May 2010

aMUSine

The ezine for people interested in museums, galleries and collections

Hope you like our 'front cover' this issue ... it's a 1907 map of the Parish of Hunters Hill in the County of Cumberland, aka the home of Macquarie University, sourced from the NSW Department of Lands.  You can find all sorts of interesting old maps online in their 'parish maps' section ... it's worth a look!

STOP THE CYBERPRESS!

Public Lecture: Museums and Social Harmony.

TUESDAY 8 JUNE

Museum Studies, Faculty of Science and International Communication, Faculty of Arts are enormously proud to present a Public Lecture by Professor Amareswar Galla from the University of Queensland in order to launch the new Soft Power and Public Diplomacy Research Group at Macquarie University.  Click here for details.

Inexpensive and enormously interesting study tour.

Museum Studies will be visiting around thirty regional museums, galleries and collections in NSW and Victoria during September.  The tour will finish in Melbourne just in time for us to present papers at the Museums Australia 2010 Conference.  Click here for details.

Age of Fishes follow-up from Dr John Merrick, GSE, FoS.

For those readers who enjoyed our article on the 'Age of Fishes' in the last edition we have received the following note from Dr John Merrick in our own Graduate School of the Environment, Faculty of Science:

"The studies summarised in your article are described in detail in a chapter by Alex Ritchie in the recent book 'Evolution and Biogeography of Australasian Vertebrates'.

"The book is available through all regular outlets (e.g. Co-op), but if people approach me directly I can arrange substantial discounts not available elsewhere."

Dr John's email is john.merrick@mq.edu.au

The editorial rant

Once upon a time, before globalisation, neo-liberalism and in Australia, economic rationalism, the word community loosely described a group of people living together in the same place who shared a common sense of identity, who helped each other out during periods of difficulty, who shared the joyous times and who genuinely worked and played together to build a good society. 

People generally did this freely and altruistically without too much thought of ‘what’s in it for me’, ‘how much does it cost’ or ‘what’s the bottom line here?; all this reciprocity seem to ‘work out in the wash’.  Buying and selling things was just a part of the social life of the community.  Now this, of course, is a very baggy description of community that will have the purists, the theorists and the academics from a range of disciplines shaking their fists, however it will do for this story...

Political economists, like me, tend to look at community through the critical lens of a disembedded economy.  That’s where the economy has been separated out from the other parts of a functional society – the political, social and cultural aspects – and given primacy which then arguably leads to a focus on efficiency and professionalism in most things.  If we look closely at Australia since the early 1980s we notice that we have become increasingly rational as a society; everything, down to how many hours you volunteer at the local school or soccer club, is measured, planned, monitored and managed as if we were a big business rather than a society. 

Efficiency is the new game in town and woe betide those who don’t ‘participate’ to the satisfaction of the government (this new form of ‘participation’ is mostly economic of course – but that’s another story).  Indeed this has some benefits in that things are more efficient in some areas and the thieves generally don’t burgle houses anymore because people can afford to buy new electrical stuff from Harvey Norman or JB (but not Clive Peeters) rather than off the back of a truck.  But I digress...

Community in the twenty first century is not simply geographic; the reality of community now is that place and its associate identity – the mainstays of pre-1980s communities – has changed as people move around their city, state, country and the globe.  The notion of community is increasingly being stretched to encompass communities of work, school, interest, religion, location (that’s real and virtual) all within the one individual.  That’s where museums, galleries and collections come into their own. 

As conventional geographic communities break down and traditional community life morphs into a more rational, instrumental version of itself people are increasingly seeking ways to connect with others with similar histories, interests and perspectives as well as looking to explore the way others live and have lived, to build their own new identities and perhaps to make sense of our increasingly rational new world order and to add a bit of organised chaos into regimented lives. 

This growing interest in things historic and/or different is not simply seeking to ‘ground’ oneself, it is to connect with others and objects in a very physical way, to see difference in an increasingly bland and samey world and to see how community was done without the demands and strictures of an efficient, measured, monitored, rational and ultimately unsatisfying social world; a place where people can go to think, imagine, dream and participate in something greater than themselves without others wanting to measure and monitor them, apart from as visitor statistics of course – but that too is another story...

Lyn Hicks, Editor

Enjoy some wonderful poetry from our own Dr Marcelle Freiman from the Department of English.  Marcelle, Professor John Simons and some of Marcelle's students read their poetry in the Macquarie University Art Gallery.  Click here for more poetry.

Marcelle Freiman

Open Lace-work

                                                                                                            Russia 1992

A row of white milestones –

silver birch forests strike past the train,

I remember the lift and tug  

of a language soft as wrapped chords

– and hands of women

their fingers drawing threads in a cloth

of open-work: spaces like halts

and absences on a journey,

a lace of silver-white stitches

laid on my grandmother's table.

We drink black tea from glasses

in silver holders etched with leaves,

hold conserved strawberries

on our tongues – through which

acrid tea passes our lips:

I see my grandfather long ago,

a long-handled spoon in his glass

lifting to his mouth

the whole-grape jam my grandmother made

to sweeten his tea.

Published in Marcelle Freiman, White Lines (Vertical), Hybrid Publishers, Ormond Vic. 2010. Permission received from publisher.

Also published in Quadrant Magazine, July/August 1999.

Marcelle feels that her poem matches well with Christopher Dean, ‘D’Oyley – monochromes 1994-1996’, Enamel and lace on canvas, below.

Elizabeth Claire Alberts

Where I’ll live now

is a question toiling through my life as you drive

a little too fast down dusty roads of the Central Coast,

my fingers rumple pages of the street directory,

stumbling over names like Ourimbah and Yarramalong.

This is the life you want—acres and acres of land

to build the house, art studio, library, chook shed.

I ride with the window down, try to stay open

to the possibilities, but I feel isolated, missing

my own country, my home on the other side of the world,

strong colonial beams, foundation settled deep into ground.

Was it hard for my mother? the crossover,

the change when my father took her away,

perimeters of a new house reconstructing her days. Perhaps

her mother’s tablecloths, her father’s study chairs,

the horsehair rugs, the upright piano shipped 

two months into their marriage helped her define the walls

around her. Different for me, how I’ll have to start

from scratch: pile of timber, nails, thousands of your ideas

which you tell me as we drive along,

peering down driveways, across front lawns,

saying things like look at that place and I could live there,

while I feel vulnerable in the open land,

the question of where I’ll live now looming just ahead,

certain as the hills and valleys we drive towards,

yet unsettled, like foundations that won’t hold,

like rooms without walls.