Museums Galleries Australia Magazine Vol 26(1) Spring-Summer 2017

vol 26 (1) spring–summer 2017 $15.00

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Australia in the Great War, Australian War Memorial, Canberra ACT Australia in the Great War is the new permanent exhibition in the First World War Galleries at the Australian War Memorial.

It is the first major refurbishment of the galleries in over 40 years and one of the key contributions to commemorating the centenary of the conflict. Principal exhibition designers Cunningham Martyn Design, developed probably the most challenging gallery re-configuration project Designcraft have ever delivered. The complex Joinery and Showcase package pushed our fabrication ability and facility to the limit.

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Exhibition design: Cunningham Martyn Design.

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Photography by John Gollings.

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8 Museums Galleries Australia Magazine – Vol. 26(1) – Spring-Summer 2017

Contents

In this issue Museum futures point to collaboration on big data, artificial intelligence and digitisation . . . . . . 12

Museums Galleries Australia National Council 2017—2019 president

Keeping the dream alive — whilst we build it. . . . . 16

Dr Robin Hirst PSM

The Green Museum Project: Creating new pathways towards sustainable practice. . . . . . . . . . 20

vice-president

(Director, Hirst Projects, Melbourne)

Simon Elliott

(Deputy Director, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane)

Digitally engaged: Experimenting with digital technologies in social history exhibitions . . . . . . . 24

treasurer

Margaret Lovell (People Support Manager, Fair Work Ombudsman, Canberra)

A toolbox for handling copyright issues in museums and galleries. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Trusted institutions and history that matters. . . . 31 ‘Important to me’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Learning through museums: Sharing our practice with schools. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 University museums and collections evolving in a changing world. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46

secretary

Carol Cartwright ([retired] Head, Education & Visitor Services, Australian War Memorial, Canberra)

members

Dr Mark Crees (Director, Araluen Cultural Precinct, Alice Springs) Suzanne Davies (Director, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne) Dr Lynda Kelly (LyndaKellyNetworks, NSW) Craig Middleton (Curator, Centre of Democracy - History Trust of South Australia, Adelaide)

Maintaining credibility in a world after truth. . . . 50 The Blue Shield: Working for the protection of cultural heritage. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 The too hard basket:Deaccessioning issues for community museum collections. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58

Debbie Sommers (Volunteer, Port Macquarie Historical Society, Port Macquarie) ex officio member

Alec Coles OBE Chair, ICOM Australia; CEO, Western Australian Museum public officer

Louise Douglas, Canberra

Introducing best practice standards within the Air Force’s History and Heritage Branch. . . . . . . . 62 Dr Don McMichael, CBE (1932–2017): a life of public commitment to our environment, museums, and heritage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64 Book Review of Museums, Ethics and Cultural Heritage (2016). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66

state/territory branch presidents/ representatives

(subject to change throughout year)

ACT Rebecca Coronel (Assistant Manager, Collections Access, Department of Communications and the Arts, Canberra) NSW Rebecca Pinchin (Collection Manager, National Trust of Australia NSW) NT Vacant QLD Emma Bain (Director (Exhibitions & Programs), Redland Art Gallery, Cleveland)

© Museums Galleries Australia and individual authors.

PO Box 24, Deakin West ACT 2600 Editorial: (02) 6230 0346 Advertising: 02) 6230 0346 Subscriptions: (02) 6230 0346 editor@museumsaustralia.org.au www.museumsaustralia.org.au

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

SA Mirna Heruc

Museums Galleries Australia Magazine is published biannually (from Volume 25 onwards) and online on the national website, and is a major link with members and the museums sector. Museums Galleries Australia Magazine is a forum for news, opinion and debate on museum issues.

TAS Janet Carding (Director, Tasmanian Museum & Art Gallery, Hobart)

Contributions from those involved or interested in museums and galleries are welcome. Museums Galleries 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 Galleries Australia, its affiliates or employees.

Content layout: Stephanie Hamilton

Museums Galleries Australia is proud to acknowledge the following supporters of the national organisation: Australian Government Ministry for the Arts; Australian Library and Information Association; National Museum of Australia; Museum Victoria (Melbourne Museum); and Western Australian Museum.

Printer: Adams Print, Melbourne

Print Post Publication No: 100003705 ISSN 2207-1806

Editor: Bernice L. Murphy Cover design: Selena Kearney

(Director, University Collections, University of Adelaide, Adelaide)

VIC Lauren Ellis (Programs Manager, Museum Victoria, Melbourne) WA Soula Veyradier (Program & Communications Manager, International Art Space, Perth) COVER IMAGE: Mounted specimen; Chrysococcyx smaragdineus Swainson; South Africa. Macleay Museum, University of Sydney.

Image courtesy of University of Sydney.

Museums Galleries Australia Magazine – Vol. 26(1) – Spring-Summer 2017 9

President's Message Practice isn’t the thing that you do once you are good. It is the thing you do that makes you good.

Malcolm Gladwell[1]

above:

Dr Robin Hirst.

1.

Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success (Boston: Little, Brown and Company) 2008.

2.

See further at <http://www. participatorymuseum.org/>

3.

Nina Simon is author of two books, The Participatory Museum (2010), The Art of Relevance (2016), and the Museum 2.0 blog, reaching around 16,000 readers weekly.

For this edition of our magazine the editor has solicited articles that feature evolving standards and examples of good practice by a variety of colleagues, working for different types of institutions, large and small.

I like the word ‘practice’. I see it as having least three different connotations. First, there is the idea that it is about doing. It is about practical application of ideas as opposed to theories about a subject.

Second, there is the notion that practice is about repeated or typical procedures once you have attained some status — as in ‘this is our practice’. Third, it can imply repeated exercise of skills or performance in order to attain perfection.

Yet the phrase ‘good practice’ has its own in-built tensions. On the one hand, it intimates a responsiveness to changing ideas; on the other hand, it suggests an element of stabilised behaviour, of keeping things the same. I like Malcolm Gladwell’s notion that practice is what helps to build improved performance and capabilities. It’s what makes you good.

Museums Galleries Australia embraces museums and galleries of all kinds. Some employ hundreds of staff, whilst others may be operated by a single individual or a group of volunteers. Whether large or small, most rely to a great extent on people who simply give their time. Whether based in the fields of art, history, science, culture, or any one of a number of other specialist areas, good practice can be embraced by practitioners in all fields. We can all invent, beg, borrow, build, adapt and share the best of our ideas and capacities.

MGA has available on our website an abundance of information on National Standards and guidelines for museums and galleries, and these are particularly useful reference tools for building skills and running a quality operation. ‘Good practice’ on the other hand, when used as a guiding term across the sector, reaches wider (and often aims higher). It will vary across place, time and context. Yet it will be driven by a continuing commitment to good outcomes as an interconnecting goal, while it will also address resources, people, skillsets and — especially in this day and age — digital technology.

It seems to me that almost all museums are continually balancing two underlying objectives. They need to ensure that they meet today’s visitors’ needs, whether in person or virtually, in order to attract political, philanthropic and community support to be sustainable. On the other hand, they need to ensure that their collections are preserved and enhanced for future generations. We are the beneficiaries of past endeavours of collectors, interpreters and conservators, and deep within us is the desire to strengthen this legacy for those who will follow.

Meanwhile digital technology’s support and access capacities will continue to transform our work. How

we take advantage of what these restless energies offer in all areas of our practice will be the key to survival.

Recently, I attended the GLAM Peak meeting held in Canberra, where the heads of the membership organisations and some national organisations met to share and learn. I was taken by a comment that Jan Müller, recently appointed CEO of the National Film and Sound Archives, made at the meeting. Müller (formerly CEO of the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision) spoke about organisations moving from analogue to digital; and the question he posed for us to ask of our own organisation is: ‘Where are we on this timeline?’. If we can look at every aspect of our operations and see where we would like to be in this transition, then at least we know what we have to do when the resources become available. I have no doubt that good practice will be aligned to how successfully we can move along this timeline.

Talking of a move to digital, Museums Australia (Victoria) recently celebrated uploading the 100,000th collection item into Victorian Collections, a free collection management system developed some years ago. This collection system was especially tailored to small museums and collections that might have limited technical resources, and it was strongly supported by Museum Victoria and the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria.

Congratulations to the Victorian Branch for taking up this management system and promoting it to many different types of users. We now have a support system for good practice in cataloguing and managing a collection that we can use to assist other small museums across the country as they journey along the analogue/digital timeline.

On the matter of good practice, the pioneering and widely shared work of Nina Simon, Director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, has recently been celebrated by the Santa Cruz Chamber of Commerce, which has honoured her as their Woman of the Year. Nina is known to many through her Museum 2.0 blog and her web-based promotion of The Participatory Museum — which she describes as ‘a practical guide to working with community members and visitors to make cultural institutions more dynamic, relevant, essential places’.[2] In addition to her two books promoting participatory change processes in museums,[3] Nina has transformed her Santa Cruz museum, tripling attendance, diversifying participants, increasing community partnerships and expanding programs. And to top it all off, she developed an ‘empty square’ locally, bringing new eateries, new performance spaces and family-friendly activities downtown.

Not just good practice but excellent practice! [] Dr Robin Hirst PSM National President, Museums Galleries Australia

10 Museums Galleries Australia Magazine – Vol. 26(1) – Spring-Summer 2017

From the National Director

A above:

Alex Marsden.

s we approach the end of the year I’m simultaneously looking back and looking forward.

2017 has seen the successful start of two big projects that I foreshadowed last year: MGA’s Indigenous Roadmap Project; and the Digital Access to Collections Program of regional workshops and state digital access plans, under the auspices of GLAM Peak.

Both were featured in the mid-year edition of this magazine, and since then have been going from strength to strength. Both were made possible through securing grants from a recent and short-lived program of the Commonwealth government, along with significant in-kind support from museums, galleries and other cultural institutions across Australia, as well as a number of technology partners. Both are exemplary national projects involving consultation, research, standards-setting and professional development. Good practice indeed.

While that particular grants program has now been closed (and we strongly supported most of the associated funds returning to the Australia Council for the Arts), the Arts Minister has set aside an allocation for projects nominated by museums, galleries, libraries and archives that are beyond the scope of the Australia Council. We’ll certainly be applying again on your behalf, and believe our recent track record will speak strongly for our case.

Good practice in managing member associations is also top of mind at the moment. By the time you read this, our online members’ survey will have closed and we’ll be discussing some of the results, along with feedback from other consultation at the last National Council meeting. Thank you to everyone who has taken part in our survey and consultation work to date.

State and Territory branch committees, National Networks and Council members will continue to hold discussions on the draft Value Proposition throughout January to May in 2018. They will gather further feedback on future directions, what we do well, and what we can do more of or better. And on that note, I devoutly hope that most of our teething problems with the new MGA and ICOM database transitions will be over — we thank you for your patience and understanding.

Part of MGA’s strategic review process is to look with fresh eyes at the world we live in, and question many of our current assumptions and assertions.

Extensive Australia Council research in recent years demonstrates that the vast majority of Australians report positive impacts of the arts and culture in their lives. Cultural institutions are seen as playing a central role in providing trusted places to engage with others.

They are civic forums for exploring what is known about the natural world, art and human history, as well as sharing our social experience, values and identity.

However, there are well-founded public concerns surrounding the political will to provide long-term and adequate levels of funding and support to our public institutions. Our organisational branches are concerned with these issues as they affect the range of institutions in their state, as well as exploring how to provide membership services generally with often limited or declining resources.

There are already clear messages emerging that members are seeking increased skills development, networking opportunities and targeted advocacy through involvement in MGA. The assertion we might now be questioning is whether MGA alone can manage to deliver the same level of state-based training and support services to every member in every state and territory. Perhaps more energies could be directed to lobbying state governments to either better fund their state government service providers or increase their grants to NGOs that currently deliver museum and gallery services.

What does appear fundamental to the future effectiveness of organisations such as ours is the increasing importance of collaboration and partnerships between associations, peak bodies and service providers, of whatever stripe.

I look forward to hearing your views. [ ] Alex Marsden National Director, Museums Galleries Australia

Museums Galleries Australia Magazine – Vol. 26(1) – Spring-Summer 2017 11

On the Horizon: 2018

Museum Leadership Program 2018 (Sponsored by the Gordon Darling Foundation) Applications close 23 March 2018 MLP details: www.gordondarlingfoundation.org. au/mlp2018.php Digital Access to Collections Regional Workshops Program: continuing around regional Australia: January — June 2018.

GLAM Peak workshops details: www. digitalcollections.org.au/workshops/locations National Awards open for entries in February, for both publication design and projects. Awards will be announced at the National Conference.

Visit the website for more information: www. museumsaustralia.org.au/awards Indigenous Roadmap Project: consultations, draft roadmap and updated Guidelines: January —June 2018. Roadmap available: www. mgaindigenousroadmap.com.au MGA strategic review: consultation continues January —June, with presentation of outcomes at Members’ Forum in June 2018.

MGA2018 National Conference in Melbourne: 4–7 June 2018.

Register for early bird now: www.mga2018.org. au National Council Meetings & workshops, June and November 2018.

Biannual expanded MGA magazine published (print version and website-release) in June/July and November/December 2018.

Museum Leadership Program, live-in program delivered in Sydney from 21–26 October 2018.

Refer also to the myriad of functions, events, publications and PD offered by state and territory branches and national networks — check the relevant section of the national website for details and look out for your branch and network e-bulletins.

STOP PRESS: MGA National Council’s November meeting debrief The National Council met in Melbourne on Monday 27 November. As members are aware, we are carrying out a strategic review of the organisation and we recently conducted a survey to gain your views on various topics. Central to the discussions at our November meeting were very preliminary results of the membership survey. A third of our membership responded — thank you everyone!

There was some great feedback about such things as membership services, the roles of the Branches and National Networks, and how we might strengthen the museums and galleries sector as a whole.

The Council also assessed the progress of other aspects of MGA’s strategic review. Branch Presidents and Network Convenors led discussions on the feedback they were getting from conversations and meetings with members and stakeholders.

Clearly, whilst we do many things well, there are opportunities for us to improve our organisation.

The review will continue over the next few months, with further opportunities to comment as we report back on some of the directions proposed for development. The next AGM, which will be held at the time of the Melbourne National Conference in June, will be an opportunity to adopt the Council’s deliberations on what they see as the future, based on your feedback and insights.

In the meantime, enjoy the photo of us all in the Red Rotunda at the State Library of Victoria. I feel very privileged to be working with this group of talented, passionate and committed advocates for museums and galleries, whose job it is represent your views and guide directions in our important organisation. [ ] Dr Robin Hirst PSM National President, Museums Galleries Australia

above:

National Council members and executive staff. L-R: Rebecca Coronel, Janet Carding, Michelle Stevenson, Suzanne Davies, Soula Veyradier, Laura Miles, Mark Crees, Padraic Fisher, Ilka Schacht, Carol Cartwright, Paul Bowers, Alex Marsden, Robin Hirst, Alec Coles, Margaret Lovell, Debbie Sommers, Craig Middleton, Louise Douglas, Mirna Heruc, Lee Scott, Rebecca Pinchin, Andrew Simpson, Lynda Kelly, Simon Elliott.

12 Museums Galleries Australia Magazine – Vol. 26(1) – Spring-Summer 2017

Tracking GLAM sector collaboration in the digital environment

Museum futures point to collaboration on big data, artificial intelligence and digitisation

Hamish Holewa

B above: right:

Hamish Holewa.

Dr Leo Joseph, Director of CSIRO's Australian National Wildlife Collection, with some of the Collection's specimens of tiger-parrots. Photo credit: CSIRO.

ig data, artificial intelligence and digitisation are exciting new technologies that will help unlock value within our collections, discover new insights, and understand our world in ways we have not previously imagined.

Implementation and understanding of these technologies can be a difficult and time-consuming process. Developing expertise, training a workforce and obtaining equipment are significant challenges.

However, this also presents opportunities. Within the GLAM sector we can look at partnering and collaborating with other sectors that are also currently grappling with these issues. In particular, the ecoscience sector has a lot of similarities with the GLAM sector. They are all in the business of collecting, organising programs and resources, and asking various disciplinary questions that encompass a very broad range of stakeholder and interest groups.

By working across sectors, we have the potential to build new relationships, quicken innovation, and unlock transformative insights.

In this article, I’ll explore some areas where building broader communities of practice around technologies and capabilities can be enhanced through working across sectors. I’ll examine the challenges and opportunities that are provided through new technologies such as big data, artificial intelligence and digitisation; and consider how development of cross-sector communities of practice can provide benefits that unlock value residing within our institutions.

Unlocking value between the GLAM sector and ecosciences At a recent conference I was fortunate enough to talk with a researcher who was examining pelt sale records during the first few decades of British settlement in Australia. These records contain accurate historical information on the abundance, size and location of animals that were present in Australia during the 1800s. This valuable data can be mined in new ways to help us understand current issues — such as changes in species populations and the functioning of ecosystems.

This is not a lone example. Fishermen have kept detailed records of catch, weather and water quality over long time-frames. Likewise, other industries have kept detailed records regarding their sources of material and patterns of trade. Forestry and agriculture provide further examples where seemingly inconsequential data contains information we can repurpose to understand, model, and predict the evolving character of our world.

Generally, such examples of extracting new knowledge from old data rely on extremely motivated individuals. They use creativity and perseverance to search out and connect disparate data, and then undertake painstaking effort to transcribe or digitise the resources found. Nevertheless, the advantages of generating ‘big data’ and associated insights have yet to be captured to their full potential. The question is how to do this at a scale that is both time- and costeffective.

Museums Galleries Australia Magazine – Vol. 26(1) – Spring-Summer 2017 13

Fundamental to the new push in machine learning and artificial intelligence is a focus on people

This situation is changing. Recent technology advances in digitisation, artificial intelligence, and crowdsourcing are making possible the ability to extract data from historical records and collections in new ways. Imagine a world where you can easily search historical records, access a variety of data across different fields, and compare results against different times and locations. As has been shown in other areas, making such data available has a multiplier effect: individuals, developers, organisations and companies can innovate; they can build and extend this data into applications and products that do not currently exist.

This data already resides in our collections, our archives, our objects and our specimens. It’s just a matter of being able to access it in a way that is convenient, scalable and easy. Whilst advances are progressing in technological means, we need to work together more collaboratively in Australia and internationally to showcase what’s possible and how to get there.

This picture sketches critical areas where much is to be gained by galleries, museums and ecosciences working together more actively. On a cursory glance, it might seem that the different domains don’t have a lot of overlap in collection typologies. However, what they are trying to achieve does — as do the fundamental technologies that are required to enable capture of next-generation data.

Engaging in collaboration and knowledge sharing regarding digitisation, innovation in extracting machine readable data, and showcasing our impact, highlights many issues in common and areas of convergent goals. Let’s have a look at some of these areas.

Digitisation At its essence, digitisation is about taking a physical item (painting, specimen, object), then photographing or scanning it (much like the MRI scanners used in health care), and making the items available in a digital format.

Digitisation can be very complex but also has enormous potential. Worlds can be recreated, and once-seemingly-irrecoverable records can be examined without destruction to the original physical specimen. For example, a crumpled and soiled piece of paper can be photographed from multiple angles and combined together to render the paper ‘digitally flattened’ — and readable!

Within ecosciences, digitisation allows for experts to easily access and integrate specimen collections.

Recent advances in technology allow digitisation of records to determine morphological characteristics (traits) of a species, including body surface area, colour, and length of a leg, wing, beak, or claws.

Collecting such data and making it machine-readable allows researchers and decision makers to ask questions about why a particular characteristic is expressed more in a certain area than others. For example, a fruit tree might produce better fruit at one location than another. Extracting such information enables us to understand how species interact and

What’s machine readable data?

Big data analytics relies on having access to data in a form that can be queried and modelled. It generally needs to be in a standardised numerical format often within large tables or matrixes. Once standardised, different data sets can be easily combined and analysed. For example, mapping applications which overlay and present different data rely on a standardised method of determining location and space.

14 Museums Galleries Australia Magazine – Vol. 26(1) – Spring-Summer 2017

Tracking GLAM sector collaboration in the digital environment

left:

Digitisation of a bug. Experimental camera equipment spins the specimen around on the same plane whilst compiling the images. right: Students using a citizen science-powered nature identifying app.

how they are influenced both by the environment and other species in their impact zone.

Digitisation entails specialised services. To achieve high-quality results, and at scale, vibrant communities of practice need to be encouraged — in which expertise, skills and know-how can be shared amongst different interest-groups — to fine-tune specific capabilities while advancing collective progress.

Working collaboratively will help to drive technology adoption, lower costs, and help to unlock value from our collections.

Artificial Intelligence and machine learning Artificial Intelligence (AI) refers to the ability of a computer to learn and reason (similar to how we learn and think). This booming field of computer science has direct relevance to the galleries, museums and ecoscience sectors.

