THE MUSEUM OF SYDNEY

The Museum of Sydney on the site of First Government House, a museum managed by the Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, opened in May 1995 amid controversy over the site’s interpretation. Rather than recreating First Government House, which was the first permanent building in Australia and the seat of colonial power in the British colony until 1846 when it was dismantled, architectural firm Denton Corker Marshall designed a new museum using Sydney sandstone and glass set back on the site, creating a forecourt under which the original foundations of First Government House were preserved. The foundations were mapped in the forecourt with granite paving and steel studs. A granite slab placed on an angle in the forecourt revealed a section of the foundations and in the entrance of the museum the foundations were visible under transparent panels installed in the floor. Part of the facade of First Government House was recreated here and a film explored the site’s changing use over time. Many believed that such a significant building deserved to be completely reconstructed, in homage to the colonial beginnings of the nation. Instead, the original building itself was absent, only evident in the fragmentary form of its foundations.

These fragmentary remains of First Government House inform the museum’s approach to interpretation in using historical evidence as only part of the story. The museum explores wider aspects of Sydney’s history to 1845 using gaps in the evidence as productive entry points for imagining life in the past. Most significantly, the Museum of Sydney explores the social history of Sydney and eschews a glorification of the nation’s founding fathers. The place of the Indigenous Eora people within early Sydney and their negotiations with the early settlers are particularly important in the museum’s exhibits. The contested nature of the place and the idea of ongoing dialogue, difference and dispute characterise the philosophical underpinnings of the museum. Conceived of as a Pandora’s box rather than a collector’s chest, the museum producers hoped to spark debate, continue unfinished dialogue and represent difference (Emmett 1994, 7).

An emphasis on the everyday life of early Sydney inhabitants is crucial to the museum’s concept of an unfinished dialogue. The everyday helps to place social history in the present by rendering the detail of past lives and their complexity. Chronology and the grand narratives of progress and development are abandoned, and in their place, we find thematic displays, a variety of media, snippets and fragments from the archive, and stories. To develop the various elements of the museum, the director of the Historic Houses Trust Peter Watts and senior curator Peter Emmett assembled a team of people including historians, filmmakers, artists, archaeologists and multimedia producers. This collaboration among different practitioners, who at that time might not have worked together in a museum context, made innovative exhibits possible.

A creative approach to history and the use of moving image, sound and art installations are a feature of this museum. Permanent museum exhibits cover the themes of Sydney’s natural environment, the everyday in the early colony, trade and the Eora people, as well as the history of the site of First Government House. Exhibits make use of film and video, documents from historical archives and artefacts from the museum’s archaeological collection. Such creative methods and focus on aesthetic experience have attracted criticism, with many critics feeling that the aesthetic and creative dominate at the expense of historical fact, grand narratives and a chronological understanding of historical events.1

The opening exhibits of the museum, some of which remain installed, portray a complex set of relations between the local Indigenous people and settlers. Eora knowledge and governance of the land is explored alongside the settler’s incomprehension of the landscape and their efforts to shape the foreign into something familiar. The public sculpture in the forecourt of the museum, Edge of the trees, by Janet Laurence and Fiona Foley, invokes these different understandings of the landscape and the layers of meaning embedded and inscribed upon the land. Giant wood, sandstone and steel pillars, some inscribed with Eora words and Latin names of plant species, form a forest through which visitors can wander. Shells, bones, ash, feathers, oxides, wax, hair and honey – substances that the Eora people traditionally used in ceremonial life and as body paint and adornments – are encased in transparent containers set into some of the pillars. A soundscape of Eora and Latin place and plant names can be heard emanating from some pillars, leading visitors through the sculpture as they listen. Edge of the trees is a site of layered meaning, which shows how for the Eora the place is rich with custom and knowledge and for the European settlers it was claimed through naming and classification systems.

Exhibits also attempted to represent a sense of the daily interaction between the two peoples in the first years of the colony. Upon entering the museum, visitors move through a glass box that plays a poetic sound installation by Paul Carter, The calling to come. An imagined conversation of sorts is taking place between an English-speaking man and an Indigenous woman. Neither speaks very much of the other’s language, and the conversation is peppered with mimicry, stuttered possibilities of meaning, playful sounding out of words and gasps of frustration. There are moments of comprehension, ambiguity and misunderstanding. Carter based the script on Jakelyn Troy’s study of First Fleet lieutenant and astronomer William Dawes’s notebooks on the Eora language, produced between 1788 and 1790. In The calling to come visitors eavesdrop on Dawes’s conversations with the Eora woman Patyegarang.

