application
Museum collections are complicated entities, and the case studies outlined within this research demonstrate a diversity of contexts within which they are contemporarily held. The legacy of ethnographic collections can to some extent guide contemporary practice in the form of redress, however, the situations and capacity for Indigenous communities today to positively deal with these legacies are so variable that the protocol environment can be only part-way effective. As such, ‘best-practice’ dominates the protocol environment in the absence of guidelines or structures that can effectively accommodate this variance.
This chapter explores how the environment of protocols interacts with the dichotomous relationship set up to persistently separate Indigenous people from museums. It further proposes the environment of protocols as a site of cross-cultural negotiation and learning, and also as a site which operates in awareness of its own inherent contradictions and limitations53. In order to etch out the contemporary environment of protocols, it is essential to first revisit the birth of the ‘other’ and its influence in the ‘museum age’.
The Museum Age
The ‘museum age’ as considered by Smithsonian anthropologist William Sturtevant in 1969, envelops roughly the 1840s through to the 1920s and signifies the era where museums transformed from the private realm to public institutions and as institutions gathered great influence through the collection and exhibition of objects and material culture (Phillips 2005:83). Sturtevant recognised that the latter part of this era (post 1890) saw an alliance between museums and universities, which served to formalise the pursuit through the academy (Sturtevant 1969:623). This era is understood to be heavily influenced by enlightenment thought, and the intensification of the scientific endeavour
53 This same kind of contradiction was recognised and articulated by Kristine Ronan in her article
exploring ‘Native Empowerment, the New Museology, and the National Museum of the American Indian’ 2014
161 to understand and categorize difference and through the process of recontextualisation, objects “were assigned new meanings derived from evolutionist, scientific, historical, and aesthetic paradigms of Western knowledge” (Phillips 2005:86). Exhibitions and exhibition techniques such as typological display and dioramas thus became devices of power (Bennett 1995:59)—the association between these early exhibitions and traditional museum practices with Western progress and enlightenment is one which endures today.
A typical objective of early anthropological displays was, therefore, to present artefacts from ‘primitive societies’ as if they were specimens akin to those of natural history. Following the tradition of the cabinets of curiosities, primitive peoples were considered to be parts of nature like the flora and fauna, and therefore their arts and crafts were to be classified and presented according to similarity of form, evolutionary stage of developments, or geographical origin. The comparative theme was the essential ingredient. (Ames 1992:51)
Interestingly, given this history and fraught association, the museum age is today often romanticized, as is the ‘cabinet of curiosity’, which is currently enjoying a resurgence in contemporary practice, complete with reference to the magnetism of material collections and exoticism of the ‘other’ (see the Australian Maritime Museum’s ‘Cabinet of Curiosities’ public program, the Australian Museum’s redeveloped Westpac Long Gallery, the ‘My learned object: collections and curiosities’ exhibition at the Potter Museum of Art (2015-2016) and journalist Philip Hoare’s (2015) commentary on the resurgence of the concept). Typological displays of Indigenous cultural objects are a good example of an enduring exhibition technique which harks back to traditional/comparative practice, and are commonly deployed in museums across Australia.
While the nostalgic invocation of traditional museum practice is certainly seen in Australia, the history of the traditional museum was almost entirely located elsewhere. Cabinets of curiosity were at their height in the Renaissance, and were for the most part, private (or reserved for the aristocracy (Bennett 1995: 59). The age of reason with the influences of scientific thinking transformed these cabinets away from private assemblages of curiosity to public demonstrations of structure and order (Bennett 1995: 40-41). It is probably at this point late in the eighteenth century that the evolution of
162 exhibition/display techniques- still with its focus on the singular (Bennett 1995:40, citing Pomian 1990) and the impressive- makes its mark in Australia.
These developments are key to understanding the ‘environment of protocols’, as they have in part, been developed in response to past practice, which is widely understood as being in its nature problematic and one-sided. As mentioned above, while Australian museum practice came much later than it did in Europe, Australian contributions to the global discourse on museum practice were of great interest.