Within ecosciences we have already seen AI identify species from photographs. Similar to the way that you can easily find and search on photos of yourself using facial recognition, this functionality uses machine

learning techniques to train a computer to detect and identify a species.

In addition to image recognition, AI also applies to reading text and handwriting. Called Optical Character Recognition (OCR), the technology converts handwriting into electronic text, enabling easier search and extraction of information from historical records.

Combined with digitisation and the ability to extract machine-readable data, this combination of technologies will transform our ability to understand and integrate previous historical records. Using the fisherman records, for example, this could allow us easily to extract data from all historic fish records, plot them to a particular location, and view the species commingling at a particular time in the past.

Citizen science and crowdsourcing Fundamental to the new push in machine learning and artificial intelligence is a focus on people!

Advances in machine learning that enable text and

Museums Galleries Australia Magazine – Vol. 26(1) – Spring-Summer 2017 15

sectors involved. Innovation is generally driven at the intersection between different disciplines, and multiple specialised areas, collections, data and communities acting in novel ways will provide mechanisms to bring people together in common cause.

Being able to share and learn during such processes will help to lift our ability to unlock the multiple potential values residing in our collections, to understand the world in new ways, and to increase research outcomes for all. [ ] image recognition need high-quality training datasets.

The value of these datasets is that they are verified and accurate records of text or images that have been successfully transcribed or identified. Such important contributions to our knowledge are currently being undertaken by passionate volunteers, and their efforts have helped in advancing science and research.

However as technology advances, the need for volunteers to do important transcription, annotation and identification work will decrease.

The prospects described above pose both opportunities and dilemmas for all sectors that utilise citizen science. The volume of records that have been made machine-readable will increase dramatically, leading to new discoveries, whilst the reliance on volunteers in this area will likely shift to other tasks.

As a special cluster of interest communities, we need at this juncture to explore new ways that can continue to engage our many support groups and volunteers to provide input and value in advancing science and research. Instead of helping with repetitive tasks, the ongoing contribution of volunteers to knowledge building calls upon higher-order thinking, involving categorising and forming new relationships.

Communities of practice Above are some examples where there is a clear alignment of capabilities that are needed by the galleries, museums, archives and ecosciences communities. We now need to move from crucial capabilities to upscaled capacity.

Communities of practices that share results, breakthroughs, and challenges need to be encouraged to accelerate the rate of advancement in our sectors.

Not only will developing cross-sector communities of practice enhance immediate outputs, they will also stimulate further innovation across the

Hamish Holewa is the Chief Operating Officer of the Atlas of Living Australia. Mr Holewa specialises in large scale, multi-institutional data integration and machine learning, eResearch infrastructure programs, and has successfully led many national collaborative projects in areas such as health, open data, ecology and climate change, and cloud computing and user support. He has extensive research management and policy development experience in the areas of health economics, psycho-social health care, palliative care and ecoscience.

Text citation: Hamish Hollewa, ‘Museum futures point to collaboration on big data, artificial intelligence and digitisation’, Museums Galleries Australia Magazine, Vol. 26(1), Museums Galleries Australia, Canberra, Spring–Summer 2017, pp. 12–15.

16 Museums Galleries Australia Magazine – Vol. 26(1) – Spring-Summer 2017

WA Museum moving along its redevelopment pathways to 2020

Keeping the dream alive — whilst we build it

Alec Coles

above:

Alec Coles OBE. Photo courtesy WA Museum. below:

Winning concept for the New Museum for WA, Perth. Photo: © Multiplex, HASSELL +OMA.

After many false starts, the Western Australian Government is finally building a new Western Australian Museum in the Perth Cultural Centre. It has been talked about for literally decades, and with a number of precursor projects, some realised and some not, the ground is now well and truly broken and the project is on its way to completion in 2020.

It is not as if the State had eschewed the idea of a new museum; it had just taken it and re-purposed it — a few times! For instance, there were two new WA Museum sites completed in 2002: the WA Maritime Museum in Fremantle — home to Australia II, the yacht that famously, with WA backing, crew and design, wrested the America’s Cup from the USA in 1983; and the impressive Museum of Geraldton, located in the coastal city 424 kilometres north of Perth.

Redevelopment of the WA Museum’s Perth site has proved a little more involved. The state Labor government led by Alan Carpenter (following the retirement of Geoff Gallop in 2006) had proposed the redevelopment of the East Perth Power Station as the new museum site. This proposal played well with the zeitgeist of the time, and the global preoccupation with the conversion of disused industrial buildings into new cultural facilities. The East Perth site, however, required intensive and costly remediation and was at an out-of-town location: ideal for a MONAtype experience, but not for the State’s principal museum that aspired to be a nerve-centre institution, easily accessible to the people of Perth and beyond.

It came as no surprise that when the Carpenter Government lost the 2009 state election, the incoming Liberal National government led by Colin Barnett moved to cancel the $500 million power station scheme, instead suggesting that it would look at redeveloping the new museum site within the Perth Cultural Centre precinct.

In 2010, when I arrived in WA as CEO of the WA Museum, there was still a lot of persuading to do.

The global financial crisis had rattled confidence, and Western Australia’s infamous boom-and-bust economy was starting to fall from the heady heights of the early 2000s. Many people believed that the new museum project would subside indefinitely in the new government’s agenda, while it wrestled with the need to invest in new schools, hospitals and roads.

After a nervous couple of years developing a business case, in May 2012, the then State Treasurer, Christian Porter, announced funding for the scheme in the state budget: $5 million planning funds in the 2012–13 budget; and then a $428.3 million commitment for the whole scheme, rolling out, progressively, through forward estimates and with a planned completion date in 2020. This launched the museum redevelopment on a solid course. I am delighted that, after another change of government recently, the new McGowan Labor Government has also embraced the project, recognising the major and positive impact the Museum will have on WA communities, as well as on tourism, education and the economy.

Previously, an intense earlier period of business planning had led to a procurement process that got moving in 2014. This designated a ‘Managing Contractor’ model, culminating in expressions of interest being submitted in 2015 from an impressive array of building contractors partnered with international architectural firms — in most cases, in alliance with Australian-based partners.

Three teams were shortlisted: John Holland led a team featuring Foster + Partners and Hames Sharley; WA construction company Doric engaged Jean Nouvel in alliance with Perth-based architects, Cameron Chisholm Nichol, and Parry and Rosenthal; Multiplex headed up an architectural alliance between OMA and HASSELL (characterised as HASSELL + OMA).

In the outcome, Multiplex with HASSELL + OMA (now, handily abbreviated to H+O) was the successful team. Their selection was announced at the end of July 2016, and since then they have worked closely with the WA Museum and the government’s Strategic Projects team to develop their winning proposal: from initial concepts through to schematic design, and onwards to the documentation and detailed design stage.

Museums Galleries Australia Magazine – Vol. 26(1) – Spring-Summer 2017 17

A two-stage contracting process means that work is well under way on site, while the final design detailing is being completed.

Parts of the project are already accomplished: for example, refurbishment of the heritage buildings at the Perth site was carried out at an early stage; meanwhile a major redevelopment of the WA Museum’s off-site collections stores and laboratories was completed in 2016, at a cost of just under $18 million.

Whilst all this building work is under way, of course, a prodigious amount of work has been carried out by the Museum to develop the content of the new facility.

A content team under the leadership of Project Director Trish McDonald includes Creative Directors, as well as a Curator, Designers and Audience Advocates. All are working closely with the WA Museum’s existing curatorial, learning and creativity colleagues to translate the Museum’s mission into content, and to try to make sense of the plethora of stories that could be shared around this content.

Indeed, the concept of sharing is crystallised in the WA Museum’s mission statement that commits the Museum to ‘Inspire people to explore and share their identity, culture, environment and sense of place, and contribute to the diversity and creativity of our world.’

In a bid to honour this mission, and to try to make sense of very diverse collections, we rapidly settled into three major themes to guide our thinking as to what the WA Museum is about. The first of these is Being Western Australian: exploring and sharing identities, and promoting understanding in a state that includes people who can claim direct descendance from the world’s oldest continuous culture, along with the many different cultures that now make WA the most diverse state, per capita, in Australia.

The second theme is Discovering Western Australia: in effect, creating a gateway to this vast and diverse state with its ancient landscapes, unique geology and extraordinary biodiversity.

The third theme is Exploring the World, and this is where we explore our place in the world and our connectivity. Perth is often infamously described as the most isolated city on earth. And yet it sits on the edge of the Indian Ocean: a vast ocean with its own ancient history, international trade routes that influenced world history for centuries, and burgeoning contemporary activity around its rim today. Perth is also ‘In the Zone’ as described by the now-annual conferences led by the University

of Western Australia’s Perth USAsia Centre — the premise being that within a two-hour time zone east or west of Perth’s time, 60% of the world’s population now resides. This offers extraordinary opportunities in today’s interactive world of unceasing communications.

As we explore and develop the key themes, through a series of galleries, we also want to ‘reveal the museum’, which manages a remarkable range of resources and activities for public good. In addition to caring for its long-developed collections, the WA Museum conducts an immense amount of research in the fields of marine and terrestrial zoology, earth and planetary sciences, and terrestrial and maritime archaeology. It works extensively with Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal communities, and has one of the most active cultural repatriation programs in Australia. These are all things that we need to share with our users!

The key aspiration of the WA Museum, and of the New Museum Project, is ‘People First’. This means not only designing with people in mind, but involving them in all that we do; and in particular, inviting them to share their opinions and stories with us as to what should be in the new museum and how it should be represented.

I am very proud of the degree to which the museum and its teams have embraced this principle. I believe that we have probably carried out an unprecedented amount of face-to-face consultation with our communities: more than 20,000 people have spoken with us to date, and we’ve been committed listeners.

We have been out and about: here, there and everywhere! This means much time spent out on country working with Aboriginal communities; it means long weekends in the shopping centres of Perth, or at festivals, or in community centres speaking with Western Australians; but, most importantly, it involves listening to them, because it is their lives and their experiences that will feature in the new museum.

To guide and inform these conversations, we have established advisory panels: a People’s Panel with wide representation; a Young People’s Panel; a Teachers and Educators Panel; a Disability and Access Panel; and we have put our Aboriginal Advisory Committee hard to work, so that we can receive constant feedback and test concepts and ideas on a regular basis. It affords me a little mischievous pleasure that many more people responded to our call for expressions of interest to join our community

We have been out and about: here, there and everywhere

18 Museums Galleries Australia Magazine – Vol. 26(1) – Spring-Summer 2017

WA Museum moving along its redevelopment pathways to 2020

panels than for the corresponding panels for the new Perth stadium. Perhaps we Western Australians are not as myopically obsessed with sport as people would have us believe!

Our two exhibition design companies (both Australian) — Thylacine and Freeman Ryan Design — are benefitting from all of this research and advice.

But they also have to sift and make sense of it. We have gathered enough stories and content for about five museums (at least), and so the difficult job of culling is already under way.

And what of our audiences whilst the Perth site is closed and under redevelopment? This is an issue we are very aware of, and so our other five museums have had to work extra hard to fill the gap. Meanwhile we have established our presence elsewhere, and have been ‘popping up’ all over the place.

For example on one recent weekend, our WA Maritime Museum in Fremantle was showing a major temporary exhibition, Escape from Pompeii: the untold Roman rescue; our WA Shipwrecks Museum, also in Fremantle, was the locus for the City’s Little Italy by the Sea festival; we had variously invaded the Perth Convention and Exhibition Centre with our recordbreaking Dinosaur Discovery: Lost Creatures of the Cretaceous exhibition; we had our long-awaited Heath Ledger: A Life in Pictures exhibition presented in the Art Gallery of WA; we had re-established our Discovery Centre and our Museum shop — the Discovery Store — in the State Library of WA; and our bespoke Inflatable Museum was on the road at a

festival in Mandurah, about 70 km south of Perth.

Our metropolitan Perth site had been attracting well over 400,000 visitors per year before it closed for the redevelopment, so we had predicted a pretty severe reduction in visitors to our sites this year. In the event, the reduction has been much smaller than predicted because of the sheer volume and diversity of off-site activities that are under way.

We always promised that whilst we were rebuilding, we would ‘never go away’, and that has certainly been the case. The only minor irritation is when people say to us (and they frequently do): ‘Oh, you must be having a nice quiet time whilst the Museum is closed!’ In truth, we are busier than ever. But as we contemplate 2020 and the opening of WA’s brand new museum, I am pretty glad that we are. [ ] Since March 2010 Alec Coles has been CEO of the Western Australian Museum, the State’s museum with branches in Perth, Fremantle, Geraldton, Kalgoorlie and Albany. He was previously Director of Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums in North East England for 8 years, and was awarded an OBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List of 2010. Coles is an Adjunct Associate Professor in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Western Australia, which awarded him an Honorary Doctor of Letters (D.Litt.) in 2017. He is an Executive Member of the Council for Australasian Museum Directors (CAMD) and Chair of ICOM Australia.

Text citation: Alec Coles: ‘Keeping the dream alive – whilst we build it’, Museums Galleries Australia Magazine, Vol. 26(1), Museums Galleries Australia, Canberra, Spring– Summer 2017, pp. 16–19.

left: New WA Museum project team: regional community engagement at KALACC Festival.

Photo courtesy WA Museum. top:

Dinosaur Discovery at PCEC. Photo courtesy WA Museum.

bottom: Escape from Pompeii body casts. Photo courtesy WA Museum. right:

Inflatable WA Museum at Elizabeth Quay. Photo courtesy WA Museum.

Museums Galleries Australia Magazine – Vol. 26(1) – Spring-Summer 2017 19

20 Museums Galleries Australia Magazine – Vol. 26(1) – Spring-Summer 2017

Museums adjusting to a changing world in their energy usage and green footprint

The Green Museum Project: Creating new pathways towards sustainable practice

above:

Simone Ewenson.

right:

Will Rosenow, Ryan Wagner and Stewart Quanchi from Long's Electrical Echuca installing a 4.55 kw Photo Voltaic system at Echuca Historical Society.

Photo courtesy MA (Vic) 2017.

Simone Ewenson

M 1.

For the National Standards for Australian Museums and Galleries, see: <http://mavic.asn. au/assets/NSFAMG_v1_4_2014. pdf>. The National Standards are also available for download on the Museums Galleries Australia national website: <https://www.museumsaustralia. org.au/resources/ national-standards-for-australianmuseums-and-galleries>.

useums Australia (Victoria) represents 1,000 organisations that hold 43 million artefacts, with 85% of these bodies run by volunteers, and many on budgets of less than $5,000 per year. Of these organisations, 73 are accredited under the Museums Australia (Victoria) Museum Accreditation Program — also known as MAP. They have already undergone a long process of consultation and capacity building aligning them with the National Standards for Australian Museums and Galleries.[1] The Green Museum Project, supported by the Melbourne Lord Mayor’s Charitable Foundation (www.lmcf.org.au), currently works closely with five small regional volunteer-run museums in Victoria.

The project goals shaping these partnerships are: to assist the museums in auditing their energy use and lux levels to reduce organisational energy costs; to cut carbon emissions by between 20% – 40%; and to build their collection care standards to best-practice levels.

These Victorian museums have faced a variety

of challenging issues around their vulnerable and ageing building fabric and fitout, rising electricity prices, and the possible effects of global warming on their care of collections. The success of the GMP partnership with these museums has been largely due to the work undertaken through MAP, and by staff and volunteers at the museums themselves — all of whom have sought practical solutions with long-term environmental benefits.

Typical of many buildings that accommodate volunteer museums and historical societies across the state, all five museums involved in the GMP are housed in 100+ year-old heritage buildings, which were never designed to function ultimately as museums. Along with the many hours of work it takes to create engaging exhibitions, operate research rooms, and run visitor tours that provide vital revenue, volunteers also care for complex collections.

From textiles to substantial amounts of sensitive paper-based items and archival documents; and objects relating to industries such as mining, logging, farming, paddle steamer transport and the High Country: these collections are gems in our regional

Museums Galleries Australia Magazine – Vol. 26(1) – Spring-Summer 2017 21

landscapes, and their custodians are pioneering bestpractice sustainability standards within their local communities.

While initially conceived as a project to assist MAP museums to change old halogen lighting systems to LED technology, therefore lowering the financial burden of rising energy costs and environment impacts, the initial baseline energy audits and site inspections at these museums revealed that they all faced long-term challenges. It also became clear that each museum required a plan for retrofitting current facilities specific to their needs.

With this in mind, the GMP project has evolved into one that assists museums to find holistic solutions encompassing a combined understanding of a number of factors. This has involved building thermal performance based on the style, age, fabric and condition of each building; and addressing issues of zoning, human behaviour, lighting, appliance use, and local weather conditions. Connecting these matters with goals of improved energy performance overall, the results have then been considered alongside the needs and demands of best practice in collection care. Additionally, the GMP project

has facilitated making positive connections, either through funding or goodwill, with local Shire Councils, who often have some commercial interest in the public buildings they own.

The differences between the five museums in the GMP project are shown in the accompanying graph. Creswick Museum’s energy consumption was dominated by lighting (more than 80%); whereas the other four institutions — Daylesford Museum and Historical Society, Benalla Costume and Kelly Museum, Echuca Historical Society Museum, and Mansfield Historical Society — had their various energy consumption issues spread across the categories of lighting, heating and cooling, computer and IT, and 24/7 items.

One of these museums, the Benalla Costume and Kelly Museum in Victoria’s north-east, is recognised as one of Victoria’s premier volunteer museums.

During the past 20 years, the museum staff have worked consistently across all areas of operations to grow and care for a substantial collection of costumes and paper-based items. The results of their dedication are evident in their 20 years of successful and continuing accreditation with MAP.

100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% right:

Energy Use Across Operational Areas.

Creswick Lighting

Benalla Heating and Cooling

Daylesford Office Equipment

Echuca

Mansfield

Museum Displays

24/7 Items

22 Museums Galleries Australia Magazine – Vol. 26(1) – Spring-Summer 2017

Museums adjusting to a changing world in their energy usage and green footprint

During coming years, we know that sustainability will play a greater role in pursuit and maintenance of the National Standards Housed in an 1869 Mechanics Institute and Free Library building, with extensions added during the 1980s, the Benalla museum’s main concern has been the inability to control seasonal temperatures and relative humidity in all three of its exhibition spaces. Although temperature and relative humidity readings are shown to be within the permissible thresholds, the museum expressed a desire to explore its sustainability options through the Green Museum Project, while avoiding installation of new HVAC systems.

The baseline energy audit at Benalla primarily identified heating and lighting as the biggest energy uses within the building. While changing over from old halogen and fluorescent lighting to LEDs is a straightforward process, understanding the total thermal performance of the building and its interior conditions can be more complicated. Through the project we asked a local builder to help us examine the building’s fabric for weak points, and advise us on aspects where improvements could be made.

In the ceiling cavity we discovered that insulation needed to be topped up, and noted that throughout both the old and new sections large ceiling vents were common, posing questions around how much ventilation is necessary today — remembering that passive environmental control from cross-ventilation was vital in days when fireplaces and gas lighting were the norm. Inside the museum we looked at draught proofing, window coverings, and a variety of other potential heat egresses to add further considerations to the energy audit.

Understanding and then modelling any potential changeover, or retrofitting on the basis of cost versus progressive savings after completion — both

Museums Galleries Australia Magazine – Vol. 26(1) – Spring-Summer 2017 23

top left:

Exterior View of Benalla Costume and Kelly Museum.

Photo courtesy MA (Vic) 2017.

bottom left: Wedding Dress c.1930. Benalla Costume and Kelly Museum. Photo courtesy MA (Vic) 2017.

monetarily and environmentally — allows us to prioritise efficiencies; and this is one of the key elements for ensuring a successful project. While the goal is ultimately installing solar panels as we have done at Echuca Historical Museum, there are often prior issues that need addressing before this step can be taken. By consulting widely throughout our networks of highly skilled industry partners and Advisory Committee members, the GMP, in partnership with the museums themselves, has sought solutions that span complex fields. The advisors enlisted help to make the calculations required, advise on specialty products and services available, and themselves provide much of the technical knowledge needed about built heritage, collection care, and conservation.

During coming years, we know that sustainability will play a greater role in pursuit and maintenance of the National Standards. Therefore, while the GMP initially provides museums with funding to help audit, understand, and purchase goods and services for retrofitting, we also support them to achieve ongoing success by planning and prioritising sustainability through their forward planning. One of the ways this is achieved is through the formulation of a sustainability policy, which is then adopted by the Management Committee at the museum and sits beside the suite of MAP policies already required for Accreditation.

