If you are a politician or a bureaucrat, when you celebrate a history, and the story telling in it, the thing worth remembering are the words of that ubiquitous humorist Mark Twain. He constantly reminds us that if you are telling the truth a good memory is surplus to requirement. When it comes to history, since we are gathering cliches together here, Napoleon's observation that history is simply a version of past events that people have decided to agree upon. Massaged history is the kind of thing that will resonate quite loudly when bureaucracies and their functionaries market themselves. They can be relied upon to talk up their own achievements won on the backs of others all the way to next performance review.
Post WW2, Winston Churchill said that for his part, "I consider that it will be found much better by all Parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history." And speaking of histories, Martin Luther King Jr famously said that he agreed with Dante. It was he who predicted that the hottest places in hell's inferno were reserved for those who, in a period of moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.
There comes a time when silence betrays excellence, when speaking up works against mediocrity. There comes a time when truth cannot be silenced.
As today's socially disadvantaged people take to the streets, the hustings and sometimes courts of law, the morally challenged must soon feel the heat as they draw themselves ever nearer to Dante's inferno. The status quo is apparently being 'all mucked up' and there are paradigms shifts disrupting the once relaxed and comfortable ideals and the belief systems that sustain the proverbial rent seekers of this world.
Celebrating a musingplace's history is a tricky business and never more so than when there is some presumed milestone that is being held aloft. Half a decade in a 130 years lifespan can be either momentous or nothing more than an inconsequential blip. But at the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery (QVMAG) in Launceston, a city that for as long as the institution has existed, proudly celebrated its colonial histories and heritage. It has worn them as a badge of honour albeit that increasingly, this is contested ground.
The QVMAG was founded on the cornerstone of the Royal Society of Tasmania (RST) endeavours to make sense of the world from its edge and in the antipodes. As a 'musingplace', the QVMAG rather quickly became a political cum colonial edifice like those in London and Paris it once subliminally modelled itself upon and aspired towards.
That these histories are blighted by the colonial assertion of terra nullius needs to be noted. Currently, all that flows from it comes with a subterranean need to smooth history over and avoid all those uncomfortable stories languishing away deep in a musingplace's 'the collections'.
So, let's not talk about any of 'this or that' if whatever it is challenges us and our assumed, and comfortable, value systems.
Albeit somewhat smaller, like the ubiquitous British Museum in the 'motherland', the QVMAG filled itself to the gunnels with the trophies and plunder that colonialism has a want to assemble in the assertion of power.
Above '42º S',Tasmania's histories played themselves out in the QVMAG's collections as they grew, as did the institution. It turns out that 'wealth grew' above 42º S as after all Launceston understood itself as the island's real capital.
Snapshots of 'the place' and the people who invested their lives and their resources in the TRS's project, 'the advancement of knowledge', we find anything but 'advancement' in a 21st C context when the colonial aspirations of the past are interrogated more intensely. And, the institution looks more and more like an enterprise of diminishing returns.
In the half decade since the QVMAG celebrated its 125th year the institution has become bureaucratically embroiled in its own imaginings of itself. Likewise, the deluded notion that as a 'cost centre' in local governance its purpose, albeit subliminally, is to define and determine 'culture' – what deluded rubbish. It turns out that it doesn’t cost any more to strive for excellence while settling for mediocrity eventually will have an enormous price tag.
It also turns out that five years on from the125th anniversary it is the 'time frame' within which the institution truly loses its plot. It has become the victim of 'managerialism' – with mediocrity as its dividend.
Consequently, effectively the institution has become 'hollowed out' as its managerial ineptitude stripped way and neutralised its real assets. All this hid out under the bureaucratic smoke screen that COVID-19 somewhat conveniently threw up as camouflage. The art of camouflage is the most interesting of all the arts in all its insidiousness.
In 2016 the 'elephant in the room' was to be seen in the flurry of activity that spawned that 125th Anniversary exhibition. All too evident in that celebratory exhibition was the 'leaving out' of Tasmania's 'First People' – the palawa/pakana. Indeed, Aboriginal cultural production per se was entirely left out of the equation albeit that there were needs to, and indeed options a plenty, to include it.
As embarrassing as that curatorial oversight was at the time, the ghost of 'Nellie-the-elephant' lingers yet with the evidence of her flatulence detectable in almost every nook and cranny and smelling of mediocrity.
However, a year later, in July 2017, The First Tasmanians: Our Story exhibit opened and to some extent put to right the institution's long standing, shadowy and subliminal dissemination of the 'Truganini myth' – that the palawa/pakana were not really there. Momentarily there was a bit of a lurch into the future.
