More museums

Mel­bourne Museum has improved remark­ably since I was last there.

The Stor­ies from a City exhib­i­tion was fas­cin­at­ing. I was intrigued, inspired, rapt. This is fairly rare in my encoun­ters with Aus­tralian museums. Some of the present­a­tion was innov­at­ive. Some­times it was simply that the mater­ial was great.

High­lights… The video of the milk­bar owners talk­ing about their lives. The cases with a wheel, a pair of shoes and a piece of pave­ment from vari­ous eras from the 1860s until today. The remin­is­cences of a woman named Marie about living in Little Lon in the 1920s. The dioramas of below street level com­plete with vir­tual tour of the sewer system (I know cer­tain people who’d love this: you can pop up to street level whenever there’s an access point and there’s 360 degree video of the above ground spot). The huge aerial pho­to­graphy of Mel­bourne that you can walk on – I found my house and showed my cousin, Vanessa, and then we mar­velled at exactly how little of Mel­bourne we’ve actu­ally been to. The eight cases of key moments in Mel­bourne his­tory (1956 Olympics, the Bicen­ten­nial, the goldrush) with doc­u­ments and arte­facts and protest stickers.

I was also more impressed with the Te Pasi­fika and Bunjilaka areas than I was last time. The Te Pasi­fika sec­tion made me hear water and marvel at inlay shell designs. I wonder that we pay so little atten­tion to the design of the func­tional in our soci­ety. Why not make a paddle an intric­ate thing of beauty?

The Bunjilaka Gal­lery was quite com­pre­hens­ive although it didn’t address the lan­guage issues I found in the Museum of Sydney the week before. On the other hand, it engaged much more coher­ently with cur­at­orial ques­tions. For example, there was a clever dis­play with large text on a glass case quot­ing the Tas­manian Abori­ginal Centre saying, essen­tially, we refuse to be dis­played in glass cases by an insti­tu­tion we have not author­ised to declare itself an author­ity on our cul­ture. Inside the glass case is a statue of the white cur­ator of one of the early museums who col­lec­ted much of the con­tro­ver­sial mater­ial also in the case.

I also liked the empty drawer with the label “Cra­nium returned to ori­ginal owners for burial”. I thought the delib­er­ate inclu­sion of such dis­plays expli­citly engaged with the rela­tion­ship between cul­tural arch­iv­ists and living culture.

Museum of Sydney was quite good when I went there a few weeks ago, but the Cadigal room seemed an after­thought. That said, it was good, with mater­ial on the first Eora people to deal with the invaders and with videos of people talk­ing about the impacts of the stolen gen­er­a­tion… but it’s still all from the White per­spect­ive, as if the his­tory of Sydney starts with that inva­sion, that encounter, whereas Mel­bourne Museum seems more will­ing to acknow­ledge his­tory and pre-inva­sion existence.

The Koori Voices exhibit at MM is also very good and reminded me of the sim­ilar wall of living and his­tor­ical faces at the Toledo “Keys to the City” exhibition.

What I did like at MoS were the large photos of the recent immig­rants to Sydney with cul­tural items that were pre­cious to them. I also loved the way the lan­guage mater­i­als were presen­ted as a dia­logue between the white man and the black woman. And I loved the wall of mater­i­als impor­ted from around the world labelled with their origin.

I also had a fab­ulous time at the Croft Insti­tute with my cousin Vanessa and her friend, Rusty, with good dub, dance­hall and drum’n’­bass, but a little more on the com­mer­cial side (Sean Paul) than the stuff Jonathan plays. Reminded me a bit of being at Nobody Writes to the Col­onel except it was less crowded.

Hoping to go see Happy Together at ACMI this after­noon. It’s all good. My only slight dis­ap­point­ment is that I’m not at the New­town Fest­ival with all the Sydney gang…