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vol 23 (1) summer 2015 $15.00
Museums
Australia
EXPLORE #MA2015
MUSEUMS AUSTRALIA
NATIONAL CONFERENCE
Sydney 2015
21-24 May
• It has been a decade since the last Museums Australia
National Conference was held in Sydney.
• A lot has changed in recent times in terms of the nature of
the work done in museums and galleries and the associated
operating environment.
• The remote and regional day will be held at the Australian
National Maritime Museum at Darling Harbour 21st May.
• The timing of the conference aligns with two key signature
Sydney events, the launch of Vivid and the Sydney Writers
Festival, the conference is part of Vivid Ideas 2015.
• Sydney is Australia’s largest and most exciting city, the
museums and galleries sector has much to both celebrate and
debate concerning the future.
• The conference will attract close to 1000 participants many of
whom will be keen to immerse themselves in the cultural life
of the city.
• The conference will be wrestling with radical propositions
around collections, the agency of people, and the spaces
where the two meet under the title Message ≠ Medium: # a _cultural _ cacophony.
• A greatly expanded “creative industries” trade show designed to
engage new audiences is being developed.
• We are planning a high profile public event and many smaller
cultural experiences that only Sydney can offer.
• The conference will demonstrate the museum and gallery sector’s
agility in facing the challenges and opportunities of new technology
and changing socio-cultural and economic expectations.
• This will not be a standard Museums Australia conference, there
will be valuable professional development and some outstanding
Sydney social events.
• It will be a high quality conference event that strongly engages
students and young emerging professionals and generates a
significant social media footprint.
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Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 23(1) – Summer 2015 7
Contents
In this issue
Museums Australia National Council 2013—2015
top:
middle:
bottom:
left:
right:
President’s Message. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Our digital stuff: Rethinking cultural
storage and retrieval in a fast-moving
world. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Breaking out in Carnamah: Virtually
transforming physical limits. . . . . . . . . . . 13
The ‘white cube’ changes colour:
Indigenous art between the museum
and the art gallery. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Museum leadership: An international
training experience. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
One man’s trash is another man’s
treasure: Australian political
ephemera. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
Iconic Frenchmen invade Swanston
Street: Hugo and Gaultier exhibitions
in Melbourne . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
Renewing a great regional museum
and visitor attraction: Flagstaff Hill
Maritime Village, Warrnambool. . . . . . . 37
ICOM Australia Awards 2015. . . . . . . . . 39
The new Murray Network of MA:
Crossing state borders, networking
regionally. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
president
Frank Howarth PSM
(Former Director, Australian Museum, Sydney)
vice-president
Richard Mulvaney
(Director, Queen Victoria Museum & Art Gallery, Launceston)
treasurer
Suzanne Bravery
(Independent museum consultant)
secretary
Dr Mat Trinca
(Director, National Museum of Australia, Canberra)
members
Dr Andrew Simpson
(Macquarie University, Sydney)
Carol Cartwright
(Former Head, Education & Visitor Services, Australian War Memorial, Canberra)
Padraic Fisher
(Director, National Wool Museum, Geelong)
Peter Abbott
(Manager, Tourism Services, Warrnambool City Council, Victoria)
Pierre Arpin
(Director, Museum & Art Gallery of the Northen Territory, Darwin)
Rebekah Butler
(Executive Director, Museum & Gallery Services Queensland, Brisbane)
ex officio member
Dr Robin Hirst
(Chair, ICOM Australia), Museum Victoria
public officer
Dr Don McMichael CBE, Canberra
COVER IMAGE:
William Baker, Kylie Minogue, Virgins (or Madonnas) collection,
Immaculata gown.
Jean Paul Gaultier Haute couture, Spring¬Summer 2007,
Net lace dress with large patterned embroidery and white linen cut-outs.
Image courtesy National Gallery of Victoria and Jean Paul Gaultier.
Museums Australia Magazine
PO Box 266, Civic Square ACT 2608
Editorial: (02) 6230 0346
Advertising: 02) 6230 0346
Subscriptions: (02) 6230 0346
Fax: (02) 6230 0360
[email protected]
www.museumsaustralia.org.au
Editor: Bernice Murphy
Design: Brendan O’Donnell
& Selena Kearney
Print: Paragon Print, Canberra
© Museums Australia and individual authors.
No part of this magazine may be reproduced in any form
without written permission from the publisher.
Museums Australia Magazine is published quarterly and on-line on the MA
Website, and is a major link with members and the museums sector. Museums
Australia Magazine is a forum for news, opinion and debate on museum issues.
Contributions from those involved or interested in museums and galleries are
welcome. Museums Australia Magazine reserves the right to edit, abridge, alter
or reject any material. Views expressed by contributors are not necessarily
those of the publisher or editor. Publication of an advertisement does not
imply endorsement by Museums Australia, its affiliates or employees.
Museums Australia is proud to acknowledge the following
supporters of the national organisation:
Australian Government Ministry for the Arts and Department of the
Environment; National Museum of Australia; Museum Victoria (Melbourne
Museum); Western Australian Museum; and Link Digital (Canberra).
Print Post Publication No: 332582/00001 ISSN 1038-1694
state/territory branch presidents/ representatives
(subject to change throughout year)
ACT Rebecca Coronel
(Manager – Exhibitions and Gallery Development, National Museum
of Australia, Canberra)
NSW Dr Andrew Simpson
(Macquarie University, Sydney)
NT Janie Mason
(Charles Darwin University Nursing Museum, Darwin)
QLD John Waldron
(Museum consultant, Sunshine Coast, Queensland)
SA Mirna Heruc
(Manager, Art & Heritage Collections, University of Adelaide, Adelaide)
TAS Richard Mulvaney
(Director, Queen Victoria Museum & Art Gallery, Launceston)
VIC Jo-Anne Cooper
(Manager, Grainger Museum, Melbourne)
WA Soula Veyradier
(Manager, Western Australian Museum, Perth)
8 Museums Australia Magazine – Vol. 23(1) – Summer 2015
President’s Message
Frank Howarth
Year in review: Museums Australia 2014
F
above:
Frank Howarth.
or me, 2014 was a pretty momentous year.
Leaving the Australian Museum after 10 years
was a significant transition tinged with sadness
and some sense of achievement too. But one
big upside of that change was the ability to give
more time to Museums Australia (MA) and to work
for the whole museum and gallery community, and
2014 was a busy year for MA.
The very successful National Conference in
Launceston in May set the tone: sell-out attendance,
great speakers and discussions, and a chance to meet
many of MA’s members in more social surroundings.
A big credit to the organising committee, led by the
irrepressible Richard Mulvaney, and to the hospitality
of our Tasmanian colleagues.
From my perspective, two significant issues
dominated national discussions amongst the
collections sector peak bodies. The first was the
increasing concern about some items held in some
Australian gallery collections that appeared to have
been illegally exported from their country of origin,
with falsified provenance. The media coverage of
these disclosures indicated genuine community
concern about the ethics of museum and gallery
acquisitions, and flagged the need for more consistent
and rigorous approaches to provenance checking.
Credit then to the Commonwealth Ministry for the
Arts, under Sally Basser’s leadership, for not just
compiling a set of cultural collection acquisition
guidelines, but for involving the sector in commenting
on and adding to the draft guidelines. The resulting
Australian Best Practice Guide to Collecting Cultural
Material, published by the federal Government in
October, is a very useful and necessary tool for all
parts of the collections sector.
The second issue is a more pervasive, challenging,
and (potentially) very rewarding and beneficial
one. That is the intersection of our sector with very
rapid and extensive change in the digital world.
It’s for good reason that the boom in hand-held
digital devices and in social media is referred to by
futurists as a disruptive technological change. I’m
even more confident now in saying that digital (in
all its manifestations) will change our sector more
than anything ever has. The challenge is in managing
that change! A key step in looking at how our sector
is adapting to digital was the report released in
September 2014 called Innovation Study: Challenges
and Opportunities for the Australian Galleries,
Libraries, Archives and Museums Sector, compiled
by the Australian Centre for Broadband Innovation,
CSIRO, and the Smart Services CRC. The report
has become known as the GLAM report. The final
document reflected extensive consultation with
the bigger end of the GLAM sector, and credit in
particular to one of the report’s authors, Chris Winter,
for that.
The report (available through MA’s website) has
had extensive comment, and suffice it to say here that
it showed that there are areas of significant digital
innovation in parts of the GLAM sector, which is
good; but on the downside, it also highlighted that
there is not nearly enough collaboration across the
GLAM ‘silos’, and that digital innovation is patchy and
not well coordinated. This has triggered significant
and ongoing discussion within the sector, and
with government. MA is playing a key role in those
discussions, and I expect a lot to happen in this space
in 2015. In particular, I am very keen to ensure that
the benefits of digital innovation are available to the
smaller and more regional parts of the collections
sector, and if at all possible, that government
assistance is focused on achieving that.
I do want to acknowledge that one of those islands
of innovation has been created by our very own MA
Victoria branch, in conjunction with Museum Victoria
and Arts Victoria, in the form of Victoria Collections, a
website and tool for smaller and less traditional parts
of our sector to use to make their collections digitally
accessible. A great initiative that may well be taken up
in other parts of Australia.
As I mentioned above, I’ve had more time this
year to see something of the richness of our sector,
and a highlight of that was attending the South East
Queensland Small Museums conference hosted by
Redlands Council earlier this year. The depth and
breadth of the material we hold, and the stories we
can tell, always surprises me; and the dedication of the
many volunteers who make much of this possible is
inspiring.
So what will 2015 bring us? Digital will continue
to be an area of focus, as I mentioned above.
Unfortunately government cutbacks at all levels are
likely to continue, but on the brighter side, there is
more generosity from philanthropists now than ever
before. The competition for that generosity is keen,
but our sector can deliver many of the community
benefits sought by those philanthropists.
More specific to MA are two issues close to the
minds of MA members. The first is the ongoing
question of whether or not there should be a more
national focus on accreditation: of institutions and/or
of individuals in the sector, and also training courses.
In parallel with this is the ongoing review of museum
left: Victorian Collections
<victoriancollections.net.au/>
bottom left:
Australian Best
Practice Guide to Collecting
Cultural Material, 2014.
bottom right: Innovation Study:
Challenges and Opportunities for
the Australian Galleries, Libraries,
Archives and Museums Sector, 2014..
standards. Both matters will take a lot of discussion,
but we must reach a view on them during 2015.
The second issue is around how MA might better
represent the interests of the visual arts and galleries
part of the sector. The founders of MA deliberately
chose the word ‘museum’ for the name to reflect the
all-inclusive meaning of museum in the northern
hemisphere; but for a range of reasons MA has
arguably drifted away from representing the specific
interests of the public galleries part of the collections
sector. This is something I will focus on working with
the MA National Council to rectify during 2015.
MA is a complex and widely spread association, and
that it works so well is a credit to both the elected
member representatives on the National Council
and the State and Territory Branch Presidents/
representatives. Big thanks are also due to the
professional staff of MA led by National Director
Bernice Murphy and the team in the National Office,
Laura Miles and her colleagues in the MA Victoria
office, and Robert Mitchell and team in the MA WA
office.
I look forward to meeting many more MA members
in 2015, and seeing you all at the National Conference
in Sydney in May. It promises to be very good indeed!
[]
Frank Howarth PSM
National President, Museums Australia
Digitising platforms and future pathways to our human heritage
Our digital stuff: Rethinking cultural storage and retrieval
in a fast-moving world
above:
Ross Harley.
right:
Sol LeWitt Wall
Drawing #1136. LeWitt left
behind detailed instructions
that today enable galleries to
realise his art for exhibition:
anytime, anywhere, any place.
Ross Harley
P
reserving humanity’s history and art conjures
up images of archaeological sites and rare
creative works to be touched only with white
gloves. But we also need to urgently come to
terms with the fragility of our digital records of
the past 30 years.
It’s not quite Dr Who’s TARDIS. But an
experimental new human-scale digital browser does
come with some of the exploratory benefits of time
travel. By standing ‘within’ the wrap-around search
tool and reaching left or right, the user can home in on
a particular period of world history, then selectively
enter an area of interest to locate digitally-preserved
objects, images and exhibits from the past.
This kind of remote-access, customised user
experience currently under development at UNSW
makes snaking our way on foot through endless
museum galleries filled with dusty glass cases,
clutching pamphlets or audio guides to interpret
exhibits, seem rather quaint.
So too does the making of history and art with
today’s digital tools. We can and are using crowd
sourcing to locate an unprecedented range of
historical documents, objects, records, images and
oral histories; and we can – and are – making art in
all kinds of new mediums, from gaming platforms
to ‘augmented reality’, which open up extraordinary
virtual user experiences.
In the foreseeable future, new technological
platforms and rapidly evolving creative technologies
will mean that visitors to galleries, libraries, archives
and museums might not even have to leave home
if they choose not to. Nor will the viewing public
even need to know what they are looking for; just
as music apps can suggest bands we might like but
haven’t heard of, there’s no reason why history or art
experiences can’t be prompted in much the same way.
The revolution in the way we document, collect,
curate and exhibit the material history of humanity
— our vast collections of ‘stuff’ — is already well
underway. We can be certain it will dismantle, or at
least profoundly disrupt, millennia of human hoarding.
On an immediate personal level, think of how those
lovingly compiled photo albums that documented and
preserved important family histories are being put
aside in favour of digital folders, now groaning with
thousands of images that we probably haven’t even
sorted.
At the other end of the scale, consider the changing
context of the world’s museums and galleries, our
repositories of human knowledge, of humanity’s
achievements and failures — in fact of virtually every
aspect of the minutiae of human existence. Digital
imaging, storing, discovery and sorting tools are
opening museum collections up to audiences we
haven’t previously imagined.
We could be standing on the brink of a fabulous new
era of ubiquitous access to the world’s intellectual,
historical and creative treasures – or at least their
digitised cousins. However, what lies ahead is not yet
clear. For all the unprecedented opportunities, there
are some apparent pitfalls and many more unknowns.
Every society collects for an infinite range of
reasons that are inextricably linked to our ideas,
values and cultures, and even our psychological needs.
The head-hunters of Borneo, for example, carefully
preserved and displayed their enemies’ heads as
physical evidence that local warriors had not just
left:
Prof. Sarah Kenderdine
(UNSW), demonstrating the
360-degree data browser
and virtual tour of caves at
Dunhuang’s Mogao UNESCO
World Heritage site (the ‘Caves
of the thousand Buddas’) on
the old Silk Route, China.
defeated their adversaries but had also ‘acquired’
their strength. Europe’s aristocracy in turn ‘acquired’
many cultural artefacts of non-European cultures (the
ramifications of which we feel to this day), storing
and displaying them in settings that were ultimately
transformed into the modern-day museum.
It is not just what we collect, sort and display that
has meaning. It’s how we link those items together;
and how, why and where they are shown. The idea
that museums and art galleries should be accessible
to all only dates back to the eighteenth century, when
the educational, cultural and entertainment values of
public collections were first recognised.