Notwithstanding any of that, the aroma of Nellie's flatulence is omnipresent. It is more than evident that within the managerial hollowing out of the institution's research credibility has become lost inn the process. The institution has been surreally 'asset stripped' and its status as a musingplace has fallen from grace.
The bureaucratic phenomena that underpins the 'cost centre rational' has put institutional purpose risk. That 'RST ideal', 'the advancement of knowledge', is out in the cold and off the agenda. Quite simply, when mediocrity is tolerated you are bound to get more of it.
Like an insidious virus mediocrity has infected almost every organ and it is transforming the institution's cultural status as an 'art gallery and museum' into that of a bland cum pedestrian theme park – a pale copy of a kind of Disneyland where along with something of yesterday and tomorrow might be seen, and where fantasy is never far away.
It is more than concerning that the institution's Governance Advisory Board has been sidelined and by doing so it strategically dumbs the institution down. Alongside this the operation's community support systems have effectively been neutralised as well.
Failure is an awful thing to contemplate. When one looks for the common denominator in failure it is always the same thing – the excuses that stand in the way of success.
So, apart from being something of a smoke screen, COVID-19 has become a metaphor for institutional degeneration and decline. Most of this can be put down to 25 years plus of blanding and blending of governance and management. All this is at the expense of the 'public purse'. In recent times 'the dividends' – the cultural dividends – flowing to 'the executive' has mimicked the corporate sector's insidious excesses. Sadly, it is the fraction that represents the whole.
So, in the vernacular, any promise of arriving at a turning point must be taken with that proverbial 'pinch of salt'. No institution could ever be as deceived by another as they typically are by themselves.
In 2020 in the hight of the first wave of COVID-19 Prof. Brian Schmidt, ANU's Vice Chancellor, advocating a reality check in academe, somewhat poignantly alerted the university world – and by extension musingplaces too – that such institutions were no longer the curators of, the keepers of, knowledge or knowledge systems. So, clearly the race is on, or it should be. The need to embrace the paradigm shift that has fallen upon academe and the imperative to build new relevancies could not be clearer.
Credible institutions differentiate between governance and management. However, it is not so, and far, far away from any kind of reality at the QVMAG. Somehow by a quirk of fate the QVMAG has no 'arm's length governance' and is left to its own self serving devices. Alarmingly, the institution has become a free wheeling and unaccountable bureaucratic fiefdom.
The upshot of that has been there to see for some time. Most recently, unfettered self indulgence and rudderless frolics guided by personal social aspirations has delivered some strange version of 'the lowest common denominator'. If it looks like cultural determinism it probably is. If it has become some kind of 'warped normality' – the kind of thing totalitarianism indulges in – it might well be.
Asking a bureaucrat in any manifestation of governance, what ‘culture’ is nowadays, it will surely earn you looks of bewilderment. It’s the kind of thing everyone says they know the answer to but when push comes to shove nobody, it seems, has a ready answer for you – at least not one that fits some convenient bureaucratic paradigm.
Culture is the central concept, the corner stone, upon which the study of anthropology is founded. Anthropology encompasses that range of phenomena that are transmitted through social interaction in human societies. Scholarship in anthropology is the discipline that is most obviously missing in the QVMAG's purview and curiously 'management' has set itself upon a course of defining Launcestonian cultural reality. We might well ask why and for what purpose?
Cultural universals are found in all human societies. They include expressive forms like art making, music making, dance, ritual, religious expression, and technologies like tool usage, cooking, modes of shelter, clothing, etc. However, the unfulfilled promise hanging in the air is for the 'City of Launceston' to have its very own 'cultural strategy' – quasi Eurocentric and monocultural no doubt – to guide its citizenry forward is nothing short of worrisome.
No, not a budget to facilitate the city's 'cultural development'. No, no, not a 'strategy' to help determine and shape a community's vision of itself. However, there is some presumably homogenised Launcestonian cultural reality on the agenda. Yes, and it is said that there is a strategy, albeit one dreamt up in a constructed vacuum.
Presumably what 'comes next' is in construction and one being planned well away from the gaze of 'the community' that needs to be configured/reconfigured bureaucratically. It is no doubt some kind of weird post-colonial, yet to be determined, administratively compliant reality. Curiously, the subjects of the strategy have thus far had little more than lip service in the way of consultation.
Curiously in the celebration of 130 years of musing it is the 1960's that are being lauded as the halcyon days as the current director prepares to exit the scene invoking a future, a pared down future and in a diminished operation resplendent in its dilettantism.
Any notion that the QVMAG's 'management structure' has anything like a social license to do what it has been doing is absurd, perverse and in the end hubristic. Yes, the institution's fiscal status must change if it is to avoid a legacy of mediocrity. Yes, the QVMAG, as a cultural institution, should head into the future deeply committed to evolve into 'community cultural enterprise'. And yes it does need to jettison its 'cost centre status' at every opportunity.