Embedding sustainability within MAP policies and practices, while providing skills and funds to assist museums to better understand their environmental impact and make smart retrofitting choices, are just some of the ways that the Museum Accreditation Program builds knowledge and expertise within

volunteer, regional museums. While the Green Museum Project is due to finish at the end of 2017, MA (Vic) will continue to measure the longterm outcomes within these five museums, using the knowledge gained to inform and advocate for continuous improvements across the sector as a whole. [ ] Acknowledgments The Green Museum Project would not be possible without the following dedicated and enthusiastic partners and individuals: The Lord Mayor’s Charitable Foundation; Creative Victoria; past and present MA (Vic) staff, Rosie Hanscombe, Liz Marsden, Caroline Wall and Ren Gregoric; Advisory Committee Members, Carole Hammond, Nicole Tse, Amanda Wild, Helen Sheedy, Chris Jensen, Barbara Reeve, Jacqueline Peel and Ruth Reddon; museum representatives Gary Lawrence, Margaret Fullwood, Alan Monger, Dot Hammond, Sue Gardner and Anne Ware; Hepburn Shire and Benalla Rural City Shire; Longs Electrical Echuca, Eco Master, and Gary Miles Electrician; and MA (Vic) Executive Director, Laura Miles.

Simone Ewenson is currently the Green Museum Manager at MA (Vic), and will be taking up the role as MAP Manager in 2018.

Text citation: Simone Ewenson, ‘The Green Museum Project: Creating new pathways towards sustainable practice’, Museums Galleries Australia Magazine, Vol. 26(1), Museums Galleries Australia, Canberra, Spring–Summer 2017, pp. 20–23.

24 Museums Galleries Australia Magazine – Vol. 26(1) – Spring-Summer 2017

Three very different exhibitions enhanced through digital creativity

Digitally engaged: Experimenting with digital technologies in social history exhibitions

top:

Craig Middleton.

bottom:

Pauline Cockrill.

right:

Art of Science AR app in action. Image courtesy of SA Maritime Museum.

far right:

Bush Mechanics AR app in action. Image courtesy of SA Maritime Museum.

Craig Middleton and Pauline Cockrill

N

avigating further into the digital age, our traditional approaches to social history museums and exhibitions must also adapt and change. As we know, the influence of digital media on the cultural sector has been inescapable and profound. Museums, galleries, libraries and archives, are ever more reliant on new technologies to undertake the basic tasks of managing their collections. Meanwhile institutions are collecting born-digital as well as material things. Furthermore, new and experimental media — often in the form of museum interactives — are often embedded within permanent and temporary exhibition spaces. And increasingly, online visitation and engagement are firmly on the reportable agenda.

The History Trust of South Australia is open to experimentation, testing and evaluation of new technologies and ways of working. With this in mind the following case studies look at recent digital interventions implemented within the Trust’s diverse schedule of exhibitions.

The Art of Science at the South Australian Maritime Museum (Adelaide) In an era where technology is ubiquitous, entertainment is at our fingertips, interfaces are simplified to the point of concealing complexity (think UberEats), and smart devices are a domestic

accessory, research suggests that museums are often reacting in contrary ways. Museums tend to be abandoning personal digital devices as an engagement tool, because they are viewed as obstructing a more traditional exhibition experience while hindering the art of good storytelling. In terms of evolving exhibition practices, such attitudes merit serious review.

Last year, at the height of the Pokémon Go craze, the History Trust of South Australia’s digital engagement team, together with the South Australian Maritime Museum’s curatorial team, saw an opportunity to enliven a collection of 200-year-old French watercolours by using Augmented Reality (AR) and smart phones. The travelling exhibition The Art of Science: Baudin’s Voyages 1800–1804, a collaboration between several Australian cultural institutions and the Museum of Natural History in Le Havre, France, brought to Australia more than 340 original paintings and drawings collected from the voyages of the Géographe and Naturaliste in the 19th century. Original sketches and paintings on display depicted Australian marine and coastal life, as well as particular Tasmanian Aboriginal people (sometimes encountered at a close inter-personal level) during the exploration of southern Australia by Nicolas Baudin. These finely detailed images were created by ship-board artists Charles-Alexandre Lesueur and Nicolas-Martin Petit.

Understanding the importance of this French collection as scientific artworks, and the significance of having them displayed on Australian soil almost

Museums Galleries Australia Magazine – Vol. 26(1) – Spring-Summer 2017 25

two centuries after their creation, the South Australian team wanted to ensure that visitors took time to explore and discover the abundant details captured by the artists. The goal was to have artworks jumping off the paper, and capturing the imagination of diverse audiences.

Nevertheless, beautiful and vibrant as they were, the artworks were also very small and risked ‘peppering’ the walls of the exhibition when installed for visitors.

With no hardware budget to draw on, the digital team was tasked with creating an experience for audiences that are increasingly used to streaming YouTube and Netflix, building architectural Minecraft creations, and designing and printing 3D models from their personal devices. By employing gaming techniques, 3D animation and Augmented Reality, the project set out to create an enjoyable and engaging visitor experience through an AR app, utilising 4 of the artworks and a ‘BYO’ device.

It is one thing to look at a static 20 x 20 cm watercolour of a jellyfish hanging on a museum wall, surrounded by 50 aesthetically similar artworks. But without disrespecting the audiences who appreciate art for art’s sake, it is quite another to view such a drawn and coloured image through the contemporary lens of a smart phone, when detailing can bring a creature to life in all its augmented, animated 3D glory — tentacles moving, and bells flaring!

The results were captivating. Engaging the imagination of visitors young and old, the app counteracted the inevitable ‘museum fatigue’ accompanying exhibitions with heavy reliance

on a single medium. What we witnessed, through evaluation processes, were visitors conversing and excitedly running between artworks to discover the next augmented animation. They lingered. And they gasped with wonder and awe as the sea creatures came to life in tantalising mobile forms.

This was our measure of success. Rather than allowing the technology to ‘get in the way’ of the rare material presented, by staying true to the original form and function of the scientific records made by artists, the Art of Science AR app enabled our audiences to discover the works’ vivid depictions; and engage more closely with the ambition of the scientific journeys of Baudin, during the height of British rivalry with France under Napoleon.

Bush Mechanics at the National Motor Museum (Birdwood, SA) After the successful use of Augmented Reality (AR) in the Art of Science exhibition, the technology’s potential to deliver visual information in highly engaging ways was clearly evident. Turning to a very different kind of project: the large painting on the surface of one of the objects featured in the Bush Mechanics exhibition, presented at the National Motor Museum, meant that the classic Ford Fairlane was an ideal candidate for interpretation through AR. The Fairlane, also known as the ‘Ngapa Car’, was painted with a ngapa jukurrpa (water creation story)

by Warlpiri elder, Thomas Jangala Rice, in the final

26 Museums Galleries Australia Magazine – Vol. 26(1) – Spring-Summer 2017

Three very different exhibitions enhanced through digital creativity

above:

Centre of Democracy interactive wall. Photo: Andre Castellucci.

1.

Bush Mechanics was a 2001 television documentary series directed by David Batty.

Produced by the Warlpiri Media Association, the series featured an Indigenous Australian take on motor mechanics keeping cars functioning through ingenious adaptations of Indigenous local knowledge, including failed metal parts replaced by some handy woodcarving.

episode of the TV series, Bush Mechanics.[1] The AR app was developed to animate the various aspects of the painting under direction of Thomas Rice, and features explanations recorded by his son and interpreter, Donovan. The app’s original concept was to allow visitors to scan the car and lock onto elements of the painting that would then trigger the animations and voiceovers. This proved unreliable in development, however, and a simpler solution was employed: one that required visitors to scroll through the animations, once the first was triggered by locking onto the painting.

The Bush Mechanics app proved to be one of the most popular features of the exhibition, particularly among young visitors. Its attractiveness ensured interest in the painting’s narrative for most visitors, while it also helped the exhibition to achieve another important goal. One of the main objectives of the exhibition’s development team, in fact, was to interpret the vehicle in a manner that engaged

Aboriginal visitors during the exhibition’s tour to remote and regional venues in the Northern Territory. Its popularity in remote and regional areas (where visitors were less likely to be familiar with museum exhibitions that feature new technologies) demonstrated the effectiveness of AR in interpreting familiar narratives in new and engaging ways for diverse audiences.

The Centre of Democracy (Adelaide) Adelaide’s newest gallery, the Centre of Democracy — a collaborative project between the History Trust of South Australia and the State Library of South Australia — is ambitious in its vision and delivery. A small gallery of less than 100 square metres, the space contains various modes of storytelling and interaction, including object displays, digital labels, a large-format interactive wall, and a large digital interactive feature,

Museums Galleries Australia Magazine – Vol. 26(1) – Spring-Summer 2017 27

entitled The Democracy Machine, commissioned by Arts South Australia.

The interactive wall, commissioned by the History Trust of SA and developed collaboratively with South Australian creative company Molten, is an eye-catching feature distinctive of the new gallery’s aesthetic. Two large screens encompassing 4 metres of wall space (a curator’s nightmare/or dream?) captures more than 100 stories, including a large detailed historical timeline (for those who thrive on the smaller details).

The concept behind the interactive wall was driven by a curatorial desire to ‘people’ the galley. Democracy at its core is about people, and fuelled by the power of people to impact decision-making processes and to bring about change. With this in mind, and addressing the reality that a lot of the objects relating to democracy are paper and text, we imagined a screen full of faces — or bubbles — which were not only representative and historically accurate but also beautiful visually.

The software employed in this last project, due to tight timeframes, was an established program called IntuiFace, often used for gaming software. This enabled multi-touch and multi-screen engagement.

Up to 10 users at any one time (due to space constraints) can be interacting with an experience.

Users can scroll columns of bubbles to reveal more and more content beyond the physicality of the screens, and once opened, move these contents from one screen to another. A range of content types are utilised including text, image, video, live Twitter feeds, and more. Large-scale videos, that when activated take up the entirety of both screens, act as ‘special events’ — including a 30-second short from former Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s misogyny speech. Finally, a large timeline can be brought up to take over both screens, while still allowing other users to interact with already-opened bubbles of content.

Knowing how well this multi-sensory, multi-faceted experience is working for our visitors is still to be established. However, if first impressions are reliable, the results seem promising.

Conclusion These three case studies provide brief snapshots of various ways in which some South Australian social history museums are implementing and thinking about new technologies within their spaces and exhibitions. With limited budgets, tight timeframes, and often restricted human resources, examples like these can be seen as both aspirational and motivational in times of fast-paced digital and technological change. The History Trust of South

Australia continues to experiment, implement, and evaluate new technologies, in a sustained effort to remain relevant to diverse and changing audiences.

The Art of Science and Bush Mechanics exhibitions will be on tour in 2018. The Art of Science will visit the National Museum of Australia, Canberra, and the Western Australian Museum, Perth. Bush Mechanics will travel to the National Museum of Australia, and the Melbourne Museum. The Centre of Democracy located within the Institute Building, North Terrace, in Adelaide’s CBD, can be visited throughout the year. [] Acknowledgments The authors would like to thank Dr Kristy Kokegei, Digital Engagement Manager, History Trust of South Australia, and Michelangelo Bolognese, Senior Curator, National Motor Museum, for their contributions to this article.

Craig Middleton, Curator of the Centre of Democracy, Adelaide, has a background in community engagement practice and public programming. His research interests are in Australian political history and community engagement in museums. A forthcoming book, Queering the Museum, co-authored with Nikki Sullivan, will be published by Routledge in 2018.

Pauline Cockrill, with museum experience in the UK and Australia, is Community History Officer at the History Trust of South Australia. She works with South Australia’s community history network to develop new programs and activities, and to build the skills and professional practice of the community museums sector in South Australia.

Text citation: Craig Middleton and Pauline Cockrill, ‘Digitally engaged: Experimenting with digital technologies in social history exhibitions’, Museums Galleries Australia Magazine, Vol. 26(1), Museums Galleries Australia, Canberra, Spring–Summer 2017, pp. 24–27.

28 Museums Galleries Australia Magazine – Vol. 26(1) – Spring-Summer 2017

Guidance on many copyright questions for the museums and galleries sector

A toolbox for handling copyright issues in museums and galleries

above:

Ian McDonald.

right:

Wrestling with copyright.

The wrestlers. Photographer: R. H. Trueman. 1905, Canada.

Copyright expired. British Library reference: HS85/10/15767.

Ian McDonald

1. In some cases, reliance on these provisions is subject to various procedures being followed (such as keeping records of copying).

Detailed information on these requirements is available from industry bodies and also from bodies such as the Australian Copyright Council.

2. As far as I am aware, this exception is not routinely relied upon by galleries or museums in Australia, so I do not address this further in the present article.

O

f all the legal issues that affect museums and galleries across Australia, one of the most intimidating can be how the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth) (the Act) applies to material in the collections.

First up, we need to recognise that copyright law is complex because it has to manage and promote different social benefits. On the one hand, it ensures that society benefits from copyright owners being adequately rewarded and ‘incentivised’ to create and distribute copyright material; on the other, it has to make sure that access to that material for various other socially beneficial purposes is not unduly inhibited or made subject to a copyright owner’s control.

With a little knowledge, however, anyone working in a museum or gallery can gain competence in how copyright applies to them.

In this article, I focus particularly on how copyright law applies to using images: a. b.

c. d.

on a museum or gallery’s website; for exhibitions, including: i. those on the institution’s website; ii. other online exhibitions (including via social media); and iii. those not hosted on your institution’s website but by other organisations; for television and other audio-visual productions involving or relating to the museum or the material; in report writing;

Museums Galleries Australia Magazine – Vol. 26(1) – Spring-Summer 2017 29

e. f. g. h.

for research and study; in museum and gallery publications (such as catalogues and newsletters); for educational purposes; and for archival purposes (including preservation and cataloguing).

Fortunately, for purposes such as research and study and for core functions of a museum or gallery such as archival activities, the Act permits a great deal. But before getting into the detail of how the Act applies to each of these situations, let’s look at what provisions are available in our ‘tool box’ for when you need to deal with situations such as these.

1. Overview of available provisions The first thing to note is that there is no ‘catch all’ provision that allows museums or galleries to use copyright material without permission.

Rather, there is a range of provisions in the Act that permit ‘libraries’ and ‘archives’ to use copyright material without permission for particular purposes or in particular circumstances. Subsection 10(4) of the Act clarifies that a museum or gallery will fall within the definition of ‘archives’ for the purposes of the Act, provided the institution does not maintain its archival collection for profit but ‘for the purpose of conserving and preserving’ the relevant material.

The principal provisions relevant to use of photographs by museums and galleries will therefore be: a.

b.

c.

the ‘fair dealing’ provisions, for purposes that include: i. ‘research or study’; ii. ‘criticism or review’; and iii. ‘reporting news’; the library and archive provisions, which enable uses such as copying and supply for: i. researchers and students; ii. administrative purposes; iii. preservation purposes; iv. onsite digital display (where the original is fragile or unstable);[1] section 200AB — the ‘flexible dealing provision’ that may be relied upon if no other provision is available and in cases where the use of the material: i. does not conflict with a ‘normal exploitation’ of the material; ii. the use is a ‘special case’; and

d. e.

f. g.

iii. the use does not ‘unreasonably prejudice’ the legitimate interests of the copyright owner. the ‘incidental filming’ provision; a provision — which I’ll refer to as the ‘permanent display exception’ — which permits the photographing and filming of sculptures and ‘works of artistic craftsmanship’ (such as carving or leadlight windows) that are on public display ‘other than temporarily’; the provisions for educational use of text and images in Part VB of the Act; and the government use provision (section 183) that may be available for museums and galleries set up under Commonwealth, State or Territory legislation and where the institution is ‘government’ for the purposes of the Act.[2]

If no exception applies, a permission will be needed from the relevant copyright owner.

2. The museum’s own website 2.1 Fair dealing provisions Generally, a museum or gallery may post images of works in its collection if it does so in the context of ‘criticism or review’ or ‘reporting news’. The second of these exceptions will generally only be available for short periods of time, but the first will permit longerterm — even permanent — posting of images to a museum or gallery’s website.

The relevant image must, however, be accompanied by a reasonable amount of critique or analysis. This might be comment, critique or analysis, for example, of the photographic techniques or the ideas in the photograph or by way of comparison of these with other works or the work of other creators, and so on.

2.2 The ‘permanent display’ exception A museum or gallery will always be permitted to post images of sculptures and ‘works of artistic craftsmanship’ to its website where those images are produced under the ‘permanent display exception’.

Note, however, that this provision applies only to sculptures and craftworks, not to other artworks such as paintings or murals.

2.3 Section 200AB Where a ‘fair dealing’ exception is not available, section 200AB may permit a museum or gallery to post images of works in the collection, though there are different views on this.[3]

3. The Australian Copyright Council (for example) has a different view from the view of the ALCC and ADA: see page 25 of its publication Special case exception: education, libraries, collections B130v02 (September 2008). As there has not yet been any court case on how section 200AB is to be interpreted or applied, definitive advice on this is difficult to provide and the matter will largely devolve to an institution’s appetite for risk, with many institutions (including, for example, the Museum of Applied Arts & Sciences and the State Library of New South Wales) taking a less risk-averse position than others.

30 Museums Galleries Australia Magazine – Vol. 26(1) – Spring-Summer 2017

Guidance on many copyright questions for the museums and galleries sector

The more robust approach adopted by organisations such as the Australian Digital Alliance (the ADA) and the Australian Libraries Copyright Committee (the ALCC) is that posting images of works in a collection is covered by section 200AB provided the images posted are thumbnails only.

The ADA and ALCC argue that: a. b. c. d.

making collection material available to the public (including online) is a core operation of a gallery or museum; licence fees for thumbnails are not yet a normal way in which copyright holders obtain revenue; posting images as thumbnails is a way of minimising prejudice to relevant copyright owners; and the use is a ‘special case’ as it is socially beneficial for a museum or gallery to promote and make available materials within its collections, while the use of low-resolution images appropriately limits the scope of the use.

See, generally, http://libcopyright.org.au/ sites/libcopyright.org.au/files/documents/ FlexibleDealingHandbookfinal.pdf (2008) at pages 29-30.

3. Exhibitions A museum or gallery may freely exhibit physical items such as photographs, and no copyright issues will arise unless or until the relevant image is, for example, scanned or otherwise reproduced and/or posted online.

Generally, the reasoning of the ADA and the ALCC in relation to section 200AB outlined above would likely apply or be available whichever medium of online exhibition is chosen and whether or not the exhibition is hosted by the museum or gallery that owns the physical item or by another museum or gallery (for example, one which is borrowing the physical object).

Similarly, any organisation may host images of photographs or other copyright material if their use is one of ‘fair dealing’ (including for ‘criticism or review’, as discussed above).

4. Television and audio-visual productions Generally, including an image of a copyright material such as a painting, photograph or other image in a film or in a television program is permitted without a licence from the copyright owner if: a. the use is a ‘fair dealing’ (for example, for

b.

c.

‘criticism or review’ or ‘reporting news’, as discussed above); or the inclusion is only ‘incidental’ to the principal matters discussed (for example, where it is merely included in footage that is not principally about that particular image); or the work is a sculpture or a work of ‘artistic craftsmanship’ and located ‘other than temporarily’ in a public place or place open to the public (for example, in a museum or gallery’s grounds or galleries).

5. Report writing Depending on the nature of the report, a copyright image such as of a photograph may be reproduced in a report if the use is one of ‘fair dealing’ (for example, for ‘criticism or review’ or ‘reporting news’, as discussed above).

In some cases, the use of an image in a report may also be covered by section 200AB, though this would usually depend on the copyright owner not usually licensing the type of use contemplated.

6. Research and study The ‘fair dealing’ exception for research or study will enable individuals to copy images protected by copyright for their research or study purposes.

Whether or not a museum or gallery could rely on the library or archive provisions to provide a copy of an image to a client for research or study purposes (or indeed, to another institution) would depend on whether or not copies of the image are commercially available. In such cases, however, providing the client with direct access to make their own copy (for example, by taking a photograph of the work or by photocopying it) would resolve any need to check for commercial availability or to contact the copyright owner.

7. Educational purposes Museums and galleries may always supply images of copyright material such as photographs to schools and universities, as these types of educational institution are able to rely on extensive educational use provisions in the Act (set out in Part VB of the Act and administered by the Copyright Agency).

Other educational institutions (such as community colleges and so on) may also be entitled to rely on

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these provisions. However, before supplying copies of images in a collection to these other types of organisation, a museum or gallery should first ask whether that organisation is an educational institution for the purposes of the Act and whether it has made the relevant arrangements with the Copyright Agency to rely on the relevant provisions in the Act. Otherwise, museums and galleries that operate extensive educational programs may wish to explore whether or not they will declare themselves ‘educational institutions’ and enter into a remuneration agreement with the Copyright Agency to cover copying for educational purposes (including copying photographs and other textual material and images in their collections).

