Australia Yearbook - 2001

536 Year Book Australia 2001
the success of a museum depended not only on
its collections but also on the number of people it
attracted. Visitor numbers could now provide
some measure of how effectively the museum
was fulfilling its mandate to enlighten and civilise
all sectors of society. In 1859, for example, when
the Royal Society of Tasmania petitioned the
colonial Governor for funds to construct a
building to house a ‘national museum of natural
history and the arts’, together with the Society’s
library, it cited the fact that the number of visitors
to its existing premises had doubled in two years.
This was evidence, the Society argued, of the
value of the museum in “stimulating and
promoting mental culture and intellectual
improvement”. 5 It appears, however, that
although many museums kept statistics on the
number of visitors, the methodology of collection
was never anything but impressionistic. A
favourite technique for measuring visitors was to
count numbers of visitors over bank holidays or
weekends, the most popular visiting times for
working class people, and to use these numbers
to assess how effectively the museum was
fulfilling its educational mandate. The well-to-do
middle and upper classes, it seems, were safely
assumed to be already dutifully visiting.
The museum’s new understanding of its audience
as the entire general public created new
challenges for the institution. It now had to get
new visitors in the door, drawing the working
classes away from their everyday amusements
such as the circus and the vaudeville and teaching
them to enjoy the restrained satisfaction of
acquiring new knowledge. Museum curators
clearly wished to distance their institutions from
these plebeian entertainments. Anxious to
maintain the air of scientific endeavour and
civilised authority which they took as their
mission, they also recognised the problems of
attracting visitors. Museums experimented with
new display techniques such as dioramas and
panoramas, designed to impress visitors with new
viewpoints and interesting subjects. Australia’s
museums became some of the first to develop
what later became known as ‘outreach programs’
designed to bring the museum to social groups
who would not regularly visit. And by the 1880s,
children became seen less as unsavoury
nuisances and more as ideal visitors upon whom
the civilising mission of the museum could be
effected through targeted education programs. 6
Australia’s colonial museums also participated in
the creation of displays for the international
exhibitions and worlds fairs of the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. These
extravaganzas, often combining sideshow
with scientific exhibition, drew a diverse
crowd. The upper classes enjoyed the
curiosities of the world as did the working
classes, and the mercantile middle class
perhaps saw new opportunities for trade and
industry. In keeping with this diverse
audience, displays representing the various
Australian colonies at international
exhibitions tended to combine specimens of
the continent’s unusual flora and fauna,
Aboriginal artefacts, and examples of the
colonies’ natural resources and primary
industries such as wool and gold. The
colonial museums often participated in such
events, sometimes by supplying artefacts for
exhibition and advising on display and
sometimes absorbing the contents of
displays into their collections after the major
exhibition closed. Through such work,
museums showed themselves as places of
potential interest to a wide variety of people.
They became the repositories of the rare and
curious, and sources of information about
economic opportunities in the Australian
colonies, while maintaining their association
with scientific education.
Beyond their commitment to educating the
general public, Australia’s museums
continued their commitment to a long
established audience. Australia’s first
museums were primarily natural history
museums, dedicated to developing large
collections of the geological, floral and faunal
resources of the continent. These museums
encapsulated the Victorian enthusiasm for
collecting, ordering and preserving the
natural world within a unified system of
classification. The process of cataloguing the
new continent’s natural history was a process
of incorporating what appeared to European
eyes ‘new’ forms of life into established
European scientific taxonomies. In
understanding their collecting work in this
way, Australia’s colonial museums implicitly
recreated an international scientific
community as their audience. This was a
community, moreover, with its centre in
Europe. This is abundantly evident in the
considerable passage of specimens of
indigenous species or geological formations
from the Australian colonies to the
collections of European museums, and the
dissemination of European systems of
thought through the practice of science.