The museum uses film, video and digital images in many of its exhibits. As visitors move between levels two and three, they can view from the stairwell platform a giant video wall, playing life-sized images of Sydney’s natural environment. Foreshores, escarpments, ridges and local plants move slowly across the screens. Even the showcase of artefacts relating to Eora life contain two small screens suspended at eye level, which play over 200 European images of the Eora. These include watercolour pictures, drawings, and animated images of the artefacts showing their use. Three large screens also play a film of a contemporary Aboriginal family, living in the inner-city suburb of Redfern. In this film, vistors follow a family picnic in which Eora places are visited, and stories and memories of those places retold. On level three the Panorama exhibit comprises large screens forming a grid and playing images to create a panoramic view of Sydney. Sources vary from early etchings, lithographs and paintings to postcards. Panoramic images slowly dissolve from one to another, and they are interspersed with images of small-scale details and views of individuals. A visual history of Sydney is brought together in this exhibit, in which individual stories interject with the grand narratives of the place.

Perhaps the most innovative use of new media was in the exhibit The bond store, which was developed by Ross Gibson and displayed in the museum from 1995 to 2002. This exhibit was a darkened room in which visitors were drawn towards lit artefacts of everyday life such as fragments of crockery. Upon approaching the artefacts and peering at them more closely, life-sized holographic images of early Sydney inhabitants were triggered, unleashing their stories about the objects and their lives. The stories were based on historical archives but spun into fictional narratives to convey an impression of everyday life in the past. Film footage was also used to dramatise the stories of these characters. The narrative reconfigured in different sequences, allowing a variety of combinations of storytelling.

Objects, however, are not lost in the museum, though they are treated in a unique way through exhibits such as Collector’s chest by Narelle Jubelin. Here three polished aluminium chests with 76 drawers in total contain fragments of artefacts combined with photocopies of historical documents and images. The artist juxtaposes elements so as to create playful visual and conceptual analogies and wide-ranging associations on diverse historical subjects. Here artefacts are treated as part of a broader archive of material working to reveal traces of past lives and forgotten aspects of history. The chests are highly interactive, needing to be opened by visitors, and can be viewed in any sequence.

The colony showcase wall contains artefacts grouped according to a spatial map of Sydney work sites in the 1820s unearthed through archaeological digs. Artefacts found on the site of First Government House and the Hyde Park Barracks, for example, were housed in this showcase. Videos showed dramatisations of colonial characters narrating their stories and conversations were screened within the showcase. Described by the museum as ‘witnesses’, these figures animated the otherwise static display with subjective stories.

Some exhibits have changed since the Museum of Sydney opened in 1995 with more attention today given to the lives and activities of the governors of the colony, the First Fleet ships and a specific focus on the Cadigal clan of the Eora on whose land the museum stands. Interpretation has shifted over the years in the museum. For example, in 1995 the arrival of the First Fleet was described as an invasion of the Eora people and land; today the event is cast in softer terms as the first contact between the Eora people and ‘British exiles’. These changes in interpretation respond to criticisms made about the museum and perhaps also correspond with changes in the broader political climate. In 1995 Keating’s Labor Government embraced reconciliation, pluralism and historical revisionism. Today ‘history wars’ wage in the Australian media, with revisionism subject to criticism and grand historical narratives being reasserted at the National Museum of Australia. The Museum of Sydney is perhaps less of a Pandora’s box than it once was; however its use of creative methods in interpreting social history and its experiential form, which place the subjective at the heart of the museum, have left an indelible mark on Australian and international museology.

ENDNOTE

1     See, for example, Young (1995, 667); Young (1998, 30); Marcus (1999, 41); Hansen (1996, 18–19). See also Gregory (2006, forthcoming).

REFERENCES

Emmett, Peter. 1994. Contested ground – contested histories – contested futures policy statement. Sydney: Museum of Sydney. Museum of Sydney Archives.

Gregory, Kate. 2006 (forthcoming). ‘Art and artifice: Peter Emmett’s curatorial practice in the Hyde Park Barracks and Museum of Sydney’. Fabrications: Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand 16 (1).

Hansen, Guy. 1996. ‘Fear of the “master narrative”: Reflections on site interpretation at the Museum of Sydney’. Museum National (November): 18–19.

Marcus, Julie. 1999. ‘Erotics and the Museum of Sydney’. In A dark smudge upon the sand: Essays on race, guilt and the national consciousness. Canada Bay, New South Wales: LHR Press.

Young, Linda. 1995. ‘Museum of Sydney’. Australian Historical Studies 26 (105): 667.

Young, Linda. 1998. ‘Wanderlust: Journeys through the Macleay Museum’. Museum National (November–December): 30.

 

Cite this chapter as: Gregory, Kate. 2006. ‘The Museum of Sydney’. South Pacific Museums, edited by Healy, Chris; Witcomb, Andrea. Monash University ePress: Melbourne. pp. 20.1–20.4.

© Copyright 2006 Kate Gregory
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