8. Archival purposes (including cataloguing) The library and archive provisions in the Act (and particularly the provisions relating to preservation copying and copying for administrative purposes) will cover copying of images (including their digitisation) for archival and administrative purposes. Usually, however, except where giving a researcher or student online access on the premises, these provisions extend only to uses that are internal to the relevant museum or gallery.[4] [] Ian McDonald is Special Counsel with Simpsons Solicitors, and advises a number of Australia’s leading museums and galleries. In addition, Ian lectures on ethics and law as these apply to cultural property in the Curating and Cultural Leadership Master’s degree course at UNSW, Sydney. He is currently revising Collections Law (an online publication) with Shane Simpson. <imcdonald@simpsons.com.au> Text citation: Ian McDonald, ‘A toolbox for handling copyright issues in museums and galleries’, Museums Galleries Australia Magazine, Vol. 26(1), Museums Galleries Australia, Canberra, Spring–Summer 2017, pp. 28–31.

4. Again, more detailed information on the scope of these provisions is available from industry bodies and from the Australian Copyright Council. <www.copyright.org.au/>.

32 Museums Galleries Australia Magazine – Vol. 26(1) – Spring-Summer 2017

Museums engaging innovatively with multiple communities and histories

Trusted institutions and history that matters

above:

Alex Marsden.

right: Shalekhet – Fallen Leaves.

An Installation by Menashe Kadishman in the Jewish Museum Berlin. Photo: Alex Marsden. next page top: Wall panel by curators, National Gallery of Australia, in Defying Empire: 3rd National Indigenous Triennial, 2017. Photo: Alex Marsden. next page bottom: Exhibition entrance wall for Defying Empire: 3rd National Indigenous Triennial, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 26 May – 10 September 2017. Photo: Alex Marsden.

Alex Marsden[1]

Introduction

M

useums are hugely trusted institutions in civil society. Research by the American Alliance of Museums (Washington) finds that:

Museums are considered the most trustworthy source of information in America, rated higher than local papers, non-profits researchers, the U.S. government, or academic researchers.

In fact in the US: 1.

This article is adapted from a keynote presentation at ANZHES/ANME Conference (Australian and New Zealand History of Education Society and the Australian National Museum of Education), Canberra, 25 September 2017.

Museums are considered a more reliable source of historical information than books, teachers or even personal accounts by relatives.

In Australia, research carried out by independent market research company IPSOS for the Museum

of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House, Canberra, reveals that museums are very high on the list of institutions that are trusted by Australians.

In the following article I advocate that museums and galleries can be considered as: • seed banks of ideas; • laboratories for learning; • rich sources of data, expertise and research partners; • authoritative interpreters of objects and places, while open to new knowledge; • producers and distributors of valuable cultural content; • narrators and guides to the past, the present, and future possibilities; • keepers of memories; • custodians of the real; • stimulators of empathy and imagination.

And, in a statement that deeply moved many of us in the audience at the MuseumNext Conference in Melbourne earlier this year, the American museum

Museums Galleries Australia Magazine – Vol. 26(1) – Spring-Summer 2017 33

educator and consultant, Elaine Heumann Gurian, argued that: Museums are one of the most respected parts of the panoply of institutions where strangers can meet in peace.[2]

What types of histories have museums traditionally focused on?

History has always been a contested terrain, and museums have explicitly and implicitly been involved in narratives of nation-building and the processes of identity formation — whether at national, regional, local or individual levels.

In Australia, museums have been engaged strongly in shaping national identity through three successive frameworks: • history shaped by explorers, pioneers, settlers, rural farmers, itinerant workers, miners, soldiers — and predominantly white people (forming the dominant narrative); • history shaped by immigrants, multicultural communities, urbanism, the contributions of women, environmental awareness, and study of Indigenous prehistory (expanding the status quo); • history shaped by multifaceted processes, multiple stories and perspectives, asking new questions, and increasingly recognising the continuity of Indigenous cultures (challenging and shifting the status quo).

Notwithstanding these changes in focus, historians of Australia consider that the role of museums remains central to our development as a social community: ‘Museums continue to be instrumental in the evolution of Australian national identities’.[3] Museum historians have traditionally relied on a number of powerful techniques to convey impact and meaning — for example, using the voice of authority, and combining deep historical research with the presentation of iconic objects. However, curators and educators in museums have also explored increasingly varied methods over the last three decades, reflecting shifts in viewpoint across the different phases of national history-telling. Museum practices have moved, for example: • •

from visitors being given one interpretation of the past, to indications of more than one understanding of events presented; from children group-learning common facts, to encouragement of skills-acquisition and selfmotivated learning;

2.

3.

Elaine Heumann Gurion, at the ‘MuseumNext’ conference, ACMI, Melbourne, 16 February 2017.

Armanda Scorrano, ‘Constructing national identity: national representations at the Museum of Sydney’, Journal of Australian Studies, International Australian Studies Association (InASA), Volume 36 (3), 2012, pp. 345-362.

34 Museums Galleries Australia Magazine – Vol. 26(1) – Spring-Summer 2017

Museums engaging innovatively with multiple communities and histories

• •

from visitors being addressed by ‘expert’ guides, to facilitation of role-play and individualised engagement; from school groups being provided presenterbased education, to resources being offered for enquiry-based learning.

As significant as these changes have been, there is a need for much more progress.

Changing environments and pressures We live in a rapidly changing environment: a world of immense social, environmental, economic and technological change. This is especially pertinent for our museums. A brief rollcall indicates the challenging array of issues affecting us all: climate change; new technologies; competition for public funding; competing ideas and faiths; disillusion with elites and received wisdom; and disparities of wealth and opportunities. The CSIRO’s Global Foresight Project identifies six ‘Mega trends’, two of which are pertinent here: • Great Expectations: expanding consumer and societal expectations for services, experiences and social interaction; and • Virtually Here: increased connectivity, impacting shops, offices, cities, governance models and lifestyles.

More recently, the American Alliance of Museums’ Centre for the Future of Museums reports in its Trendswatch, of 2017, on five dominant trends for museums: • A Mile in My Shoes: closing the empathy deficit.

• Let Justice Roll Down: the next horizon of civil rights.

• The Rise of the Intelligent Machine.

• Reshaping the World: migration, refugees, and forced displacement.

• Failing Toward Success: the ascendance of agile design.

Finally, lest we think that museums are only responding, and not also actively shaping their environment, a range of museum-led audience research is revealing changing contexts, behaviours and expectations. Meanwhile museum curators are undertaking, commissioning and utilising the many different types of academic and community histories now being written, which foreground multiple viewpoints and interpretations, and draw on much wider sources of data than previously.

How are museums responding now?

Some of the most exciting trends in Australian museum thinking and practice focus on seeking inclusion and challenging assumptions. For example: • ideas of custodianship of collections rather than ownership; • the increased blurring of discipline boundaries and the mixing of media and tools to engage multiple communication styles, spaces and platforms; • collaboration, design thinking, and co-design; • increasing accessibility to and of content, in particular through digital access to collections; • the idea of museums as proactive agents of change.

Many museums around the world, therefore, are rethinking national histories through new concepts and different perceptions. Museums in Australia are responding in both the types of stories they are researching and presenting, and the ways in which they do this. National identity is less consensual, more fractured; is less spoken of as a central concept; and is increasingly interwoven with Indigenous histories and continuing cultures.

Indigenous histories and cultures Exemplars in Australia include the Bunjilaka Aboriginal Cultural Centre, Melbourne Museum,[4] where the First Peoples Exhibition has been described as ‘like a giant family photo album’. This part of the museum also has a Deep Listening Space, where people gather to talk of identity and culture; and presents programs such as ‘Hidden Histories’, which invites the visitor to: ‘Uncover the forgotten and deliberately hidden histories of massacres and homeland wars that occurred in Victoria. Hear stories from all around the state not just about these acts of violence but also about resilience and strength.’[5] The recently redeveloped Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, in Hobart, reinterprets the accepted colonial narrative from many harrowing Indigenous viewpoints. Meanwhile artists this year in the third Indigenous Art Triennial at the National Gallery of Australia, Defying Empire,[6] are deliberately ‘revealing historical and present day truths [that] can be both painful and cathartic’.[7] Decolonising the museum is front and centre for many historical museums. This includes new approaches to shared research and concepts of custodianship, repatriating sacred and ceremonial material, and (as a frontline priority) provenancing and consultative return of Indigenous ancestral remains to descendant communities. The

4.

5.

6.

7.

Banjilaka Aboriginal Cultural Centre, Melbourne Museum, Museums Victoria; information available online at <https://museumsvictoria. com.au/bunjilaka/>.

Visit online at <https:// museumsvictoria.com. au/bunjilaka/whats-on/ hidden-histories/>.

Defying Empire: 3rd National Indigenous Art Triennial brought together works of 30 contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists, and was shown at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 26 May – 10 September 2017.

Online at https://nga. gov.au/defyingempire/ themes/bearing.cfm.

Museums Galleries Australia Magazine – Vol. 26(1) – Spring-Summer 2017 35

left: National Museum of American History, Washington, DC. Photos: Alex Marsden, 2016.

development of new kinds of exhibitions that involve consultation and guidance from communities, and often Indigenous curatorship, have been important changes in museum practice of recent years.

A ground-breaking current example in Australia is the exhibition Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters, which opened at the National Museum of Australia in September 2017 to much critical and public acclaim.[8] Reviewing the exhibition, journalist Paul Daley posed the question: How could a museum with walls and windows and display cases even contemplate an exhibition about something as central to 60,000-plus years of Indigenous life on this continent as ‘songlines’… which references paths of Indigenous knowledge and creation history that crisscross land, heaven and water?

Daley’s answer is that the NMA’s exhibition ‘tells this story the way the people to whom it belongs — of the Martu, Ngaanyatjarra and APY lands — understand it…’. And he concluded his review with the judgment that the exhibition is ‘a triumph of 21st century museology that the world deserves to see’.[9] (It has a long showing, by the way, and can be viewed in Canberra until 25 February 2018.)

Stripping museums of their colonial-era mindsets and structures was, understandably, a huge topic at the Commonwealth Association of Museums conference, hosted in Calgary, Canada, in June

this year. Participants heard how South Africa is steadily rebuilding a new national identity, through consciously ‘reconstructing a decolonial history and its public representation — [in] museums and monuments’.[10] Meanwhile the Barbados Museum and Historical Society, represented at the CAM conference by its Director, Alissandra Cummins, rethought its national story for the 50th anniversary of the country’s Independence in 2016. Rather than an already accomplished fact, national identity in the Barbados museum has been recast as an ever-evolving production, which Cummins emphasised — quoting Jamaican-born cultural theorist Stuart Hall — as ‘always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation’.[11] The National Museum of Singapore is also exploring historical identity well beyond the traditional version of the city-state’s formation: Jervais Choo, Senior Assistant Director at the museum, has stated: ‘[O]ur role is to provoke questions – we want people to leave with more questions than when they entered.’

More museums are seeking and giving primacy to other voices beyond their walls and beyond their power structures As we know, social media and new technology are changing the dynamics of power: changing the way people interact with each other, within communities,

8.

9.

10.

11.

Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters, National Museum of Australia, Canberra, 15 September 2017–25 February 2018.

Paul Daley, ‘Songlines at the NMA: a breathtaking triumph of 21st century museology’, The Guardian, 16 September 2017; online at <https:// www.theguardian.com/ artanddesign/2017/sep/16/ songlines-at-the-nma-abreathtaking-triumph-of21st-century-museology>.

Presentation by Dr Shahid Vawda, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Head of the School of Social Science, University of Witwatersrand, SA, during the Commonwealth Association of Museums General Assembly and conference, Heritage and Nation Building; hosted by the Glenbow Museum and Archives Calgary, Alberta, Canada, 19–23 June, 2017.

Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation’, in Framework, Vol. 0, No. 36, 1989.

See <https://saltwaterstories. net/2017/06/22/stuart-halland-cultural-identities/>.

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Museums engaging innovatively with multiple communities and histories

Voicing your opinion or sharing your experience — whether as visitor, citizen, or community collaborator — is an accelerating trend in museums and galleries

12.

13.

14.

Both quotes from <https:// www.mca.com.au/telling-tales/ telling-tales-bouchra-khalili/>.

See <https://www.ted.com/ talks/chris_milk_how_virtual_ reality_can_create_the_ ultimate_empathy_machine>.

See <http://modernasian.com. au/chinese-children-tour-theworld-s-museums-12107.html>.

with the media and institutions, including with museums and governments. Rising expectations both challenge organisations and create opportunities for doing things differently and better. User-testing has moved from the realm of designing industrial products to designing policies and programs that place citizens and communities at the centre of the whole process.

In museums and galleries, this means stepping back from the voice of authority and using more collaborative methods, such as prototyping approaches and exhibitions co-developed with the citizens/users/visitors’ backgrounds engaged from the start. Such approaches aim to ensure that various communities’ experiences, ideas and feedback can be sought to inform each stage of development. This means seeking to understand different views and needs, developing empathy and, most challenging of all, sharing power. Some call it democratising the museum. The question of ‘whose story is it?’ requires the skilled museum curator and educator to explore and balance different authorities, expertise and knowledge; and to recognise that meanings change over time and may vary across different groups.

Blurring and shifting boundaries — such as between curator and subject, or artwork and historical record — are exciting, challenging, and evolving dynamics of today’s museum experience. The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia recently exhibited Moroccan-French artist Bouchra Khalili’s The Mapping Journey Project (2008–11), an eight-screen video installation, previously shown at MoMA New York, which ‘documents stories of extraordinary personal agency and risk, narrated by immigrants travelling from northern Africa and the Middle East to Europe and beyond’. In Khalili’s work: Each anonymous person speaks both for themselves and on behalf of all of those who have fled persecution, poverty and violence worldwide.[12]

In addition to empathy shaping museum and gallery exhibitions is a concern to encourage and develop empathy in visitors, particularly children. Empathy is seen as one of the critical values to be developed in modern education, and cultural institutions are well placed to promote learning through identification of multiple viewpoints and experiences in their displays and related programs.

Another innovative feature of recent years is bringing training in ethical awareness into programs for youth education. The State Library of Victoria offers primary school children a number of Ethical Capability Trails. One of these, Fairness, takes young visitors back to when the city of Melbourne was first founded, and encourages them to consider: Was what took place fair? This is a different approach to experiencing history and heritage places than was offered to early-schoolers in the past.

New technologies such as Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality are also used to achieve heightened emotional responses in museums. Nils Pokel, digital experience manager at the Auckland War Memorial Museum, has embraced Chris Milk’s notion (in a 2015 TED talk) that ‘VR can create an ultimate empathy machine’[13] — it enables full immersion, shows objects at scale, and places them in context. Meanwhile opportunities to connect audiences through technology such as Twitter and live-streaming spawn such programs as ‘100,000 Kids Touring 10 Museums’ — extending history and education to disadvantaged children in China’s rural areas.[14] Along with these different methodologies and technologies comes the ability to tap into expanding sources of data. The State Library of NSW is providing online access to huge amounts of public biometric and socio-economic data, suggesting this as source material for social history story-telling. In other areas, our museums are moving beyond the vast resources of their science and natural history collections to collaborate on ‘big data’ sociological research programs with academic institutes, to enable new forms of historical enquiry.

Voicing your opinion Using these and other resources and techniques, voicing your opinion or sharing your experience — whether as visitor, citizen, or community collaborator — is an accelerating trend in museums and galleries. An outstanding international example of this approach is the current History of Innovation

Museums Galleries Australia Magazine – Vol. 26(1) – Spring-Summer 2017 37

exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History — where a fascinating history of inventions in the USA explicitly encourages reflection, application of insights to your own life, and sharing of your answers to questions based on the skillsets shown by pioneering innovators. Similarly, the Newseum, also in Washington DC, on a display panel covering Privacy versus Security after 9/11, asks ‘WHAT WOULD YOU GIVE UP TO FEEL SAFER?’, and invites personal responses: ‘Use a marker to share your thoughts, or call 202/292 6529 to leave your comments by phone.’ Back in Australia, the Museum of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House successfully engaged online audiences in 2015 in re-imagining the November 1975 drama of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s Dismissal, through running a Twitter feed on the 40th anniversary of the event as the critical days and decisions were revisited.

Museums as agents of change

above:

How Australians Imagine Their Democracy: The Power of Us , from the Institute for Governance & Policy Analysis (University of Canberra). Photo courtest of Museum of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House.

So, back to the questions of what sort of histories have museums traditionally focused on, and how are museums increasingly enabling a multiplicity of voices and viewpoints to be engaged? History in museums is now often enrolled in multiple ways to challenge the status quo rather than entrench elite or static positions of the past.

In New Zealand, curator Rowan Carroll of the NZ Police Museum at Porirua, near Wellington, states that ‘The museum’s strategic plan is a social investment one.’ Meanwhile the ZKM (Centre for Media Arts) in Karlsruhe, Germany, commissions artists and sociologists to inform and provoke social action. In Washington’s Newseum a display, ‘Make Some Noise’, is focused on students and the USA’s Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, ending with the question: ‘What’s your cause?’ The museum exhorts young people to find one and spread the word.

President Lincoln’s Cottage in Washington DC, where the Proclamation to emancipate slaves was signed, is named the Home for Brave Ideas, and is very deliberatively a centre for enabling people to tackle contemporary issues such as modern-day slavery.

It does this without compromising a program of intensive historical scholarship that is used to inform interpretation. Every tour is led by a guide and works on an empathetic response to the place. Across the Atlantic, the International Slavery Museum, part of the group of National Museums Liverpool, has spent the last decade working in the field of human rights.

‘Whether we think we [museums] should be apolitical,

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Museums engaging innovatively with multiple communities and histories

we’re not’, stated director, Dr Richard Benjamin, in June this year, at the CAM conference in Calgary.

Perhaps the most explicit example of this activist mindset is currently to be found in the Smithsonian’s newest museum, the long-awaited National Museum of African American History and Culture, which opened in Washington DC in September 2016. Didactic, passionate and powerful, it is uncompromising in its interpretation of the country’s shameful history of exploitation and brutality. It demonstrates that the successful modern American nation is built as much on this shared history as on the renowned sporting, musical and political contributions of African Americans. There are numerous calls to action and, movingly, a vast space for contemplation and healing is provided for visitors

after experiencing the stories of sadness and suffering.

A year after opening, the museum continues to be packed out.

Are there risks in these new ways of interpreting history?

There are of course challenges and risks for museums and galleries in using these different lenses to examine history and national identity. There are the challenges to authority, received wisdom, the expert; to ownership and management of collections; to the monolithic nation-state view of the world and, possibly, to the government funders of public institutions.

top:

Erik Mátrai, Turul, 2012, light installation with surveillance camera from ZKM.

bottom from left:

ZKM (Center for Art and Media) Karlsruhe, Germany.

Drawings by Romanian artist Dan Perjovschi, as part of the ZKM exhibition GLOBALE (exhibition ended 1 May 2016).

Photos: Alex Marsden, 2016.

Museums Galleries Australia Magazine – Vol. 26(1) – Spring-Summer 2017 39

15.

16.

Paul Daley, ‘Beersheba centenary: let's remember that story is not the same as history’, The Guardian, 30 October 2017; online at <https://www. theguardian.com/australianews/postcolonial-blog/2017/ oct/30/beersheba-centenarylets-remember-that-story-isnot-the-same-as-history>.

Quotes are from notes taken by the author. See presentation text provided by Elaine Heumann Gurion, ‘The Importance of And’, for MuseumNext conference, Melbourne, 16 February 2017; online at <https://www. museumnext.com/insight/ the-importance-of-and/>.

There are also risks of losing trust in the non-partisan voice. Yet Canada, celebrating its 150th anniversary this year, has seen many fine exhibitions challenging a national narrative of progress. Canadian museums were very exercised by the need to educate, to manage the delicate balance of raising and presenting difficult issues while not alienating people (or losing funding).

Meanwhile, we need to remember that historical narratives require careful consideration and research: ‘Story is not the same as history’, as Paul Daley insists, with benefit of his own primary research in the past about the facts of the remarkable Light Horse charge at Beersheba a century ago.[15] Personal memory often slips in accuracy with time and distance. There is also the risk of confusion — a cacophony of stories. Do we need an overarching narrative to link different experiences and vantage-points?

These questions point to the continual balancing needed: of being open and egalitarian, of maintaining rigorous research and sound historical enquiry, and yet still needing to present viewpoints anchored in actual experience and individual knowledge. The modern museum needs to navigate a plethora of competing methodologies in preparing programs today. And what about the move to the post-museum — as in Central America’s Belize or Africa’s Malawi, where colleagues are experimenting with institutions that hold no objects at all? Instead, they focus on exhibitions of stories and experiences, in contrast to object-rich institutions that are embracing the reinvigoration of object-based learning in school and university curricula?

While utilising digital technologies extensively, historians and educators in democracy’s processes at MOADOPH, in Old Parliament House, also worry that ‘digital can be quite superficial’, insisting that ‘we hope to inspire people to research further’. Another concern is that VR can be isolationist rather than a shared experience — which is traditionally one of the great attractions of visiting the museum or gallery at a physical site.