The Sydney International Exhibition in 1879 and then the Melbourne International Exhibition in 1880 are both examples of the Australian contribution to the international exhibition format. In the Australian context, however, it was the interest in Indigenous material culture which commanded great global interest. Collection of Indigenous material culture was at its height during the museum age, as the edited volume ‘Makers and Making of Indigenous Museum Collections’ points out.
It was with the emergence of the social evolutionary paradigm and the not unrelated rise of the ‘museum age’ (1880-1920), that Aboriginal material culture took on a universal academic significance and a high public profile through artefact displays at international exhibitions both home and abroad. Given the poor state of the museum holdings of Aboriginal material, it is not surprising that an intense scramble for artefacts characterized this [period] of collecting from c. 1880 to c. 1920. (Peterson, Allen and Hamby (eds.) 2008:10)
While the history of the cabinet of curiosity took its place much earlier in Europe, both the concept and its exoticising tendencies wistfully endure. The ‘museum age’ is often visually referenced as cabinets of curiosities, or as overcrowded halls of collected objects arranged typologically and purposefully. The University of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum is archetypical in this regard (Ames 1995:51) —an institution which is often called upon to visually reference ‘traditional’ museums and museum practices of the museum age. The Pitt Rivers Museum, is however, aware of these enduring associations, and they provide mechanisms to explore and interrogate them including an ‘artist intervention’54 program and a breadth of critically engaged and contemporary public
163 programs and research partnerships (including Christian Thompson’s work ‘We Bury Our Own’, which will be explored in Chapter 6).
In Australia, many contemporary exhibition spaces reference exhibition devices of the traditional museum era including typological display and dioramas as well as the cabinet of curiosity, but without the degree of reflexivity to critically engage with either the museum era which anchor these traditions, or the associations often made with these traditions. As such, references to exhibition mode of the past retain enduring and implicit references to Australia’s colonial past. The Australian Museum’s redevelopment of their original ‘Long Gallery’ seeks inspiration from their own historical modes of display, as it moves to purposefully summon the gallery’s ‘former glory’.
When the doors [of the Museum] opened in 1857 ten thousand people visited in the first week to view the Colony’s eclectic array of weird and wonderful offerings….The Long Gallery is being redesigned to create a contemporary tribute to its former glory. Showcasing rare and fascinating items, from prized skeletons and extinct mammals…to rare insects, the world’s oldest crystal and prized items from the museum’s Indigenous and Pacific collections.
https://australianmuseum.net.au/longgallery accessed 11/02/2017
We can consider the Long Gallery redevelopment as an example of the endurance of the traditional museum aesthetic in a future museum context. It continues a long line of traditional museum exhibition techniques which have enjoyed a close association with Indigenous cultural material. The typological display of objects in the Many Nations display at Bunjilaka, Melbourne Museum is a visual reference to museum traditions with the addition of a contemporary digital interactive component where further information can be sourced; the similar display of 19th century shields at the National Gallery of Victoria (also pictured below) deploying the same exhibition device to accentuate the shields’ artistic and aesthetic qualities.
Finally, the example of the South Australian Museum, which uses the old-fashioned aesthetic as a justification not to redevelop. Cited as “a must-see” and exuding “old- world charm”, the Pacific Cultures gallery also contains a display of over-modelled heads (see Fig. 5.4 and 5.5) as well as decorated skulls and other human remains; this kind of display—regardless of where this kind of material sits within localised community
164 contexts, sits uncomfortably within a state museum gallery, not only as Indigenous human remains tend to not be placed on display, but also because of the unresolved issues surrounding the collection of this type of material in to museums in the first place.