But today’s major museums, galleries, and even
libraries only ever have a tiny fraction of their vast
collections on display (often as low as 0.5%). We
have simply accumulated too much stuff. So most of
it never, or only occasionally, makes its way out of
the storage vaults. We rely largely on knowledgeable,
specialist curators to choose and display items in a
meaningful way.
However the ability to create vast data-banks with
digital versions of the world’s collections – and the
capability to easily search those collections using new
remote-access tools — now promises unparalleled
opportunities for us all to view and understand much
more of the world’s art and cultures than previously
possible.
Take the newly opened digital visitors’ centre
serving north-western China’s extraordinary
Dunhuang Mogao Caves — a UNESCO World
Heritage site incorporating 492 lavishly decorated
temples on the old Silk Route, within which 1,000
years of cave art is still preserved.
With its new, immersive, interactive, 360-degree
digital gallery, the half-million or so annual visitors
to the Dunhuang Mogao Caves — as well as any
number of virtual visitors — can experience all that
this globally significant Buddhist art site entails.
By holding up a tablet device within a darkened,
‘artificial cave’ inside the new visitor’s centre – or in
an equivalent facility anywhere in the world – users
can ‘peer’ into any cave they choose. Hidden digital
markers beam back high-resolution images as though
viewers are sweeping their gaze around the cave’s
walls or roof. Meanwhile, the increasingly fragile
decoration of actual caves can be selectively opened
to public viewing on a rotational basis, to dramatically
reduce the wear and tear caused by tourists.
Likewise a visit to the Museum of Contemporary
Art in Sydney, for example, could become a unique,
personally customised experience. A visitor might
view a physical exhibition then use search tools
to explore similar digital forms or related items in
other museums around the world, while his or her
companion looks at the same physical collection from
a very different perspective, then heads off on an
entirely different digital trail.
Just as we have become accustomed to multiple
worlds of consumption — physical, online, and
through what we used to call shops but now are
increasingly reconceived as ‘location-based retail'
— the concept of museums and galleries as solely
physical repositories of history or art is radically
changing.
New digital tools and platforms are also enabling
us to build collections in new ways. Take the massive
Europeana project that aims to collect, digitise and
make freely and easily available online some 30
Digitising platforms and future pathways to our human heritage
million or so objects, art works, records, personal
diaries, documents and images of Europe’s history.
Europeana’s current First World War centenary
project has linked local village histories together
for the first time, by taking teams out into the
community to source records and memories of
human experiences of the war, then further link
them together in a vast digital repository open to all.
Arguably, the result is a collection far richer and more
detailed than even the finest curators could previously
have hoped to build.
That’s the positive side.
However, those marble and bronze statues dating
back to antiquity could prove to be our most durable
historical and artistic records – unless we approach
the digital promise with some caution.
Since the mid-1980s we have relied increasingly on
rapidly evolving technologies with very short lifespans. In the art world we might consider video games
to be one of the first iterations of a new generation
of techno-art. There have since been many more
iterations that depend on particular technological
platforms for display, play and function.
When something is ‘born digital’, that’s often
supposed to solve all the technical format and storage
problems of the past. A digital file can be copied and
distributed so that everyone can access it; and it is,
theoretically, never lost — unlike those single copies
of a precious book, painting or sculpture that could
be destroyed by fire, water or war. To a certain extent
this expectation is warranted; nevertheless our digital
enthusiasm masks the fragility of today’s digital
records, and risks overlooking the impact of the pace
of technological change.
Go back for a moment to those dusty family photo
albums. Are we really better off with our vast digital
collections that we don’t have time or aptitude to
sort, curate, or display, or that we simply can’t access
anymore?
First, in terms of understanding and appreciation,
‘more stuff’ isn’t necessarily more meaningful. It’s
easy to simply collect, but not to sort, because we
imagine the ‘cloud’ and other networked storage
resources as being infinitely large — when, of course
they are actually finite resources located in huge
server farms. Within a few years of its inception, for
example, YouTube already hosted more material than
was produced in the entire history of television. But
that didn’t necessarily make it better as a cultural
repository for future access.
And what about preserving what’s important
today for the future? We might think we’re putting
everything ‘up’ in a safe digital cloud – just like
we once trusted our most precious records and
endeavours on CD-ROMs.
However giant IT firms are not public museums;
they have a very different stake in harvesting our
collective historical records. Google and Apple are
far more interested in selling us the next generation
of digital platforms than worrying about whether we
can access what we’ve stored on last year’s model
for future retrieval. We already know that those old
CD-ROMs of the 1990s are laminating and gathering
dust in cupboards, rendering much of what’s stored
on them useless.
Then consider the implications of ownership:
every time we click to accept the conditions of use
on a ‘free’ platform like YouTube, we are giving away
our copyright to a private company. Many of the
records of our lives and creativity from the last 30
years are now captured on proprietary platforms that
effectively own that work.
The solution is either to retain entire working sets
of the technology of different eras, or to constantly
reformat objects, records and artworks into formats
that are accessible on current generations of digital
platforms – something that will be enormously
expensive and time-consuming to achieve in reality.
Another option is to thoroughly document the
way things were made, so they can be re-created or
re-staged at a later date. Consider someone like the
American modern artist Sol LeWitt – who pioneered
conceptual art by arguing that the idea or set of
instructions, rather than the realisation of the work
itself, was what defined the artwork. His work may
endure more readily than that of equally famous and
influential video artists of the same period – such as
Nam June Paik – simply because LeWitt left behind
detailed instructions that today enable galleries to
realise his art for exhibition: anytime, anywhere, any
place. Video, on the other hand, is threatened as an
inexorably obsolete format that has many of us in the
art world scrambling to find ways to preserve it.
For today’s museums, galleries, libraries and
archives, our biggest challenge is how to take up the
new opportunities technology offers without being
blind to the accompanying risks.
We need everything from new legislation on digital
ownership and rights to new curating and collecting
practices, both for individuals and organisations.
In order to ensure we don’t lose generations of
digital works and creativity, but instead are able to
preserve them in the museums, galleries, and cultural
storehouses of the future, the time to act is now! []
Professor Ross Harley is the Dean at UNSW|Art & Design,
Sydney, and the lead researcher on a number of Australian
Research Council (ARC) digital cultural heritage projects.
Citation for this text: Ross Harley, ‘Our digital stuff: Rethinking cultural storage and
retrieval in a fast-moving world’, Museums Australia Magazine, Vol. 23 (1), Summer
2014, pp.10—12.
Something more than a museum and historical society in WA
Breaking out in Carnamah: Virtually transforming
physical limits
Andrew Bowman-Bright
D
top:
Virtual ticket to
Carnamah's online collection.
above:
Andrew Bowman-Bright
espite the rumours, Carnamah is actually
quite a small place! It is an agricultural district
located approximately 300 kilometres north of
Perth, in Western Australia’s Mid West region.
It’s an obscure spot – not on the coast; away
from main roads; heading north; and searingly hot in
summer.
The Carnamah Historical Society was founded in
1983, and as one might expect, its purpose is to collect,
record, preserve and promote local history. We have
established and now operate the Carnamah Museum;
restored and manage the heritage-listed Macpherson
Homestead; and strive to share and promote local
history online. We are a community organisation with
no ongoing funding, but we have a small and active
membership.
We made our online debut in 2003. It was a great
opportunity, but not one to be wasted on simply
promoting our organisation. It was one, we decided,
that should be used to help further our reach and
share our history and heritage with new and greater
audiences.
Jumping forward a decade: our audience has
grown exponentially; we’ve made it into the National
Museum of Australia; won an MA Museums and
Galleries National Award (2014); and firmly placed
Carnamah on the historical map. Our online
content has grown, evolved and developed into our
multi-strand virtual museum, biographical dictionary,
education resources, and our virtual volunteering
program.
Virtual Museum: to be known and
distinguished as Carnamah
A few years ago, we began a project to share online
some of our collection through the development of
a simple virtual museum. A secondary aim was to
provide the public with the opportunity to view and
enjoy items not normally accessible due to their rarity,
size, condition and/or location. The rationale wasn’t
just to share images of objects or a catalogue, but to
create a series of connected and interpreted virtual
exhibitions.
The project encompassed research, interviews,
the careful photographing of objects, scanning
photographs, digitisation of ephemera, photographing
modern-day scenes and places for contrasts, editing
images, the writing of interpretative text, the
construction of specific virtual exhibitions, and finally
promotion through postcards and social media. This
was in fact a simple approach to replicating online
what you would find within a physical interpretative
exhibition – bar the sole difference of providing
striking and clear photographs in lieu of actual
physical objects.
Photographs of objects had their visible background
removed to give them an uncompromised presence on
July-August 2013 cover – relayed to 7,000 hardcopy
readers around Australia and New Zealand and
reaching 10,000 digital subscribers (including a
history of the object and a plug for our Virtual
Museum on the first page). Later in the year, CBH
Group discovered and used an image from our
Midland Railway virtual exhibition for the cover
of their 2014 calendar. These are great physical
outcomes from virtual endeavours!
Australian Curriculum Education Resources
above:
A recognisable 'artefact'
from many a regional
community museum.
right:
May Turner's doll. Part of
Carnamah's Virtual Museum and
an example of the photography
and post-processing undertaken
to 'exhibit' the collection.
This doll belonged to May Turner,
who arrived in Carnamah with
her parents as a five-year-old
in 1916. May kept the doll at
her Carnamah home until her
death at the age of 94 in 2006.
the page, and were painstakingly laid out with other
images and interpretative text. The angle objects
were photographed at, the side of the page they were
placed on, the way they interact with adjacent objects
on the page, the closeness and amount of text, margins
and white space: all were strong considerations
in ensuring that the conveyed stories flowed both
aesthetically and logically.
Three virtual exhibitions ‘went live’ in 2011,
and another six in early 2013. They take special
advantage of being online by inviting comments
and contributions from the public, which can
then seamlessly become part of an exhibition and
progressively enrich the experience for future online
patrons. The exhibitions are also layered with links
to other online content, especially entries in our
biographical dictionary.
The project has received highly positive feedback,
including many emotive responses. People have
greatly valued being able so easily to discover and
engage with our collection. This includes direct online
visitors and others from social media, Google searches
and mentions in Wikipedia articles. Exposure is a
powerful force, and the project has led to an increase
in both online and physical visitors.
For example, Inside History magazine used an
image from one of our virtual exhibitions for their
In collaboration with Ignite Your Audience,
Carnamah has created a series of Australian
Curriculum resources, which are freely available to
teachers and students via our website. The resources
have been carefully created so they can be utilised
from classrooms anywhere in Australia (with our
online content), or linked to school visits in our
physical museum. To our surprise, one of the teachers
at our local school did both, and this meant we had
an exponentially larger impact on those students.
They used our website, virtual museum and education
resources over a period of two months, and then
finished up with a visit to our physical museum.
Biographical Dictionary of Coorow,
Carnamah and Three Springs
Our virtual museum was built on the success of
our first major online project, which was recently
transformed to become our Biographical Dictionary of
Coorow, Carnamah and Three Springs.
Through the Biographical Dictionary for the region,
we capture and reference information on people
from vital records, electoral rolls, post and telephone
directories, rate books, minute books, newspapers,
passenger lists, oral histories and hundreds of other
sources. We look far beyond our own collection and
frequently gather information from the holdings of
local, state and national libraries, and archives more
broadly.
Our Biographical Dictionary not only attracts people
to our website, but is often itself the genesis for their
The rationale wasn’t just to share images
of objects or a catalogue, but to create a
series of connected and interpreted virtual
exhibitions.
interest. Online visitors might never have heard of
Carnamah before, but discover there is a connection
to their family or research topic. There is no better
example than the case of the National Museum of
Australia in Canberra, when it one day Googled
‘soldier settlement’. The NMA wasn’t looking for
Carnamah, but there we were! – with comprehensive
information available on dozens of soldier settlers
and four soldier settlement estates. As a direct result,
Carnamah is now featured in the NMA’s Landmarks
exhibition, and is part of their book Landmarks: A
History of Australia in 33 Places. Or as we like to say:
that’s Carnamah and 32 others!
Over recent years, many people have deviated in
their travels to pass through Carnamah as a result of
a previous Google search that had led to our website.
Also valued are those who have found us online and
will never visit – since at least we’ve still made it
possible for a different kind of interaction with our
museum and its resources.
Virtual Volunteering
In 2012 we decided to give virtual volunteering a
go. We put the word out on Facebook, and within a
few hours had a handful of people keen to take part.
Indexing and transcription projects were started,
using links to images in a Dropbox folder and to files
in Google Docs. A big surprise was how much people
genuinely appreciated the opportunity of taking part
and being involved. We soon realised that this was
something bigger than our organisation, and also a
support facility sorely lacking in the hugely dispersed
physical extent of Western Australia.
We applied for, and were successful in receiving a
grant from the Government of Western Australia’s
Social Innovation Grants Program – for a project to
further develop our concept of virtual volunteering.
This provided funding over two years for research,
development, trials, refinement, and the sharing of
outcomes. The aims of the project are to increase
the output of our organisation; to improve social
inclusion; and to provide additional volunteering
opportunities. To date, tasks undertaken by virtual
volunteers include transcribing, indexing, data entry,
data extraction, photo editing, and online research for
our Biographical Dictionary.
Carnamah has emulated the wonderful DIY History
model of the University of Iowa Libraries in the US,
using a blend of open-source platforms, plugins and
code. The result is our Virtual Volunteering website,
which has been used for many of our transcription
projects and is presently being utilised by the State
Library of Western Australia for the transcription of
their WA Biographical Index Cards.
The last ten years have changed the face of the
Carnamah Historical Society and Museum as
an organisation, exponentially adapting how we
interact with the wider community. Our visitors and
volunteers were once limited to tourists and locals.
Today, we are sharing with and receiving help from
anyone who is interested – wherever they are located.
The world just got a whole lot smaller, in a good
way. []
Andrew Bowman-Bright is Virtual Curator for the
Carnamah Historical Society & Museum.
Website: <www.carnamah.com.au>
Citation for this text: Andrew Bowman-Bright, ‘Breaking out in Carnamah: Virtually
transforming physical limits’, Museums Australia Magazine, Vol. 23 (1), Summer 2014,
pp.13—16.
above:
Volunteers at
Carnamah Museum.
How is Indigenous art 'framed' in varied exhibition contexts?
The ‘white cube’ changes colour:
Indigenous art between the museum and the art gallery
Margo Neale
F
top:
Installation image of
exhibition Utopia: the Genius
of Emily Kame Kngwarreye.
Photo: Lannon Harley, National
Museum of Australia, 2008.
above:
Margo Neale.
1. This essay follows the British
convention that refers to art museums
as ‘art galleries’, and to ethnographic
and history museums as ‘museums’.
2.The then Director of the National
Museum of Australia, Andrew Sayers,
has an art curatorial background.
rom about the 1980s, the protocols of public art
galleries and museums began to intersect. One
hundred years earlier, these museums were
established to authenticate the differences
between European civilisation and Indigenous
cultures. Like heaven and hell, they were two very
different domains: one reserved for those who
would inherit the earth, its large well-lit white walls
showing-off the splendour of its art; and the other
designated for those doomed races, their savage
practices displayed like relics in glass cases and
crowded in dark interiors like hastily gathered loot.
