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Recent cultural studies have demonstrated the weakness of some of the fashionable theoretical positions adopted by scholars of imperialism in recent times. This book explores the diverse roles played by museums and their curators in moulding and representing the British imperial experience. The British Empire yielded much material for British museums, particularly in terms of ethnographic collections. The collection of essays demonstrates how individuals, their curatorial practices, and intellectual and political agendas influenced the development of a variety of museums across the globe. It suggests that Thomas Baines was deeply engaged with the public presentation, display and interpretation of material culture, and the dissemination of knowledge and information about the places he travelled. He introduced many people to the world beyond Norfolk. A discussion of visitor engagement with non-European material cultures in the provincial museum critiques the assumption of the pervasive nature of curatorial control of audience reception follows. The early 1900s, the New Zealand displays at world's fairs presented a vision of Maoriland, which often had direct Maori input. From its inception, the National Museum of Victoria performed the dual roles of research and public education. The book also discusses the collections at Australian War Memorial, Zanzibar Museum, and Sierra Leone's National Museum. The amateur enthusiasms and colonial museum policy in British West Africa are also highlighted. Finally, the book follows the journey of a single object, Tipu's Tiger, from India back to London.
A visitor to Canberra today would have a difficult time avoiding the Australian War Memorial. The Memorial, a mock-Byzantine structure topped by a green copper dome at the end of a wide, sweeping parade joining the Memorial in a visual axis with Australia’s Parliament, attracts around a million visitors a year to its imposing site. 1 To enter, a visitor climbs broad, grey stone steps, passes through a wide doorway, and walks between two stone lions (taken from the original Menin Gate in Belgium) before being
War Memorial and the National Archives of Australia, and interviews with ex-RAAF flight nurses who served both in Japan and Korea.7 The chapter aims to document the development of the RAAF air evacuation system during the Korean War and to examine the role of the RAAF flight nurses as the war progressed. Further exploration of the training, role and working conditions of this group of flight nurses will illustrate the way in which the flight nurse role evolved and was shaped by the concepts of ‘being a good nurse’, gender and class. The efforts of this small number
Archive of the Army Medical Services Museum, Aldershot (QARANC Collection); the Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore, USA; the Australian War Memorial, Canberra; and the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. Among nurses’ professional 82 ‘This fiendish mode of warfare’ writings are articles in nursing journals, and material from the most influential text book of war nursing published in Britain during the war: Violetta Thurstan’s A Text Book of War Nursing. These are placed alongside medical journal articles that discuss the scientific bases for
at the Australian War Memorial, and letters published in newspapers – sources that are contextually limited due to editing.6 102 Health, healing and harmony In the primary material available from the war period, perceptions are that invalid cooking was a safe subject to record; censors would be unlikely to remove it and most readers of letters and memoirs could easily understand the topic. While Australian military nurses were providing these treatments, and it was of such consequence to the nurses they included it in their writings, invalid cookery is a
point she retired from professional nursing.1 Nellie Gould is remembered as a visionary and pioneer, prompting the often rather triumphalist and sanitised recording of her biographical details. She has frequently appeared in military and medical histories of both the Second Boer War and the First World War, and has been central to many commemorative endeavours, for example the Australian War Memorial’s 2011 exhibition Nurses: From Zululand to Afghanistan and, most recently, ABC’s celebratory TV miniseries Anzac Girls (2014). Like her colleagues in South Africa, Gould
new Commonwealth War Graves cemetery at Pheasant Wood – the first to be constructed for over half a century – finally bringing ‘closure for the families of the men’, according to the Australian War Memorial. 27 Families attended the services and were invited to add a personalised inscription to the headstones. Pheasant Wood cemetery, the Musée de la Bataille de Fromelles and
writes, ‘Tummy still sore. Bazley [his batman and later assistant at the Australian War Memorial] in same way.’ 17 Oral testimonies tend to reveal more than diaries, letters or memoirs, and the discussion here draws on the interviews with Australian veterans conducted by Patsy Adam-Smith at the State Library of Victoria in the 1970s, and interviews with British veterans
establishment and maintenance of museums. Her examination of the Australian War Memorial demonstrates how memorialisation impelled certain museums as strongly as collection display and interpretation. Museums were also developed in conjunction with other political imperatives. The chapters of Paul Basu and Sarah Longair, focusing on museums in twentieth-century West and East Africa respectively, forcefully illustrate how museums were part of wider political contexts. Colonial policy, or often the lack of it, informs their case studies
experience of ‘the war as hell’, and of his own feelings of inadequacy as a soldier, because those aspects of the war are portrayed in the history books and films of the 1980s. He marvels at how well some recent Anzac historians and television directors depict the horror and degradation of trench warfare. The personal pleasure of having his experience as a soldier recognised and affirmed after years of alienation was vividly expressed when I asked Fred about his visit to the Australian War Memorial in Canberra (second only to the Sydney Opera House as a national tourist