The proper business of museums

Sunday 19 March 2006 8:45AM

Kimberley Webber, author of Yesterday's Tomorrows, a book that celebrates 125 years of the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, discusses the role of museums in the past and present.


Robyn Williams: So what is a museum? In the old days we'd automatically say: a shrine of edification, of learning and scholarship. Nowadays a museum can look like a centre for entertainment, or even a shopping mall.

Those are the tensions that Kimberley Webber addresses in her book Yesterday's Tomorrows, celebrating 125 years of the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, which once had a very different name, and an uncertain future.

Kimberley Webber: Although very clear about the museum's mission, to educate the working men (and women) of New South Wales on the 'science of everyday life', it was another thing to convince working people to visit, and the Minister to pay.

The Technological, Industrial and Sanitary Museum was founded in 1880, largely as a result of the success of Australia's first international exhibition, held in the purpose-built Garden Palace in Sydney's Domain. At the time, it represented an entirely new type, where museums of art and natural science traced their origins back to 16th century 'cabinets of curiosities' (and had their local presence in the Australian Museum, founded in 1827) technology museums were a comparatively recent innovation. The first, the Musee des Arts et Métier in Paris, was founded in 1794 with the express purpose of democratising knowledge. It was to be a 'three dimensional encyclopaedia' that would 'enlighten ignorance, which knows not, and poverty, which has not the means to know'.

Similar high ideals accompanied Sydney's Museum. Its first curator was Joseph Henry Maiden, who, at the age of 22, and only recently arrived from England, took responsibility for classifying and organising the collection into bays recently vacated by the International Exhibition. But in September 1882, with a planned opening to the public only weeks away, 10,000 exhibits and all of Maiden's work were lost in a few hours, when the Garden Palace burnt to the ground in one of Sydney's more spectacular fires.

Such was the general enthusiasm for this new type of museum, and Maiden's capacity for dogged perseverance, that within weeks new collections were being formed and a new location found. In this case, it was in a former Agricultural Hall in Sydney's Domain. The location was far from ideal, Maiden describing the surrounding part as 'a favourite resort of idlers' and the museum shared the building with Sydney Hospital's outpatients department, yet a little over a year after the fire, the doors of the Technological, Industrial and Sanitary Museum were opened to the public 'without ceremony'. And, at least at first, the public streamed in.

And what they found were thousands of objects carefully classified into the three great kingdoms of nature: animal, vegetable and mineral, and organised in such a way as to illustrate the progress of manufactures from raw material to finished product. Blocks of Australian clay suitable for ceramic manufacture sat alongside clay from Staffordshire. The focus of every exhibit was on its 'economic' potential. As early guides constantly reiterated, this was not a museum for the merely curious. Unlike natural history and art museums, it was not a place to while away an idle afternoon. Instead, the Technological Museum was where men and women came to be educated and inspired, to learn to produce better wool, finer ceramics, improved castings in iron.

Most important, it was where they came to learn more about the commercial potential of Australia's animals, plants and minerals. At first by himself and, from 1886 with the help of collector William Bauerlen, Maiden attempted to collect, classify and display the principal economic plants, and to a lesser degree animals and minerals, of New South Wales. He later recalled the excitement of successfully negotiating steep mountain roads in cedar country, and avoiding snakes and leeches around Dorrigo. He was enthusiastic about family holidays taken in 'unfashionable' sorts of places, where abandoning his linen shirt and starched collar, he could go out into the bush constantly seeking something new. What his wife and four young children thought about such holidays is unrecorded. However, the results filled the Technological Museum's showcases and corridors. Glass jars held gums, kinos, seeds and bark with their origins and dates of collection recorded on neatly printed cards. Whether visitors were looking for wood suited to boat building, or bark to tan leather, they could find the answer in the Technological Museum.

And initially the Museum was extremely successful. 57,197 people came through the turnstile in the first year (a particularly impressive figure, given that Sydney's population was then a little over 250,000). Sunday accounted for almost half of the total visitor number, suggesting the majority were the working people Maiden so wanted for his 'working man's museum'. And as the comments column in the visitors' book testifies, they liked what they found. Such phrases as 'well ordered', 'highly instructive' and 'a great boon' repeatedly graced its pages. The idealist in Maiden must have been thrilled to read the comment of one visitor that a 'splendid variety of useful knowledge may be learned' or of another who wrote 'with a good companion I could spend a week here, employing my time profitably'.

Clearly, this new type of museum had found a new audience through its mix of education, research and entertainment. But the challenge for Maiden was to sustain that audience and to gain the government funds to leave what he so often called 'this wretched shed' for a purpose-built museum in a more appropriate location. And he spent most of the fifteen years of his directorship trying to do just that.

Even according to the standards of the day, Maiden maintained an extraordinarily extensive and global correspondence. And all of this correspondence is preserved in the Museum's archives. Leafing through it today, we see letter after letter (in Maiden's spidery writing or his secretary's elegant copperplate) to Kew, Washington, Edinburgh, Tokyo, London and Turin, asking for objects, seeking exchanges of 'indigenous' materials, sending annual reports and publications. No effort was spared to make Sydney's Technological Museum a truly global institution. Take, for example, his correspondence with the Chevalier Jervis of Turin's Royal Industrial Museum. The two began writing to each other in 1883. Maiden commissioned Jervis to purchase models, catalogues and objects for the Sydney Museum and asked for copies of the Turin Museum labels as a model for his own. In response, Jervis, having dispatched box after box of objects to Sydney, enthusiastically promoted his own views on technology museums. Arguing they were the key to the fight against the 'evil tendency' of socialism, he wrote in 1891, that 'a museum if properly directed has it in its power to do good, incalculable good, by showing that there are objects higher and more noble than mere material riches.'

