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Museums were an expression of the western conviction in the onward march of the rational. Local civilisations were also the prime focus in other Asian imperial museums. This is the first book that examines the origins and development of museums in six major regions if the British Empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It analyses museum histories in thirteen major centres in Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, India and South-East Asia, setting them into the economic and social contexts of the cities and colonies in which they were located. Museums in Canada have a longer, though somewhat chequered, history than elsewhere in the British Empire. The Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto and the Royal British Columbia museum in Victoria were two notable, yet very different, expressions of imperial expansiveness . The book then overviews two representative museums: the South African Museum (SAM) in Cape Town and the Albany Museum in Grahamstown. The origins and development of the National Museum of Victoria (NMV) in Melbourne, South Australian Museum (SAuM) and Australian Museum (AM) are then discussed. New Zealand/Aotearoa, with its Canterbury Museum and War Memorial Museum, has discrete origins as a colony in the nineteenth century. Imperial museums in Asia were unquestionably distinctive compared with those of the territories of white settlement. A number of key themes emerge: the development of elites within colonial towns; the emergence of the full range of cultural institutions associated with this; and the modification of the key scientific ideas of the age.
Australian museums were characteristically founded in each colony by a group of bourgeois dilettante scientists, wealthy businessmen and influential professionals. Initially, the creation of such museums was designed to forward their own natural historical interests, to establish a club in which they could interact, and to connect them with both imperial and international
Museums deal in history of one sort or another – or at least contemporary perceptions of such histories. It is perhaps not surprising that they attempt to push their own pasts back as far as possible. In the case of the South Australian Museum (SAuM – the ‘u’ to distinguish it from that other SAM, the South African Museum), it has been customary to identify its origins as
Pacific ethnography display in the South Australian Museum, Adelaide. Notable examples of overall reconstruction and reformulation can be found in Victoria, British Columbia and Melbourne or Singapore. Some are redeveloped little by little, often limited by resource constraints. Some, like the Royal Ontario in Toronto, are so large and significant that landmark buildings have been added (by the architect
’ artefacts before the anticipated demise of the Aboriginal ‘race’. 70 Indeed, capturing the spirit of the times, as one of his collectors, James Field, noted in a letter to Spencer in 1903, ‘I have not forgotten what you told me and am annexing all I can lay hands on’. 71 In his work on the South Australian Museum, Philip Jones has suggested that a key reasons for this
concerned with defining relations between different cohorts of people. The arguments will be developed with reference to two Australian museums – the Migration Museum in Adelaide, which uses the more conventional pedagogies of looking, reading and listening, and the Immigration Museum in Melbourne which is experimenting with a pedagogy of feeling alongside the other three. The inspiration for describing interpretative approaches as a form of ‘pedagogy’ comes from Tony Bennett’s3 work on late nineteenth-century exhibitions and his focus on the way in which they embodied
more highly trained figure than [William] Blandowski, but still a law unto himself and lacking any real scientific specialism’. 7 MacKenzie characterises McCoy’s personality as ‘fiery, blunt, cantankerous and polemical’. 8 He paints a picture of McCoy along with Gerard Krefft (the director of the Australian Museum in Sydney) as being feisty attention-seekers whose egos and lack of ability to cooperate hampered their scientific capacity. Similarly, Sheets-Pyenson maintained that McCoy ‘colluded’ in gaining control of the
such local expertise generated? Eschewing anatomy for testimony, settlers circulated knowledge about snakebite and its treatment well beyond the formal networks of natural history which, into the 1850s, were confined to rarefied society. 94 Published in 1837, the first catalogue of the new Australian Museum in Sydney merely noted ‘Ten specimens’ of snakes, offering neither
-bite antidotes remained lucrative, collaborative and authoritative. In a well-publicised 1880 experiment, conducted before ‘a large number of scientific and other gentlemen’, the grounds of Sydney’s Australian Museum saw ‘Several canine waifs and strays … captured for the purpose of being handed over to the tender mercy of the snakes.’ 85 After bites by serpents purchased for
single blocks of granite transported hundreds of miles from Aswan would have made them very valuable. Six monolithic granite palmiform columns were excavated by Naville in 1891 from the pronaos of Herakleopolis Magna and sent to museums: the British ‘palmiform’ columns 439 Museum (EA 1123), the Manchester Museum (1780), Bolton Museum and Art Gallery (1891.14.1/1891.14.2), the South Australian Museum at Adelaide (inventory number not known), the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (91.259), and the University Museum, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (E636