In overview, we cannot fail to work with technological change, which is already the vehicle of many new kinds of social experience. There are more risks in not exploring and embracing some of the new approaches to learning than in doing so. Experimental approaches to presenting content offer innovative ways of maintaining relevance for many established museums, while establishing community connections and imparting historical knowledge for the first time for many others.

To quote Elaine Heumann Gurian again: ‘museums have the obligation to be a civic space and be knowledge managers, not knowledge hoarders’.

And finally, I join with her in asserting: We don’t look at our museums as a finished monument, but a changing thing, enacting its civic responsibilities in a variety of ways.[16] [] Acknowledgments The author would like to thank the Museum Education Network and the Historians Network for their advice and input when writing the presentation on which this article is based.

Alex Marsden is National Director of Museums Galleries Australia, Canberra. See national website <www.museums australia.org.au>.

Text citation: Alex Marsden, ‘Trusted institutions and history that matters’, Museums Galleries Australia Magazine, Vol. 26(1), Museums Galleries Australia, Canberra, Spring– Summer 2017, pp. 32–39.

40 Museums Galleries Australia Magazine – Vol. 26(1) – Spring-Summer 2017

Museum skills enabling art-based experiences and wellbeing programs for the aged

‘Important to me’

above:

Pip McNaught.

right:

Important to me, exhibition on view at Carey Gardens, 2016.

Photo courtesy Pip McNaught.

Pip McNaught But science is not enough. We are not machines, in for repair. We are people and how we think and feel matters, in itself and because it influences how we respond to treatment. (François Matarasso)[1]

T 1.

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<https://parliamentofdreams. com/2016/03/03/bothsides-of-the-coin/> <http://www.britishmuseum. org/about_us/community_ collaborations/partnerships/ age_collective.aspx> Liverpool Museums House of Memories <http://houseofmemories. co.uk/ University College, London https://blogs.ucl. ac.uk/museums/2013/10/17/ museums-can-make-youhealthy-and-happy/> National Museum of Australia <http://nma.gov.au/blogs/ education/2015/08/13/ the-bigger-story-runningworkshops-for-peoplewith-dementia/>

he curatorial project ‘Important to me’ is actually a museum program realised in an aged care centre: a collaboration between the curator, Aged Care Centre residents and staff, and the Research Centre at the National Museum of Australia. I had long considered and planned such a project, but as a full-time curator my work lay elsewhere. Yet I have always enjoyed the research and talking to people to uncover the story of an object — you never know where it will lead!

Where better to find wonderful stories than where elders reside?

The opportunity to begin arrived in 2013, and from very small beginnings this documentation and display project grew to an anticipated annual event. With the achievement of an ACT Government Grant, this year (2017) a book of 23 stories has now been published.

In recent years, the benefits of taking museum objects to patients in hospitals and residential care centres for reminiscence exercises have been the focus of a number of projects by museums, and have been well documented. Wellbeing outcomes from ‘heritage-in-health’ programs more broadly have also been successful. These include The British Museum Age Collective, The Liverpool Museums House of Memories, and projects at University College, London.[2] In Australia, museums and galleries have also developed programs for seniors and visitors with dementia and their carers.[3] Drawing inspiration from such programs but seeking more cognitive interaction, ‘Important to me’ invites residents of aged care centres to choose a

significant object they own (important to them) and participate in its documentation. (Families also assist with information — such as dates or names where necessary.) The personal history of each selected object is developed through interviews and noted by the curator, while research into its background is also carried out. While the project is primarily concerned with documentation and reactivating the significance of objects to their owners, the chosen items are also brought together and presented as an exhibition at the aged care centre.

The display is a simple operation and local skills and reusable materials can contribute: some tables, a few metres of fabric, metal photo frames for the text labels, hinged timber frames for photographs and context. The timber frames can be made by a friendly handy-person or possibly a Men’s Shed in your area.

This project demonstrates successful community engagement and promotes networking and interaction between residents. Staff who are generally focused on the physical wellbeing of residents often gain a more holistic awareness of their personal history and background, and many have commented that being alerted to the story of a valued object on a shelf promotes a better understanding and connection with residents.

A synergy is also developed between families, health workers and museum spheres. Residents have been encouraged to talk about their significant objects and share events in their past lives that might otherwise remain undisclosed. Some families are surprised and delighted by discovering a familiar object’s history.

At the centre, the exhibition is open to the community, their families and friends. It is also a museological project, engaging the resources museums people have well-developed, in documenting the significance, provenance and associations of things. Many families have objects with associated stories kept alive through the generations; yet stories are also easily lost. The

Museums Galleries Australia Magazine – Vol. 26(1) – Spring-Summer 2017 41

documentation is important, and the exhibition of the objects, stories and research in a familiar environment is both a highlight and a celebration.

I was very touched to receive a letter from one participant’s family: Seeing her small section in ‘Important to me’ is something that we, her family, will always cherish.

I am sure that it was your gentle encouragement that helped her speak about her past and share it with us all.

These object-stories are about lives lived: personal stories that link to local, national and sometimes international events, often with small details that augment the bigger picture. The activity of gathering stories is also beneficial for participants: ‘This was a good project: it gave us something to think about.’

(Participant, 2014) So many are singular stories: some from the world stage and some from just down the street. They include: • A tin of chocolate from Queen Victoria sent to a Trooper in the NSW Lancers in 1899. The tin was always on the dresser in the kitchen and his daughter (who turned 100 in 2014) said, ‘We always knew it as Dad’s chocolate … It was a miracle it survived as those blokes were hungry!’

• A woman worked in an office while her children were at school. This was sixty years ago – and she was the only woman in her street to go out to work.

• A favourite table lamp is a window into the early 1950s when a Queanbeyan company delivered 21 tons of ice each week to Canberra houses.

• A photograph is of a young woman in the Australian Women’s Army Service (AWAS).

AWAS was established in 1941, and 24,026 women enlisted. They took over the jobs of the men sent to fight, and were paid two-thirds of the wages of their male equivalents.

• The first woman Commonwealth car driver in Canberra has memories of driving Dame Pattie Menzies, who later gave her a tapestry picture of birds she had embroidered, signed on the back with her best wishes.

• A ‘Five Pound Pom’ arrived in Australia in 1950.

She paid half fare because she was under 18.

• Medals for war service carry stories of gallantry and courage, but also deprivation and loss.

The ‘Important to me’ project activates social memory and shows that sharing stories can contribute to community building, while lessening isolation in aged care centres. It generates respect and networking, and enriches the knowledge of staff.

It is also an exciting, affordable and simple model applicable to many institutions. The benefits last long after the exhibition has closed. Seniors bring to the arts a lifetime of experience that we need to engage with, explore, and not forget.

At the annual Arts and Health conference in Sydney, the theme 'Creative ageing' involves a wide range of researchers, doctors (both medical and non-medical), along with artists and performers. There are many inspiring projects to encounter. The Bealtaine festival in Ireland has been running for more than 20 years.[4] It is Ireland’s largest co-operative festival as well as the world’s first national celebration of creativity in older age; and it has inspired a number of international festivals such as Luminate in Scotland, and others.

For some years Clown Doctors in Australia have been successfully visiting children in major paediatric hospitals, and now Elder Clowns visit residents in aged care and dementia care centres with equal success: Humour puts life into perspective. It helps us understand the orthodox, tolerate the unpleasant, overcome the unexpected and survive the unbearable. (Jean-Paul Bell, co-founder of the Clown Doctors) There are also successful painting, music and poetry projects, large and small, that yield significant

below: Valda and Audrey, in front of a photo of their double wedding in 1945, part of Important to me.

Photo courtesy Pip McNaught.

4.

www.bealtaine.com http:// bealtaine.ie/page/about_us/ what_we_do Dominic Campbell, Bealtaine Festival Director for eight years became inaugural Atlantic Fellow for Equity and Brain Health at the Global Brain Health Institute, a project between Trinity College Dublin and University College Southern California an ambitious worldwide program seeking social and public health solutions to reduce the scale and adverse impact of dementia. http://www. creativeageinginternational.com/

42 Museums Galleries Australia Magazine – Vol. 26(1) – Spring-Summer 2017

Museum skills enabling art-based experiences and wellbeing programs for the aged

left: Alzheimer’s Day morning tea at the National Museum of Australia, 21 September 2017, with performances by Vivacity and Alchemy Chorus. Photo courtesy Maddie Manning.

benefits. Nevertheless, funding often depends on quantifiable results, and there are inherent challenges in measuring the outcomes of arts projects, since arts and health often talk different languages.

Research is revealing that in addition to enhancing quality of life, engagement in arts programs by aged community members contributes to higher selfesteem, mental strength and resilience, and fewer falls. There can also be less reliance on medication and the attention of medical staff when there is sustained involvement in such programs. This is important when society is facing both an ageing population’s needs and increasing pressure on health and community services. However, old age is a continuum, experienced differently from person to person, but their professional and personal interests don’t cease.

As mentioned by Dominic Campbell: ‘An activist is still an activist, and artists don't disappear.’[5] Museums and galleries can be made into age-friendly places. The British Museum’s Age Collective program, a cross-sector partnership project with Glasgow Museums, Manchester Museum and National Museums Northern Ireland, has for some years explored how museums can work more effectively with seniors. For World Alzheimer’s Day in 2017, the National Museum of Australia hosted a grand morning tea with performances by Alchemy Chorus and Vivacity Dance. Both groups included performers with dementia. The National Gallery of Australia, along with many other galleries and museums, has a well-established program for seniors and visitors living with dementia, which is realised together

with their carers.[6] Seniors meanwhile bring to the arts a lifetime of diverse experiences that are worth capturing.

François Matarasso, a Nottingham-based writer, producer and trainer in this arena, is interested in how people create and interact with culture. He believes that participation in the cultural life of the community is a fundamental human right: Essentially, I want to make a case for the therapeutic value of non-therapeutic art experiences, rooted in the idea that it is because they are not intended to bring about a health outcome that they do.[7] ‘Important to me’ is a non-therapeutic art experience-based program that has had positive outcomes in our local aged care centres in the ACT. A project like this might also make a difference in your community. [ ] Pip McNaught is a curator who has worked at the National Museum of Australia (NMA) and for volunteer-staffed museums. Her recent work with aged residential care communities has culminated in a book, ‘Important to me’: Snapshots from elders in objects and stories, published in 2017. She is currently an Associate at the Research Centre at the NMA. Text citation: Pip McNaught, ‘‘Important to me , Museums Galleries Australia Magazine, Vol. 26(1), Museums Australia, Canberra, Spring–Summer 2017, pp. 40–42.

5.

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5th International Arts and Health Conference, Sydney, 2013.

See Adriane Boag, ‘The NGA’s Art and Alzheimer’s Programs’, Museums Australia Magazine, Vol. 20 (2), Museums Australia, Canberra, pp.16-18.

Material prepared by François Matarasso for his ‘Artistry in Old Age’ presentation at the 9th Annual International Arts and Health Conference: The Art of Good Health and Wellbeing, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 30 October–1 November 2017; see <www.artsandhealth.org.au/ events/9th-annual-arts-forhealth-international-conference/ conference-presenters/>.

Museums Galleries Australia Magazine – Vol. 26(1) – Spring-Summer 2017 43

Museum skills as subjects as well as vehicles for youth learning

Learning through museums: Sharing our practice with schools

above:

Liz Suda.

right:

Princes Hill Primary School students getting advice from an exhibition designer.

Liz Suda

W

hen we think of the role of museums, the words ‘heritage’ and ‘learning’ invariably appear. The learning part of museums usually relates to the content of the museums’ collections and the stories told through exhibitions, websites and seminars.

Heritage incorporates that which is deemed worthy of conservation and preservation, through cumulative experience and value judgments that build up over time.

Museums pride themselves in creating experiences that inspire awe and wonder and communicate important information. Meanwhile learning in museums is generally associated with the acquisition and consumption of knowledge through visiting an institution and experiencing its collections or temporary programs in situ. However the concepts and prior work that have led to the creation of those experiences are not often considered as part of the learning process to be shared.

Museum practitioners, of course, are readily interested in the ‘technical’ aspects of their work, and regularly gather to compare and share that knowledge across their professional community. Yet how might museum practices themselves become part of the learning experience offered to the wider social community, especially to young learners within school education? This article discusses a recent project undertaken by the education team at Museum Victoria, and some of the implications it may have

for the role of museums in education practice more broadly.

The project involved museum staff working with a local public school in Melbourne, and assisting young learners to acquire the concepts, skills and content that would enable them to present (for a short while) a museum devoted to their own school. In 2016, the Museums and Galleries National Awards (MAGNAs) recognised this project, involving Museum Victoria and Princess Hill Primary School, with an award for Interpretation, Learning & Audience Engagement made for the Building Our School Museum project.

First, a mid-point snapshot: In 2015, after a year of research and development, 120 Year 3–4 students from Princes Hill Primary School (PHPS) installed their PHPS Museum as a pop-up at Melbourne Museum, over two days — to seek feedback from museum professionals. This was crucial to realising early ideas in a professional environment and gaining some critical reflection in that context. It led on to the end product, which was realised through five Year 3–4 classrooms at the school being transformed into a museum (complete with specialised galleries). The final outcome was a testament to the value of sharing museological practices with young learners.

As with many projects, the evolution of this idea was both serendipitous and iterative, building on the good will and enthusiasm of a creative primary school teacher, an innovative museum educator, and previous initiatives undertaken by the museum education team.

The grade 3&4 teachers at PHPS posed a big question

44 Museums Galleries Australia Magazine – Vol. 26(1) – Spring-Summer 2017

Museum skills as subjects as well as vehicles for youth learning

above:

Feedback on a student display from Museums Victoria curator Rebecca Carland. right:

Princes Hill Primary School students getting advice from a curator.

for their students to explore as their inquiry question for the year: What makes us part of the community?

The concept of museums as institutions that are involved in cultural production and preservation emerged from this inquiry. For the students to be able to test their theories about what museums are and what they do, the learning process required them to have close contact with museums and the people who work in them. From those first contacts, a desire to replicate the practices of the museum in curating and presenting knowledge took shape.

The young students visited each of the three museums of Museums Victoria — Melbourne Museum, Immigration Museum and Scienceworks — to gain an understanding of how Museums Victoria’s

institutions tell the stories of their world: ranging from the sciences to the humanities, and from technological innovation to the deep knowledge systems of the First Peoples of Australia. Cameron Hocking, then MV Digital Education co-ordinator, supported the school on site and via Google hangouts.

Princes Hill Primary School had architects visit their school to talk about the process of building design; and an exhibition designer from Museums Victoria to talk about his approach to visual storytelling.

The students went out into the community and looked at the cultural organisations in their local area; they researched other museums in the world through Google Cultural Institute; and they began to think about what they wanted to research in their own learning teams. Each group identified an aspect that they wanted to explore in their community: topics as diverse as technology, plants, minerals and rocks, parks, sports, architecture, Italian culture, fashion, the arts, conservation, and the history of their school.

Each topic finally selected was based on the interest and aptitude of the students.

The students constructed displays to tell the stories gained through their research, using some of the ideas they had studied in other museums. Before long, they wanted to know what museum people might think of their creations, and so the idea of a pop-up museum was conceived.

To facilitate this idea, the 120 students were divided into two groups, with each research team responsible for carrying their precious cargo on a tram-ride to Melbourne Museum. Two pop-up museums were then created over consecutive days. Many museum staff engaged deeply and critically with the students’ ideas, and provided constructive written feedback on the sheets provided by the student curators. The generous support of museum staff encouraged the students to tackle a second draft of their ideas.

Mia said: I felt really important to have so many museum people come and look at our exhibits.

Museums Galleries Australia Magazine – Vol. 26(1) – Spring-Summer 2017 45

Classroom teacher Melinda Cashen reported: It was such an authentic experience for the children. They have built up a great relationship with the museum over the year and they felt that the effort they have put into building their own exhibits was worthwhile and valued. They really appreciated the feedback they received, making changes to their exhibits when they returned to school.

There was also benefit for the staff at Museums Victoria. Rebecca Carland, Curator of History Collections, reflected: I was delighted by how engaging the pop-up Museum was. The science displays made me re-think how we write for younger audiences; some of them really nailed it. And the use of digital tech in one of the history displays was seamless and so professional. I think we met a couple of our future colleagues.

The work of museum scientists, historians, designers, creative producers and curators provides a model of cross-disciplinary collaboration that few organisations can offer. As a workplace, Museums Victoria is home to a diversity of job descriptions that range from the practical and creative to the scholarly.

It has the potential to model significant vocational skills and make connections to project-based learning skills currently in favour in schools.

In 2017, Museums Victoria was invited to present this MAGNA-awarded project to The Best in Heritage conference held annually in Dubrovnik, Croatia. Of the forty-three presentations from 25 countries, this project was distinctive because of the innovative approach evident in facilitating the students’ interaction with the museum as a site for learning about concepts of design and interpretation of knowledge as well as its final presentation.

With the support of experienced museum practitioners, young learners were able to deconstruct museum practices and apply these to their own inquiries. The aim of such an approach is not necessarily to create the museums workers of the future, but rather to use museum practices as an alternative pedagogical approach for learning within the classroom environment of a school.

One of the participants at the Best in Heritage conference in Dubrovnik, in September, asked: ‘How can such an approach be leveraged into a more sustainable and broadly applicable approach to learning in museums?’ A good question!

It’s not possible here to fully explore answers to this question, except to affirm that there are many ways in which museums can usefully share their practices with school-learners.

Over the years Museums Victoria has attempted to do this through a number of channels: providing

on-line resources for how to use objects in the history classroom (Small Object, Big Story); providing ‘expert’ videos (Making History) to guide classroom practice; and by making museum collections available on-line as a general resource for learning. More recently we have explored approaches that engage students in gathering stories for museum research projects in the Australian Research Council-funded Invisible Farmers Project, with student works being presented on display in the museum alongside museum-curated exhibits.

The key learning to be gained for museums in this approach is that by engaging school-age students in the museum-making process, museums are better equipping future generations to understand the value and importance of the GLAM sector to their communities: in all the specialised processes that we employ, and which themselves can unlock learning aptitudes as much as the content produced in the myriad technologies of communication and display employed by museums today. [ ] Liz Suda is Program Co-ordinator of Humanities Education at Melbourne Museum, within Museums Victoria. She has worked in secondary schools, tertiary institutions, adult education, and most recently in the museum sector; and is passionate about developing innovative pedagogies to make learning enjoyable and accessible to all.

Text citation: Liz Suda, ‘Learning through museums: Sharing our practice with schools’, Museums Galleries Australia Magazine, Vol. 26(1), Museums Galleries Australia, Canberra, Spring–Summer 2017, pp. 43–45.

above:

Student-constructed display exploring technology.

46 Museums Galleries Australia Magazine – Vol. 26(1) – Spring-Summer 2017

University of Sydney to host international ICOM-UMAC meeting in Sydney in 2020

University museums and collections evolving in a changing world

David Ellis

H top:

Concept design of the exterior of the proposed Chau Chak Museum at the University of Sydney, by Johnson Pilton Walker.

Image: Johnson Pilton Walker.

above:

David Ellis.

far right from top:

Bust, from fragmentary statue of the pharaoh Horemheb as a kneeling scribe.

18th Dynasty (1336 BC -1323 BC), Egypt. Nicholson Museum, University of Sydney. Donated by Sir Charles Nicholson, 1860. Photo courtesy of University of Sydney.

Fan, Guadalcanal Province, Solomon Islands. Macleay Museum, University of Sydney.

Donated by Professor Adolphus Peter Elkin, 1979. Photo courtesy of University of Sydney.

ow are university museums developing new programs and models of innovative practice today?

Most universities hold cultural and scientific collections — an accumulation built over time of items associated with teaching and research. They were often originally collected in the field or purchased as teaching aids, donated, or in some instances designed and developed to assist in research.

For many universities and their wider communities, these collections are historically and culturally significant and embody the history of the institution.

At the University of Sydney, established in the 1850s, benefactors such as Sir Charles Nicholson were motivated to inspire and instruct students distanced from the ‘old world’, from which much material was collected. Nicholson’s original collection of antiquities has now grown into the largest and most significant of its kind in Australia. Meanwhile the entomology collection of Sir Alexander Macleay, on its arrival from Britain in 1820s Sydney, was already of world importance, entering the University just twenty years after the institution’s founding. These and other collections were, quite literally, a physical embodiment of the University’s Latin motto, which can be translated as ‘The same under different skies’.

The earlier collecting aspirations have inevitably met challenges over the last century, when many collections expanded in scope and origins through the addition of newer collections formed through different motivations. This is reflected in the general diversity of university museums and collections in terms of their various holdings and scale. Their contexts range from single part-time curators working with narrowly focused collections through to large, broadly-based, multi-subject and purpose-built museums supported by scores of staff.