Fig. 5.1 Cabinets of Curiosity at the Australian Museum, interim design concept precipitating the redevelopment of the Long Gallery in 2016. http://garrettdonnelly.com/cabinets-of-curiosity-at-the- australian- Accessed 05/10/2016
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Fig. 5.2 Shield display in the 'Many Nations' exhibition. Bunjilaka, Museum Victoria. https://museumvictoria.com.au/bunjilaka/whats-on/first-peoples/ accessed 05/10/2016
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Fig. 5.4 & Fig. 5.5 The Pacific Gallery, South Australian Museum, images Jilda Andrews. "This gallery is being preserved as an example of 19th century museum displays"
http://www.samuseum.sa.gov.au/explore/museum-galleries/pacific-cultures-gallery accessed 05/10/2016
167 These examples serve to illustrate the strength and endurance of traditional museum exhibitionary practice in contemporary Australian museum displays despite a growing discourse which closely aligns these past practices with the subjugation and othering of Indigenous cultures in the public museum sphere. This reflexive movement gathered pace 30 years ago with ‘new museology’, a significant critical shift in the role and relevance of museums in a changed and changing society.
New Museology
The recognition of Indigenous agency within museum theory can be charted from the intervention of ‘new museology’. Brought about during a time of reassessment and reflexivity in the 1980’s, the push to decentralise power and authority from within the inner sanctum of museum practice provoked a new discourse, which was determined more than anything to set a new path for museums- away from its past. Robin Boast retrospectively surmises its goal thus:
The goal of the new museology was, and largely still is, the transformation of social practices through the transformation of the museum from a display of singular expert accounts to a site of different educational engagements. (Boast 2011:58)
New museology was characteristically post-colonial, and engaged widely with a broad spectrum of museum practices from curatorial, exhibition, education and interpretation. It brought tools to understand museums as colonial devices, and it offered academics a way of theorising power, locating power, and defining the agents of power. The corollary of this was that it shone a light on the once subjugated ‘other’ and the contexts of their perceived ongoing subjugation. New museology was not only a methodological intervention bringing about new ways of approaching museum collections, but it was importantly a disciplinary one, and challenged the primacy of the traditional disciplines in museum. The reflexive net was cast wide to include a varied and extensive array of practices to participate in the critique and offer opportunities for its new direction. New anthropological methods, collaborative engagements, new perspectives meant that the way Indigenous agents were considered in relation to museological practice needed to change.
168 This movement was occurring simultaneously with the burgeoning Aboriginal Arts sector in Australia, led by the formation of the Aboriginal Arts Board (AAB) of the Australia Council in 1973 (Berrell 2009). The interaction between the AAB in a reflexive global museum sector activated a global Aboriginal Arts exhibition program, and the space which had been made for Indigenous voices in an expanded arts/museum/culture sector was effectively taken by the AAB through notable Indigenous leadership of Wandjuk Marika and Dick Roughsey, and was represented by an array of work by Indigenous artists (Berrell 2009). The relationship between Indigenous art and museums stems from this serendipitous relationship, and not only has it endured to today, but it has played a part of the development and success of an Indigenous art industry. The fit of course is apparent—the high aesthetic quality of Indigenous cultural material is something present within early cultural collections through to many works collected by museums today. Acknowledging the agency of Indigenous artists back in the 1970s is an important point here. These significant strides lay a critical and creative foundation for Indigenous engagement with museums today; a point which can be sometimes overlooked in the fervour of postcolonial criticism of the museum. The agency of Indigenous artists was also influential in how protocols have been activated, enacted and applied. Their significant influence is explored later in this chapter.
Despite the intervention of new museology to traditional museum practice, and the commanding presence of Indigenous agents, the more restrictive legacies of the museum age persist. New museology intended to diffuse the centralised power from within the museum walls to outside, a process which was not an entirely democratic power diffusion, but a rather focused one. What needs to be acknowledged in this power shift is that an increased power has been offered to audiences, and not all audiences and visitors groups are created equally. Indigenous people are today often considered ‘non-traditional museum audiences’ (MacDonald and Alsford 1995, Smithsonian Institution 2001, Hayes and Slater 2002, Davis 2007), citing both a history of Indigenous absence (or social exclusion), and a continuation of this absence in contemporary museums. While there is very little statistical data to elucidate the extent of this exclusion today, the point is often taken as a given, and it is further bolstered by invoking historical bad practice in both ethnography and museum practice (Ames 1992, Kelly, Bartlett and Gordon 2002, Phillips 2011).
