Tag Archives: Museums Australia conf

Memorable moments of the MA conference

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So… Museums Australia conference 2007 has happened. For me, the bloodrush of the session-to-session dash was a welcome relief after sitting still for an hour and a half, so I enjoyed the multi-venue approach. And how good was it having an umbrella in your conference pack?

I also got a lot out of the presentations, and hereby present my list of memorable moments. (I’m leaving out the part where we learned about the reproductive cycle of giant squid, although I’m happy to share that too, on request.) I’d call this a list of favourite quotations except they’re mostly paraphrasings.

  1. There is no longer any excuse for failing to consult with Indigenous people about museum practices – Jackie Huggins, historian/author from the Bidjara and Birri-Gubba Juru peoples
  2. The Faith Bandler–Pearl Gibbs alliance is a critical part of Australian political history – Professor Marilyn Lake, historian at La Trobe University
  3. Museums should develop a sabbatical approach to research – David Pemberton, Curator–Zoologist at Tasmanian Museum & Gallery
  4. Zoos are worryingly bereft of intellectual curiosity – David Hancocks, consultant/author
  5. You can demand plain English where you can’t demand good writing – Jennifer Blunden, consultant

Feel free to add your own items to this list.

Techno but not dialogic

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The South Australian Museum is implementing a kind of mother-CMS, so that collection items, once arranged and described, can be output to any screen device in the museum, be it hand-held, part of an exhibition display, on the web, whatever.

When this tech was being demonstrated at the MA conference, the presenters mentioned a facility to track changes made by users. I got all excited, thinking how great it would be for visitors to be able to interpret the collection too… but then I realised they didn’t mean visitor users; only staff users. The output is all centrally controlled.

Then an education officer from the museum said that the technology is convenient but that the template structure is fixed, so it can be a straitjacket.

That subdued me quite a lot.

Would anyone from the SA Museum care to comment?

How do you know?

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A slow, head-shaking moment from the MA conference…

Paula Hamilton and Paul Ashton‘s study of Australians and ‘the past’ confirms that community and family learning are critical to historical knowledge and understanding. Governments are not the gatekeepers of history. Whew!

Most Australians consider museums the most trustworthy source of narratives on the past. But for Indigenous people, the opposite is true — museum practices are highly questionable.

And yet, even for non-Indigenous Australians, museums are not necessarily places where they feel connected to the past.

So even people who believe museums know best about the past don’t expect to learn much from them…?!

Power to the people

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My ‘Hurrah!’ moment from the MA conference: when David Anderson (Director of Learning & Interpretation at the Victoria & Albert Museum) said:

  • people have a right to be involved as producers of culture – not only as its consumers

and

  • scholarship and participation need not be in conflict.

So why do so many museums still hog the authorial seat?

You can download his conference paper (PDF). In fact, you can read more of David Anderson’s good ideas about museums and learning.