In the last thirty years there has been a revolution in
museology around these differences.
Today Indigenous art is displayed in both major
art galleries and museums, and often in similar ways.
[1]
Sometimes the same exhibitions appear in each
venue. Not long ago, the National Gallery of Victoria
(NGV) and the Museum of Victoria (MoV) jointly
curated a major exhibition of Papunya Tula paintings,
Tjukurrtjanu: Origins of Western Desert Art (NGV,
30 September 2011—12 February 2012). Exhibited
initially at the NGV in Melbourne, it later toured to
the Musée du quai Branly in Paris (9 October 2012–
20 January 2013) where, despite the ethnographic
display of the French museum’s own diverse cultural
collections, the Papunya paintings from Australia were
generously spaced on well-lit white walls.
In 2013 the exhibition, Old Masters: Australia’s
Great Bark Artists, was shown elegantly at the
National Museum of Australia (NMA) in a style that
conforms to the connoisseurship curatorial model of
modernism, with its ‘white cube’ attributes of minimal
context and dominant curatorial direction over
minimal Indigenous agency. This was unusual among
any of our non-art museums today, and certainly
for the NMA.[2] A number of visitors thought the
left: Installation image of
exhibition Papunya: Out of
the Desert. Photo: Lannon
Harley, National Museum
of Australia, 2007.
exhibition might reside more comfortably in an art
gallery.
By comparison, the Melbourne Museum had earlier
developed a hybrid museum and art gallery exhibition
in collaboration with Melbourne University’s Ian
Potter Museum of Art in 2009, utilising the Donald
Thomson collection and entitled Ancestral Power and
the Aesthetic: Bark Paintings and Objects — where
both the ancestral and the aesthetic were presented
with meaningful resolution. Here the various objects,
historic contexts and stories were pertinently
melded and brought into creative dialogue, and
Indigenous community engagement was high. Clarity,
connectedness and context prevailed. This jointly
created exhibition was later installed comfortably
in a number of city and regional art galleries and
museums when it went on tour.[3] Similarly, in 2005,
the art exhibition Colour Power: Aboriginal Art
post-1984 from the NGV had taken up residence in
the history-focused First Australians Gallery at the
National Museum of Australia, causing consternation
and raised eyebrows. What has been happening across
these varying exhibition projects and sites?
The short answer involves understanding of the
increasingly peripatetic nature of Aboriginal Art
across sites and categories. The longer answer relates
to the liberation and vocalisation of Indigenous
agency, stimulated by decades of political agitation
for Indigenous rights, and backgrounded by a global
postcolonial disposition surrounding all issues of
cultural representation.
The recent curation of Indigenous art has
confounded conventional museological practices in
Australian museums and fine art galleries, and found
a new presence in both. A well-known early example
of this categorical dilemma was Tony Tuckson’s 1959
negotiation of a collection donation (by Dr Scougall)
to the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW).
This enabled the long-term presentation of a group
of Pukumani poles from the Tiwi Islands, which
attracted the oft-quoted remark, ‘[T]heir rightful
place is in a museum.’[4]
However in 1988, following a showing in the
Biennale of Sydney, there was hardly a murmur
when 200 hollow log coffins were acquired for
the collection of the National Gallery of Australia
(NGA), as a memorial to Aboriginal deaths during
two centuries of colonisation. Another example of
category contests occurred with curator and academic
Vivien Johnson’s inability to place the now highly
sought-after Western Desert canvases in public
collections in the early 1980s. They were constantly
‘rejected by art galleries as too ethnographic, and by
museums as not ethnographic enough’.[5] Since then,
3.The exhibition toured to six venues
throughout NSW, VIC, TAS and NT,
which included regional, territory and
city art galleries, a museum, and the
main (combined) museum in Darwin,
MAGNT.
4. Margo Neale, Yiribana. Aboriginal
and Torres Strait Islander Collection
(Sydney: Art Gallery of New South
Wales, 1994) p.13.
5. Vivien Johnson, quoted in Diana
Streak, ‘Papunya’s Dream Images’,
The Canberra Times, Panorama, 1
December 2007, p.4.
6. Nicolas Peterson, Lindy Allen and
Louise Hamby (eds), The Makers
and Making of Indigenous Australian
Museum Collections (Carlton:
Melbourne University Press, 2008),
p.6.
7. http://www.iconophilia.net/ronsspeech/.
8. Rover Thomas and Trevor Nickolls
represented Australia in the Australian
Pavilion in Venice in 1990; and Emily
Kame Kngwarreye, Judy Watson and
Yvonne Koolmatrie in same Pavilion
in 1997.
9. Ron Radford made both this and the
previous point, in 2010, on a panel
of which I was also a member. The
paper was delivered at an Australian
Academy of Humanities symposium,
presented in Adelaide, 19 November
2010.
10. Simon Wright and Michael Eather,
‘Some other way: MJN and Campfire
Group’; exhibition catalogue,
Fireworks Gallery, Brisbane 2000 (np).
An exhibition of Michael Jagamara
Nelson’s work used his quote as the
title for the showing at the Brisbane
City Gallery, Queensland, in 1999.
11. Nicholas Thomas, Possessions:
Indigenous Art/Colonial Culture
(London: Thames and Hudson, 1987),
p.220. See also Howard Morphy,
Becoming Art: Exploring cross-cultural
art (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2008).
Morphy states that ‘formal appearance
unmediated by cultural knowledge’
has moral implications (p.184).
Anthropologist Ronald Berndt and
artist Tony Tuckson had also argued
over such points in the 1960s.
12. The old story that to provide
information beyond ‘vital statistics’
with contemporary works of art
reduces them to ethnography no
longer holds sway with the advent of
iPads and O systems (MONA) – if it
ever did!
13. Terry Smith, Thinking Contemporary
Curating (New York: Independent
Curators International, 2012), p.151.
however, Aboriginal paintings from the central and
northern deserts have found a place in both.
The ontological slipperiness of Indigenous art gives
rise to institutional debates that confuse, confound
and redefine not only the art itself but also the places
in which it resides. While western cultural institutions
have often suffered an identity crisis in relation to the
correct placement of Indigenous material, Indigenous
people generally have not shared any such dilemma.
It’s not our identity crisis.
Where the contemporary art world has generally
considered ‘the story’ to be a distracting scaffold,
the museum world has been overly invested in the
authenticity of Indigenous stories, usually mediated
by anthropologists, to the point that when an aesthetic
emphasis was given to these storytelling objects
it often disqualified them from holding historical
status. The last two decades of the twentieth century
witnessed strong contests in the field of exhibitions of
Indigenous art:
Central to the rise of Aboriginal art
[in the 1980s] was the effort by many
outside anthropology to wrest it from
anthropologists, and the ethnographic
museum, and locate it inside the gallery.[6]
One of the first to do this was Bernice Murphy,
who included three large Western Desert paintings
in Australian Perspecta 1981, when inaugurating a
biennale of contemporary Australian art at the Art
Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney. Some objected
that the ‘spiritual’ desert works were contaminated
by their close proximity to the colour-field abstract
paintings of David Aspden, falsely framing them in
terms of Western abstract art values. Others had a
contrasting concern: that the detailed ethnographic
interpretations (reproduced from the catalogue) that
were wall-mounted above their museum labels –
unlike works elsewhere in the exhibition – ‘othered’
the work as culturally distinct and ‘tribal’. This
dichotomy continued to challenge curators and
institutions over the following decades, and is at the
core of this story.
As recently as 2010, at the opening of the Indigenous
galleries at the NGA, then Director, Ron Radford,
still caught up in these old plotlines, declared that
‘The galleries are ... consciously and unapologetically
designed for the permanent collection of Indigenous
art, not for anthropology’.[7] This point was already
anachronistic. It is now well over two decades since
five Aboriginal artists, across two occasions (1990
and 1997), were selected to represent Australia at
the Venice Biennale – arguably the most prestigious
contemporary art event in the world.
There have also been notable Indigenous inclusions
in innumerable international biennials and triennials
since then, which reflects its well-established position
as contemporary art[8]. This apparent boxing at
shadows would seem to be a case of not letting the
truth get in the way of a good story – the ongoing
story believed by some that art galleries continue to
be the sole discoverers and saviours of Aboriginal
art. This attitude expressed by Ron Radford is also
the apparent justification for the lack of context
accompanying Indigenous work, seemingly on the
basis that to contextualise is to make it ethnographic
and thus diminish its value as art.[9]
The downside of this thinking is to deny the rights
of artists to have their stories heard – which for
most is a primary purpose in making art. As Michael
Jagamara Nelson put it in 1999, ‘[W]ithout the story,
the painting is nothing’.[10] The removal of cultural
context also denies audience access, promotes
western elitist attitudes, and reinforces the stereotype
of us as a people being mystical and unknowable.
The impact of allowing the imposition of western
disciplinary categories and institutional values on
our cultural production, without discernment (or
intervention), risks a form of assimilation according
to anthropologist and cultural historian Nicholas
Thomas. Thomas has observed that:
[T]hose who declare their progressive
stance … and an interest in cultural
difference … in fact only acknowledge the
work that is most consistent with the space
and time of the art world ... close to their
own aesthetic and theoretical values.[11]
It is similarly misguided to consider an emphasis on
the aesthetic form of Indigenous objects as somehow
diminishing of their cultural or historical value.
Rather, it is when art gallery exhibitions and museum
exhibitions both acknowledge the place of cultural
context and find different ways of transmitting story
that the boundaries between art and ethnography blur,
and as such are not confined to any particular site.
Some good examples of this development have already
been found in exhibitions such as Ancestral Power and
the Aesthetic: Bark Paintings and Objects (Ian Potter
Museum of Art at the University of Melbourne, 10
June—23 August 2009); Papunya Painting: Out of the
Desert (National Museum of Australia, Canberra, 28
November 2007—3 February 2008); Yiwarra Kuju: The
Canning Stock Route (National Museum of Australia,
30 July 2010 —26 January 2011); and string theory:
Focus on Contemporary Australian Art (MCA, Sydney,
16 August—27 October 2013).[12] These exhibitions
were mostly displayed in darkened spaces. With the
advance of the decolonising curatorial model, the
white cube changes colour.[13]
Such concerns, and others, were provocatively
addressed in 1996 by the Brisbane-based Campfire
Collective, with its artistic intervention entitled
All stock must go!, shown at the Second Asia-Pacific
top:
middle:
bottom:
left:
right:
14. See Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational
Aesthetics (Paris, 1998; English edition,
2002).
15. Margo Neale, Cultural Brokerage
in the Aboriginal StockmarketInstallation Art as Social Metaphor,
Present Encounters. Papers from the
conference, The second Asia-Pacific
Triennial of Contemporary Art,
Queensland Art Gallery & Griffith
University, 1996, p. 76.
16. As the inaugural Indigenous art
curator at Queensland Art Gallery,
and a member of the local Indigenous
community, I was a participant in the
creation of this work. Consistent with
‘dismantling hierarchies’, I was the
‘black insider’ of the white institution,
joining the ‘outsiders’.
17. Both responses were given to me at
each institution.
Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT2), at the
Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane. Campfire’s
mission of artistic self-determination included
a challenge to prevailing art/artefact/kitsch
categories,[14] as used to define and confine us, when
in fact Aboriginal art is neither, but both – thus the
institutional challenge.
Furthermore, Campfire Collective challenged
‘us and them’ attitudes by enacting the reality of
shared influences, in visual collaborations between
Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists, unknowingly
engaging in what Nicolas Bourriaud has referred to
as relational agency. Propelled by political satire with
a large dose of Aboriginal agency, this performanceinstallation piece of 1996 defiantly located itself in the
intersection between the art gallery and the museum.
The work was described as a cattle truck with a mob
of ‘blackfellas’ selling art from the ‘back of a truck’[15]
when installed outside the entrance of QAG. We were
invited in, but chose to stay out.[16] We were ‘at’ but
not ‘in’ the state gallery. This self-marginalisation
was so successful that it took a decade for the work to
find its way eventually inside, and become part of an
institutional collection.
Despite the fact that All stock must go! was
suitable for inclusion in an international triennial
of contemporary art at QAG, it was rejected for
acquisition by the then Assistant Director on the basis
that it was ‘not the kind of thing we collect but better
suited to a museum’. A decade later it met a similar
reaction from the NMA, which declared that it was
‘better suited to an art gallery’.[17] Whilst the work was
still considered unsuitably artistic and metaphoric
rather than original and authentic by some at the
NMA, its strong historic narrative and urban voice
eventually got it over the line, with a debut showing
at a museum achieved in the exhibition 70% Urban, in
NMA’s Gallery of First Australians, in 2007.
left:
Campfire Group (with
Director Doug Hall as serving
boy) in the Boardroom at
Queensland Art Gallery , 1996,
catalogue photo for installation
‘All Stock must go!’, Asia-Pacific
Triennial of Contemporary Art,
Courtesy Fireworks Gallery.
middle:
right: Campfire Group installation,
‘All Stock must go!’, Queensland
Art Gallery, Asia-Pacific Triennial
of Contemporary Art, 1996.
Since the 1980s, the politics of contemporary
art in Australia have ‘wrested’ Aboriginal art from
anthropology across to the art gallery, subjecting it in
the process to the ‘white cube’ formalist display and
reception applied to Western art. Whilst this removed
Aboriginal art from the stigma of primitivism, it also
subjected it to the tropes of modernism that are used
to rebadge Aboriginal art as contemporary art.
It might have seemed a good idea to compare
Western Desert painting to Western abstraction
(with minimal text, as if this would alone prove its
contemporaneity), but it became a double-edged
sword. At the very moment when Aboriginal art was
subject to contemporary paradigms of modernism,
modernism was already outmoded. In the 1960s and
1970s, western contemporary artists turned away from
modernism in favour of land, conceptual, spiritual
and performance art. By the 1980s, post-conceptual
practices had moved well beyond the aesthetic
regimes of modernism and into the post-colonial
models that emerged strongly in the 1990s.
Ironically, the approaches of museums rather than
the practices of art galleries now seem more attuned
to the relational art and postcolonial practices that
have captured the imagination of contemporary
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists and
curators, both black and white. It is not only the
museums’ practices in relation to documentation,
installations and recreations that resonate, but also
their anthropological focus on elements inherent in
Indigenous culture – such as connection to land and
environment, spirituality, ritual and ceremony.
Today, the values of the contemporary are bringing
the once very different paradigms of the art gallery
and museum into creative dialogue. In Australia,
the dilemma of how to display Aboriginal art as
simultaneously Aboriginal and contemporary was
instrumental in developing the new museology of
the twenty-first century. The paradigms of western
modernism were not necessary to make Aboriginal art
seem contemporary – it already was. []
For a fuller discussion of this topic, see Margo Neale,
‘Whose Identity Crisis? Between the Ethnographic
and the Art Museum’, in the forthcoming book,
Transculturation: Indigenous Contemporary Art, edited
by Ian McLean (Cambridge Scholars Publishing –
forthcoming).