At their core, university collections and museums are places of engagement and learning. However it is becoming more widely acknowledged that, at their best, a reach beyond the student and staff cohort enables such collections to become a vehicle through which universities can engage with broader communities.

Reflecting this, university museums across the globe are at varying stages of development, while their many host universities grapple with understanding and managing their cultural and scientific collections and appraising what to do with them – especially when their original purpose might have changed.

Some museums are incorporated into established university museum structures, while others remain as faculty-held collections, and in some cases struggle to maintain relevance in a rapidly changing tertiary education sector. For many, their role is being

Museums Galleries Australia Magazine – Vol. 26(1) – Spring-Summer 2017 47

re-evaluated as universities realise the potential of these collections for both teaching-focused, objectbased learning as well as community engagement.

Creation of UMAC in 2000 Recognising and contributing to this general evolution, university museums and collections were formally recognised as a committee of ICOM (the International Council of Museums, headquartered in Paris) in 2000. An Australian, Dr Peter Stanbury — former director of the University of Sydney’s Macleay Museum (1967–1992), and chair of the Australian university museums committee, CAUMAC — was instrumental in mounting a case to ICOM’s governing Board for creation of a new International Committee focused on university museums. Initially, there was some debate by ICOM’s Board about duplication of its existing disciplinary committees, and the case was deferred.

Peter Stanbury’s resolute pressing of the university museums’ cause eventually won through at a subsequent ICOM Board meeting, and in 2000, the International Committee for University Museums and Collections (UMAC) was approved to become the 29th International Committee operating as part of ICOM’s world-wide professional networks. Dr Stanbury became UMAC’s inaugural chair, and Australian colleague, Dr Sue-Anne Wallace, the first treasurer.

UMAC meets annually, with an organising university preparing its program of lectures, discussions and museum/collection visits in the host city selected for each occasion. These annual gatherings and conferences move progressively around the globe. UMAC also has a seat (and voting rights) at ICOM’s large Advisory Council meetings of Committee Chairs convened annually in Paris (usually over 3 days in June).

In recent years there has been a noticeable increase in participation in UMAC’s activities from Asian universities. UMAC now has membership from more than 60 countries and territories, ranging across all continents and regions spanned by ICOM’s activities.

‘UMAC 2017’, Finland The 2017 UMAC conference, hosted in September by the Universities of Helsinki and Jyväskylä, in Finland, brought together 120 delegates from 30 countries. A wide spectrum of university museums and collections was represented. These ranged from single-subject, faculty-managed collections, with a primary focus on teaching and research, to more broadly-based, centrally managed and professionally

staffed museums, with an additional focus on community engagement.

Many of the issues identified when UMAC was formed still remain. Staffing and funding aside (when are these not issues?), maintaining relevance of museums and collections to their host institution in a rapidly changing tertiary education sector remains the most challenging and constant issue. Perhaps most importantly, a museum’s ability to be agile, and react to change — as the tertiary education sector and society change — along with its ability to engage with current issues and to experiment, are all strengths that within a university setting and structure can be its most powerful assets.

While many established university museums and collections are thriving, others — especially those collections not aligned to a formal museum structure — are often struggling to gain adequate resources and recognition within their university and beyond.

The formation and use of such collections are often driven by the passion of an individual rather than any formal structure or policy that might underpin their endeavours and aspirations. Once that individual leaves, the collections are often at risk of neglect, deterioration, or outright disposal.

The museums and collections that are thriving today are finding new ways of engaging with staff and students; building strategic alliances with communities within and beyond their campus (including nationally and internationally); and accomplishing progressive ways to utilise, understand and better appreciate their collection resources.

Innovative examples cited at the UMAC conference in Helsinki included involvement of artists in natural history and scientific collections. This was usually (but not always, as one example showed) to the benefit of museum staff as well as the all-important, persistent target: increased visitors.

The digital age has enabled the universities sector to become more responsive and inventive in providing different options for interacting with collections.

University museums are today learning much more about visitor-needs from their peers in other areas, especially around co-responsive learning and engagement of multiple audiences. Several Helsinki papers focused on understanding the needs of visitors, and being more aware of how they might wish to interact in diverse ways with collections and museum spaces.

The need for understanding and working within the university structure was also a common theme in Finland. UMAC’s first conference workshop, Thriving and surviving within a parent institution, focused on introducing higher education museum professionals to the importance of aligning the museum/collection mission with the university’s overarching mission; and

48 Museums Galleries Australia Magazine – Vol. 26(1) – Spring-Summer 2017

University of Sydney to host international ICOM-UMAC meeting in Sydney in 2020

applying basic theoretical and methodological skills to the development of a strategic plan, policies, and procedures.

Universities have special resources, with their close access to researchers and research labs. In a campus setting they are well equipped to utilise their specialist skills and collegial networks in investigating current questions involving cultural and scientific collections. Presenters in Helsinki gave examples of how they are using collections to amplify research being undertaken not only with their collections, but more broadly across the full intellectual scope of the university. Others demonstrated how the university museum can be used as an accessible and trusted public face of the university, reaching out and involving the wider community in the processes and results of academic research.

Several museums outlined initiatives they are taking in forging new object-based learning across a broad range of faculties. These initiatives usually arose from within the museum itself, rather than a faculty. This approach has seen the formation of specialist new museum positions, which then become the interface between collections and faculty. First implemented in the east coast USA, as the result of a Mellon Foundation grant nearly 20 years ago, such academic liaison positions can astutely investigate tertiary curricula and find new ways of integrating collections into tertiary teaching programs through object-based learning — as discussed extensively in a recent article in this Magazine by Andrew Simpson.[1] In doing so, they broaden the capacity of faculties to provide new ways of engaging students with visual literacy, analytical thinking and problem solving. These positions are gradually becoming more commonplace, and several have emerged in Australia in recent years, notably at the University of Melbourne and University of Queensland.

Sydney University to host 'UMAC 2020' The University of Sydney will be hosting the 2020 UMAC conference in its new purpose-built Chau Chak Wing Museum (pictured), situated within the campus close to Parramatta Road. The new museum (designed by Johnson Pilton Walker/JPW architects) will bring together the collections of the university’s Nicholson and Macleay Museums, together with the University art collection, for exhibitions and associated programs integrated within one capacious building. Subject to DA approval, the museum is scheduled to begin construction for completion in 2019. The 2020 UMAC conference will partner with local museum colleagues and groups, especially the Committee of Australian University Museums and

above:

Collection of paintings from the University of Sydney art collection. Photo courtesy of University of Sydney. left:

Camera and daguerrotypes showing early images of indigenous peoples. Macleay Museum, University of Sydney. Photo courtesy of University of Sydney. right: Selection of Australian Aboriginal stone tools from Written in Stone exhibition, Macleay Museum, University of Sydney. Photo courtesy of University of Sydney.

Collections (CAUMAC) and University Art Museums Australia (UAMA).

In Australia, the university museums sector is especially strong in visual arts and ethnography (and archaeology) collections. Programs are robust, involve communities, and are attracting increasing numbers of visitors and use by staff and students.

Like other situations around the world, it is the 19th-century natural science collections in Australian universities that are struggling to find new relevance in the 21st-century university. The large size of these collections, together with the high costs of maintaining natural history collections, tend to exacerbate the challenges.

Capital works projects in some ways reflect the changing state (and status) of university museums today. Over the past twenty years, there has been considerable investment by universities in new museum buildings and refurbishment of existing spaces. Much of this investment has been within the

1.

See Andrew Simpson, ‘‘The Future of the Object’: University of Melbourne initiatives lead object-based learning’, Museums Galleries Australia Magazine, Vol.25 (2), Museums Galleries Australia, Canberra, Autumn– Winter 2017, pp. 59-61.

Museums Galleries Australia Magazine – Vol. 26(1) – Spring-Summer 2017 49

visual arts sector, which is steadily gaining wider audiences from beyond the campus. Meanwhile the rising trend in capital investment for redevelopment of facilities also reflects a lack of investment in previous decades. Once again, those universities with formal museum structures and professional museum staff have generally benefited most from recent capital investment.

However capital works projects alone do not reflect the health of engagement that many university museums and collections have with their respective communities. Strong partnerships have often been forged to the benefit of their host institutions in many intangible but no less important ways.

Such universities tend to see their museums and collections as providing many positive opportunities to engage with their multiple internal and external communities, highlighting special cultural as well as teaching resources, across campus and beyond.

For some museum staff, a shift towards being a more publicly focused institution can be a confronting challenge, even a digression from what were previously considered the core functions of caring for collections and providing access to them for teaching and research. Nevertheless, active guidance of staff through this transition, leading to a multiple-purpose museum that acknowledges its still-central campus role while harnessing the potential of a more outward focus, is likely to benefit the long-term health of the sector, as university museums constantly evolve and adapt to changes within their host environment.

Finally, university museums are actively addressing the inexorable pace of the digital environment transforming experience and learning today. The rejuvenated significance of university collections, through energised interdisciplinary exhibitions incorporating digital augmentation, enables wider accessibility and relevance to new audiences (many arriving online) than was imaginable decades ago.

This can only point to a stronger future for the sector, where increasing numbers of university museums and collections have the chance to become newly-appreciated resources, as both learning and destination venues way beyond their once-local catchment of academic audiences to a far broader national and international visitation. [ ] David Ellis is Director, Museums, University of Sydney.

He is a member of ICOM’s International Committee for University Museums (UMAC) and UAMA (University Art Museums Australia); and deputy chair of CAUMAC (Council of Australian University Museums and Collections).

Text citation: David Ellis, ‘University museums and collections evolving in a changing world’, Museums Galleries Australia Magazine, Vol.26(1), Museums Galleries Australia, Canberra, Spring–Summer 2017, pp. 46–49.

50 Museums Galleries Australia Magazine – Vol. 26(1) – Spring-Summer 2017

Natural history museums adapting to change

Maintaining credibility in a world after truth

above:

Dr Eric Dorfman.

right:

Researchers at Powdermill Nature Reserve, the environmental research centre of Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Pittsburgh, USA. far right: Benedum Hall of Geology at Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

Eric Dorfman

The diverse institutional heritage of natural history museums

H

1.

2.

L McRae, R Freeman and S Deinet, ‘The Living Planet Index’, in R McLellan, L Iyengar, B Jeffries, and N Oerlemans (eds), Living Planet Report 2014: Specied and Spaces, people and Places (Gland, Switzerland: WWF), 2014.

Eric Dorfman, ‘Ethical Issues and Standards for Natural History Museums’, in Bernice L Murphy (ed.), Museums, Ethics and Cultural Heritage (UK: Routledge, and Paris: ICOM), 2016, pp. 54–60; p.56.

ow can museums best compete in this noisy world with a relevant offer that is uniquely theirs? Certainly, disseminating many ‘facts’ known through science and promoting ‘truth’ about nature are still generally perceived as core responsibilities of natural history museums. Yet it is widely recognised in the museum world that natural history museums are among the slowest to change institutionally. In many circumstances, this is not a bad thing, while they preserve and care for a collective 3 billion specimens held worldwide in public trust: for advancing knowledge about the world’s natural history and its long journeys of adaptation leading to the present.

However, thinking in the sector about collecting has moved on substantially from the 19th century, when taking fauna for museum collections ushered species over the brink of extinction, or when individuals of easily handled species were specifically bred by museums to be killed for dioramas, as was common practice until the mid-20th century.

Collecting specimens from nature is one of a number of issues that distinguish natural history museum ethics from other branches of museology.

Others include the fact that it can be considered an ethical responsibility of natural history museums to work to conserve the environments from which their collections are derived.

The operating context for natural history museums today is fast-moving: both in terms of our fundamental resources and mission, and in our changing relations with more diverse social communities. Many biological populations from which our collections have been assembled are declining catastrophically: 50 percent of the world’s species have disappeared in the last 40 years.[1] Habitats are declining on a similar scale through changing land-use practices and steadily destabilising climate systems.

At the same time, the global financial crisis of recent years has left many natural history institutions — especially in the US — with reduced scientific staff balancing demands of continued research and the need to communicate with increasingly diverse and technically sophisticated audiences. In response to this altering environment, methods and motivations for managing natural history museums are being more closely reviewed, both from outside the field and from within.

Natural history museums have a significant role to play in changing thinking about critical resource issues of our time. As I have argued previously: ‘Natural history institutions engaging in best practice might well include biodiversity conservation in their core mission.’[2] They are also ideally placed to advance an ethical mandate to provide stewardship for the wildlife populations from which their specimens derive.

Many museums give life to this mandate through protecting and championing biodiversity, promoting various kinds of environmental conservation, remediation and adaptation, while also addressing wildlife trafficking, and providing data to other conservation agencies nationally and internationally.

Natural museums have added to their traditional brief by engaging in conservation activities that protect biodiversity, animal populations and sea creatures in situ.

Public trust It has often been noted, based on audience research, that museums enjoy a level of public trust largely unmatched by other types of institutions. The concept of public trust and its social obligations inform museums’ self-identity, and shape standards and processes of their self-regulated behaviour — as set out in codes of ethics for the profession.

How can we both steward the public trust in museums and also engage our visitors in difficult conversations about the coming decades of environmental, socio-political and technological

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changes that will re-shape the context in which we operate? Today, best practice for the museums sector also includes changing attitudes around collection ethics, especially with respect to museums' responsibility for partnering with indigenous peoples in interpreting their objects and histories; and understanding their traditional knowledge of the close interface of ecosystems and human behaviour.

To some degree, natural history museums are working hard to find their most appropriate roles in the world of today, which makes thinking about the future both challenging and speculative. And yet, such conversations are imperative to help prepare for whichever future appears as the net result of these evolving issues. If we do not work to influence our future, it will be decided without us.

Urgent questions for us to examine are: What are the roles, potentials and constraints for natural history museums, and for conservation of nature’s systems in general, over the next decades?

Museums closing The last few years have been difficult for cultural institutions in many countries. In 2015 in the UK, one in five regional museums closed a part or branch of their operations; and in the United States, between 2000 and 2015, more than 50 museums closed down. In the same period, the African Association of Museums (AFRICOM) has undergone a significant downscaling, an indication of how little sector support exists for continuing scientific work across the African continent in many countries between Egypt and the Maghreb in the north and South Africa. In 2016, the trend of museum closures has continued.

The Walter P Chrysler Museum in Auburn Hills, Michigan, closed permanently; as also did the Morbid Anatomy Museum in New York City, along with three Museums in France: the Pinacothèque de Paris, the Paris Museum of Eroticism, and the Normandy Tank Museum in Catz, to name but a few.

Sorting the ‘truth’ challenges of today How should we as natural historians shape our narratives and programs when science as a discipline is increasingly being questioned in the public domain?

Many highly distinguished thinkers are exploring the challenges and opportunities of conducting research and conserving natural heritage in a world where scientific observation must fight for credibility in insisting on accuracy of knowledge — often contending with the massive power of social media to relay alternative stories. Although we might struggle to decide on best responses, the need for action is clear: the planet and its ecosystems are increasingly imperilled.

Natural history museums are shaped by an extremely diverse institutional lineage, and their approaches reflect this diversity. Thus, while the range of operating environments favor a wide selection of social, entrepreneurial and even curatorial strategies, they share common internal structures developed around collections stewardship, research, and public engagement.

The grounding of natural history museum practice in the study of physical specimens means that these institutions have at least a goal of objectivity, no matter how influenced by curatorial subjectivity the framing of questions can sometimes be. However, the articulation of evidential knowledge, concern over changing political environments and even in quality of governments themselves, are not new, nor restricted to the museum field.

Diagnosing the Anthropocene Our sector is itself grappling with shifts in current scientific understanding and the process of defining and disseminating new concepts. The increasingly used concept of the Anthropocene is employed to mark a tipping point in humankind’s development: moving from the older paradigm of battling nature to survive, to the emerging paradigm of stewarding nature to survive.

52 Museums Galleries Australia Magazine – Vol. 26(1) – Spring-Summer 2017

Natural history museums adapting to change

Meeting the challenges of change

With acceleration of human population growth and the concurrent global scale of human environmental manipulation, we have tipped the living planet toward mass extinctions and disturbance of the global systems on which the interdependent web of life depends. ‘The Anthropocene’ has come to represent the post-tipping point epoch in cultural and planetary history. Meanwhile though already widely used, the term is itself under formal consideration as the accepted name for a new stratigraphic epoch contouring our era — with a nomenclature decision likely by the end of 2017.

Glancing back from the future Imagine a vastly distant world looking back on clues to the conditions of our era. The current chemical composition and rate of deposition of marine sediments may be evident, millions of years from now, in the rock layers from this period in earth’s history.

The profound impact of human activities on the Earth will be represented in those solidified deposits, including radioactive sediments from atomic bomb tests; and the residues of plastics from the massive production and profligate disposal of detritus that is emblematic of late-industrial culture.

Today’s museum practitioners are faced with leading heritage efforts amid ever-changing technological and political landscapes, organisational structures, resources, funding streams, and partners.

Whether change involves establishing a relationship with new government officials, reorganising or integrating program areas, shifting gears to take advantage of a new grant opportunity or sustaining efforts when there is a gap in funding, natural history museums are increasingly juggling the responsibility of leading community change on one hand while having to manage internal and external change on the other. Although dealing with change and transition are not novel issues, the impact of these common scenarios, if not managed effectively, can have a significant impact on an institution’s ability to achieve its mission and current objectives.

While regional and national differences are important (China, for instance, opens about 200 new museums each year, boosting a total of almost 5,000 museums nationally), the global context over the last decade has been one of successively diminishing resources. Natural history museums, in particular, bear an additional cost-burden in maintaining often vast collections, frequently garnered over long periods through expensive, research-based field work.

These imposts on conservation of their resources from the past, coupled with growing pressure to help respond to urgent environmental problems of the present, mean that in the next decades natural history museums will find it necessary to balance higher stakes and greater risks with more complex ‘real world’ questions and precarious political environments. Those that will likely thrive in this atmosphere are generally the large and well-funded institutions whose evident public value secures their strength, or those that have become extraordinarily good at doing business, or both. Others will undoubtedly face retreat, reorganisation, new partnerships, or closure.

Opportunities Natural history museums cannot afford to let inertia hamper their readiness to respond to changes in the legislative and intellectual environments, public expectations and funding possibilities that face us. We are approaching a cross-roads of planned change on one hand and unplanned change on the other.

At the same time as many sharp challenges are presented, opportunities abound for those museums ready to take them on board with affirmative commitment and intellectual venture. In the next two decades, new technology will continue to generate breakthroughs in medicine, manufacturing, transportation, and many other fields, which means there will be strong demand for workers schooled in biology, chemistry, maths, and engineering. For

left: Victorian Field Guide App, developed by Museums Victoria, is an example of how natural history museums are being innovative and adaptive to change.

right: The spotted owl's habitat is threatened by the logging of old-growth forests—an industry that has lawmakers inquiring about more high-tech measures to save the birds in an effort to justify more deforestation. Photo: Joel Sartore, National Geographic.

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institutions like natural history museums, which deliver effective education programming in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines — alongside the arts, which produce the enlarged STEAM cluster — many new trends in learning hold considerable promise.

Using advances in 3D scanning and printing, drone technology and robotics can yield direct benefits to many of the scientific questions we are posing today.

Dealing with global climate change may require new technology not yet even on the drawing board.

Environmental and conservation science can only increase in importance, as the planet’s biodiversity and fragile ecosystems are steadily degraded.

Opportunities already exist for museums to leverage in-house knowledge as environmental consultants and professional trainers.

Attendance at the world’s top 12 natural history museums in 2015 was just shy of 35 million visits, giving impetus to fresh thinking around developing further income sources based on collections — for example, through increased image-sales, merchandising and knowledge-based products and services. These services can all be developed while maintaining ethical standards and advancing the knowledge-based mission of museums.

Grasping uncertainty and adaptability The concept of adaptability is especially relevant for natural history museums, looking forward to the multitude of circumstances that will combine to make up the future that will shape our institutions’

operations and viability.

In management thinking today, predictability of a future for anyone’s business has been graded with an increased measure of inbuilt uncertainty: ranging from ‘sufficiently clear to allow predictive confidence’ to ‘true ambiguity’. Where on this continuum our own futures lie should influence our strategies for planning change, and our responses to the unplanned events that will inevitably impact on our institutions in coming years. [ ] Dr Eric Dorfman is Director of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Pittsburgh, USA. He is President of the ICOM International Committee for Natural History Museums (NATHIST), and is a member of the Ethics Committee of ICOM. His most recent book, The Future of Natural History Museums (2017) was published by Routledge, the first book in ICOM’s series ‘Advances in Museum Research’. Over a number of years he chaired a NATHIST Working Party that drafted ICOM’s Code of Ethics for Natural History Museums, adopted in 2013. This code may be downloaded from ICOM’s website at: <http://icom.museum/the-vision/code-of-ethics/ code-of-ethics-for-natural-history-museums/> Text citation: Eric Dorfman, ‘Maintaining credibility in a world after truth’, Museums Galleries Australia Magazine, Vol. 26(1), Museums Galleries Australia, Canberra, Spring– Summer 2017, pp. 50–53.

