A Musingplace, Anxiety And An Elephant's Ghost

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The Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery(QVMAG) celebrates its 125 Anniversary with an exhibit that is as troubling as it might be described as being enlightening, beautiful, intriguing, interesting or even fascinating. However, let there be no doubt about it, unquestionably the room is filled with the beautiful, the curious and enlightening objects.

Nonetheless, while exploring the narratives the exhibit constructs, and the spaces it inhabits, somehow one can sense the presence of a ghostly and flatulent elephant in the room. One might grimace, and even deny its presence, but once this monster's presence is felt then its eerie omnipresence, and the smell of it, haunts you even after you’ve left the room.

This celebratory exhibit that explores ‘The World Inside’ at the QVMAG draws upon the rich histories played out in a place, a city, a harbour, a destination, and one that ranks highly among Australia’s oldest colonial outposts.

As a consequence of British imperial aspirations Launceston was founded in March 1806 as much as a penal colony and a military garrison as it might now be for the ‘settlement’, and the city, it was to become because of its geography and histories.

No matter how intently you might want to look ‘the other way’ there is no escaping the reality that the land upon which this city, this musingplace, this celebratory narrative, is constructed and laid out upon, is plundered and alienated land.

This land is an ancestral homeplace for ‘The First Tasmanians’. The tracks of the people crisscross this terrain alongside the tracks of marsupials, emus, etc. and it remains ancestral land. Nonetheless at the event’s opening, despite the ceremonial and ritual acknowledgement of the land’s ancestral significance, different and less polite imperatives are in fact in play when the crowd disperses.

In this exhibit somehow these primordial presences, these ghosts of another time, have been swallowed up and displaced. They have been put aside in a curatorial construct that privileges the colonial paradigm and smooths over the histories with all their uncomfortable excesses and the evident exploitations of ‘place’.

In various ways the exhibit’s ‘construct’ is a kind of jollied-up postmodern reconstruction. Moreover, it is quite clear that no real attempt has been made to either deconstruct or even interrogate either the foundations or underpinnings upon which the QVMAG’s collecting has been going on for 125 years – celebrate yes, deconstruct no.

Launceston’s postcolonial histories and heritage has enabled the city to claim many firsts in the colonial and postcolonial paradigms within which the city variously imagines itself. They are “firsts” such as the first use of anaesthesia in the Southern Hemisphere, the city being the first in Australia to have underground sewers and it being the first Australian city to be lit by hydroelectricity and so on. If this exhibit had included The First Tasmanians in the broad context of a cultural discourse it might well have been a first for the QVMAG.

Much of this is a reflection of the city being amongst the richest in the colony and arguably the British Empire too when the sun never set upon it.

Albeit a far flung place it should not be a surprise that Launceston relatively quickly developed a Eurocentric cultural life that might match anything found anywhere in the Empire. The reflections of this are relatively easily found in the city’s placescaping – its streetscapes, its built heritage, its open spaces, etc.

Against this background the QVMAG declares and proclaims that it is its mission to be a leader in the intellectual and creative development of Launceston via the development of new understandings of Tasmania’s natural and cultural heritage.

Consistent with that the institution asserts that its collections have been assembled to be:

·     • An archival record of the artistic heritage of the people of Tasmania – but it seems not always or by necessity inclusive of ‘The First Tasmanians’;

·      • A repository for the material culture of the peoples who now and previously inhabited Tasmania and adjacent lands – but not always or by necessity inclusive of ‘The First Tasmanians’;

·      • A record of the living and past faunas and floras of Tasmania and adjacent lands and seas – but it seems not always or by necessity inclusive of the perspectives of ‘The First Tasmanians’ bring to the understanding of place and placescaping;

·      • A record of the minerals and rocks that make up Tasmania – but it seems not always or by necessity inclusive of the perspectives ‘The First Tasmanians’ bring to the understanding of place;

·      • A reference and source of material for researching the fields of the arts, the social histories and the sciences – but it seems not always or by necessity inclusive of the perspectives of ‘The First Tasmanians’ bring to the understanding of place and humanity’s place in the world;.

·     • A source of materials and ideas for educational programs, particularly exhibitions – and clearly not always or by necessity inclusive of the perspectives of ‘The First Tasmanians’ bring to the understandings of place and placescaping that contemporaneously enrich our understandings of the world.

Stepping outside ‘The World Inside’ exhibit on either of the QVMAG’s campuses currently it is not possible to glean a hint of ‘The First Tasmanians’ being anywhere near or close to a mindful or respectful acknowledgement of their presence in the community. Even after 125 there is no imperative to imagine that Tasmania's 'first people' might be relevant in the imaginings going on in Launceston's musingplace.

In fact, there is a rather strong whiff of the lingering ‘Truganini Myth’ that suggests that, along with the thylacine and the Tasmanian emu, the ‘First Tasmanians’ are, euphemistically, just no longer with us.

