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).
De-accessioning is too often characterised as an ill-wind, blowing through the vast and mostly undisturbed reaches of our cultural store-houses capriciously violating the integrity of our collections.
Conservation - access, equity and future directions. Everyone is talking about the effects of the economic climate, some people are calling it a recession and others a depression.
In 1975 the Whitlam Government's Committee of Inquiry on Museums and National Collections (the Piggott Committee, after its chairman P H Piggott) unsuccessfully recommended setting up of a Museum's Commission.
Museum exhibitions tend not to challenge visitors with critical perspectives, contradictory points of view or subject matter which is controversial. I would like to explore different ways that conflict might be included in exhibitions and used to further our understanding of the past.
The South Australian Museum has the world's largest and most comprehensive collection of Australian Aboriginal material culture. It also has a vast archive of information about that material and about other aspects of Aboriginal life in the form of photographs, films, audio tapes, diaries and other records.
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?
Daniel Thomas provoked a distinct murmur at the 1990 CAMA Conference when he suggested that art museums have a greater capacity to disturb and move people than other cultural museums. If this is true and I think it is.....
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.