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.....
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.
Exhibition review The Heritage of Namatjira
Tandanya National Aboriginal Cultural Institute
Adelaide South Australia
November - December 1991
Curated by Angela Tidmarsh and JVS Megaw on behalf of the Flinders University of South Australia
Catalogue edited by Ruth Megaw.
Cultural diversity has become a key issue in the 1990s for a number of reasons. In the United States we have recently completed a census. The results of that census indicate a dramatic change in the nation's demographics.
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.
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).
Headlands: Thinking through New Zealand Art. Exhibition for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney from 31st March 1992. Article by the co-curator Robert Leonard.
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.