Australia Yearbook - 2001

Chapter 12—Culture and recreation 537
Australia’s colonial museums thus positioned
themselves between two audiences. On the one
hand, the ‘public’, often thought of as an
undifferentiated mass requiring enlightenment
and needing to be attracted, and on the other
hand, a scholarly community of scientists and
intellectuals who would provide the resources for
enlightenment and education. At times, museums
were evidently squeezed between the two as,
throughout the nineteenth century, critics
charged museums both with abandoning
intellectual rigour in favour of the lowest
common denominator and of alienating visitors
through being high-brow and inaccessible.
Despite these pressures, the colonial museum
remained a place where the educated expert
would provide information, and the uneducated
everyday visitor would absorb it. There was no
sense that all members of the audience should
have access to the museum in terms of the
museum representing and speaking to their own
particular interests and concerns.
Evolving an audience
The focus of Australia’s early museums on
natural history gained strength throughout the
nineteenth century. Practices of exhibition
emphasised the display of collections of flora
and fauna, and mineralogical and geological
specimens, according to scientific systems of
classification which demonstrated typological
relationships. Frederick McCoy, for example,
the first director of the National Museum of
Victoria, stipulated that the specimens of the
Museum’s palaeontological collections would
be
“… first divided into geological groups or
periods according to the distribution in time
and analogous to the distribution in space
indicated by the arrangement of the
collections of specimens of the living species.
The fossils of each formation are then
arranged in zoological systematic order, and
fully named with genus, species, locality and
formation”. 7
Such exhibitions were seen to embody and
communicate the principles of order, rationality
and considered examination which lay at the
heart of enlightened thinking and behaviour.
These exhibitions were seen as one of the tools
through which the masses might learn such
attitudes and self-disciplines; and they
consequently rested at the heart of the museum’s
‘civilising mission’. 8
The new role for museums as educators of
the public also emphasised the importance
of art, sculpture, literature and other
products of ‘civilisation’ in refining the
morals and sentiments of working people.
Art and culture would improve ‘taste’, while
natural history taught ‘reason’. This emphasis
on the possibilities of high culture led almost
every Australian colony to found, between
the 1860s and 1900, public art galleries and
museums of applied arts, science and
technology. These new museums, and
particularly the museums of applied arts,
science and technology, also represented a
continuation of an alternative museum
tradition in the Australian colonies. From the
1830s to the 1860s, Mechanics Institutes
flourished in Australia, offering labourers and
the less well-to-do middle classes lessons and
lectures in both technical and intellectual
subjects. Attached to these Institutes were
often small collections of objects, art and
books, providing teaching and cultural
resources. As the larger metropolitan
museums (and libraries) were founded and
developed a public education mandate, the
collections of urban Institutes tended to be
absorbed by them. Some Institutes, and
particularly rural ones, persisted longer,
often until governments created colony- or
State-wide technical schooling organisations
and libraries to take up and extend the work
of the Institutes. 9
After the 1860s, the collection and exhibition
practices of all these museums came to be
increasingly shaped by theories of natural
and social selection, succession and progress
deriving from evolutionary thinking.
Exhibitions of art and culture were important
in declaring the common heritage of
Australian and European society through
bringing the masterpieces, or at least copies
of masterpieces, of European civilisation to
Australia. Natural history and particularly
ethnological collections and exhibitions,
however, carried the primary burden of
communicating concepts of social evolution.
Australia’s colonial museums had collected
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
artefacts, and sometimes human remains,
since their foundation, understanding
Australia’s Indigenous inhabitants as part of
the curious natural history of the continent.
After the 1860s, as ideas about social
evolution gained wider acceptance,