of Australia’s museological offering. It is a subject too complex to be discussed at any length in this chapter, but several notable projects must be acknowledged on account of the impact they have made.
The Hobart-based investor and entrepreneur David Walsh has, quite literally, changed the cultural landscape of Tasmania, fundamentally transforming the cultural tourism economy with his spectacular Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), situated dramatically on a private peninsula jutting into the estuary of the Derwent River in northern Hobart. Walsh’s concept has been to create an architecturally significant building complex (designed by Nonda Katsalidis, with James Turrell’s recently installed and brilliantly lit Pharos highly visible from the river and surrounding land) to house his deliberately eccentric and challenging collection, and changing exhibitions. At the time of opening in 2011 a driving concept of “sex and death” was announced, offered along with cutting-edge navigational technology which allowed the complete absence of labelling and didactics. For example, the downloadable app offered to visitors provided a link to the “Art Wank” series of often cheeky commentaries. Walsh wanted the public’s encounter with exceptional works, such as the Chapman brothers’ Goya-influenced Great Deeds Against the Dead, to be an experience of public museology stood on its head – and he succeeded. The owner-curator’s characteristically outspoken blogs about the collection and exhibitions, and art and life generally, are eagerly read.
In Sydney, Judith Neilson, with her daughter Paris, has created another significant entity, White Rabbit Gallery (opened 2009), inserted within a traditional inner suburban commercial building by Smart Design Studio. Neilson’s collection is dedicated exclusively to contemporary Chinese visual culture in all its forms, often on a monumental scale, installed with verve and courage. The huge collection they have formed, always selecting personally and instinctively, and the exhibitions drawn from it and other sources, have had a transformative effect on the reception of contemporary Chinese art in Australia.
In Victoria, the first of these major new private initiatives was the TarraWarra Museum of Art created and funded by Marc and Eva Besen, with a building designed by Allan Powell on their estate and vineyard in the Yarra Valley to the north-east of Melbourne, opened in 2003. At the heart of the museum is the Besen’s important private collection of mainly mid–late twentieth century Australian art, now constantly enhanced by their curatorial team with major contemporary acquisitions, and a program of often very edgy exhibitions and special installations.
Following a model well established in the US, Melbourne itself now has two dedicated private “house museums” available to the public at designated times and by appointment. The first was architect Corbett Lyons’s and his wife Yueji’s “Lyon Housemuseum” in the suburb of Kew, and such is its success, and such are the demands imposed by the size of their growing collection of essentially contemporary Australian art, that another wing has recently been added.
In addition, the architect Charles Justin and his wife Lea have created the “Justin Art House Museum” project in another Melbourne suburb, deliberately smaller in scale than the former example, conceived as a broad and very personal interactive engagement, often with art and technology a recurrent feature, with the owner-curators creating opportunities for relaxed discussion.
There are numerous other private collections now open to the public on a permanent, or regular, basis, the most recent being John and Pauline Gandel’s astonishing sculpture park on their coastal estate at Point Leo, on the Mornington Peninsula, with important examples of largely contemporary Australian and global sculpture.
A key question, often asked, concerns the long-term, inter-generational future of these projects, the circumstance and terms on which they are likely to continue, and the process by which proper provision is made for long-term continuity and innovation (given that particular collections will represent a taste at a given moment likely to become less “current” as time passes) is one to watch. These private art museums open to the public have very quickly caught the imagination, and garnered the support, of the museum-going public, particularly as the combination of gallery collection with cafés, restaurants and cellar doors reinforces the museum visit as an enjoyable leisure activity.
Conclusion
Given Australia’s relatively short history of European settlement, and relatively small population (25 million in 2018, occupying a large country in which nearly half the total population, however, is concentrated in an around Sydney and Melbourne) the nation has been, and continues to be, well served in its public access to art museums and galleries.
The nineteenth century colonial cultural experience closely reflected the new museology – driven by principles of self-improvement and broad access to education – which had evolved in Britain, and taste and public collecting were inevitably oriented to Britain. It was not until the latter part of the twentieth century that notable shifts in public museology brought significant changes, which better reflected Australia’s changing perspective on its place in the world, and its post-colonial, post-WWII relationship with its own region. Australia’s public art museums have needed to focus on, and accommodate, key issues such as the embrace of modernism and contemporaneity (the NGV in Melbourne only acquired its first Picasso painting in 1986); the need to support Australia’s own artists and art systems; the rise of the contemporary Indigenous art movement, and how that art would be collected and exhibited in the nation’s art museums, large and small; and the process by which the visual cultures of Asia would be better understood, collected and exhibited, either through permanent collections or temporary exhibitions.
The culture of the temporary exhibition, particularly the genre of the large, imported “blockbuster”, has been transforming, driving ever-increasing audiences, and focussing government decision-making on infrastructure funding, tied as it inevitably is, to financial considerations of the economic benefits of cultural tourism. At the same time, governments at all levels have been reducing operating funding, demanding a greater level of self-sufficiency through entrepreneurial activities, and philanthropic and sponsorship support. That said, Australian art museums, in common with many others elsewhere, are increasingly searching for new, relevant and credible criteria for assessing the real social, civic and cultural value of its museums and galleries sector. In such a strongly multi-cultural country, it is an interesting and essential debate. The great challenge to Australian art museology is balancing its traditional and necessary commitment to Australian art and artists, in an increasingly global environment, with an international perspective. In many ways, this simply reflects Australia’s geographic and socio-political position on the Pacific Rim, a country with ancient indigenous, and more recent non-indigenous cultures, a British-European history of settlement, and social structure, and a necessary post-WWII openness to both the US and its economy and culture, and Australia’s regional Asia-Pacific neighbours.
Notes
1 1 Before the creation of the Australian federation in 1901 each state was a self-governing colony with its own parliament and therefore its own educational and cultural policies, and this remains the case today in terms of the responsibilities of each state and territory.
2 2 See Bernard Smith, Documents on Art and Taste in Australia, Melbourne: OUP, 1975, pp. 64–69, p. 68.
3 2 Smith, op. cit., pp. 148–161.
4 4 Ann Galbally, Alison Inglis et al., The first collections: the Public Library and the National Gallery of Victoria in the 1850s and 1860s: University Gallery, the University of Melbourne Museum of Art 14 May – 15 July 1992, pp. 9–10.
5 5 See Catalogue of Works of Art, exhibited in the Lauceston Mechanics’ Institute building, on the occasion of its opening, April 9 1860.
6 6 Catalogue of the Art-Treasures Exhibition held in the Legislative Council Chamber, Hobart Town, Tasmania, in the year MDCCCLVIII.
