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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).