Somewhat rubbing salt into the cultural wounding, within the ‘Tasmanian Connections’ exhibit on the QVMAG’s Inveresk campus there are two exhibits that speak loudly about the cultural forgetfulness that’s at work in Tasmania – and in its institutions by extension.

It seems that it may not be for nothing that Launceston has chosen a dead and extinct marsupial carnivore as the city's logo.   

One object in ‘Tasmanian Connections’ (Tasmanian Disconnections) plainly delivers a declaration of war to the First Tasmanians and the other is a kind of trophy won for the dispossession the First Tasmanians suffered at the hands of the colonisers.

The first object, an example of the colonial Governor Arthur’s now infamous circa 1829,  “Proclamation Boards”, declares war and sits somewhat ominously beside the second, “Robinson Cup”. This cup was presented to GA Robinson in appreciation for establishing a conciliation with the First Tasmanians, as hollow as it was.

The colonial histories and subtexts attached to these two objects conjure up some of Tasmania’s bleakest and most troublesome narratives. Arguably they should be deinstalled and reinstalled in the QVMAG’s Royal Park Colonial Gallery rather than being some clumsily camouflaged narrative in a disparate, scatter-gun and unconvincing approach to talking about Tasmania and Tasmanianness in all too general a way.

The infamy attached to these two objects, and the context in which they are shown, should alert musers to the institution’s carelessness – disinclination even – to pay serious attention to the cultural sensitivities and sensibilities of the First Tasmanians. Certainly its on the institution's agenda to install a First Tasmanians Gallery some 125 years after opening in 1891. Interestingly, neither the institution, nor Launceston's Council, could find the resources for such a project and only now is it being done with the aid of hefty grant from the Tasmanian Community Fund. In the meantime it seems that there is no real imperative for meaningful acknowledgement.

Albeit an audacious proposition, this celebratory exhibit might well have been the opportunity to return the  Woureddy and Trucaninny busts by Benjamin Law (1835 & 1836) to the public gaze in Launceston. The busts are now held in the QVMAG's reserve collection having been hastily, and somewhat embarrassingly, spirited away at the time of  the 'Sothebys' debacle' – Melbourne August 25 2009. 

This celebratory exhibit might also have been an opportunity achieve another 'Launceston First' by putting Woureddy and Trucaninny together with Law's the bust of Robinson – "The Pacificator" – thus, finally, realising Robinson's aspiration for a kind of 'triptych' when he commissioned Law to make these busts.

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Nationally, the 'Southey's Law Busts Debacle' drew close attention to the tensions in Tasmania to do with The First Tasmanians and the "Forgotten War" and as Peter Stanley coined it, "The slaughter on stolen land". More recently Nicholas Clements' "The Black War" draws attention to the critical scholarship that seemingly the QVMAG, on the evidence of this exhibit, is most comfortable when such scholarship does not involve the institution in any kind of audacious contention. 

Consequently, on the QVMAG’s Royal Park campus, and the ‘The World Inside’ exhibit where the 125 years it celebrates, is loaded with contention. Indeed, why is there no acknowledgement of The First Tasmanians ether in this exhibit or anywhere on the campus?

Herbert Hedley Scott is one of the most significant individuals in the QVMAG’s history. He was the museum’s first full time curator and it is highly unlikely that he wasn’t the least bit curious about The First Tasmanians. 

Nonetheless, well might Scott's exemplary work be acknowledged and celebrated on the occasion of the QVMAG's 125th birthday.

Under Scott’s untiring guidance the QVMAG began to prosper as he devoted his life to the museum and its collections. For forty years Scott served not only as curator as he did whatever it was that needed to be done – the research, the lecturing, the preparation of exhibits, the displays and labelling not to mention the cleaning.

By all accounts Scott was eclectic, curious and scholarly individual. He saw the value of scholarship. Over the years he published important reference material, including articles in the Royal Society of Tasmania’s Papers and clearly he was the personification of the QVMAG – and in ways that could hardly be matched today.

Scott devoted his life to the museum and in his era his knowledge of Tasmanian flora and fauna was almost unrivalled. Clearly Scott was the very model of a 19^th Century museum curator. Essentially he was a man of his times and one who shared the passions of his time.

The imaginings and constructs that informed the world that Scott occupied would have found their inspiration in ‘The Enlightenment’. Thus the musingplaces of Scott’s time evolved from the sensibilities that informed Europe’s wunderkammers and kunstkammers centred as they were on the empowerment enlightenment allegedly endowed upon ‘collection keepers’ – kings, princes and heroic generals.  

In the 21^st Century, and 125 years on from the QVMAG’s foundation, rather than attempting to ‘make-nice’ and somewhat romantically reconstruct a cluttered 19th Century cabinet of curiosities, it is much more relevant to seriously interrogate and deconstruct such mind spaces.