54 Museums Galleries Australia Magazine – Vol. 26(1) – Spring-Summer 2017

Australian museums-sector bodies and partners linked to safeguard heritage

The Blue Shield: Working for the protection of cultural heritage

top:

The Blue Shield.

bottom: right:

Tanya L Park

Tanya Park.

Kiribati is one of the first countries in danger of being uninhabitable due to climate change. Photograph: Jonas Gratzer/LightRocket via Getty Images.

The Blue Shield as an international body for heritage protection

I

n the early 1950s, UNESCO facilitated development of a (third) Hague Convention, to address the severity and extent of cultural destruction that had occurred during World War 11 (as the earlier Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 had provided the first attempts to frame internationally agreed ‘rules of war’, and war crimes meriting prosecution under international law). The 1954 convention signed in the Netherlands — the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict — was adopted by UNESCO to provide the first international treaty aimed at the protection of cultural heritage in the context of war, and highlighted the idea of a common heritage shared by all humanity.

Cultural heritage today is understood to include both tangible and intangible heritage. Tangible heritage encompasses buildings, monuments, historic landscapes, written literature and works of art, whilst intangible heritage includes traditions, folklore and knowledge. Natural heritage comprises natural formations and culturally significant landscapes inclusive of biodiversity.

The Blue Shield is the protective emblem specified in the 1954 Hague Convention, for marking cultural sites to give them protection from attack in the event of armed conflict. It echoes the Red Cross and Red Crescent emblems mandated under the Geneva Conventions much earlier, signifying international humanitarian aid and protection of

human life.

The International Committee of the Blue Shield (ICBS) — as the Blue Shield’s executive body was first known — was founded in 1996: ‘to work to protect the world’s cultural heritage threatened by wars and natural disasters’. In forming this committee the motivating philosophy was not to create an entirely new organisation or duplicate bodies already working for the protection of cultural property in times of armed conflict, natural disasters and other threats, including effects of climate change. It was decided that a more practical method for more concerted action worldwide would be to link the established agencies and associated knowledge bases of four existing NGOs: these being ICA (International Council on Archives), IFLA (International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions), ICOM (International Council of Museums) and ICOMOS (International Council on Monuments and Sites). Essentially the approach was to utilise existing resources and bodies that already included constituencies operating at a national level — with the aim of creating readily linked national-level agencies of the then-ICBS.

Recent international tragedies demonstrating the need for Blue Shield action During Syria’s long and ongoing civil war there has been significant intentional destruction of the nation’s cultural heritage. Aleppo, in particular, has experienced devastating loss, both of human lives and the associated cultural heritage of numerous groups and communities.

The Ma’arra Mosaic Museum, for example, houses

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one of the most significant collections of 3rd- and 6th-century Roman and Byzantine mosaics in the Middle East. The museum was an old caravanserai (or roadside inn) originally constructed in 1595, and refurbished as a museum in 1987. An emergency protection project was initiated to ensure the survival of the unique mosaics during the ongoing Syrian conflicts. After consultation with experts in mosaic conservation, a Syrian rescue team applied layers of glue and cloth to the mosaics, designed to fortify and keep the tesserae (inlaid stones) together in case of physical disturbance. Several truckloads of sandbags were then laid out to protect the mosaics from further loss, and some 150 square metres of mosaics were protected through these measures.

This emergency project was first conceived during a Syrian cultural heritage emergency workshop in the summer of 2014, held over four weeks. The workshop was an initiative of an international grouping of organisations, known as the Safeguarding the Heritage of Syria and Iraq Project, and comprising a number of agencies linked to provide joint action and specialist resources.

The bodies joined as a consortium in this effort were the following: Penn Cultural Heritage Centre at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, Philadelphia; the Office of the Under Secretary for History, Art, and Culture at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC; the Geospatial Technologies Project, of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Washington DC; Shawnee State University, Ohio; The Day After Association — a Syrian-led civil society organisation supporting democratic transition of the war-torn state; and the United States Institute of Peace, Washington DC. The consortium planned the remediation and protection project, coordinated necessary governmental approvals within Syria, and supplied the materials required to carry out the important conservation work.

In conflict zones, the majority of destroyed buildings often constitute vernacular heritage, and are reflective of the daily life of civilian populations.

With the collapse of civil administration, sufficient qualified staff are often not available to act locally. It is frequently during the clearing and rebuilding process in areas that have suffered from armed conflicts that heritage is further at risk, and the danger of looting is high. The results are even more severe when there is no recourse to professional assistance or even correct recording processes to deal with damaged cultural heritage.

During armed conflict, the preservation of human life is inevitably at the forefront of attention, and cultural heritage at a lower rung of concerns. The Blue Shield emphasises that alongside measures for prevention of the loss of human life, international

The Blue Shield emphasises that alongside measures for prevention of the loss of human life, international law also protects cultural property law also protects cultural property, as highlighted in the 1954 Hague Convention, and its two associated Protocols (of 1954 and 1999). The Convention calls upon countries to avoid deliberate actions that might damage, directly or indirectly, the cultural and natural heritage in the territory of nations and groups impacted by armed conflicts.

In addition to direct damage to heritage in conflict zones, significant threats to cultural heritage also exist due to climate change and associated rises in sea levels, increasing the frequency of hurricanes and typhoons. Today, forty percent of the world’s population lives within 100 km of a coastline, while 145 million live less than one metre above sea level.

Meanwhile sea levels are rising 50 percent faster than twenty years ago.

The small Central Pacific republic of Kiribati sits 2 metres above sea level. Encompassing a group of coral atolls and small islands, Kiribati has 100,000 residents who, in the foreseeable future, will have to relocate elsewhere, essentially becoming climate change refugees. However the UN does not currently recognise climate change as grounds for refugee status.

Whilst direct warfare is less of an immediate concern in Australasia, climate change and the associated extremes of weather patterns are an insistent present-day reality, which will forever restructure and reshape the societies directly impacted by these changes.

National Committee structures supporting the Blue Shield internationally The international initiatives championed by the Blue Shield as a world body are generally taken up and supported by local initiatives, typically aiming to interconnect the various professions, and representatives of local and national governments, along with local emergency services and the armed forces.

Such collaborative structures also provide a forum to improve emergency preparedness by sharing experiences and exchanging information, with the objective of raising national awareness of the threats to cultural heritage. These committees also

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Australian museums-sector bodies and partners linked to safeguard heritage

far left:

Opposition fighters fire a starting shell from a hell-cannon toward the Syrian Army, in Aleppo on December 2, 2014. File photo: Karam Almasri/Nur. left:

Sandbags are stacked on the inside walls of the Ma'arra museum, shielding fragile, ancient mosaics from the blast of regime jets and looters. Ma'arra Museum Project/Safeguarding the Heritage of Syria and Iraq Project.

assist in advocating the importance of ratification and implementation by national governments of the Hague Convention, and especially the recent 1999 Protocol (still gaining ratifications), to all States Parties to these conventions.

The Association of National Committees of the Blue shield (ANCBS) has for some years had its headquarters in The Hague, within The Netherlands.

This administrative body was established in December 2008 to coordinate the efforts already being made by the National Committees of the pillar organisations forming the Blue Shield, especially regarding the strategic and operational guidelines adopted under the international BS banner.

Blue Shield International (BSI) General Assembly, 2017 The Blue Shield International Assembly was held recently in Vienna (in September, 2017). During the accompanying symposium, a significant step was undertaken towards achieving a more effective unified entity for the protection of World Cultural Heritage.

This was accomplished through a merging of the international and national bodies of the Blue Shield, which in Australian terms has meant combining the ICBS and ANCBS — rather than working through complicated separate structures at national and international levels. It is anticipated that a single united Blue Shield International (BSI) will now be better purposed to act in conformity with the Strasbourg Charter (The EU Charter of Fundamental Rights). This entails the following principles: joint actions, independence, neutrality, professionalism, and respect for cultural identity. Meanwhile BSI will more effectively pursue shared strategies and actions for countering the attacks and very real threats to cultural heritage that are increasing globally.

A new international board for the repurposed BSI was elected at the Vienna Assembly, for the triennium 2017–2020. The new board comprises Karl von Habsburg-Lothringen (Austria), Nancy Wilkie (USA), Bae Kidong (Korea), Manana Tevzadze (Germany), and Peter Stone (UK).

Local Blue Shield action — Blue Shield Australia (BSA) Blue Shield Australia (BSA) is one of many national committees organised under the mission and objectives of Blue Shield International. Blue Shield Australia was established in 2005 as a federation of the four non-governmental organisations (again, known as the NGA ‘pillars’) which represent professionals active in these respective fields at a national level. These bodies echo the key parent organisations forming BSI: Australia ICA; ICOM Australia; Australia ICOMOS; and Australia IFLA. It is clearly important that international initiatives are taken up and supported by local initiatives. Blue Shield Committees are continuing to be formed in a number of countries, each bringing together different professions, local and national government representatives concerned with heritage protection, and through government representatives, facilitating links to the emergency services and armed forces that may be needed in times of armed conflict or natural disasters.

The national committees provide a forum to improve emergency preparedness for protection of heritage, through sharing experiences, offering mutual support, and promoting useful information such as disaster-preparedness plans. They also provide a focus for raising national awareness of the threats to cultural heritage, and are vehicles for public advocacy of the importance of ratification and implementation by national governments of the Hague Convention and its Protocols. [ ] Dr Tanya L Park is Chair of Blue Shield Australia. She is a Bureau Member of the ICOMOS International Wood Committee, and is a University Associate of the School of Architecture and Design, University of Tasmania, Hobart.

Text citation: Tanya Pak: ‘The Blue Shield: Working for the protection of cultural heritage’, Museums Galleries Australia Magazine, Vol. 26(1), Museums Galleries Australia, Canberra, Spring–Summer 2017, pp. 54–56 .

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2018 Blue Shield Australia Symposium (January 2018) The upcoming Blue Shield Australia Symposium, to be held at the National Library of Australia, Canberra, in January 2018, will be the first important event for the BSA calendar in the new year. Since Blue Shield Australia’s mission is to safeguard cultural assets from risks due to conflict or natural disaster, this symposium is a flagship event in 2018 for BSA. Local and international supporters, and all who are involved in cultural heritage preservation, are welcome to attend the symposium. Emergency responders and disaster management professionals will also be participating.

The symposium will be held over the following two days: • Monday 29 January 2018 — Tours, Workshops, and Evening Welcome Reception • Tuesday 30 January 2018 — Symposium with invited speakers The purpose of the symposium is to share expertise, experiences, and case studies of the protection of cultural heritage in times of natural disaster, as well as examining the impacts of climate change and the strategies being put in place by the sector to work towards a sustainable future. Australia, New Zealand, Asia and the Pacific Regions regularly face severe natural disasters of one form or another — from cyclones, tsunamis, raging fires and severe floods, to catastrophic earthquakes.

The BSA Symposium affords the opportunity to learn from one another, pool expertise, and refine long-term heritage-protection measures such as disaster preparedness plans and sustainability measures at different scales. It will be a key event in the national calendar for the museums, libraries, sites and heritage sector in 2018: to advance the work of the ICBS in safeguarding cultural assets for future generations.

Workshop Registration: AU$60 Symposium Registration (including Welcome Reception): AU$210 (Students AU$160).

All interested colleagues can register interest in the Symposium at <www.blueshieldaustralia.org. au>; and updated information will be available on the Blue Shield Australia Webpage and Facebook during 2017. Membership continues to be regularly sourced via association with the four Australian pillar organisations.

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Challenges of rationalising policy and procedures in volunteer-run museums

The too hard basket: Deaccessioning issues for community museum collections

above:

Bill Storer at the Newcastle Maritime Museum.

Picture: Phil Hearne

right: View of the Museum’s cherished cargo shed (built 1910, as part of Lee Wharf in Newcastle). Photo courtesy of Newcastle Maritime Museum.

Bill Storer

I

know that there are community-based, volunteerrun museums that could tell their version of this story — because it touches on a reality for most of us.

We started out with the intention to collect, document and exhibit the finest examples and memories of our communal maritime heritage, collected in the significant NSW coastal city of Newcastle. Yet over time, the objects and the stories grew exponentially to the point where we could no longer properly manage all aspects of the assembled collections, and resource issues had become critical.

We had too much stuff! And we now lacked sufficient income to look after all the good material assembled over time. There was simply no more room in the store or display areas to keep going on as before.

An obvious solution was to re-examine our collecting policy and narrow the focus of the collections we had acquired. This could provide a clearer rationale for use of our resources, and prepare

for the disposal of some objects that no longer fitted the stories the museum was able to tell. But this proposal proved too hard at first bite.

For us, it all heated up when a newly elected member of the management committee came up with a ‘solution’ to the looming financial crisis that might result in the museum closing its doors. It was indeed a simple solution: ‘Let’s sell some of the collection.’

Sounds fine to some. But! We’re talking about a collection of more than 7,000 objects, generally of the maritime persuasion. Over the 45 years the collection has been gathered – mostly without a collecting rationale to guide decisions – there are certainly some objects that have deteriorated beyond economic repair; and some that really do not belong in the collection.

The trouble is, looking back over the inventory today, without clear records of origins in many cases, nobody can clearly tell what stories and which objects we were actually supposed to be collecting across those decades of gathering. There is no collection

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top:

A deaccessioned 1950s-era 16-foot vessel that has no known donor. The boat is still in the collection store awaiting a suitable placement for transfer. Photo courtesy of Newcastle Maritime Museum.

left:

Collection items on display at the Newcastle Maritime Museum.

management policy or parameters for the collection’s growth, although some policy intent is enshrined in the Museum Society’s constitution. One such policy statement is: Any item which it is agreed by the Committee and Curator to de-access will be treated in accordance with established museum procedures.

The challenge here is that ‘established museum procedures’ did not really exist in the form of any detailed documents that could provide guidance to the management committee in deciding how to handle such situations. Furthermore, there are four different classes of items held in the museum’s collection.

These merit review in relation to resources and responsibilities of the management committee today.

First, there are objects on loan that have been held by the museum for 10 years or more. Many of these objects have no real relevance to the purpose of the museum, while requiring the expenditure of resources

to care for and store them. A challenge today is that details of the original loan arrangements were often meagre or not clearly recorded, and many objects were loaned by persons now deceased. Obviously the museum is not legally entitled to dispose of these objects without some serious investigation, including of matters related to deceased estates and heirs.

A second class of objects are uncertainly ‘donated’ items, where the donor is named but there is no accompanying documentation to prove a transfer of ownership to the museum. Again, such objects present challenges to ensure that ownership was ever clearly vested in the museum. Currently, responsibility for them is often a moot point.

Third, there are ‘donated’ objects for which there is a record of a transfer of ownership, but other questions arise, such as current relevance to museum purpose. While it might seem that these objects may be disposed of by the museum — if circumstances argue for this course of action within the framework of collection policy — there are nevertheless no

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Challenges of rationalising policy and procedures in volunteer-run museums

Over time, the objects and the stories grew exponentially to the point where we could no longer properly manage all aspects of the assembled collections, and resource issues had become critical

museum procedures in place to ensure appropriate steps for ethical disposal to be carried out.

Last, there are many objects that have been in the collection for more than 10 years, but for which there is no record of either donation or loan, or any other documentation to clarify their status.

Facing all these dilemmas at our museum, it was suggested that a deaccession policy and procedures should be written. Not so hard really — or so it sounded at the time when I was asked to assist.

So why would you deaccession an object (remove it from the museum’s collection inventory) and dispose of it (take steps to remove it physically from the museum’s care)? One obvious reason might be that an object has deteriorated beyond economic repair.

Another reason could be that an object no longer fits the acquisition criteria, either because it never should have been acquired and accessioned in the first place, or because the museum has more recently revised its collection policy, to rationalise the scope of the collection held and cared for. A further and more alarming possibility is that an object might have been stolen (or wrongly ‘souvenired’ from a former combat zone or cultural site), and its acquisition was illegal.

As always, there are pitfalls for the unwary. The first can be a misunderstanding of intentions. As soon as it becomes known that a museum wishes to return, dispose of, or — more rarely — sell any object from a public collection, some ‘punters’ will likely misread or misinterpret your position, and the museum might be castigated vociferously for its actions if long-standing supporters feel put off side. However, under carefully planned and self-regulated circumstances, a museum can survive such a storm: by having procedures and policy in place to handle any deaccessioning; and by being open and honest about its reasons for any action, or any change in policy that might have brought this about.

All good. But how can a museum prepare to deaccession and then dispose of an object in a procedurally transparent way, and ethically? In our case, it seemed best to establish a process for handling each class of objects mentioned above. A methodical and transparent process for any disposal is vital.

Ethically, the following steps should apply: a.

When an object proposed for return to a donor is not required by the donor, the museum will do the following: i. In the first place, investigate whether the object can be offered for transfer to an alternative and appropriate not-for-profit collection — that is, see if the object can remain in the public domain, cared for by an appropriate organisation. Should the offer of the object to other not-for-profit collections not be taken up, the following means of disposal may then be adopted: a. the object might be advertised for sale by closed tender; or b. the object might be advertised for sale by public auction; or c. the object might — as an action of last resort — be abandoned or destroyed.

left:

The figurehead from paddle steamer William the Fourth keeps an eye on things near the harbour doors at Newcastle Maritime Museum.

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b.

c.

When deaccession followed by disposal or transfer have been adopted as a course of action, the museum will appoint a select group (not less than 3 persons) to ensure that the object is not transferred or sold to a member of the museum society (or relevant governing body), nor family or friends of the governing body, nor to volunteers or staff of the museum or their family or friends.

A permanent record of the disposal action — and reasons for this action — will be retained by the museum, as a retrievable document associated with its collection inventory and history.

When rationalising a collection’s care and management, the category of loan objects that no longer fit with up-to-date policy might raise the most problematic issues. The obvious first step is to contact the person who originally loaned the object and ask them to collect the loan since it is no longer required or able to be cared for by the museum.

Should the search for the lender be unsuccessful, then a description and details of the object should be advertised publicly to allow any person with a legitimate claim to retrieve the object. A reasonable time limit should be set for such a claim to be made.

Generally, 30 days would be sufficient.

A similar procedure for tracing the original donor should be applied for other objects listed for disposal.

Again, when the relevant donor is unknown or cannot be traced, it is imperative that objects are advertised publicly as prepared for disposal, allowing the original owner an opportunity to prove ownership and arrange for return.

So the three take-away points I would suggest for museums reviewing their public responsibilities are as follows: 1.

Consider the need for policy and procedures in caring for collections — and I believe that

2.

3.

for most community-based museums that have been in existence for more than two years, there is a definite need.

Examine whether you have a policy for acquisition, loans and deaccessioning that is up-to-date, specific and realistic — and for reassurance, I know my museum does not yet have such a document, and to formulate such a policy is hard work and demanding, but we will get on with these tasks.

Consider whether your deaccessioning and disposal policy and procedures fit with general ethical guidelines for museums.

I know that a deaccessioning and disposal process is time-consuming and fraught with pitfalls. But properly documented and sincerely pursued, this can be a strong benefit to your organisation, clarify your management responsibilities and use of resources, and make clearer your public interface with the community you serve. [ ] Bill Storer AM has been associated with museums in Sydney and Newcastle in a generally voluntary capacity for many years. He has been President of the Community Museums National Network and President of NSW Branch of Museums Galleries Australia; and served as a member of MGA’s National Council for a number of years, both as an ordinary member and as Secretary.

Text citation: Bill Storer, ‘The too-hard basket: Deaccessioning issues for community museum collections’, Museums Galleries Australia Magazine, Vol. 26(1), Museums Australia, Canberra, Spring–Summer 2017, pp. 58–61.

62 Museums Galleries Australia Magazine – Vol. 26(1) – Spring-Summer 2017

Australian Air Force upscales museology training for Aviation Heritage Centres

Introducing best practice standards within the Air Force’s History and Heritage Branch

right:

SQNLDR Brett Marshall (NZAF) at the controls of a beaufighter at the Moorabbin Aircraft Museum.

Wing Commander Mary Anne Whiting and Wing Commander Terry Ryan, CSM

M

ost military aviation enthusiasts would know the RAAF Museum at Point Cook, in Victoria, as the iconic place to learn about RAAF aviation history in Australia.

However, the Air Force also has a number of regional Aviation Heritage Centres (AHCs) located at air bases in New South Wales and Queensland. AHCs were established to reflect the Air Force’s historical relationships with communities in local and regional areas. Therefore the AHCs provide the Air Force with a means and facilities to educate its own personnel and visitors today about the importance and roles that each respective RAAF Base has played, both for the community and in defence of the nation, over a long period.