Margo Neale is a Senior Research Fellow, Senior Curator and
Principal Indigenous Advisor to the Director at the National
Museum of Australia. Margo is also an Adjunct Professor in
the history program at the Australian National University's
Australian Centre for Indigenous History.
Citation for this text: Margo Neale, ‘The ‘white cube’ changes colour: Indigenous art
between the museum and the art gallery’, Museums Australia Magazine, Vol. 23 (1),
Summer 2014, pp.17—21.
The potential of museum leadership development in a global perspective
Museum leadership: A new international training experience
Louise Tegart
G
above:
Louise Tegart
far right:
Guggenheim Bilbao
featuring "Tall Tree & the
Eye" by Anish Kapoor 2009.
lobal practices in arts administration
are constantly undergoing profound
transformations as a result of advances in
technology, access to information, funding
systems, management practices, and changing
audiences. Working in museums in Australia, it
can often seem that we focus intensely on our own
situation, and if we do get the time to look at broader
museum practice and trends we tend to look around
regionally to our neighbours in Asia.
ILPVAM: a multi-site model for museum leadership training globally
In 2014, I had the privilege of participating
in an innovative new professional development
program that aimed at truly global perspectives. The
International Leadership Program in Visual Arts
Management (ILPVAM) was developed by three
institutions abroad – New York University, DeUsto
University Bilbao, and the Guggenheim Museum,
Bilbao — and 2013–2014 offered the added spur of
participation in the inaugural edition of the program.
The ILPVAM content modules combined advanced
business theory and development techniques,
together with the latest concepts and global trends
in visual arts management and administration, to
provide a rigorous, engaging educational program for
experienced museum professionals.
The aims of the program were to facilitate
understanding of the current competitive
environment and key drivers of success in global
arts industries; to strengthen the strategic vision
of cultural organisations and the leadership skills
required to face the challenges of the industry in the
twenty-first century; and to improve decision-making
skills and process through a number of learning
strands. The program focused on mastering the
fundamentals of arts management, including strategy
and governance, financial management, marketing,
fundraising, and operations. A further goal was to
facilitate acquisition of an international network of
colleagues, experts, and practitioners in the global arts
industry, which would provide a stimulating reference
group for ongoing self-development of participants
after the program concluded.
The application and interview process to gain
admission to the ILPVAM program was rigorous
and competitive, since the program coordinators
wanted the right balance of experience and diversity
of candidates from different institutional and
non-institutional backgrounds. The fifteen selected
participants were drawn from a wide geographical
catchment area: from the United States, Canada,
Spain, Qatar, Mexico, Italy, Macau, Kuwait, Serbia,
Ghana and Australia. I was the only Australian
participant, and was fortunate to receive a grant from
the Career Fund of the Australian Copyright Council
to assist with costs of attendance.
The participants’ diverse professional roles
demonstrated the variety of different models of visual
arts management in play across the globe today:
from the Head of the Axia Bank Foundation in Spain,
where banks fund cultural projects; to an independent
curator from Mexico, working on projects in Italy and
the US; to a private Arts Foundation director from
Ghana.
Unlike similar leadership programs, such as the
Getty Leadership Institute program developed
through several iterations since the 1980s in the
USA, the unique aspect of the ILPVAM program
was provided by the three different locations, and
successive stages, through which the course was
realised.
ILPVAM was delivered through three fiveday, intensive modules, immersing participants
in three sites of innovative cultural management
internationally: first in Bilbao, in September 2013;
next in New York, in February 2014; and finally in
Abu Dhabi, in April 2014. The international scope of
the program allowed participants to experience firsthand these important and very different centres of
the global arts sector, as well as receiving first-hand
training from leading instructors in each region.
This open structure, and developmental time-scale,
allowed ILPVAM participants to develop their ideas
and learning techniques between modules, in order
to return subsequently with questions derived from
applied practice of earlier training. Each module
had an extensive pre-reading list of articles, and
assignments to be conducted between modules, as
well as online discussions and exercises throughout
the six-month period of the program’s realisation.
The three training modules were further shaped
around the environment in which each was held.
Realised across three distinctive cities and
institutional contexts in such different parts
of the world, the program ensured a highlevel learning experience around leadership.
Module 1: Bilbao
The first module in Bilbao was titled Understanding
the Environment: Global Trends and Strategic Vision.
Key areas of focus for this module were: Global
Trends in Arts Management; Strategy and Value
Creation; Sustainability as a Competitive Advantage;
Mission, Identity and Institutional Visibility; Building
Cultural Value and Capital; Entrepreneurship and
Innovation; New Leadership Concepts: Coaching in
Cultural Institutions; Art and Urban Development;
Culture-Led Initiatives: Creative Industries; and
Communicating with Audiences.
In order to bring these topics to life, the first day
of the program (in Bilbao, September 2013) focused
on the city of Bilbao and the Guggenheim Museum
Bilbao. It is widely known that the Guggenheim
Museum Bilbao is the result of an unprecedented
partnership between the City of Bilbao and the
Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in New York.
More than seventeen years after its opening in
October 1997, the Museum is a reality that has
exceeded the most ambitious artistic and cultural
expectations of its creators, and ‘the Bilbao effect’
— or the extraordinary stimulation of the urban,
economic, and social regeneration of the city of Bilbao
and the Basque Country — is widely known. This
is sometimes rebadged as ‘the Guggenheim effect’,
as other museums and city governments around
the world have courted the Guggenheim to achieve
similar developments through partnership with the
famous New York-based museum.
However the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao was
only one piece in the puzzle that provided the
comprehensive cultural and economic regeneration
of Bilbao in the 1990s. In an extraordinary example of
long-term strategy and leadership, the Bilbao Council
spent twenty-five years enacting their comprehensive
plan to improve the environment, services, transport,
public art and architecture of the city.
Culture was defined in fact as one of eight priorities
for the City of Bilbao, and was anchored in a broader
strategy of redefinition of the city following the
collapse of its industrial economy, centred on steel, in
the 1980s. The City of Bilbao undertook 25 significant
projects over 25 years in their redevelopment strategy,
utilising funding from private and public partnerships
as well as state and national government funding.
Vision and consistency were key aspects of the
implementation of their strategic redevelopment.
The Deputy Mayor of Bilbao, Ibon Areso, spoke to
the ILPVAM group in 2013: highlighting the need
for visionary, even strident leadership in the face of
adversity. For example, the Bilbao museum’s council
persisted against doubters and went ahead with
the Guggenheim project, even after the city had
unanimously voted against it, because they believed
in the vision and strategy that they had developed.
Such determination paid off in eventually producing
an economic impact of $330 million euros and
6,324 people in local jobs, as a result of the cultural
redevelopment of Bilbao.
Director of the Guggenheim Bilbao, Juan Ignacio
Vidarte, reflected on the museum as a catalyst for
change and a boost to self-esteem of the city: to
project a new image to the world and demonstrate
that Bilbao could compete on a global scale.
Vidarte spoke of culture as a transformational tool,
and emphasised the unique private and public
partnerships that have allowed the museum to
flourish.
The Guggenheim Bilbao has been so successful
that there are now plans for a second Guggenheim
museum in the northern Basque Country. The gamble
has paid off in multiple directions and the success
of the Frank Gehry–designed Bilbao Guggenheim
Museum achieved more than perhaps any other
cultural institution of its time to convince city leaders
and developers worldwide that where cultural megaprojects go, economic transformation follows.
However it was the long-term strategic plan
encompassing the regeneration of many parts of
the city that was uniquely robust in Bilbao, and
has demonstrated why other planned Guggenheim
projects, as well as a great proliferation of large-scale
museum projects internationally, have since failed.
For example, the Vilnius Guggenheim Hermitage
project for Lithuania, originally scheduled to open
in 2011, became mired in set-backs that eventually
produced a public inquiry into allegations of
misappropriation of funds within the municipality.
Meanwhile the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, scheduled
to open in 2013, is delayed and due to open in 2017,
amid ongoing protests about labourers’ rights. And
the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, opened shortly
after the Guggenheim Bilbao and funded entirely
by Berlin’s Deutsche Bank in whose headquarters
building it opened in 1997, closed at the end of 2012.
It is not just the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum
and some of its partnership-ventures that have
failed to repeat the model of economic regeneration
through art and new architecture in Bilbao. Failures
to replicate the ‘Bilbao effect’ elsewhere have
demonstrated that a singular quest for addition
of a signature new building by a ‘starchitect’ does
not guarantee success. For example, the National
Lottery-funded National Centre for Popular Music in
Sheffield, England, which opened on 1 March 1999,
received only a quarter of its projected visitors and
became bankrupt in its first year of operations, closing
in June 2000. The Canadian Museum for Human
Rights, Winnipeg, has been through similar challenges
more recently: its ambitious building design failed
to achieve planned completion in 2012, and finally
opened in November 2014, but $40 million dollars
in excess of budget. Meanwhile the much older
American Folk Art Museum, redeveloped in a new
‘signature’ building (2001) opposite the Museum of
Modern Art in New York City, was unable to service
its loans, forcing the museum to relocate in 2011 to
its modest former home at Lincoln Square and sell
its mid-town building (to MoMA as it turned out).
All these ambitious projects experienced failure and
frustration, through over-optimistic development
modelling.
Returning to the ILPVAM leadership program:
the final two days of the Bilbao module focused
on strategy, in particular the concept of strategic
orchestration. Developed by charismatic lecturer
Alejandro Ruelas Gossi, Professor of Strategy at
Miami University, the idea of strategic orchestration
mobilises concepts that provide an antithesis to
contemporary management theory. Ruelas-Gossi
argues contrarily that benchmarking encourages
sameness; that pursuit of low-cost goals is ineffective;
and that competitiveness is ultimately unproductive.
Strategic orchestration, in this counter-analysis,
occurs when an organisation pursues a development
opportunity not by leveraging strategic power or
seeking to command all required resources but
by innovatively assembling and coordinating a
network of partners. While not having all resources
needed initially, but being able to gather them
through partnerships, strategic orchestration allows
organisations actually to ‘get to market’ faster, to adapt
nimbly to changing circumstances, and to lower their
invested capital and exposure to risk, thereby allowing
them to search out less immediately profitable
but new opportunities – such as serving emerging
markets, which can then grow further in future.
With such a perspective, strategic orchestration has
immense potential in the domain of public-private
partnerships for cultural organisations.
Ruelas-Gossi advocated not just listening to
customers but understanding what they do; and
not simply satisfying present customer demands
but surprising them by coming up with a new value
proposition. Through not focusing on competitors
but expanding your value and creating a unique
offer; through strengthening your strengths and
re-orchestrating internal weaknesses: by these means
an organisation can act effectively to create and lead
new developments.
Ruelas-Gossi also outlined ten key characteristics
he found in successful leaders: yhey have no Plan
B; they demonstrate passion for their projects; they
above:
Students in the ILPVAM
Program visit the Queens
Museum. Photo: Ann Webb.
can weather the storm of an uncertain environment;
they can manage many things at once; they utilise
diplomacy; they are a meaning facilitator; they are an
orchestrator of combined effort; they are preoccupied
with growth; they have an excellent memory; and they
are obsessed with details.
Additional sessions in the Bilbao program examined
the creative industries in Europe, entrepreneurship,
the future of cities, sustainability, and global trends
affecting museums. There were also intensive sessions
provided with curatorial, exhibitions, education, and
visitor services managers at the Guggenheim Bilbao,
and participants were given unprecedented access to
their knowledge, practices and facilities.
Other site visits after a full day of learning sessions
included the 1999 Euskalduna Conference Centre
and Concert Hall (designed by architects Federico
Soriano and Dolores Palacios and located in a former
shipyards area of Bilbao); and the Alhóndiga Bilbao
cultural centre, a redevelopment in a former winery
building designed by Phillipe Starck and opened in
2010. These two further local cultural redevelopments
allowed us to gain back-of-house insights into the
management of major mixed-use cultural facilities.
Module 2: New York
Relocating from summer in Sydney to winter in
New York, for the February 2014 course module,
was an unforgettable experience climatically. In the
worst winter week in twenty years, the ILPVAM
participants reconvened after a six months gap at New
York University, overlooking the magical downtown
setting of Washington Square.
Module 2 focused on Leadership, Audience
and Funding. It included sessions on Leadership
and Change Management; Understanding the
Changing Culture Audience; Cultural Marketing
and Communications; Cultural Branding and Brand
Management; Innovations in Fundraising; Governance
and Board Management; Strategic Alliances;
Partnerships and Collaborations; Interactivity and
Participation; Art Practices, Art Law and Intellectual
Property Rights.
Speakers including from the Museum of Modern
Art, Guggenheim, and Whitney museums, the
American Federation for the Arts and New York
University, diversely addressed current notions of
participatory experiences, the changing needs of
audiences, market segmentation, new funding models,
and the impact of new technologies for cultural
organisations.
Professor Mary Jo Hatch, Professor of Business at
the University of Virginia and Adjunct Professor at
the Copenhagen Business School and Boston College,
spoke to the importance of understanding and
utilising a brand: a museum leader can use leadership,
management and communication principles to
strengthen an organisation’s brand, and through
branding effect changes in an organisation’s identity,
culture, image and reputation.
Mary Jo Hatch’s model of alignment between
the strategic vision, organisational culture and
stakeholder perceptions of a cultural facility derives
from a process of examining a number of critical gaps:
the vision/culture gap, the image/culture gap, and the
image/vision gap. Her ‘gap’ modelling presents a clear
methodology for identifying where unresolved issues
frequently lie within an organisation’s understanding
of itself, and provides a path to articulating a clearer
strategic direction for development. Her example
of Lego, which diversified its products to such an
extreme that it faced bankruptcy, was a significant
case-study of how clarity of purpose and authenticity
need to be the prime drivers of any organisation’s
development.
Site visits in New York included the Consulate
General of The Netherlands, to discuss soft power,
art and diplomacy; and a further session on
interactivity and participation at MoMA, led by
Wendy Woon, Deputy Director for Education. We
were give an overview of recent research at MoMA
about participatory activities, and of MoMA’s social
and multi-modal way of engaging with art by direct
experience and created interventions, including
activities in the museum spaces provided for groups.
One of the highlights in New York was a site
visit to the recently redeveloped Queens Museum,
where then-Director Tom Finkelpearl outlined
his personal philosophy on leadership and the
development of his museum. The Queens Museum is
an outstanding example of what a regional museum
can be, embracing both local and international
engagement of audiences. Without understanding
and embracing the local specificity of Queens, the
museum would have been merely a second- or thirdtier venue for travelling exhibitions. However in the
context of America’s most diverse population locally,
the dynamics of internationalism, globalisation,
multiculturalism and the complexities of immigration
were able to be engaged in the one borough adjoining
Manhattan.
The Queens Museum has hired community
organisers to pursue different paths of community
engagement. For example, it has involved art
therapists who have developed programs around
autism; provided programming in multiple languages;
employed community workers and artists who work
off-site; and produced community festivals and public
art projects. These are just some of the innovative
programs that have worked successfully within a
ground-breaking culture of community engagement at
Queens Museum.
