Looks at the exhibition 'Terra Australis Incognita' at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery in New Zealand, to celebrate the 350th anniversary of Abel Tasman's discovery.
According the the Australia Council figures in 1990 a number of people exceeding the entire population of Australia visited the 187 Australian Museums that employed paid staff in 1989/90 at a cost, for maintence, development and operations in excess of $13.00 per head of population, excluding any charges imposed on entry to museums or exhibitions. And what does $13.00 buy for the Museum going public?
Museums are complex social phenomena and valuable resources. There's an ecological analogy there; if you mess with even apparently trivial elements of a complex system, the results can be unpredictable, powerful and are most often catastrophic.
Jim Specht of the Australian Museum Sydney, has written that "public and private collections of archaeological and ethnographic specimens around the world contain tens of millions of specimens yet only a minute fraction of this total is actually held in its countries of origin" ; most of this material he says, was acquired through colonial or military occupation.
Background to the National Agenda for a Multicultural Australia with the final report to be released by the Office of Multicultural Affairs OMA in mid 1992. See also the article by Helen Andreoni in this issue.
Helen Andreoni writes on matters which are addressed in the report commissioned by the Office of Multicultural Affairs (OMA) by Amareswar Galla (also in this edition of Artlink).
One of the things which continues to fascinate me about museums is how, despite the vast amount of talk about displaying material culture, the often personal, often idiosyncratic, often haphazard decisions about departments are very rarely mentioned. Yet these decisions are central to much of the museum's collection, display, exhibitions and research programme.
Exhibition review An Interrupted Dialogue. One of the first international experimental art exhibitions to be shown outside Hungary since the end of World War 2. Grayson worked with Suzy Meszoly of the Soros Fine Art Documentation Centre of Budapest in 1988 during the time when changes were sweeping through Central Europe.
In the first project of its kind, private investors will provide half the money needed to build the Museum of Victoria at a new site on the Yarra River.