169 Exhibition devices, nomenclature, and structures of engagement with Indigenous agents remain largely on the museums terms, they benefit and privileged those who are already conditioned by the ethnographic gaze. As Lissant Bolton of the British Museum explains: “[t]hrough the practices of collection and public exhibition, museums have developed a discipline of looking—a way of retrieving meaning from objects” (2003:42-43). Museum workers and visitors alike are disciplined to see these objects in certain ways. New museology has not given adequate concern to the needs and expectations of those who are ‘undisciplined’ in both visiting and retrieving value from museums. The discourse on non-traditional museum visitors is unquestionably lacking, and in the case of understanding Indigenous visitation and audiences, is pitiful, considering that new- museology draws attention to postcolonial responses to traditional museum practices. The new-museum is arguably still a site for the privileged. This gives way for the influential ‘museum as contact zone’ theory to emerge.
The Museum as Contact Zone
‘The contact zone’ was a concept originally coined by linguist Mary Louise Pratt in 1991 and refers not only to museums, but:
social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today. (Pratt 1991:34)
Formally applied to a museum context by James Clifford in 1997, the contact zone theory offers a way to consider the meeting of museums with their Indigenous source communities—particularly what happens at these intersections, the contexts surrounding them, the sites of agency, and the ongoing though changing relationships of power.
When museums are seen as contact zones, their organizing structure as a
collection becomes an ongoing historical, political, moral relationship—a power-
charged set of exchanges, of push and pull. (Clifford 1997:192)
Clifford’s treatment of the concept for a museum application has been widely taken up in academia, which in itself is an interesting point to make. There has not been an equal
170 investigation of what the ‘contact zone’ can offer Indigenous source communities, and so the theory remains largely within the scope and realm of the empowered.
In taking the term to the museum context, Clifford is interested in showing how it helps to shift analysis of the relations between museums and colonial peoples away from a binary system of meaning towards one which sees meaning as being shaped along a continuum of unequal power relations. (Witcomb in Watson 2007:142)
The ‘Museum as Contact Zone’ is an important interposition to the new museology theory, as Indigenous agents are finally articulated- and more than just as a nameless opposition. Agency is theorized as deserved, warranted though understood to be historically inaccessible within both Pratt and Clifford’s treatment of contact zone theory. As an example of a true reflexive turn in museum theory, the contact zone is best likened to a hamster wheel- invisible and normalized while in motion, until it stops and one steps off. Clifford himself falls into this trap in his understanding of museums as contact zones, when he so readily offers an interpretation of its delicacies, himself obviously from a privileged position (Clifford 1997:197). Pratt elaborated to discuss the inherent ‘struggle for interpretive power’ which is a struggle felt by the subjugated party in the contact zone. Clifford’s ease of offering an interpretation of the interplay (from his privileged position) demonstrates that there is a real need for perspectives from subjugated parties in contact zone theory and that academia may not be the ideal perspective from which to seek these.
The Environment of Protocols: An Australian Context
In 1993 the Council of Australian Museum Associations launched a document which marked a changing point for museums and source communities. Previous Possessions, New Obligations: Policies for Museums in Australia and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People (PPNO) was a clear demonstration that there were issues facing the sector which required a movement of change. In the post-bicentenary heat of Indigenous and non-Indigenous relations, and with the newly released Report of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody in 1991, museum collections were
171 being implicated as an enduring, negative product of colonization55, an association which not only had to change, but also was identified as having the capacity to positively influence Australia’s socio cultural environment.
The PPNO report under the stewardship of Des Griffin and his position as Chair of the Council of Australian Museum Associations, and his membership of the Council of Australian Museum Directors, went a significant way to articulating the issues with a view to lead a whole-of-sector response. The report articulated the implications of an