Ray Norman April 2021
The Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery has been a constant in Launceston since its opening in 1891 at Royal Park.
This year, the museum will turn 130 on April 29.
To begin with the museum had a caretaker, but no curator. The first curator, Herbet Hedley Scott, was appointed to the role in 1897. Mr Scott's successor was his son Eric, a well-regarded scientist.
The beginnings of QVMAG came from collections sourced from the Royal Society of Tasmania and the Launceston Mechanics Institute. The early collections focused on mineral specimens and natural sciences on the ground floor, with art displayed on the upper level.
However, more space was needed. So, in 1907 the first extension was built to accommodate a zoological gallery. In 1927 the museum gained a significant additional collection when it purchased the John Watt Beattie collection. The lot included a trove of early colonial history and art, as well as an extensive convict-related collection. The museum continued to develop over the years, with more extensions and research and objects acquired.
In 1998, the museum extended further with a new site at the Launceston railway yards at Inveresk. The new site opened in 2001. Then, six years later, a decision was made to create a dedicated art gallery at the original Royal Park site, with the Inveresk site to focus more on natural sciences and history. The refurbished art gallery was opened as a space dedicated to the visual arts and design in 2011.
Experiences of QVMAG
City of Launceston's general manager of arts and cultural services Tracy Puklowski said the museum was made up of stories.
"It's a story about the history of Launceston. It's a story about how museums have changed over the years. It's a story about the personalities that have run the museum over the years," she said.
Ms Puklowski was appointed to her role as director of the museum in 2018 and was amazed by the size and scope of the institute. She said the challenge when she started was to hone in on what the museum should specialise in, narrowing the focus.
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"What struck me was these incredible unique stories that we have here, and how much innovation there has been in Launceston over the years," she said.
Senior curator of visual arts and design Ashleigh Whatling said when she started at QVMAG in 2017, she saw the potential to mix things up and challenge some of the assumptions around the artworks.
"I thought there were opportunities for us to tell more rounded stories, getting different parts of the collection to speak to different eras."
Museum assistant of natural sciences Judy Rainbird started at the museum in January 1998. She applied because of the technical aspect and the opportunity to work with the collections the museum had.
Collection changes There is no doubt QVMAG has changed substantially over the years, and not just with site builds and expansions. Collections have grown, staff have come and gone, and technology has helped bring the concept of the museum into the 21st century.
Ms Rainbird said the when she started she primarily assisted the curator at the time, and though the work had changed over the years, the collection curation requirement remained the same.
"I think the biggest change is that being a small museum we are now internationally known and have a reputation," she said. "It's just through digitalisation ... we are more exposed."
Ms Puklowski said QVMAG had become more aware of its audiences, who they were, and what they wanted.
"I think we have become a lot more confident in ourselves as an organisation," she said. "We are a bit more willing to experiment, take risks, push the boundaries. It's been a delightful evolution to be a part of."
Ms Whatling agreed with Ms Puklowski and said the museum had been able to tackle the social and political aspirations of northern Tasmania. She had also focused on acquiring a more diverse range of works from contemporary artists.
The meaning of QVMAG
City of Launceston deputy mayor Danny Gibson said QVMAG had long been central to the cultural fabric of the city.
"QVMAG is a central part of Launceston life. For 130 years the institution has been dedicated to sharing the stories of our people and places," he said. "I commend Tracy and her team on providing opportunities to engage with art, science, history, and space to the people of Launceston."
Ms Puklowski said the anniversary marked an important turning point for the institution.
"We are so proud to celebrate our 130 year anniversary with the people of Launceston," she said. "Museums are a reflection of the times. Our institution continues to transition and adapt through cultural change since 1891. In the future, we continue to look to reflect, grow and adapt."
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The future No one knows what the future will hold, but the women of QVMAG weighed in their opinions about what could be focused on in the years to come.
Ms Rainbird said she imagined the staff would increasingly find more stories to link to the objects in the collection due to all the access to resources they now had. She said the information would also fill in the gaps for items that had unknowns attached to them.
Ms Whatling said a greater range of diverse voices would be found, and more challenging stories would be brought to the forefront.
"Not just more diversity in our artists, but in the curators, in the leadership team, not just the voices that we are curating," she said. "The bottom line is, I feel like I'm part of a long chain of custodians of this collection and the chain will continue after me."
Ms Puklowski, even though she will soon be leaving her position at QVMAG, still had an idea of where the museum may head in the future. She believed it was important for the history of QVMAG that the governance and funding structure should head into the next phase of evolution.
"I think that QVAMG is in a really great position at the moment to take that next step into its future," she said. "I'm really sad to be leaving but I'm proud of what we have achieved."
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