Module 3: Abu Dhabi
Module 3, two months later, involved another extreme
weather change when ILPVAM reconvened in Abu
Dhabi in April 2014. This last module, titled Operating
in the Global Art Sector, focused on the following
components: Reinventing Operations Management;
Managing People; Financial Management; Cultural
Heritage; Cultural Diplomacy; Global/Local: Cultural
Tourism; Developing Community and Creating
Audience; Art Markets; and Re-Visioning the Visual
Arts Sector.
Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates, has
been the focus of a slew of media reports in the last
few years about its iconic Saadiyat Island Cultural
District development: entailing the building of twentynine hotels, creation of a branch campus of New York
University, and construction of five major museums.
Scheduled for completion in 2016–17 are the following
‘signature’ cultural institutions: the US 800-milliondollar Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim Abu Dhabi,
which will be twelve times the size of the New York
flagship museum; a half-billion dollar outpost of the
Louvre museum, designed by Jean Nouvel; and the
Zayed National Museum, designed by Norman Foster,
to be the centrepiece of the Saadiyat Island Cultural
District and showcasing the culture and related
traditions of the United Arab Emirates.
This last venture also involves a major partnership
in programming, with the British Museum engaged
in organisation of major exhibitions for ZNM. The
choice of architects for each of these museums has
been deliberate and strategic, since each is from the
country with which a major development partnership
has been forged for each museum’s construction and
ongoing programming.
The remarkable museum projects in Abu Dhabi
provide an interesting study in the development of
audiences today, as well as in the cultural potential
of harnessing ‘soft power’ to convert ‘hard’ wealth
available through exploitation of natural resources.
Fifty years ago Abu Dhabi was a Bedouin village
whose inhabitants survived on fishing, pearl diving
and animal herding. Oil production began in the
1960s, and western oil companies financed the first
paved roads, hospitals and schools. The city grew
rapidly and absorbed a growing population drawn
from around the world, with Emiratis today making
up twenty per cent of the population and foreigners
the remainder. Globalism, as evidenced in the growth
of neighbouring Dubai, has demonstrated how a
developing city may utilise a variety of resources and
completely transform itself in a very short period.
Sheik Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahayan, son of Sheik
Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahayan, who founded the
country by bringing together several emirates under
Abu Dhabi’s leadership in the 1970s, aims now to instil
national pride in the UAE, while providing Emirati
citizens with intellectual and psychological tools
for living in a global society. Faced with a need to
diversify beyond reliance on oil and create sustainable
socio-economic sectors for the future, the way Sheik
Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahayan has chosen to achieve
this long-term development is by utilising art and
architecture for nation-branding, through the building
of world-recognised museums.
Sheik Khalifa’s cultural vision is for Abu Dhabi
to be a destination of international standing, while
developing twenty-first-century skills in critical
thinking and problem solving, and providing career
paths for Emirati citizens in future. In terms of labour,
sixty percent of workers hired for the new museums
will be Emiratis — an ambitious objective, as currently
there are less than 20 Emiratis with training and
specialisations in museums and cultural management,
and foreigners at present make up the majority of the
museums’ staff.
The Louvre Abu Dhabi’s curatorial strategy, through
displaying objects and art both chronologically
and stylistically, will explore connections between
seemingly disparate civilisations and cultures around
the world. The overarching museological concept is
for a ‘universal museum’, transcending geography and
nationality. Louvre Abu Dhabi is developing its own
national collection, including Islamic art, which will
be enriched by loans from French National museums
including the Musée du Louvre, Musée d’Orsay, and
Centre Pompidou.
The Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, by contrast, will
provide a focus for modern art, concentrating on
the period from 1965 to the present and showcasing
the primacy of Western art, through its planned
representation of key movements since the 1960s
in Europe and the United States. The Guggenheim
project is proving the most problematic in the
curatorial approaches adopted, since there appears
to be no concession towards the culture of the
country in which the museum is located. Rather, the
Guggenheim Abu Dhabi project provides a direct
import-model: of simply installing Western culture as
the source of modern art’s progress, without creating
local connections for its ongoing development.
However the Zayed National Museum, by contrast,
will involve a richer conception of culture, displaying
both tangible and intangible UAE heritage. It will
aim to increase a sense of UAE national identity
through highlighting awareness of culture’s diverse
manifestations today.
Manarat Al Saadiyat is a 15,400-square-metres
visitors centre, designed to bring the vision of the
new island and Cultural District to life through the
Saadiyat Story. The developing museums have to
date been showcasing their differing concepts on the
Island through a series of exhibitions — such as the
Louvre Abu Dhabi exhibition, Birth of a Museum,
2014, which displayed part of that museum’s growing
collection.
Each institution has also been running a program
of public talks in order to develop audiences in the
lead-up to their openings. While there have been
steady visitor numbers engaged, these are not yet
large enough to claim that sustainable audiences
are being developed for the future support of these
museums. The challenges ahead lie in connecting the
diverse mix of cultures locally, embracing language
differences, and addressing the dilemma that many
museum scholars are not automatically great public
communicators. Meanwhile a venture to engage
the powerful world of contemporary art, Abu Dhabi
Art Fair, has also been developed as a pre-museum
audience development initiative — though to date
this Fair falls dramatically short of the region’s more
established Dubai Art Fair.
The main concern around developing audiences
for the five major museums on Saadiyat Island is
that there is no existing museum culture in Abu
Dhabi. Bedouin traditional culture is largely focused
on intangible heritage, transmitted mainly through
inter-personal and oral traditions such as storytelling,
right:
ILPVAM participant
Sa'id Costa, Director Visual Arts
Katara Village Doha giving a
tour to ILPVAM colleagues.
poetry and songs. The majority of the foreign
population in Abu Dhabi meanwhile is made up of
imported workers who are brought in to provide a
labour-force for new construction. These groups don’t
naturally provide the audiences sought as visitors for
the new museums, and a critical strategic question
is whether the huge cultural organisations being
created can be sustained mainly through an economic
modelling focused on international tourism.
The Abu Dhabi museums have also drawn the
attention of international media, due to local social
and labour questions concerning the treatment of
the construction workers employed on the signature
cultural projects. For example, the Gulf Ultra
Luxury Faction (G.U.L.F.) is currently trying to raise
awareness about UAE labour conditions, and this
group’s activities have included an online presence as
well as staging protests at New York’s Guggenheim
Museum — most recently at the beginning of
November 2014. G.U.L.F has also joined cause with
Gulf Labor, a coalition of artists and activists who
have been working since 2011 to highlight issues
affecting local workers, such as the withholding of
their passports, onerous debts incurred through
recruitment fees, violent interrogations of alleged
labour organizers, wage deception, and even
deportation of labourers who protest their conditions.
Discontent with many aspects of the UAE museums’
creation is also not confined to the Middle East. There
has been resistance voiced in France to the idea of
exporting and ‘franchising’ a National Museum such
as the Louvre. Meanwhile the Guggenheim Museum
in New York has also drawn criticism for its director
Richard Armstrong’s overbearing comments such
as that the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi will ‘be a beacon
of cultural value’ in the United Arab Emirates.
Guggenheim officials have meanwhile maintained
that they believe expansion is central to their own
mission and survival, and that the museum in Abu
Dhabi is expected to produce significant revenues for
the Solomon R Guggenheim Foundation.
For ILPVAM participants, invaluable discussion and
debate about the new Saadiyat Island museums was
facilitated by first-hand study and presenters from
the local context. A range of speakers from the Abu
Dhabi Tourism and Culture Authority, which oversees
the museums, as well as by US Ambassador Michael
Corbin, provided first-hand views on the role of
museums in developing the future of Abu Dhabi.
Participants were privileged to take a site tour of
the Louvre Abu Dhabi, and to witness Jean Nouvel’s
magnificent dome being put in place. While many of
the participants had conflicted reactions about the
development of these new museums, it was generally
agreed that the total enterprise was a courageous
and commendable venture on the part of Abu Dhabi
leaders to utilise culture and the arts as key drivers
in developing a distinctive ‘brand’ for their nation
globally.
ILPVAM in review
The International Leadership Program in Visual Arts
Management offered both global scope and enriched
local knowledge of cultural institutions and changing
markets today. Realised across three distinctive
cities and institutional contexts in such different
parts of the world, the program ensured a high-level
learning experience around leadership. It provided a
forum for debate, discussion, and engagement with
an international network of senior practitioners and
experts, and it richly expanded opportunities for
international networking of all alumni afterwards.
Within the unique environments provided,
participants were enabled to develop their own
understanding and skills in leading and managing
visual arts organisations today, in ways that were
relevant and transferable back to their own contexts
and organisations locally.
The key themes and connecting lessons that
emerged — notably the importance of integrity and
being true to your mission and values — provided
linking threads through all the modules, together with
cultivation of participants’ abilities to harness the best
of themselves and concentrate attention on achieving
clarity around purpose, goals and resources.
From my personal vantage-point, the ILPVAM
program to nurture leadership in visual arts
management proved an incredibly stimulating
and enriching experience, and provided learning
opportunities and contacts that I will continue
to draw on in my ongoing work in Australia. The
program confirmed that as a leader today one needs
multiple skills of being nimble and articulate, being
well-equipped to present key arguments for the
development and management of cultural institutions,
by not simply being reactive but ready to explore and
instigate informed change initiatives.
Firm friendships and connections were made by
the conclusion of the program in Abu Dhabi, and an
additional four days spent outside the course were
added onto the Abu Dhabi module – to enable visits
to Qatar, and its capital Doha, on the eastern coast
of the Persian Gulf, and to view various museum
developments there.
The 2013—2014 ILPVAM participants are now
planning on meeting in Mexico in 2015, to continue
the professional development gained through this
innovative program, and to extend their experience
in another country and region of today’s globally
developing cultural institutions and infrastructure.
Museum Leadership Program 2015
“From Vision to Reality - Ideas to Action”
4 — 9 October 2015
Macquarie Graduate School of Management
Sydney
Who Should Apply
The Museum Leadership Program targets high-level
museum professionals.
Places on the Museum Leadership Program are
limited and selection is competitive.
Expressions of Interest
Related Museums Australia
For further information about the Museum
Leadership Program please contact Lee Scott at
[email protected] before 27 March
2015.
Magazine articles:
1.
Annette Welkamp, 'Current
Gulf States projects:
Internationalism and
cross-cultural exchange',
More information
Museums Australia
Magazine, Vol. 18 (1),
For more information on the Faculty and past MLP
programs visit the Museums Australia website at
www.museumsaustralia.org.au
September 2009, pp. 27-30.
2.
‘MLP 1999–2012: A
far-sighted initiative
elevating museum
leadership capabilities
in Australia’, Museums
Louise Tegart is Manager of Exhibitions at the State Library
of New South Wales, Sydney.
Australia Magazine, Vol.
21(3), Museums Australia,
Canberra, Autumn 2013,
Citation for this text: Louise Tegart, ‘Museum leadership: A new international training
experience’, Museums Australia Magazine, Vol. 23 (1), Summer 2014, pp.22—28.
pp. 12.
Ephemera collections and their place within larger collections
One man’s trash is another man’s treasure:
Australian political ephemera
Craig Middleton
T
top:
Craig Middleton
above:
Australian Labor Party,
Badge: Bob Hawke, AHM1936.
Image courtesy of the
Australian History Museum.
hink about the last museum you visited. You
might have arrived by public transport, which
meant you bought a ticket. If you drove, maybe
you paid for a parking ticket. You arrived and
greeted the front-of-house team and purchased
your entry ticket. If the museum offered free entry,
you might have taken the site map or a flyer about the
collection and its significance. In any such case you
have interacted with ephemera on a basic level.
Ephemera are those materials that are transitory
by nature; and the fate of these items is usually their
disappearance from existence or record. That is to
say that most ephemeral material is thrown away,
disregarded and never thought of again. In the case of
your bus tickets, museum entrance tickets or museum
flyers: these are created for short-term use in large
numbers. It is interesting, then, to consider that
mass-produced ephemera are often the least likely
to endure and the most difficult to locate after shortterm use; but that this type of ephemera is significant
and worthy of collection, because such items are
representative of everyday life.
Ephemera collections can be sorted into two
main collection types. The first is that of an already
existing collection on a specialist topic – for example,
motoring history – which includes pieces of ephemera
within that history, such as a 1950s driver’s licence
(Clinton, 1981). This type of collection is more likely
to be found in most collecting institutions that cover
social history. However such ephemera are rarely on
display; or if displayed at all, included only to provide
background context for a more prominently presented
social history.
The second type of collection is that of what Leslie
Shepard has coined ‘Street Literature’ (Shepard, 1973).
This type of collection enables us to take a look back
through social history, focusing on specific ephemera
that were used to educate and inform the everyday
person through mass communication, and often street
communication. Such collections include posters,
proclamations, tickets, ballot papers and various other
forms of related ephemera.
Museum collections that incorporate printed
ephemera, or even focus solely on such material, are
generally more common in the United States. This
could be due to the fact that the US is highly focused
on celebrating its history in the education of American
citizens; and more attention was paid generally to
American history in the nineteenth century (Lewis,
1976) than Australians usually paid to their own
history.
Ephemera collections can often be underrated or
misunderstood in our history collections and displays,
but that is not to suggest that they do not exist. On
the contrary, the Australian state libraries and other
specialist collecting institutions in Australia do collect
ephemera, but generally do not commit corresponding
energies to their use or active interpretation in
exhibitions. More active interpretation of ephemeral
items needs to be addressed by Australian institutions
that collect such material.
Political ephemera
Political ephemera provides a unique
perspective into Australia’s social life
and political landscape: the rise and fall
of policies, issues, parties and careers
(National Library of Australia).
Items of political ephemera form a unique category
of ephemera, encompassing many different forms of
transitory material that have inherent connections
with specific political contexts – that is, the everyday
materials and objects, fleeting by nature, used for
election campaigns and political purposes. Material
such as posters, buttons, speeches, ballot papers and
tickets are all significant forms of political ephemera.
This sub-category of ephemera also encompasses
other objects that may be retained from the full range
of political action and protests, such as a variety
of signs, slogans and hand-made or printed items.
Political ephemera also embrace a rich variety of
transient materials, from the textual to the visual,
relating to innumerable political issues and agendas
defining party campaigns.
Campaigns can include multiple forms of
expression such as speeches, correspondence,
cartoons, prints, stickers and other realia dealing
with aspects of the environment, women’s rights,
trade matters, and countless other politically driven
issues. It is important however to understand that
political ephemera are not limited to elections or
political party propaganda. For this reason defining
political ephemera becomes a challenging task, as it
incorporates many diverse collection media and areas
and may be elusive in its placement within a broad
permanent collection.
Nevertheless, Australian political ephemera
collections do exist within many institutions in
Australia. The Directory of Australian ephemera
collections: a listing of institutions and individuals
in Australia collecting ephemera (Robertson, 1992)
proves the extent of such collecting activity: providing
an index of institutions and individuals in Australia
that house ephemera collections. Although this
publication is now slightly outdated, it remains the
most comprehensive of its kind. This important
resource was published by the State Library of
Ephemera collections and their place within larger collections
NSW, a front-runner in the collection of ephemera
in Australia. The Directory highlights the broad
extent of ephemera collections in Australia and
indicates that they remain important enough to
document as a special category. However a general
absence of theoretical consideration and comparative
understanding around the importance of Australian
ephemera collections is possibly a chief factor in the
scarcity of interpretation of current material held in
dispersed institutions across the country.
