkable ski-collection, including a pram on skis, and boasts a dozen outbuildings all housing collections of hugely diverse objects. The research room of the museum at Corryong provides access to many local records, photos, newspapers, and local Indigenous information. And of course the history and stories of Jack Riley, believed by many to be the inspiration behind The Man From Snowy River poem by Banjo Paterson.

The Albury Library Museum, as one of the few museums in the region with paid staff, has often been the unofficial contact point for community museums asking for help about regional cultural history. The Library Museum in Albury has extensive collections, and provides exhibitions and workshops that help inspire smaller institutions in the area to increase the standards and presentation of their own collections.

The Jindera Pioneer Museum was opened in 1968 by painter Sir Russell Drysdale. This complex consists of the original Jindera village store, the new Wagner’s store, a period residence, slab hut, wattle-and-daub hut, Huon post office and original blacksmith’s workshop. Highlighted in the collection are the everyday items of the pioneers of the Jindera district in the early-nineteenth century. The collection includes period furniture, clothing, shop fittings, and an original German wagon used by the Funk family in 1867 when they migrated east from South Australia.

The Corowa Federation Museum is home to a collection of outstandingly significant original drawings by Aboriginal artist Tommy McRae. McRae, working in the late-nineteenth century, is renowned in Australia for his depictions of traditional Indigenous scenes — as well as new settlers and even Chinese pigtailed immigrants represented in some scenes — all drawn on European paper with careful outlines in ink.

Tommy McCrae’s drawings have steadily gained in ‘national’ significance in recent decades — and he was included, for example, in the major survey exhibition of Australia’s art shown at the Royal Academy in

London in 2014, co-organised by the National Gallery of Australia. This is just to suggest how important is the ongoing work of reconnecting and repositioning many items held in regional collections as outstanding components of our shared heritage as a nation, for communication to future generations.

The Burke Museum in Beechworth is part of the Beechworth Historic Precinct, and is the oldest regional museum in Australia, dating back to the 1850s. One of its most significant collection areas is formed by the R.E. Johns Aboriginal Collection. This is one of the oldest and most comprehensive single collections of its type surviving in the twenty-first century. The artefacts held in Burke are considered to be important early examples of weaponry and Indigenous ceremonial objects and tools, some in use prior to European contact and showing the great skill of the Aboriginal craftsmen using pre-European technologies and materials. The Burke Precinct also houses the most extensive collection of Ned Kelly memorabilia and related information, held in the original Sub-Treasury building.

Bonegilla Migrant Experience, as a last example of bodies and cultural heritage resources linked in the new Murray Network, details the rich tapestry of experience of the migrants who began their Australian lives in the Bonegilla camp in Victoria, conserving and bringing their stories to life for future generations.

The joys, heartaches, and struggles experienced by such migrants can be experienced in some of the original buildings and displays presented on the original site.

These sketches of the variety, and in many cases unique significance, of items held within the range of bodies making up the new cross-border network spanning the Murray, suggest the strong potential of this new formation within Museums Australia’s national footprint and collaborative structures. [] Marita Albert is a member of the Upper Murray Historical Society T/as Man From Snowy River Museum, Corryong, Victoria.

Citation for this text: Marita Albert, ‘The new Murray Network of MA: Crossing state borders, networking regionally’, Museums Australia Magazine, Vol. 23 (1), Summer 2014, pp.41—42.

DUAL AWARD PROGRAM

Dual Award in Cultural Heritage and World Heritage Studies 14128-Dual Award Program-PC-100x150-v2-ml.indd 1 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; a first for Deakin University

15/12/2014 2:21 pm

Deakin University Australia, in partnership with Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus-Senftenberg, Germany, is pleased to announce a new Dual Award Program in Cultural Heritage and World Heritage Studies.

This initiative is the first reciprocal international dual award postgraduate program offered by Deakin, and is the first of its kind in the cultural heritage and museum studies discipline in Australia and Germany. As a leading, globally recognized university in cultural heritage education and research, this unique postgraduate program is a groundbreaking step for Deakin and a rare opportunity for heritage and museum studies students.

The program provides qualified students with the opportunity to earn a Master of Cultural Heritage from Deakin University Australia and a Master of Arts in World Heritage Studies from Brandenburg University of Technology (BTU) Cottbus-Senftenberg, Germany, in two years of full-time study.

Students from BTU will complete two trimesters of study at Deakin and Deakin students will complete a semester of study at BTU. Students from both universities will experience a distinctive mixed-mode of on-shore, on-line and international learning, in a multi-cultural environment.

The program is fee neutral, meaning students only pay tuition fees to their home institution. There are no tuition fees charged to BTU students when they are in Australia and vice-versa for Deakin students when they are in Germany.

This exceptional program also serves as a PhD pathway for those students who wish to take their museum and cultural heritage studies further.

Find out how you can be a part of this exciting initiative!

Visit deakin.edu.au/chms Or contact Dr Linda Young, Senior Lecturer Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies School of Humanities and Social Sciences Faculty of Arts and Education Deakin University, Melbourne Burwood Campus E: linda.young@deakin.edu.au P: +61 3 9251 7130