Since the first Aviation Heritage Centre model was launched in 2010, the network had grown to four by 2016, with consideration now being given to further possibilities in the lead-up to the Air Force’s centenary in 2021. With a growing network of AHCs, there is a need to develop models of good practice and standards for our Centres, as well as establishing good systems to guide continuing improvement of displays and conservation standards over time.

For many years the Australian Army History Unit has run internal museum training courses to meet their needs. With the creation of the Air Force’s own History and Heritage Branch, there was a

recognition that Air Force personnel and volunteers working at the AHCs similarly need to be trained in contemporary museology practices.

Building upon the work done by the Army History Unit staff earlier, two of our own officers have created the now-recognised, Defence-accredited training course, History and Heritage Museum Practice: Fundamentals. The two colleagues who achieved this new training model are Wing Commander Clive Wells (Officer in Charge of the RAAF Amberley Aviation Heritage Centre, and a graduate of the University of Queensland Master of Museum Studies program), and Flight Lieutenant Mathew Keam (Staff Officer, Education and Training Reform, at Air Force Headquarters).

The inaugural delivery of the course was achieved recently (18–22 September 2017) at the RAAF Amberley Aviation Heritage Centre, southwest of Ipswich in Queensland. It was led by Wing Commander Wells, together with Captain John Land, Curator at the Australian Army Infantry Museum.

The course participants included RAAF Reserve personnel and volunteers from the Aviation Heritage Centres at RAAF Bases Amberley, Townsville, Wagga Wagga, and Williamtown; and uniformed and civilian representatives from the Fleet Air Arm Museum (near Nowra), together with the Australian Army History Unit museum network. There were also international students attending from the Royal New Zealand Air Force, the New Zealand Army, and the Royal Malaysian Air Force.

Museums Galleries Australia Magazine – Vol. 26(1) – Spring-Summer 2017 63

In opening the course, Air Commodore John Meier (Director-General of History and Heritage for the Air Force), stated: This course will improve the knowledge of the staff of the RAAF Aviation Heritage Centres, which will see the introduction of current national standard museum practices. In the longer term it will increase the quality of the experience of the many thousands of visitors to RAAF Centres.

The general aim of the course is to introduce members to the importance of preventive conservation measures and museum best-practice standards. The course has three detailed objectives: • to provide course members with the knowledge required to apply basic museum principles when working with objects in their collection, including the importance of caring, handling, storing and exhibiting objects to avoid damage or deterioration; • to provide an overview of current heritage best practices; and • to generate an understanding of the Air Force’s new History and Heritage organisation, and promote networking.

Areas addressed during the course included collection policies, the museum collection management system used by Defence, significance assessments, managing visitor expectations, exhibition development, display techniques, storage, packaging and handling, conservation techniques across various mediums, gallery maintenance, oral histories, risk assessments, and disaster plans. In addition, there were hands-on exercises to consolidate the theory presented, and a visit to another local Defence museum was incorporated.

For international students attending the recent course, a consolidation phase involved visits to various museums further afield: the Australian War Memorial, Canberra, in the ACT; in New South Wales: the RAAF Wagga Aviation Heritage Centre, Wagga Wagga; and in Victoria: the Army Transport Museum at Bandiana, the Army Tank Museum at Puckapunyal, and the RAAF Museum at Point Cook.

Feedback from the course participants can be best summarised by a comment made by Lieutenant Colonel Abd Rahman Bim Lazim, who is soon to be posted to the Royal Malaysian Air Force Museum in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Reviewing the course after completion he said: ‘I now have a much better understanding of how our Museum should be set up, how it should look, and how it should be managed.’

The Air Force’s History and Heritage Branch

now intends running this course yearly for its own personnel, as well as making it available more widely to Army, Navy and international participants. [ ] Wing Commander Mary Anne Whiting is the Deputy Director Community and Industry Engagement. She is a graduate of the Australian Command and Staff Course and in 2014 was awarded a PhD from the University of New South Wales (Australian Defence Force Academy) for her thesis on the contribution of the RAAF Squadrons during the Combined Bomber Offensive, 1942 to 1945.

Wing Commander Terry Ryan, CSM, Deputy Director of Air Force Heritage Centres, has had a long career in the Royal Australian Air Force and has accepted the challenge to develop the Air Force Museums Network. The challenge leads towards the RAAF Centenary in 2021.

Text citation: [author/s]: ‘Introducing best practice standards within the Air Force’s History and Heritage Branch’, Museums Galleries Australia Magazine, Vol. 26(1), Museums Galleries Australia, Canberra, Spring–Summer 2017, pp. 62–63.

above:

Grant Hays — NZDF — National Army Museum Waiouru, New Zealand.

64 Museums Galleries Australia Magazine – Vol. 26(1) – Spring-Summer 2017

Tribute to an outstanding career

Dr Don McMichael, CBE (1932–2017): a life of public commitment to our environment, museums, and heritage

above:

Louise Douglas.

Photo courtesy of National Museum of Australia.

right:

Dr Don McMichael.

Photo courtesy of National Museum of Australia.

Louise Douglas

T

he recent death (10 June) of Don McMichael marked a sad farewell to a great Australian museum professional.

All careers gather a shape that is formed over decades. Don’s museum career began in 1948, as a cadet in the molluscs department of Sydney’s Australian Museum. He finished an undergraduate degree in zoology at the University of Sydney in 1952 (with 1st-class honours); and through a Fulbright Travelling Scholarship that assisted him to study further in the United States, he graduated from Harvard University with a PhD just two years later (for a study of Australian freshwater mussels). First appointed an assistant curator at the Australian Museum in 1955, Don had risen to the post of Deputy Director by the time of his departure from hands-on museum work in Sydney in 1967.

For the next 15 years Don worked primarily in executive and board positions with organisations focused on the environment. He became first Director of the recently formed Australian Conservation Foundation (founded in 1965), and two years later, in 1969, Director of the National Parks and Wildlife Service of New South Wales. Don moved to work for the Commonwealth in 1974, as the first Secretary of the Department of Environment, formed under the Whitlam Government. During this period, he was Secretary of a number of Commonwealth government departments responsible variously for Home Affairs and the Environment, and represented the government at meetings of the recently formed Australia Council of the Arts. He also served as president or chairman of organisations focused on

environmental protection — such as the River Murray Commission (Chair, 1973–1975) and the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (Chair, 1976–1978). In addition, he chaired the Council of the Canberra College of Advanced Education for some years (today the University of Canberra).

For his distinguished achievements and outstanding public service in these various roles, Don was honoured with award of a CBE (Commander, Order of the British Empire) in 1981.

Don returned to the museums sector in 1984, as the inaugural Director of the National Museum of Australia (which was then planned to be opened in 1990). In the ensuing years, based in interim museum offices at the intended lakeside site of Yarramundi Reach, Don was a committed advocate for the Museum, at a time when there were changes in federal government and its commitment to the museum’s intended role and purpose shifted.

Surprisingly to many, significant doubts arose about the museum’s future.

However, while himself an experienced scientist, Don also showed a remarkable commitment during these early years of the NMA’s development to the need to collect the everyday history of Australian lives — which is still a strong aspect of the museum’s collecting policy today. In 1989, it became clear that the Hawke-Keating Government had abandoned commitment to construction of the National Museum, emphasised by Paul Keating’s public statements decrying any need for ‘another mausoleum’ on the Lake in Canberra. Don took stock of this indifference and made his own decision. He resigned as Director, and retired from full-time paid employment.

However, Don’s service to museums and environmental heritage was to grow and diversify for many more years. He continued to be intensely active from his continued base and busy life in Canberra. Don was an important supporter of Australian museums nationally, and his administrative knowledge and experience were critical in assisting with the formation of Museums Australia in 1994 — for which he drafted the founding constitution.

He also sought to improve Australia’s profile on the international stage, particularly through the International Council of Museums (ICOM). His involvement with ICOM’s networks began when Noel Flanagan, as then Director of the Australian War Memorial and Chair of the ICOM-Australia National Committee, encouraged Don to take an active role in both the Australian National Committee and ICOM’s networks internationally.

Don began attending some of the international meetings of ICOM in the mid-1980s, and his longhoned skills in heritage care and understanding of governance matters drew him into an active role in some of ICOM’s international meetings. In 1987 he was elected Chair of the ICOM Australia National Committee; then from 1992 to 1995 served on the (international) Executive Board of the world body, during which time he worked with a small group

Museums Galleries Australia Magazine – Vol. 26(1) – Spring-Summer 2017 65

of colleagues to revise (and greatly clarify) ICOM’s constitution.

One notable outcome of Don’s close work with Australian colleagues was the success of Australia’s bid (awarded in 1995, in Stavangar, Norway) to host ICOM’s triennial Conference and General Assembly — realised in Melbourne, in October 1998. This meant bringing the world museums body — and largest professional assembly and conference of museums people triennially — to Australia for the first time.

The ICOM Conference, under Australia’s chosen theme of Museums and Cultural Diversity, was organised by a team of Australian museum directors and other leaders, with Don, Des Griffin AM and Bernice Murphy taking leading organisational roles, and with a company structure and board chaired by the distinguished former Minister for Industry and Commerce in the Hawke Government, The Hon. John Button. Often intrigued by museum colleagues’ passions, Don Button fondly referred to the sector as ‘the mueslis’. A distinguished Aboriginal elder of the Gunai/Kurnai peoples, the late Uncle Albert Mullett (1933–2014) was also an important member of the ICOM’98 organisational board, to ensure Indigenous guidance in its organisation.

The Melbourne ICOM’98 Conference was a success: culturally, professionally, and financially. Don acted as Secretary to the ICOM’98 company until its job was done, and its accounts and business operations were wound up. The financial outcome was a modest profit (hard to achieve for ICOM triennial conferences).

This became a line-item ‘fund’ in the National Committee’s budget afterwards (supported by some matching funds from ICOM in Paris), which enabled ICOM Australia to distribute small grants annually to support collegial links in the Asia-Pacific region — an initiative that still continues under guidance of the ICOM-Australia board today.

After such a distinguished career, Don was unusual among his colleagues in continuing to offer steady contributions of public service to the museums sector long after his retirement. Never caring that younger colleagues were unaware of his distinguished career or honours to his name, Don continued to serve his colleagues in various roles as Public Officer, Treasurer, Secretary, and Membership Secretary of ICOM over many years — always with warmth and good humour. Meanwhile he took on training for another university degree in his post-retirement years, studying law by correspondence with the University of New South Wales. Putting his new law degree to work, Don kept busy for quite some years in ACT affairs, and served as Deputy Chair of the ACT Land and Planning Appeals Board.

Although Don was eminently practical in his orientation within museum work, and would never have considered himself a theorist, it turned out that his closest and most enduring personal friendship formed through ICOM internationally was with Vinoš Sofka, the highly distinguished Czech-born founder and Chair of ICOM’s Museology Committee

(ICOFOM). Sofka had been sentenced to 2 years’ imprisonment by the Czech Government after the failed Prague Spring of 1968, and lived in Sweden during his last decades, as a distinguished professor of museology. The two men (and their families) remained in close touch until shortly before the death of Vinoš Sofka in 2016.

When national honours were prepared to mark the centenary of Federation in 2001, Don was awarded a Centenary Medal, recognising his role as first Director of the Australian Conservation Foundation, and continued dedication to environmental conservation throughout his life.

For his outstanding achievements in international relations and sustained undertakings in international work on behalf of Australian museums over a long period, ICOM Australia presented Don with the 2015 Individual Achievement Award in International Relations for the sector. At the same time, Museums Galleries Australia acknowledged his contribution to the Australian museum community with the award of an Honorary Life Membership.

After Don’s death this year, his impact on ICOM was noted in an ICOM news electronic posting by Suay Askoy, President of ICOM: Dr. McMichael will be remembered by the Australian and international museum community as a great advocate of the museums as agents committed to making the world a better place. …

ICOM is very grateful for all his contributions.

To the numerous people who interacted with Don in many different roles over decades, his journey through life was marked by a commitment to principles, a very generous spirit and readiness to encourage others, and a capacity for great wisdom. The Australian museum community is deeply grateful that Don shared his energy and talents with us through that long journey of service and commitment to our national heritage — environmentally, scientifically, multiculturally, and through our social history. [ ] Acknowledgment Thank you to Bernice Murphy, who contributed information on Don’s role in ICOM over many years.

Louise Douglas has had a successful career in cultural heritage management spanning 30 years, working at senior and executive management levels at both the Powerhouse Museum and the National Museum of Australia. She has contributed to the evolution of museums in Australia through various roles on the governing bodies of Museums Galleries Australia and ICOM Australia. In retirement, Louise works as a consultant to the museum sector and is Deputy Chair of the ACT government’s Cultural Facilities Corporation Text citation: Louise Douglas, ‘Dr Don McMichael, CBE (1932–2017): a life of public commitment to our environment, museums and heritage’, Museums Galleries Australia Magazine, Vol. 26(1), Museums Galleries Australia, Canberra, Spring–Summer 2017, pp. 64–65 .

66 Museums Galleries Australia Magazine – Vol. 26(1) – Spring-Summer 2017

Book review: a set of tools for working through ethics issues in museums

ICOM’s resource book on museum ethics: Review of Museums, Ethics and Cultural Heritage (2016)

above:

Dr Andrew Simpson.

Museums, Ethics and Cultural Heritage, ed. Bernice L Murphy, Routledge UK & ICOM Paris, 2016; Routledge Museum Studies / Heritage Series.

Andrew Simpson

A

cartoon that appeared on October 13 this year in Le Devoir, a French-language newspaper published in Montreal, depicted an ISIS insurgent swinging a pick furiously on top of an ancient structure labelled ‘Palmyra’.

Alongside is an image of the current US President doing the same atop a similar structure labelled ‘UNESCO’.

It is a disturbing reminder of the present trend away from internationalism that seems to be gripping the body politic in many parts of the globe today. The French-Canadian cartoon eloquently illustrates how this resurgence of inwardly focused nationalism, be it just a passing phenomenon or the deepening of a longer-term trend, poses major physical and intellectual challenges for humanity’s approach to our shared cultural heritage. As we know, the physical heritage of peoples and whole civilizations has been looted, destroyed, hidden and sold throughout history.

In a world that is increasingly fractured politically today, with many demanding control of national

resources and institutions to the exclusion of all others, the very concept of the universality of human heritage is confronted by multiple challenges.

Museums, Ethics and Cultural Heritage, published in 2016, is an anthology arising from a partnership between the Paris-based International Council of Museums (ICOM) and Routledge in the UK — the latter imprint well known for a vast output of scholarly publications in the field of museums and cultural heritage. This book was published last year, to coincide with the 70th anniversary of ICOM’s founding and the 30th anniversary of ICOM’s Ethics Committee.

The anthology is drawn together by someone whose editorial skills and long-term deep engagement in museological issues are well known to readers of this Magazine. Bernice Murphy is both the editor and a contributing author in this volume. Given her previous role as Chair of ICOM’s Ethics Committee for seven years (2004–2011) and her extensive international networks, she was well equipped to produce a work of this scope, depth and ambition.

The book consists of 34 essays by authors from 14 different nations, and its thematic structure is divided into seven sections. It contains extensive information on the history of ICOM’s endeavours in the area of setting ethical standards and includes, as appendices, a number of key documents and reference tools brought into one convenient place of access. These are: the ICOM Code of Ethics for Museums, ICOM’s Code of Ethics for Natural History Museums, the CIMAM (International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art) Principles of Deaccession, the PIMA (Pacific Islands Museum Association) Code of Ethics; and the most recent (2015) UNESCO Recommendation concerning the protection and promotion of museums and collections, their diversity and their role in society.

Many of the essay contributors are those who were international players either engaged in the process of formulating these standards-setting documents, or involved in specific interpretations and applications of their contents. Other essays take up stories and case-studies that demonstrate the ethical principles and ideas outlined in the various codes. The essays are supported by a comprehensive set of notes and references. There is also a very useful index at the back of the volume that gives the reader the option of tracking the details of specific threads that are woven throughout the book.

Contributing authors are mostly from Europe and North America, but there are also essayists from Asia, South America, Africa and Australia. Apart from offering profound insights into the amount of work that has consumed this group of global scholars and practitioners, and demonstrating the benefits and important outcomes that can be derived from internationalism in the area of museology, the book is an important anthology for a number of reasons.

First, it untangles many commonly-held misunderstandings around ethics, morality and legality in the field of museology. The third section

Museums Galleries Australia Magazine – Vol. 26(1) – Spring-Summer 2017 67

of the book covers international action, treaties and benchmarks for the protection of world heritage. Occasionally you may hear some museum practitioners argue that ethical frameworks are contingent, and should be regularly reviewed and (possibly) changed. Gary Edson, however, argues eloquently that the construction of the framework is a separate issue from the application of the framework; and his essay opens the section on heritage care and ethics ‘through the lens of multiple cultures and regions’.

In this section there are some great insights into contemporary museum developments: for example, an essay on the vastly-scaled Humboldt Forum project of coordinating connections across all the Prussian collections displayed on the Museum Island in Berlin; and in another essay, an account of the explosive growth in the number of museums in China, spurred by its massive and emergent middle class, national ambitions for cultural heritage, and the ethical conundrums these developments pose. The diverse essays gathered together are often written by those who have directly sought to resolve such challenges.

Second, the book is a strong reminder of why an ethical framework should underpin all museum practice. Topics explored include provenance, repatriation, restitution, human rights, sustainability, representation, education, cultural identity, difficult or contested heritage, inclusivity, engagement and education. The comprehensive nature of topics explored, with an elaboration of the ethical frameworks involved, perhaps underscores the primary reason why so many people still regard museums as trustworthy organisations in comparison with other areas of self-regulated professional endeavour.

Third, the final section of the book outlines a number of specific case studies that provide significant utility for further scholarship and debate.

Topics covered include the exhibition and scientific study of human remains; an artist’s claims to portraits she had made in a concentration camp of holocaust victims (and the difficult issues that caused ICOM’s Ethics Committee to favour their retention in a museum); the final restitution of a stolen religious artwork through winning a case against a reluctant museum; and the historical complexities of antiquities that circulate through various commercial networks of traders and collectors.

In these case-study examples, the ICOM Code is shown close-up, as tested by a multiplicity of factors including massive socio-cultural and political change, the ethical frameworks of other professions, and the ever-changing legal structures and regulatory measures promulgated by governments and public service requirements, while often contested by diverse claimant groups. The case studies show ethical questions are put to work in actual situations, and provide fascinating insights into how cultural production can be buffeted by profound social change, leaving the fate and legacy of many collectors and

collections stranded by uncertainty.

While the public may still hold museums in high esteem as trustworthy organisations, the diverse perspectives and complex issues explored throughout the book provide many intersecting opportunities to consider how a government agency views and interacts diversely with the collecting sector. For example, there is some analysis of the ethical dimensions that result when museums are evaluated only for what one author terms, with alarm, ‘their shallow touristic capabilities’. Under the new public service management agenda adopted throughout much of the western world, this is often a primary framework today for how museums are measured, considered — and to some extent, funded. There is language and analysis of responsibilities in this volume that might assist colleagues in being clear about their public obligations long-term, alongside their need to be engaging and serve current audiences and communities.

This book therefore demonstrates that, through the multilateral internationalism that is a defining aspiration of organisations such as ICOM and UNESCO today, the disturbing retreat into militantly local responses to cultural heritage today, as lampooned by the Le Devoir cartoon, can still be counteracted through the important connective and comparative work of museums.

The anthology clearly sets benchmarks and provides uniquely collated resources as a work on the ethical foundations of museums and cultural heritage practice today. As such it should readily find a place on the bookshelves of many leaders of collecting cultural organisations, and be a reference tool for their younger colleagues. But it can also be used as a text in advanced museological training and study programs. It is required reading for anyone interested in the collective heritage of humanity and its future prospects. [ ] Dr Andrew Simpson is an Honorary Fellow, Department of Ancient History, at Macquarie University, Sydney. He was Director of Museum Studies at Macquarie University (2007—2014), and continues as an active member of UMAC, ICOM’s International Committee for University Museums.

Text citation: Andrew Simpson, ‘ICOM’s resource book on museum ethics: Review of Museums, Ethics and Cultural Heritage (2016)’, Museums Galleries Australia Magazine, Vol. 26(1), Museums Australia, Canberra, Spring–Summer 2017, pp. 66–67.

www.tashcosystems.com.au tashco@tashcosystems.com.au

Galleries of Remembrance The Shrine of Remembrance Photographer Vlad Bunyevich.

The National Anzac Centre Albany WA Photographer Lee Grifď&#x192;&#x17E;th.

Galleries of Remembrance The Shrine of Remembrance Photographer Vlad Bunyevich.

Showcasing Australia For The Past 40 Years