The future
Ephemera collections of many types, and political
ephemera collections more specifically, provide
significant historical records and information about
the way in which Australia’s many social worlds
and groups have functioned around the important
processes of political engagement and activism.
How-to-vote cards, for example, are vital records of
candidates, parties, and the configuration of choices
offered in any electoral campaign. Similarly, political
posters – today often referred to as core flutes – are
important documents of socio-cultural information
as well as political communication, accompanied as
these items are by party campaign slogans or a variety
of ‘pitches’ by individual candidates. Through the
documentation of such slogans it is possible to retrace
significant issues surrounding a specific election
process and outcomes.
The posters and flyers highlighting major political
events in Australian history stand witness to the
continued existence of some of the most enduring
political issues that have shaped our nation’s shared
consciousness, and to the transformations of many
people’s collective ambitions and susceptibilities
throughout that evolution. Political ephemera, for
this reason, are important to Australia’s heritage and
identity, and it is not only the responsibility of political
parties but also collecting institutions to preserve
such materials – and for museums and galleries to
interpret and exhibit them subsequently as part of our
social history and collective heritage.
Without active interpretation of such ephemera,
much of Australia’s political development and social
context might be lost in other translations, or simply
lost from the material record entirely. That is to say,
the wider context of social history would be poorer
without the collecting and interpretation of everyday
transitory materials that reflect our political and
social interactions.
Hindsight is a double-edged sword that makes a
researcher, like me, think about the flyers he should
not have thrown away. For this reason it is important
for the Australian history and heritage industries to
provide a platform for the more active interpretation
and preservation of ephemeral material. Furthermore,
in an age of commodity disposal and digital
precedence, where ephemeral material becomes more
fleeting than ever in its often momentary forms of
appearance, it is even more vital to ensure alertness
and protection of the records of our social history
through collection, preservation, documentation
and interpretation of the transitory evidence of our
evolving social consciousness. []
Craig Middleton, trained in Museum Studies at Macquarie
University, is an early-career museum professional with
an interest in the interpretation of transitory material. He
is currently resident Foyer Gallery Curator at Carclew, SA,
and actively participates in curatorial projects with the Art
Gallery of South Australia and History SA.
Citation: Craig Middleton, ‘One man’s trash is another man’s treasure: Australian
political ephemera’, Museums Australia Magazine, Vol.23 (1&2), Museums Australia,
Canberra, Spring & Summer 2014, pp.29—30.
left top: Australian Labor Party,
Advertising, 1993, 15.0 x 7.5 cm,
AHM460. Image courtesy of the
left bottom: Liberal Party of
Australia, Our Aims, 19851989, Sydney, 21.0 x 10.0 cm,
AHM5166. Image courtesy of the
References
Clinton, A., 1981, Printed Ephemera:
Collection, Organisation and Access, Clive
Bingley, London.
Lewis, J., 1976, Collecting Printed
Ephemera, Studio Vista, London.
National Library of Australia, Federal
Election Campaigns, https://www.nla.
gov.au/ephemera/federal-electioncampaigns
Robertson, A., 1992, Directory of
Australian ephemera collections: a listing
of institutions and individuals in Australia
collecting ephemera, State Library of New
South Wales, Sydney.
Shepard, L., 1973, The history of street
literature: the story of broadside ballads,
chapbooks, proclamations, news-sheets,
election bills, tracts, pamphlets, cocks,
catchpennies and other ephemera, Newton
Abbot: David and Charles.
Two international blockbuster exhibitions augmented locally in Melbourne
Iconic Frenchmen invade Swanston Street:
Hugo and Gaultier exhibitions in Melbourne
right: The Fashion World of
Jean Paul Gaultier: From the
Sidewalk to the Catwalk at the
National Gallery of Victoria.
Photo: Brooke Holm.
above:
Suzanne Bravery.
Suzanne Bravery
I
1. Victor Hugo: Les Misérables— From
Page to Stage (State Library of Victoria,
Melbourne, 18 July—9 November
2014).
2.The Fashion World of Jean Paul
Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the
Catwalk (National Gallery of Victoria,
Melbourne, 17 October 2014—8
February 2015).
n October I viewed two exhibitions in Melbourne at
state-owned collecting institutions a kilometre apart.
Victor Hugo: Les Misérables—From Page to Stage
was about to close at the State Library of Victoria[1],
while The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From
the Sidewalk to the Catwalk[2] had just opened at the
National Gallery of Victoria (NGV).
These two exhibitions were primarily drawn from
collections in overseas museums, but each included
an Australian contribution and connections, and both
projects were the result of extensive planning and
collaboration. Considered together, each explored
the particular influence of a single French man: one
a writer, philosopher and artist in the nineteenth
century; the other a fashion designer of the past four
decades. Reflecting an increasingly strong trend
in presentation of large exhibitions today, both
incorporated strongly interactive experiences and
settings to lead visitors on an informative journey
through their respective ‘worlds’.
Victor Hugo: Les Misérables—From Page to
Stage
It may seem unusual for the State Library, rather
than the Arts Centre Melbourne, to present a unique
exhibition based on the Cameron Mackintosh
blockbuster musical, Les Misérables – until you recall
that the musical is only the most recent incarnation
of the best-selling eponymous novel by Victor Hugo.
Meanwhile the exhibition was co-curated by Tim
Fisher, seconded to SLV from Arts Centre Melbourne,
and Anaïs Lellouche, who previously worked for the
Centre Pompidou at Metz. For such an important
venture, SLV employed a theatre designer, Anna
Cordingley, as exhibition designer.
A new stage production in town provided the
opportunity to offer audiences access to the important
’back story’: not only of Hugo’s novel but also of its
author and the political and social context of his
work. It also presented a chance to draw upon the
remarkable collections of Melbourne’s State Library,
supplemented by some other critical loans in this
didactic display.
In an exhibition space earlier reserved for local and
state stories – but now used to accommodate some
major exhibitions of international and Australian
material (illuminated manuscripts; rare Library
holdings and precious books) in the SLV’s more active
programming – the first section of Les Misérables used
traditional museum techniques such as low lighting
for framed works on paper, displayed on grey walls.
By the time of my visit, Hugo’s centre-piece autograph
manuscript, lent from the Bibliothèque nationale
in France, had been replaced by a digital copy. So
I missed the level of excitement associated with
viewing the original object. However there was still
much to view and enjoy in this immersive exhibition
experience.
In the foreword to the catalogue, State Library
CEO Sue Roberts reported that the exhibition had
been curated to draw together the two themes of
Australians’ love affair with musical theatre, with
Melbourne widely recognised as the historical
centre, together with the city’s world distinction as a
UNESCO City of Literature.
Curated to take ‘our visitors...on an extraordinary
literary journey...giving them a colourful theatrical
experience’[3] the project had secured partnerships
with Sir Cameron Mackintosh and collaborators
in Australia, and drawn loans and support from
significant collecting institutions in France, including
from the historic resources of the two Maisons
de Victor Hugo, located respectively in Paris and
Guernsey (Hugo having retreated to the Channel
Island for a period of political exile under Napoleon
111). The SLV paid expansive tribute to its major
institutional partners abroad:
Not only have they lent us examples
of Hugo’s extraordinary literary and
artistic mastery, they have provided
unstinting professionalism and intellectual
encouragement to our curators, and we are
indebted to them.[4]
This multi-faceted project also enabled important
insights into the complex process of producing such a
musical as Les Misérables.
Les Misérables began its journey from novel to
musical in 1978, when a Paris-based lyricist, Alain
Boublil, viewed the Lionel Bart film Oliver! and
perceived strong similarities between Dickens’s
famous pickpocket, the Artful Dodger, and the
streetwise figure of Gavroche created by Hugo.
Boublil subsequently wrote the lyrics, and songwritercomposer Claude-Michel Schönberg the music, for
what would become a hugely popular piece of musical
theatre. An English version produced by Cameron
Mackintosh was launched in London in 1985, and by
2014 the ‘25th Anniversary production’ (originating in
Cardiff in 2009) had assured the show’s status as the
world’s longest-running musical.
Extensive research of the resonant context in which
Hugo compiled his epic novel was evident in the
diverse historical records presented: excerpts from
his letters; staged photographs of the author in his
‘exile’ seascape of Guernsey (shown with his back
turned to France); evocative photo-images (some
extremely rare items from the SLV collection and
never previously exhibited), together with etchings
(loaned from the NGV) of Paris both before and after
Haussmann’s massive slum demolitions of mediaeval
precincts and street-widening to create the grand
boulevards of the nineteenth century.
Powerful close-ups of this traumatically disrupted
urban-scape populated by the bewildered and
dispossessed give way to broad, empty, tree-lined
streets and handsome mansions of a wealthy
industrial middle class. Society’s poor have been
moved to the periphery. Audiences were also
introduced to Hugo’s dramatic sepia pen-and-ink
renditions of the changing social landscape, and
scribbled word-sketches for some of the characters in
his vast novel developed over many years.
Numerous adaptations of Les Misérables on
stage and small and large screens, on radio and
in animation, provided materials for the second
section of the exhibition, which also included staged
photographs of the characters. There were scripts,
scores and costumes from theatre productions, and
from the most recent film version featuring Australian
stars Russell Crowe and Hugh Jackman.
A progression of the exhibition’s narrative through
‘Les Mis’ in world-cinema, providing free screenings
of excerpts from foreign-language adaptations of the
above left:
Les Misérables
by Victor Hugo, New York,
Classics Illustrated no. 9, 1950,
State Library of Victoria.
above:
Les Misérables 'Cosette'
advertising flyer, Sydney, 1989,
Cameron Mackintosh Archive,
London, ©1986 CMOL.
right: Victor Hugo. Image
courtesty of the State
Library of Victoria.
far right:
Victor Hugo, Les
Misérables, vol. 1, 1845–1862,
manuscript, Bibliothèque
nationale de France.
3. Sue Roberts, in Victor Hugo: Les
Misérables From Page to Stage, op.cit.,
Foreword, p.vi.
4. ibid.
central story, celebrated the universal themes of the
original novel. This section incorporated feature-film
selections alongside rare scripts, scores, designs and
posters from the 1985 English theatre production. In
a slow and steady transition from black-and white-to
colour, the viewer was exposed to, and educated
about, the development of both photography and
moving-image genres. Although located in a particular
time and context, advertising material in many
community languages demonstrated how viewers
globally have related to the universal characters and
powerful nature of the central story.
Located in an awkward space between two
buildings, the final section of Les Misérables
encouraged the viewer to participate in the musical
directly, by offering vignettes of the ‘back stage’ areas
of preparation – including costumes, wardrobe and
dressing-rooms – as the materials and props inviting a
first-person entry into the ‘Les Mis’ repertoire. Dressups and sing-alongs to pre-recorded music, provided
on a makeshift stage with a large-screen background,
lent themselves to ‘selfies’ featuring back-stage access,
with all areas set up to incorporate the grand walls
of the State Library as the local nineteenth-century
backdrop for this drama, with tricolour fabric bunting
cascading from the first floor above.
The total project incorporated a meld of intellectual
rigour, both national and international and public
and private partnerships, as well as elements of
sheer fun and interactive participation. This is a
difficult partnership: to appeal to all elements of a
visitor experience and to all visitors, with only a little
stumbling from researched and original historical
material to a recreation of stage experience. Full
marks to the Library for this effort.
There was a clear delineation between the serious
components and the dress-ups and experiential
dimensions of the exhibition. However all were
curated with an experiential emphasis for audiences.
The difference between the still photographs shown
of nineteenth-century Paris and those drawn from
the cinema were obvious. And although visitors
were invited to cloak themselves in the costumes of
the musical and sing the very hummable tunes, the
historical transportation to a time of extreme poverty,
discrimination, social turbulence and revolution,
was made stronger and more immediate through the
contemporary documentary images and evidence of
Hugo’s life and autograph text.
A series of public programs accompanying the
exhibition focused on community singing; tales
from behind the curtain of earlier Australian stage
productions, with actors reminiscing; a festival
celebrating Victor Hugo; guided tours, the exhibition
catalogue, and a tailored school-visits program for
primary and secondary schools.
The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier:
From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk
South of the Yarra at NGV International, The Fashion
World of Jean Paul Gaultier occasioned another
exploration of a French life, creative inspiration,
and vast mainstream impact in a project that leapt
dramatically into the twentieth century, with vibrant
translations in today’s overlapping worlds of high
couture and street-style.
In the strong tradition of costume and textile
exhibitions presented at the National Gallery of
Victoria, the work of contemporary international
designer Jean Paul Gaultier is in many ways the latest
stand-out in a rich NGV tradition of both collecting
and exhibiting fashion.
The current Asia-Pacific-wide itinerary
collaboration has drawn together staff of the National
Gallery of Victoria; the Montreal Museum of Fine
Arts director Nathalie Bondil; initiator and developer
of the exhibition, curator Thierry-Maxime Loriot;
and the ‘Maison Jean Paul Gaultier’. Promoted as
‘the visionary world of the couturier’, the NGV
presentation again incorporates ‘value-adding’ local
material not presented at the other major tour venues
in Montreal, London or New York. Melbourne has
enabled ‘Gaultier’s world’ with recent haute couture,
ready-to-wear items, and pieces highlighting the
‘Australian connections’ of Kylie Minogue, Nicole
Kidman and Cate Blanchett.
This discursive overview and retrospective of
Gaultier as a designer exposes the viewer to both the
personal and public journeys of the fashion designer
as ‘creative artist’, exploring his colourful, experiential
and sometimes confronting designs and imagery. The
exhibition also highlights some current questions
about the mission of a public gallery in the rising
vogue for exhibitions of fashion. The broad public
appeal and pleasure these shows provide is an obvious
imperative. However some precarious distinctions
arise around fame and powerful commercial forces
when contemporary fashion designers migrate from
catwalk to museum; and whether such attention and
resources would be given to the first exhibition, for
example, of an aspiring young designer.
Located in the Gallery’s major touring exhibition
space on the Ground Floor of NGV International —
near the entrance and adjacent to the museum store
for maximum exposure and retail connections — the
Gaultier show is clearly a ‘coup’ in the Melbourne
Gallery’s longer-term objective of repositioning itself
as a popular venue able to command much broader
local as well as visiting audiences. The exhibition
provides an immersive, and in some ways fantastical
experience, which cleverly interconnects experiences
of costume, context and inspiration as it unfolds.
The show is carefully designed to lead the viewer
visually from the smart ticketing area on arrival,
into the first of seven thematically arranged and
appropriately decorated immersive rooms or sensory
boxes. It transitions artfully from black-and-white
to colour in Gaultier’s costume; and in genres from a
modest day dress to a more transporting garment for
adult late nights.
Quotes on the walls reinforce the idea of this
clothier as (celebrity) artist, contextualising him
through Andy Warhol’s statement of 1984:
...the way people dress today is a form of
artistic expression. Art lies in the way the
whole artist is put together. Take Jean Paul
Gaultier what he does is really art.
