University of Queensland Art Museum
Published 11 October 2019
Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery
Araluen Arts Centre
Published 07 October 2019
Samstag Museum of Art
Published 27 September 2019
Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts
Published 15 September 2019
Fremantle Arts Centre
Published 23 August 2019
Jam Factory
Arts Project Australia
Looks at Arthouse in Launceston Tasmania.
On 23 October 2002, yet another Council of Australian Museums Associations (CAMA) ran down. Conferees were already half deep in thought about melting credit cards and distant work site desks stacked high with urgent files. Well Not exactly CAMA...
Published March 1992
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.
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.
One of the curious things about very large cities is the gulf that exists between the inner city and the outer suburbs or hinterland.
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?
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.
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.
The quintessential purpose of Museums is to encourage and instil the joy of intellectual and aesthetic discovery. Abstracted partly from a public lecture entitled 'Ideas -Heresies even - for Museum Futures' given in Perth for the Western Australian Government Department of the Arts Task Force on Museums in August 1991.
Exhibition review Unfamiliar territory: Second Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art 1992 Art Gallery of South Australia 28 February - 19 April 1992
Life in Cyrus with all its charms and challenges.
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.
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.
