Published April 2021
Report on the 3rd International Salon of Museums and Exhibitions (SIME) at the Grand Palais Paris January 1992
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.
Published March 1992
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).
Guest editor for Vol 12 No 1 Museums on the Edge. This edition was founded on a perception of a lack of any quantity of readily available material on the Australian and New Zealand experience of museums.
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.....
The recession led rash of public conferences on the theme of Australian identity raises questions about the sources of our national self-knowledge. The congregation of bureaucrats, economists, television personalities, writers and artists has a democratic ring to it but it also points to the failure of our cultural institutions - notably our museums, galleries and libraries - to embrace their responsibility to develop a regional self consciousness.
Book review Australian Art Museums and Public Galleries Directory published by the Art Museums Association of Australia Inc and the National Centre for Australian Studies Monash University 1991.
Whatu Aho Rua - Tandanya Aboriginal Cultural Institute Adelaide Festival. The exhibition Whatu Aho Rua 'weaving with two strands' organised by the Sarjeant Gallery in Wanganui, New Zealand, is a departure form exhibitions usually seen in New Zealand Galleries.
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.
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.
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.
Selected list of museums and art galleries around Australia.
One of the curious things about very large cities is the gulf that exists between the inner city and the outer suburbs or hinterland.