By implication the work of an artist should be
interpretive, individual and creative, using fashion as a
form of expression and making it a celebration of both
popular appeal and diversity.
A major component of the exhibition’s
interpretation is provided through the 32 custommade mannequins, utilising blue screen backgrounds
and high-definition audio-visual projections
(presented with texts in French). This is surprising.
With a schedule including three major Englishspeaking venues it seems remiss not to provide
recordings in the (English) language of the venues, or
at least to offer printed translations.
Celebrities have lent their faces and voices for
above:
William Baker,
Kylie Minogue,
Virgins (or Madonnas)
collection, Immaculata gown,
Jean Paul Gaultier Haute couture,
Spring¬Summer 2007.
Net lace dress with large
patterned embroidery and
white linen cut-outs. Image
courtesy National Gallery of
Victoria and Jean Paul Gaultier.
this project, including Gaultier himself, and the
celebrity connection is a consistent, repeated and key
sub-theme in the exhibition — whether including
Pop visual artists such as Andy Warhol or Pop
singing icons such as Madonna (the historical and
the contemporary female versions of the exhibition’s
celebrity subject). Gaultier seems to have established,
and now be sustaining, his credibility in the larger
world that ‘matters’: the world of cross-over between
individual authorship and popular cultural influence,
and the global zone of greatest impact where
commissions are likely to be stimulated, through
radiating celebrity connections.
Gaultier’s intention is to reveal that beauty is to
be found everywhere. Yet his is a highly controlled
vision. He worked in the houses of Pierre Cardin and
others before achieving his first solo show in Paris in
1976. And he has expanded his skills in areas where
a specialist costume designer rather than an haute
couturier would normally be employed: in music,
dance and the cinema, including costumes for Peter
Greenaway’s 1989 celebrity film, The Cook, The Thief,
His Wife and Her Lover.
The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the
Sidewalk to the Catwalk is arranged thematically.
THE ODYSSEY provides an introduction to the
couturier’s universe and Gaultier’s trademark themes.
Sailors, mermaids, and religious iconography set the
tone. Gaultier’s earliest design (1971) is exhibited here
for the first time. It also features stage costumes worn
by Beyonce, as well as Oscar Awards dresses created
for Catherine Déneuve and Marion Cotillard.
THE BOUDOIR reveals the designer’s fascination
with lingerie and corsetry, from his childhood teddy
bear ‘Nana’ wearing the first cone bra in the early
1960s, to designs for women’s and men’s couture and
ready-to-wear lines, and for Hermes — where Gaultier
was creative director from 2003 to 2010. Gaultier’s
dramatic conical bras and bold-coloured intricate and
reworked corsets are featured, in general designed
to enhance and distance women as objects of desire:
his sharp cones, designed both to attract and repel
the viewer, were made for Madonna’s 1990 Blonde
Ambition world tour, and used again for her MDNA
tour in 2012.
PUNK CANCAN features the contrasting styles and
themes Gaultier has blended throughout his career,
from Parisian classicism and elegance to London
punk. Parisian icons and symbols, such as the beret
and Eiffel Tower, are melded with the imagery of the
Pigalle quarter. London’s tattooed punks, wearing
latex, leather, lace and fishnet, take on new meaning
— as ironic symbols of elegant, convention-defying
power. This room features the chiffon-camouflage
dress – 312 hours in the making for Sarah Jessica
Parker — worn at the 2000 MTV Movie Awards.
A catwalk mock-up with figures on a rotating
stage, and incorporating front-row seats for a join-in
audience, enables visitors to experience some of the
excitement of a haute couture fashion show.
SKIN DEEP shows how Gaultier creates clothing
that has the character of a a second skin, sometimes
through trompe l’oeil effects that give the illusion
variously of nudity, a flayed human body, a skeleton,
or tattoos.
METROPOLIS showcases Gaultier’s collaborations
with a variety of artists: film-makers; famous French
choreographers; and pop icons such as Tina Turner
and Lady Gaga. Borrowing from the emerging sounds
of New Wave in the 1970s, Gaultier explored the
fields of high technology and science fiction. Since
his first pieces of electronic jewellery and the HighTech collection of 1979, he has used a variety of
contemporary fashion fabrics not previously deployed
for the catwalk, including vinyl, lycra and neoprene.
URBAN JUNGLE is where cultural influences
from around the world are synthesised to form a
new aesthetic integrated into haute couture. Gaultier
mixes multi-ethnic influences—Bedouin, orthodox
Jewish, Chinese, flamenco, Russian, Bollywood and
Nordic—in what he sees as the urban jungle of today’s
world.
MUSES presents the outcome of the couturier’s aim
to create a new ideal of beauty: beyond the established
codes of fashion and society, and celebrating
difference by removing all boundaries of body size,
skin colour, age, religion or sexuality. This could so
easily be a mish-mash of disparate elements, but reads
as another way of exploring mixed styles of traditional
dress in an experimental manner.
Whilst it is pleasing that the NGV’s presentation
includes an Australian Muses section highlighting
Gaultier’s relationship with local Australian
fashion, movie and music icons — including Kylie
Minogue, Nicole Kidman, Gemma Ward and Cate
Blanchett wearing his costumes — it is nevertheless
disappointing that not even one of these international
celebrities is featured in other venues, as is the case
with American actor, Sarah Jessica Parker.
The mid-week audience I joined was noticeably
composed of women of ‘a certain age’ and
demographic: many seemingly early retirees exposed
to ideas not usually familiar in the programming of a
state collecting institution. Interesting layering had
clearly been achieved, through a broad span of genres,
from peep-shows and the demi-monde frisson of tight
corsets through to celebrity and high fashion.
Interesting issues about museums today as
vehicles of social encounter and transformation are
highlighted through this exhibition’s presentation
and impact. Does the museum context make it safe
to introduce audiences to challenging contents and
top:
Jean Paul Gaultier, Lascar
dress, Les Indes galantes (Romantic
India) collection, haute couture,
Spring-Summer 2000.
© Patrice Stable/Jean Paul
Gaultier. Image courtesy of
National Gallery of Victoria.
above:
Jean Paul Gaultier and
Australian supermodel Andreja
Pejic, on the eve of the opening of
his exhibition at NGV, Melbourne.
Photo: News Limited.
imagery beyond their everyday existence? Does the
context re-process normally unacceptable images as
acceptable, and even elevate them to ‘high art’? Was
Gaultier’s main impulse here to provide immersive
experiences within the charged walls of the NGV, or
to maximise the opportunity to reinforce the image of
the clothier as artist?
Clues to the character of Gaultier appear early in
the show — in the photograph presenting him as
an ingénue. Outwardly, Gaultier’s face is strongly
made up, artificial, with bottle-blonde hair and
highly stylised. This sets a tone for the exhibition as
a whole: Gaultier’s creations are highly designed and
controlled, whilst also exuberant and the opposite of
controlled (except for the much-used motif of formregimenting corsets). In fact there are many highly
structured pieces.
Gaultier loves black-and-white for outerwear,
but also deep, rich colours as well — especially for
underwear, and for restrictive clothing such as
corsets. Details of components are important – such
as the characteristics of embroidery, lace, contrasting
fabrics and textiles.
Gaultier relishes contrasts. His approach to fashion
is deliberately contradictive. His creative ideas are
hidden underneath an often highly regulated surface.
This exhibition is a controlled and stylised exploration
of what lies beneath his final forms, and what has
influenced the clothier’s art, drawn from often highly
charged conservative imagery and human experience
— for example, the power of religious iconography
first encountered as a child, through the Catholic
imagery of Mary Immaculate.
Themes from this exhibition have informed the
accompanying public programs designed to make
connections with local festive events such as the
Melbourne Cup. They also offer opportunities
for return visits stimulated by Friday-night live
performances transforming NGV into a late-night
destination venue for entertainment, incorporating
access to the exhibition combined with live music,
a bar and food. There are education programs,
publications and French dining on offer, as well as
merchandise inspired by Gaultier: orchestrating a
general celebration of ‘all things French’. Meanwhile
opportunity is taken to include designs from
Australian-based designers — also offered for sale.
Both of these elaborately curated and presented
exhibitions have utilised highly-charged original and
supporting objects to explore the creative output of
one person. Props and technology have been used to
enable the most passive viewer to interact directly
with the key themes of subject and narrative, while
also drawing visitors out of their comfort zone,
encouraging the confidence of each to engage with the
exhibits and better understand their meaning.
Gaultier’s declaration, that ‘to conform is to give
in’, could be applied equally to the character of Victor
Hugo, whose strength of social perspective and
publicly declared political critique caused his exile to
Guernsey, where his most famous literary portrait of
the times, Les Misérables, was written.
Both these creative ‘artists’ are excellent subjects
for exploration. Each has strong and unusual stories
to tell – for which a broad audience is essential to
the success of their work. Each of these temporary
exhibitions has been designed to be educative and
informative, as well as ingeniously produced and
broadly appealing, whether using the Library’s more
traditional, dependable display and interpretation
methods, or the Gallery’s more innovative and (as
expected) more contemporary content and cultural
style.
The curatorial approaches behind each these
exhibitions, and the powerful public personae of their
French male subjects, are all products of their time
and place – and for a short time, they shared a single
urban avenue in a major city in Australia. []
Suzanne Bravery is a museums and cultural heritage
consultant with extensive experience in curating and
managing all aspects of house museums. She is currently
Senior Curator at North Sydney Council. Suzanne is the
Treasurer of Museums Australia.
Citation for this text: Suzanne Bravery, ‘Iconic Frenchmen invade Swanston Street:
Hugo and Gaultier exhibitions in Melbourne’, Museums Australia Magazine, Vol. 23 (1),
Summer 2014, pp.31-36.
above:
The Fashion World of Jean
Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk
to the Catwalk (National Gallery
of Victoria, Melbourne, 17
October 2014—8 February 2015).
Flagstaff Hill Maritime Village, Warrnambool, redevelopment
Renewing a great regional museum and visitor attraction:
Flagstaff Hill Maritime Village, Warrnambool
Peter Abbott
S
top:
Warrnambool Garrison.
Image courtesy Flagstaff
Hill Maritime Village.
middle:
Peter Abbott.
bottom:
Flagstaff Hill Steam
Packet Inn. Image courtesy
Flagstaff Hill Maritime Village.
ince 1974, Flagstaff Hill Maritime Village
(FHMV) has been the primary tourism and
cultural heritage attraction for Warrnambool
and the Great Ocean Road travellers in
south-west Victoria. Over the past four
decades almost three million people have explored
the dedicated museum and our maritime village
complex built around the state-heritage-listed Lady
Bay Lighthouse and 1887 Warrnambool Garrison area
– displaying life in a key nineteenth-century port and
town on Victoria’s southern coast.
The success of FHMV is a credit to the vision of the
Warrnambool citizens who helped make it a reality,
and the hundreds of staff and volunteers who have
ensured it remains an enduring feature of the region
and an important economic driver for the city.
Winner of many tourism, community and museum
awards, the site encompassing 40 buildings and
spread over 10 hectares has developed from a formerly
overgrown, disused precinct to become a vibrant
part of the Warrnambool community. In 2014 the site
celebrated 40 years of continuing development and
recognition of our region’s rich maritime and social
history.
Like all museums and heritage attractions, ongoing
review of the Maritime Village site’s products and
guest experiences is vital to its continuing success.
Many years of targeted effort in ensuring FHMV
was recognised as a regional asset had been well
spent. This included ensuring the site was noted in
regional and state tourism and cultural plans, along
with building local engagement with the precinct.
Whilst such lobbying often seems an endless process,
it ultimately maintains awareness that the site is an
important economic asset as well as an integral part of
the culture of the city.
Local support remains strong, with good levels of
localised membership as well as maintaining a high
local media profile to support the museum element of
our site. Obtaining Museums Australia accreditation
(MAPS) has been an important part of building our
local credibility as being more than ‘a site for tourists’.
The site currently operates daily with a
museum, outdoor village area, state heritagelisted Lady Bay Lighthouses and Warrnambool
Garrison, accommodation in the original Lady Bay
Harbourmaster’s home as well as the Garrison Camp
area. By night the Shipwrecked Sound and Laser
Show operates, recounting the last voyage of the
clipper ship, Loch Ard, with a multi-media experience
using the beautiful village as an evening backdrop.
An on-site restaurant, tearooms and small tavern
ensure that the complex offers visitors a wide range of
experiences.
In 2012, Warrnambool City Council (WCC)
instigated a strategic review of the site’s use, in
response to changing visitor trends and increased
operating costs the site experienced due to a decline
in visitors following the GFC and its broad effects
on the leisure and tourism industries. Funding for a
new strategic plan was obtained through Regional
Development Victoria, Tourism Victoria, and a local
bequest.
In April 2014, the WCC committed to pursue
funding for the redevelopment of Flagstaff Hill, to
shape success for the next 40 years. The proposed
Flagstaff Hill Maritime Village, Warrnambool, redevelopment
first stage of the redevelopment included an
upgrade of the Shipwrecked Sound and Laser Show;
reconfiguration of the FHMV reception facilities to
include a Visitor Information Centre; consolidation
of the boat fleet and an upgrade of the wharf area to
make it safer and more accessible.
Warnambool City Council allocated $1 million
towards Stage I of the redevelopment, and on 19
September 2014, Premier Denis Napthine announced
a State Government supporting grant of $1.95 million
towards the project.
Why redevelop the site?
Investment in the site will sustain the important
tourism and cultural attractions provided by the
Maritime Village complex for the Warrnambool and
Great Ocean Road tourism region. FHMV is listed
as a key heritage and cultural tourism asset for the
region in the Regional Development Australia—
Great Ocean Road World Class Destination Plan and
other regional and state plans. Its redevelopment is
critical in maintaining a prime tourism attraction that
has enormous benefit for the Warrnambool region’s
economy.
Flagstaff Hill Maritime Village – some key
data
When regional heritage bodies or museums seek
major upgrade of their facilities, it is crucial to draw
on vital data about the value of a facility in social and
economic terms. The following data have been vital
to the case for the Flagstaff Maritime Museum Village
redevelopment:
• FHMV adds $2.9 million to the Warrnambool
economy annually;
• Over 5,000 students complete the FHMV
education programs annually;
• The Visitor Information Centre caters for 200,000
visitors annually, over the counter, online and by
phone;
• Since 2003, more than 300,000 people have
experienced the Shipwrecked Sound and Laser
Show, operated nightly to generate additional
bed nights for Warrnambool, with 42% of guests
surveyed reporting that the show influenced their
decision to stay in Warrnambool that night;
• Based on Tripadvisor reviews, FHMV is the
highest-ranked paid attraction provided on the
iconic Great Ocean Road experience for travellers
and tourists;
• FHMV was used as part of the movie set for the
forthcoming film, Oddball. Based on the true
story of Warrnambool's Middle Island Maremma
Project, which uses maremma dogs (famous for
guarding Italian sheep) to guard the Little Penguin
colony locally, FHMV staff care for the dogs
throughout the year, again reinforcing FHMV as
central to life in Warrnambool
Tourism and the Warrnambool economy
Tourism’s estimated contribution to the
Warrnambool economy includes the following data:
• 745 jobs or 6% of Warrnambool employment;
• $138.9 million in gross revenue earned locally; and
• $38.2 million in wages and salaries, or 4% of total
wages and salaries in Warrnambool.
