In 1954 Richard T.M. Pescott wrote the first book-length history of the National Museum of Victoria, looking back at the 100 years since the institution was founded as the Museum of Natural and Economic Geology in 1854. The work, Collections of a Century, is very much a product of its time.[1] Pescott, Director of the museum since 1944, outlines key facts and figures and briefly highlights significant individuals and collections in what is an inward looking, almost bureaucratic survey of his domain. Throughout, there is barely a mention of the social, cultural and political environment beyond the walls of the museum – the gold rush, the 1890s depression, the world wars – little about Aboriginal communities and cultures, and a noticeable lack of reflexivity.

There is no sign in Pescott of the entrepreneurial spirit and “missionary zeal”[2] of inaugural director Frederick McCoy, nor is there any hint of the changes to come. But over the next half century significant shifts occurred in museums and historical practice which would change the emphasis of the institution, its staff and its relation to society.

Museum Victoria as it is today had a parallel predecessor, the Science Museum of Victoria, which was the subject of its own centenary history, written by Warren Perry in 1972.[3] The ‘Foreword’ by J.A.L. Matheson is enough to suggest that, eighteen years on from Pescott, Perry had a more expansive brief. “It was clear,” Matheson writes of Perry, “that he would have to bring together a composite picture of social conditions, political pressures, and scientific progress within the frame of a century.”[4]

Perry does not fully achieve this, but there are signs of a shift occurring. Among them is Perry’s summary of an international study trip by Deputy Director John Kendall in 1967, which created an awareness that the “old system” where numerous variations of objects were arrayed in simple cases had been discarded in favour of more “attractive and instructive displays” created in collaboration with architects, designers and artists.[6]

Also evident is an increasing awareness of the decentralisation of museums and museum knowledge. Hinting at the emerging field of public history, Perry notes the importance of local and regional stories alongside larger, national narratives and shows support for the idea of regional networks of museums, each concentrating primarily on their own area and actively supported by larger institutions[7] – an idea also supported by P.H. Pigott and the Committee of Inquiry on Museums and National Collections in their 1975 review of museums in Australia.[8]

The shifts hinted at by Perry can be placed in a broader context. In 1967, the same year as Kendall’s study trip, Marshall McLuhan and his collaborator Harley Parker held a seminar at the Museum of the City of New York where they argued strongly for placing museum objects more firmly in their social and cultural contexts and concentrating more on audience participation than on the imposition of single, linear narratives.[9]

Kenneth Hudson – who ten years later still viewed McLuhan’s perspective as “characteristically exaggerated and provocative”[10] – names 1971 as a pivotal year. Following an International Council of Museums (ICOM) meeting where a delegate from Benin questioned the utility and worth of museums to contemporary life and the general public, Latin American museum experts met in 1972 and concluded that societal issues required broad, socially engaged, cross-disciplinary approaches, and that museums needed to be part of this. Hudson writes that this was the point where “it became obvious beyond all reasonable doubt that there would have to be a fundamental change in the philosophy and aims of museums, and that the traditional attitudes were leading to disaster.”[11]

In Australia the Pigott review, mentioned above, took a national perspective. Among the findings were that, though science museums were once “dogmatic and fervent” and natural science museums “impersonal”, both had started to develop and had more recently come into favour with government. Museums had an important educational function, and – though underutilised by some, including historians – could also play a key role in supporting research and exploring contemporary issues. In an echo of McLuhan and Parker, Pigott suggests museums should be “both art-form and theatre”, entertaining people of all ages.[12]

Over the same period the discipline and practice of history was also evolving. Through the 1970s ‘social history’ and ‘public history’ gained prominence, the latter in particular with links to rising numbers of small community museums and historical societies.[13] Despite this, there was a disconnect between history and large museums. Tom Griffiths suggests the cause of this lay as much with historians as museums. The discipline was, he argues, slow to engage in research using material objects of the past as evidence.[14] But with the emergence of public history this started to change, so much so that – according to Carolyn Rasmussen’s history of Museum Victoria and its predecessors – by the 1980s “History had been knocking at the door of the Museum for some time.”[15]

The door was opened in 1983. Following a decision made two years earlier, the National Museum of Victoria and the Science Museum of Victoria were amalgamated to form the Museum of Victoria (later to become simply Museum Victoria). In so doing, the remit of the new institution was expanded beyond just the sum of its component parts. For the first time the Museum was formally charged with collecting and exhibiting Victorian history. As stated in the first Museum of Victoria annual report, the merger “created an institution with a vision of social history in terms of natural resources, the development of technological solutions to practical problems and the social and political influences on the shaping of Victoria’s multi-cultural society.”[16]

Continue to Museums, collections and history – Part 2 of 2

 

[1] Richard T.M. Pescott, Collections of a Century: The History of the First Hundred Years of the National Museum of Victoria (Melbourne: National Museum of Victoria, 1954).

[2] Susan Sheets-Pyenson, Cathedrals of Science: The Development of Colonial Natural History Museums during the Late Nineteenth Century (Kingston, Ont: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988), 12. Sheets-Pyenson attributes this quality to pioneering colonial museum directors in general, including McCoy.

[3] Warren Perry and Science Museum of Victoria, The Science Museum of Victoria: A History of Its First Hundred Years (Melbourne: The Museum, 1972). The Science Museum of Victoria was opened in 1870, as the Industrial and Technological Museum. It closed in 1899 then was re-opened in 1915, before being renamed the Museum of Applied Science, then the Institute of Applied Science, and finally becoming the Science Museum of Victoria in 1971.

[4] Ibid., vii.

[5] James Wood, “Perry, Edward Warren (1909–2010),” Obituaries Australia, accessed March 7, 2015, http://oa.anu.edu.au/obituary/perry-edward-warren-1543.

[6] Perry and Science Museum of Victoria, The Science Museum of Victoria, 151.

[7] Ibid., 123, 177.

[8] Committee of Inquiry on Museums and National Collections, Museums in Australia 1975: Report of the Committee of Inquiry on Museums and National Collections Including the Report of the Planning Committee on the Gallery of Aboriginal Australia, ed. P. H. Pigott (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1975), 24–25.

[9] Marshall McLuhan et al., Exploration of the Ways, Means, and Values of Museum Communication with the Viewing Public. Principal Speakers: Marshall McLuhan, Harley Parker [and] Jacques Barzun. (New York, Museum of the City of New York?, 1969).

[10] Kenneth Hudson, Museums for the 1980s: A Survey of World Trends (London and Paris: UNESCO, Paris; and Macmillan, London, 1977), 7.

[11] Ibid., 15.

[12] Committee of Inquiry on Museums and National Collections, Museums in Australia 1975, 5–6, 14.

[13] Ibid., 7. Pigott notes that the majority of Australian museums in 1975 were small local museums, and the majority of those had opened in the past 15 years.

[14] Tom Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia, Studies in Australian History (Cambridge ; Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 215.

[15] Carolyn Rasmussen and Museum Victoria, A Museum for the People: A History of Museum Victoria and Its Predecessors, 1854-2000 (Melbourne: Scribe Publications, 2001), 325.

[16] Museum of Victoria, “Annual Report 1983-84 – Museum of Victoria” (Museum of Victoria, 1984), 2.