Search results
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.
increasing immigration, and of urban expansion, but the self-respecting province now required the institutions that would confirm its individual significance within the nation state. The Royal Ontario and the Royal British Columbia museums were two notable, yet very different, expressions of this phenomenon. The Royal British Columbia Museum Many museums emerged out of natural
scholarly respectability. Almost all significant museums continue to maintain libraries and archives as research tools for their own staff and as a public resource (the Royal British Columbia Museum is a notable exception to this pattern). Many larger museums have developed significant conservation functions or make important contributions to environmental issues. 10 It is instructive that when the Bhau
important and pioneering collaborations with First Nations’ communities and artists were developed during the 1980s by the British Columbia Provincial Museum (now the Royal British Columbia Museum) and the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology. Several exhibits at Vancouver’s Expo ’86 reflected the impact of those institutions’ innovative approaches. But it would take two more decades and the crisis provoked by the native boycott of The Spirit Sings exhibition mounted for the Calgary Winter Olympics in 1988 for
installations of the Douglas Cardinal building. The earlier exhibit was designed as a ‘Milwaukee-style’ streetscape exhibition whose more immediate models were to be found at the Royal British Columbia Museum and the Epcot Center at Disneyworld.15 Its visitor path traced the temporal and spatial expansion of Canada as a settler nation by taking visitors through a sequence of recreated three-dimensional historical environments. Each featured a representative vignette of social history and was intended to provide an immersive, experiential understanding of what life was like
scramble, a competitive acquisitiveness that would leave its losers culturally and educationally bereft. These were certainly the significant factors in the emergence of the Royal Ontario and Royal British Columbia museums as significant institutions for the twentieth century. Notes 1 ‘Royal’ was used in some documents