These are powerful statistics that have
supported Flagstaff Hill Maritime Village’s case for
redevelopment, both locally and at state level, to
ensure the complex continues to develop and meet the
changing expectations of visitor experiences today. []
Peter Abbott is Manager Tourism Services, Flagstaff Hill,
Warrnambool City Council, Victoria. <www.flagstaffhill.
com>; <www.visitwarrnambool.com.au>
Citation for this text: Peter Abbott, ‘Renewing a great regional museum and visitor
attraction: Flagstaff Hill Maritime Village, Warrnambool’, Museums Australia Magazine,
Vol. 23 (1), Summer 2014, pp.37—38.
above:
Flagstaff Hill Maritime
Village. Image courtesy Flagstaff
Hill Maritime Village.
Honouring colleagues who have performed outstanding service internationally
ICOM Australia Awards 2015
T
above right:
The glass globe
sculptures were commissioned
by ICOM Australia from
Sydney-based master glassmaker
Benjamin Edols, and were created
at the Canberra Glassworks.
Photo: Roger Garland.
he next round of the ICOM Australia Awards
for International Relations was launched in
December, along with a new streamlined name:
the ICOM Australia Awards.
The program, established in 2006 and
managed by the Australian National Committee of
ICOM, provides two awards — one to an individual
and one to an institution — for outstanding projects
that have strengthened international exchange
between museums and the Australian sector.
The ICOM Australia Awards, promoted throughout
Australian and international organisations, have
become a very good way of profiling and celebrating
what Australian museums and colleagues can achieve
in collaboration with our overseas neighbours. The
Awards are announced each year at the Museums
Australia Annual Conference Dinner, with the
presentation to each recipient of an inscribed
glass globe commissioned through the Canberra
Glassworks and created by Australian glass artist Ben
Edols.
Eligible projects for the Awards can be drawn from
any field of museum practice, including collection
management, exhibitions, museum management,
audience development, marketing, research,
sponsorship, education, training, or professional
development. The scope is limited only by our
museums’ creativity and initiative in realising welldesigned opportunities for international exchange.
The Awards are open to Australian individuals,
museums or partner organisations. Nominees must
be members of ICOM, or be currently or formerly
employed by institutions that are ICOM members.
Nominations can come from industry peers, and selfnominations will also be accepted. The application
process is not onerous: the focus is on a two-page
summary of the project's vision and achievements.
Over the years there have been many outstanding
awardees. The inaugural institutional award was
made to Questacon, for its collaborative initiatives
with science centres in the Asia-Pacific region.
Other institutions to be recognised have included
RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, for its commitment to
presenting the work of international art, craft and
design in Australia; the Cultural Heritage Centre for
Asia and Pacific, Deakin University, for its lamp and
temples project focusing on collection management;
the Powerhouse Museum for its exhibition Spirit
of jangin: treasures of Korean metal craft, presented
in collaboration with the National Museum of
Korea; and the Australian Museum for its exhibition
Rituals of seduction: birds of paradise, presented in
conjunction with the University of Goroka and other
PNG cultural agencies.
Individual awardees have included Will Inveen
of Questacon, for his contribution to international
relations through science education, exhibitions
and awareness programs; Ron Vanderwal of
Museum Victoria, for his work in the Pacific Region,
particularly in Fiji and with the Fiji India diaspora
in Australia; Bernice Murphy for her contribution
to the ongoing work of ICOM and the ICOM Ethics
Committee; and Robin Torrence for her lifetime’s
achievement as a researcher in archaeology and
material culture, including exchanges between Papua
New Guinea and Australia. A full list of past awardees
is included below, and indicates the depth of expertise
and commitment to international activity that we
have in the Australian museums sector.
Our most recent awardees (in 2014) were the
Western Australian Museum for its collaborative
project with the National Research Institute of
Maritime Cultural Heritage in South Korea. As part
of this program the two institutions undertook joint
research and skill-sharing with a focus on underwater
excavation and materials conservation. Professor
Robyn Sloggett, from the University of Melbourne,
was meanwhile presented with the individual award
for her sustained contribution in fostering museum
conservation practice between south-east Asia and
Australia.
The quality of all the projects and personal
service recognised by the ICOM Australia Awards
demonstrates the tremendous amount of work
Honouring colleagues who have performed outstanding service internationally
being done by museums and individual colleagues
in the international arena. ICOM Australia warmly
encourages institutions and individuals to consider
nominating for the forthcoming Awards program in
2015.
Details and nomination forms are available on
the ICOM Australia website at http://icom.org.au.
Applications are due in late February. []
Individual Awards
2007: Will Inveen, Questacon, Canberra
2009: Dr Ron Vanderwal, Museum Victoria, Melbourne
2009: Bernice Murphy, MA National Director, Chair, ICOM Ethics Committee (2005-2011).
2010: Daniel Thomas AM, Emeritus Director, Art Gallery of South Australia
2011: Vinod Daniel, Chair AusHeritage
2012: Professor Amareswar Galla
2013: Dr Robin Torrence, Australian Museum, Sydney
2014: Professor Robyn Sloggett, University of Melbourne
Institutional Awards
2007: Questacon (National Science and Technology Centre), Canberra
2009: RMIT Gallery, Melbourne
2010: Cultural Heritage Centre for Asia and the Pacific, Deakin University
2011: Australian Museum, Sydney
2012: Powerhouse Museum, Sydney
2013: Museum Victoria, Melbourne, and JSW Foundation
2014: Western Australian Museum, Perth
top:
Professor Xiaolin Ma (Deputy
Director, Henan Administration
of Cultural Heritage), Associate
Professor Robyn Sloggett
(Director, The Centre for
Cultural Materials Conservation,
University of Melbourne), Mrs
Gan Lan. Photo taken at the
Henan Museum, May 2014.
bottom:
Excavating shipwrecks
in the waters near Taean, Korea:
Jon Carpenter (Maritime
Archaeological Conservator,
Department of Materials
Conservation, Western
Australian Museum) working
with the South Korean Maritime
Archaeology team in 2011.
MA members collaborating regionally and spanning state borders
The new Murray Network of MA:
Crossing state borders, networking regionally
above:
From left: Bridget Guthrie,
Albury Library Museum;
Bernadette Zanet, Bonegilla
Migrant Experience; Elizabeth
Morgan, Corowa Federation
Museum; Karen Wenke, Jindera
Pioneer Museum; Patrick Watt,
Burke Museum and Beechworth
Historic Precinct; Marita Albert,
Upper Murray Historical Society.
Marita Albert
S
tate borders in Australia have often been
the subject of division and confusion, and
the museums sector has not been excluded
from these dilemmas. There are a number
of collecting institutions that span the
Murray River around the Albury-Wodonga area,
with interconnecting policies that include collecting
and display of information and artefacts from both
Victoria and New South Wales. Both Museums
Australia (Victoria) and Museums & Galleries NSW
have provided great support and information for these
bodies; but frustratingly this is often dependent on
where the main collecting institution is located within
state and civic jurisdictions, not the interconnected
cultural histories and regional areas through which
their collections may have been formed.
A group of forward-thinking individuals from some
of these border organisations recently decided to try
something new, to facilitate and increase collaboration
between the museums and historical societies that
span the Murray in their region. At an inaugural
meeting during an event in Albury in September
2014 — convened to determine the level of interest in
establishing a cross-border Museums Australia group
for ongoing collaboration — there were 32 people
gathered, collectively representing 20 organisations
interested in the potential of this new formation.
An interesting historical reflection is that
this ‘regional alliance’ movement was initially
spearheaded at Corowa, in days when the border
issues were already confusing. Today, the Federation
Museum in Corowa is participating in a renewed
effort of cross-border collaboration!
There was clear consensus achieved in Albury
that those present were keen to establish a Murray
Network affiliated with Museums Australia. This
group would, amongst other objectives, encourage
sharing of both resources and visitors; provide
opportunities for formal networking, sharing
and mentoring; and also tap into the resources
encompassed by two neighbouring state-sourced
groups reaching out to work more collaboratively on
common cultural heritage issues for their region.
Direction was given to establish a steering
committee formed initially by six people, sourced
from each of the Local Government areas of Albury
City, Wodonga, Greater Hume, Indigo, Towong,
and Corowa. Acknowledging the many volunteerrun organisations within the designated boundary
for the new Network regionally, it was decided that
the fairest make-up of the committee would be if its
members equally represented three funded museums
and three volunteer-run museums.
The breadth, depth and variety of the museums
now represented in the new National Network is
remarkable in such a concentrated area, with many
organisations holding outstandingly significant items
of ‘national heritage’, together with unique collections
representing diverse local histories. The potential
ahead for more proactive sharing and expansion of
both the capabilities and capacities of these existing
groups within a new regional network is very exciting.
Many of the museums and collections in the
new Network are community- and social historybased organisations. Following below are just a
few examples of the Murray Network member
organisations.
The Man From Snowy River Museum in Corryong,
for example, is a totally volunteer-run museum,
open seven days a week, and housing an extensive
collection. The Museum proudly displays Jim
Simpson’s POW rug — a unique object hand-knitted
MA members collaborating regionally and spanning state borders
A group of forward-thinking
individuals from some of these
border organisations recently
decided to try something new.
above:
Items of significance from
the Murray region. From top
to bottom: Jim Simpson's POW
rug from Man From Snowy
River Museum in Corryong; a
pram on skis, part of the Man
From Snowy River Museum's
extensive ski collection;
gramophone from Jindera Pioneer
Museum; printing press from
Corowa Federation Museum.
by local farmer J.O. Simpson whilst he was a
prisoner of war in Germany in WW2, and featuring
a map of Australia complete with all state coatsof-arms. The same museum also has a remarkable
ski-collection, including a pram on skis, and boasts
a dozen outbuildings all housing collections of
hugely diverse objects. The research room of the
museum at Corryong provides access to many local
records, photos, newspapers, and local Indigenous
information. And of course the history and stories
of Jack Riley, believed by many to be the inspiration
behind The Man From Snowy River poem by Banjo
Paterson.
The Albury Library Museum, as one of the few
museums in the region with paid staff, has often been
the unofficial contact point for community museums
asking for help about regional cultural history. The
Library Museum in Albury has extensive collections,
and provides exhibitions and workshops that help
inspire smaller institutions in the area to increase the
standards and presentation of their own collections.
The Jindera Pioneer Museum was opened in
1968 by painter Sir Russell Drysdale. This complex
consists of the original Jindera village store, the
new Wagner’s store, a period residence, slab hut,
wattle-and-daub hut, Huon post office and original
blacksmith’s workshop. Highlighted in the collection
are the everyday items of the pioneers of the Jindera
district in the early-nineteenth century. The collection
includes period furniture, clothing, shop fittings, and
an original German wagon used by the Funk family in
1867 when they migrated east from South Australia.
The Corowa Federation Museum is home to a
collection of outstandingly significant original
drawings by Aboriginal artist Tommy McRae.
McRae, working in the late-nineteenth century, is
renowned in Australia for his depictions of traditional
Indigenous scenes — as well as new settlers and even
Chinese pigtailed immigrants represented in some
scenes — all drawn on European paper with careful
outlines in ink.
Tommy McCrae’s drawings have steadily gained in
‘national’ significance in recent decades — and he was
included, for example, in the major survey exhibition
of Australia’s art shown at the Royal Academy in
London in 2014, co-organised by the National Gallery
of Australia. This is just to suggest how important is
the ongoing work of reconnecting and repositioning
many items held in regional collections as outstanding
components of our shared heritage as a nation, for
communication to future generations.
The Burke Museum in Beechworth is part of the
Beechworth Historic Precinct, and is the oldest
regional museum in Australia, dating back to the
1850s. One of its most significant collection areas is
formed by the R.E. Johns Aboriginal Collection. This
is one of the oldest and most comprehensive single
collections of its type surviving in the twenty-first
century. The artefacts held in Burke are considered
to be important early examples of weaponry and
Indigenous ceremonial objects and tools, some in
use prior to European contact and showing the great
skill of the Aboriginal craftsmen using pre-European
technologies and materials. The Burke Precinct also
houses the most extensive collection of Ned Kelly
memorabilia and related information, held in the
original Sub-Treasury building.
Bonegilla Migrant Experience, as a last example of
bodies and cultural heritage resources linked in the
new Murray Network, details the rich tapestry of
experience of the migrants who began their Australian
lives in the Bonegilla camp in Victoria, conserving and
bringing their stories to life for future generations.
The joys, heartaches, and struggles experienced by
such migrants can be experienced in some of the
original buildings and displays presented on the
original site.
These sketches of the variety, and in many cases
unique significance, of items held within the range
of bodies making up the new cross-border network
spanning the Murray, suggest the strong potential
of this new formation within Museums Australia’s
national footprint and collaborative structures. []
Marita Albert is a member of the Upper Murray Historical
Society T/as Man From Snowy River Museum, Corryong,
Victoria.
Citation for this text: Marita Albert, ‘The new Murray Network of MA: Crossing state
borders, networking regionally’, Museums Australia Magazine, Vol. 23 (1), Summer 2014,
pp.41—42.
DUAL
AWARD
PROGRAM
Dual
Award
in Cultural Heritage
and World Heritage Studies
14128-Dual
Award Program-PC-100x150-v2-ml.indd
1
– a first for Deakin University
15/12/2014 2:21 pm
Deakin University Australia, in partnership with Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus-Senftenberg, Germany, is
pleased to announce a new Dual Award Program in Cultural Heritage and World Heritage Studies.
This initiative is the first reciprocal international dual award postgraduate program offered by Deakin, and is the first of
its kind in the cultural heritage and museum studies discipline in Australia and Germany. As a leading, globally recognized
university in cultural heritage education and research, this unique postgraduate program is a groundbreaking step for
Deakin and a rare opportunity for heritage and museum studies students.
The program provides qualified students with the opportunity to earn a Master of Cultural Heritage from Deakin
University Australia and a Master of Arts in World Heritage Studies from Brandenburg University of Technology (BTU)
Cottbus-Senftenberg, Germany, in two years of full-time study.
Students from BTU will complete two trimesters of study at Deakin and Deakin students will complete a semester
of study at BTU. Students from both universities will experience a distinctive mixed-mode of on-shore, on-line and
international learning, in a multi-cultural environment.
The program is fee neutral, meaning students only pay tuition fees to their home institution. There are no tuition fees
charged to BTU students when they are in Australia and vice-versa for Deakin students when they are in Germany.
This exceptional program also serves as a PhD pathway for those students who wish to take their museum and cultural
heritage studies further.
Find out how you can be a part of this exciting initiative!
Visit deakin.edu.au/chms
Or contact Dr Linda Young, Senior Lecturer
Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies
School of Humanities and Social Sciences
Faculty of Arts and Education
Deakin University, Melbourne Burwood Campus
E: [email protected]
P: +61 3 9251 7130

Members can the magazine

Transcription

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