Australia Yearbook - 2001

Chapter 12—Culture and recreation 543
The drive for Australia’s museums to respond to
the interests and experiences of diverse social
groups also stimulated the emergence in
museums, since the 1980s, of collections and
exhibitions devoted to the social, cultural and
technological history of nineteenth and twentieth
century Australia. In part, this new field of
practice represents museums attempting to speak
more closely to subjects of interest and relevance
to ordinary Australians; but it must also be seen
as a response to the changing priorities of
Australian public culture. 24 Since the 1970s,
history has emerged as a key arena through
which Australians negotiate senses of national
identity. The focus for historiography in Australia
has shifted from detailing Australia’s connections
to England to exploring the specific dynamics,
challenges and problems of Australian societies. It
is unsurprising that museums, as sites of
collective memory, should engage with these new
questions.
In addition, the development of national and
international tourism has created new audiences
for Australian museums. The numbers of
international visitors to museums vary
considerably depending on where the museum is
located within Australia, but for high profile
institutions, and especially those in cities such as
Sydney, anecdotal evidence suggests that up to a
quarter of total visitors are international tourists.
Unlike local visitors who may engage with a
museum in multiple ways over several visits,
visitors on tour expect a concise experience
through which they can glean a coherent
understanding of the locality they are visiting.
Since the 1970s, this experience has come
increasingly to be framed in terms of the local or
national culture or history, and Australian
museums are consequently increasingly
interested in creating exhibitions that can meet
this expectation.
Australia’s museums have consequently
encountered the end of the twentieth century
with a revised public education mandate. Rather
than disseminating élite notions of science and
culture and speaking exclusively to an assumed
white male visitor, museums now attempt to
represent and speak to a diversity of people,
interests and viewpoints. This new commitment
to representing diversity raises potential conflicts
for Australian museums. As public institutions,
they must now answer both to a diverse public
and to the specific governments which fund
them. It is the nature of democratic society that
these two will not always agree, and
contemporary museums often find
themselves attempting to answer both
masters. In addition, the complexities of
exploring social, natural and historical
diversity are often poorly served by museums
seeking to create quick, coherent
experiences for tourists.
The audience figures
The transformations occurring in Australian
museums since the 1970s have been
accompanied by an explosion of interest in
understanding and examining museum
visitors and the professionalisation of visitor
research. In 1991, the first permanent
position for an evaluation and visitor
research coordinator was created at the
Powerhouse Museum in Sydney. In 1994, the
Australian Museum and Museum Victoria
followed suit, and in 1996, the Australian War
Memorial made a further appointment.
These designated positions represent in
many respects the tip of the iceberg, as
evaluation and visitor research are also now
habitually carried out by other staff and by
consultant research companies. Evaluation of
exhibitions, both establishing prior visitor
expectations and interests and assessing
visitor experience at the exhibition, is now
quite widely carried out. Much of this
research tends to remain, however, poorly
disseminated within the museum profession
generally, with the results of studies tending
to lodge within institutions rather than
contributing to the broader development of
knowledge about museum visitors. The first
national conference devoted to visitor
research, for example, was held in Australia
only in 1995. This lack of communication of
results between museums derives, perhaps,
from the fact that museums are reluctant to
share information obtained through
commercial consultancies, or from the
atmosphere of competition between
museums as leisure choices that is generated
by scarcity of funding to museums generally.
The development of visitor research since
the early 1990s has grown in part from the
revision of the public museum’s mandate
described above. Museums worldwide now
enshrine equity and access to collections for
all social groups as part of their core
mandate. Maximum participation from all
members and sectors of the community is