Sadly, in all the reconstruction and the making-nice no attention at all seems to have been given to deconstructing the foundations upon which collecting and musing might be carried forward in a 21^st Century context. That is perceptions of ‘collecting’ in contrast to the business of collecting in Scott’s time when artifacts and exotic cultural production was being traded globally. Indeed in Scott's time and well before there was lively world wide trade going on with the body parts of Aboriginal peoples along with other now contentious cultural curiosities.

Unhappily the invisibility of The First Tasmanians in this rendering of ‘The World Inside’ at the QVMAG raises question upon question upon question to do with curatorial rigour and cultural sensibilities.

In putting “a little bit of everything” in the exhibit it turns out that ‘cleaning up the act’ boils down to little more than an aesthetic blurring of, and a blanding of, the discourses in that ubiquitous ‘good room’ museums keep to impress their various audiences – but not The First Tasmanians it seems. Sadly, the missing cultural production of the First Tasmanians cannot even be found on a postcard at the QVMAG's Royal Park campus.

After thinking about that, as Nicholas Clements says in his book The Black War, “the cultural brokers of the last century have led Australians to graze contentedly on a lean historical diet of national triumphs, sporting heroes a rural battlers” which points us to the need to revisit the foundations upon which musingplaces are constructed and up the ante.

So why might any of this matter?

Musingplaces depend on ‘the public’ not only for their recurrent costs but also to underwrite their collecting. Following on very closely from that is the fact that the places that have musingplaces are variously uplifted or derided for the community cultural dividends they do, or do not, deliver.

If musingplaces are not delivering the dividends expected of them, then their always presumed social licenses need to be reviewed and challenged on the grounds of a lack of accountability.

Given that these musingplaces’ very existence depends upon the generosity of the ‘public purse’, and from conscripted funding at that, condescending and ‘ivory-towerishness’ should not be tolerated.

In his now famous ‘Redfern Speech’ [Link] Paul Keating reached out to First Australians with what he was later to call a ‘fundamental act of recognition’. There are resonances in this speech that echo almost everywhere and not the least in Australian musingplaces with long histories founded in colonial paradigms.

10 December 1992

Memorably Keating said:

“…… the starting point might be to recognise that the problem  starts with us non-Aboriginal Australians.…… It begins, I think, with that act of recognition.…… Recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing.…… We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life.…… We brought the diseases. The alcohol.…… We committed the murders.…… We took the children from their mothers.…… We practised discrimination and exclusion.…… It was our ignorance and our prejudice.…… And our failure to imagine these things being done to us.…… With some noble exceptions, we failed to make the most basic human response and enter into their hearts and minds.……We failed to ask – how would I feel if this were done to me?…… As a consequence, we failed to see that what we were doing degraded us all.

In the same way, failing to imagine ‘The First Tasmanians’ as a part of Launcestonian/Tasmanian/Australian cultural realities diminishes everyone in this and other contexts. The blighting overflows and moreover it brands everything else done in the name of ‘reconciliation’ as tokenism – for the unmistakable tokenism it truly is.

In exploring the narratives ‘The World Inside’ exhibit constructs, the spaces it hopes to inhabit in audiences’ cultural imagination, it is almost no surprise to sense that ghostly elephant in the room. We cannot really deny its presence, but its presence needn’t haunt us.

In the 21^st Century there are ways and means whereby narratives hitherto unable to be interrogated can be opened up and told to potentially millions of people over a yet unknown timeframe. If they are never sought they’ll never be discovered. If we can only look back with tunnel vision we’ll never discover a way forward. If we cannot look back and forward we are bound to locked in a space that will never allow us to find new understandings, the understandings we build musingplaces, observatories of a kind, will  never be found.

Orson Welles said of himself that “everything about me is a contradiction, and so is everything about everybody else. We are made out of oppositions; we live between two poles. There's a philistine and an aesthete in all of us, and a murderer and a saint. You don't reconcile the poles. You just recognise them.” If musingplaces simply looked to advice like this they might well serve their communities more inclusively and arguably, better.

In Japan when a precious pot breaks the “kintsugi” technique is employed. When something breaks, something precious, it is put back together with gold lacquer. Instead of making the cracks invisible, the imperative is to make them beautiful. The issue is to rejoice in the pot’s history, to celebrate what it's been through, where its been and what its done. We might well think of communities’ stories like that, full of gold veins, filled with rich narratives, filled with beauty instead of offencive divisions.

Kintsugi is a philosophy that treats breakages and repairs as part of the histories to be commemorated and celebrated rather than something to be hidden and disguised.

Musingplaces might well invoke kinsugi instead of trying to hide derision and division, contention even, in the backroom – and controversies never really out of sight or mind. Do we really need to encounter ghostly elephants in shrines of forgetfulness?

Indeed, what if public musingplaces were inclusive of, and accountable to, their communities of ownership and interest for the policies that drive them? What if public musingplaces were fearless and inclusive in their research effort? What if public musingplaces sought to initiate research that leads to new knowledge and better understandings?