Ironically, Maiden's focus was on promoting his constituency's material riches, through research into the economic applications of indigenous materials. Central to his Museum was a laboratory, where he could analyse this 'botanical terra incognita' that was Australia. By encouraging colonists to send in animal, plant and mineral samples, he hoped his Museum would become Australia's principal 'bureau of information'.

And as the Museum's archives reveal, he was successful. Each year hundreds of inquiries arrived from people of all sorts and conditions. Alongside letters from well established squatters and businessmen written in careful copperplate on elegant letterhead are pages torn from notebooks with barely legible requests scratched in pencil. Walter Prince was typical. He sent in samples of tea tree oil from the Tweed River for analysis in the hope, as he wrote, that 'you can assist me in finding ever so small a value ... for at present it costs money to keep the land clear of it.'

A.D. Healey inquired about the possibility of making dominoes out of shank bones. Could the bone be made easier to cut? Could it be worked with small saws? Could workmen be found to process the bone? Maiden was particularly enthusiastic about the commercial possibilities of wattles in the tanning industry. Undaunted by poor results obtained with local species, he encouraged widespread planting of the economically useful South Australian golden wattle, Acacia pycnantha. For years, the Museum sent out envelopes filled with seed to anyone who asked. The Sydney Mail and Town and Country Journal were each sent three kilogrammes for distribution to readers. Maiden is said to have scattered seed from the window of his train every time he travelled out of Sydney. To this day, driving along country roads and beside railway lines, one can still see stands of golden wattle, the hardy descendents of Maiden's economic mission.

The success of this early collecting and research, and the increasing reputation of the Museum as an information bureau, encouraged Maiden to embark on a number of ambitious publishing projects, including his now largely forgotten Useful native plants of Australia. In contrast to Baron von Mueller's work in Melbourne, this was more a compilation of information than the product of original research and today appears a curious mix of the scientific and the popular. Thus we learn that in southern New South Wales a salve for wounds can be made from the leaves of Cymbonotus Lawsonianus'; and that teeth can be cleaned using the gum of Eucalyptus Stuartiana. More significant are the detailed descriptions of Aboriginal foods and medicines. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Maiden respected traditional knowledge and urged his fellow colonists to follow Aboriginal example when living in the bush.

Meanwhile in the Domain, Maiden continued to add to the collection. By 1890, there were over 23,000 objects on display. But this was not a cabinet of curiosities filled with the rare and unique. It was a museum of commodities, of the mass produced and the commonplace. It was indeed a 'mail order' museum. And the very fact that it dealt with the 'everyday' meant that, after initial burst of enthusiasm, interest in the museum fell away. By 1888, five years after opening, visitor numbers had dropped by a third, with annual Sunday attendances falling from over 26,000 to just 12,000. At the same time the government resisted Maiden's pleas for a new building in a new location. It seemed quite possible that Sydney's Technological Museum could be as short-lived as Melbourne's.

But then, salvation came, and from a most unlikely source, in the form of a reproduction of the astronomical clock in the Cathedral of Notre Dame at Strasburg. It was built by a 25-year-old Sydney watchmaker, Richard Smith, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the foundation of New South Wales. As one of his supporters wrote in The Daily Telegraph, it not only demonstrated the ingenuity of the maker, it also served as 'a constant example of what can be accomplished by young Australians'. Bought for the Museum in 1890, its impact on visitor numbers was immediate. Those that had tired of endless rows of glass jars, now thrilled at the clock and its hourly parade of apostles, a flapping rooster, the devil and Jesus Christ.

Entertainment saved the Technological Museum. Three years later it opened in a purpose built structure on Harris Street in Ultimo. Exhibits were arranged according to the three great kingdoms of nature, with a laboratory on each floor for scientific research. Maiden resigned in 1896, going on to an illustrious career at Sydney's Botanic Gardens. Successive curators and directors continued to juggle popular appeal against research, entertainment against education. In the 1930s, the 'working man's museum' became the 'business man's museum'. In the 1980s, as the Museum moved up the road to the Ultimo Power House site, the then director, Dr Lindsay Sharp, declared it was to be 'not just a new museum, but a new kind of museum'. In 2006 the debate as to the proper business of the museum continues.

For in the course of the Museum's 126 years, the Australian museum environment has completely changed. Where once there were only a handful of museums concentrated in major centres, now most cities, towns and even villages have at least one. Statistics show that more people visit museums than attend football matches. Yet there is just as much debate about the 'proper business of museums' today as there was in 1880. How does one balance education against entertainment, the popular against the scholarly?

My response is to say that there is no one answer. Through their exhibitions, publications and now their websites, museums are constantly changing and reinventing themselves. The one constant is the collection. Thus if we walk through Powerhouse Museum stores today we can still see the 'greatly enlarged' models of insects 'beneficial to man' that Maiden bought for 12 pounds in 1883; the ploughs Chevalier Jervis sent from Switzerland in the 1890s; the marble samples collected to demonstrate that Australia could equal the best that Italy could provide.

For a day of entertainment, inspiration and education, visit your local museum and judge for yourself.

Robyn Williams: Kimberley Webber. Her book on 125 years of the Powerhouse Museum, called Yesterday's Tomorrows, is published by the University of New South Wales Press.


Kimberley Webber
Powerhouse Museum


Yesterday's Tomorrows
Kimberley Webber
University of New South Wales Press


Robyn Williams
Brigitte Seega