Ms Margaret Anderson is Director of the History Trust of South Australia and is the author of Material culture and the cultural environment: Objects and places. In a career spanning more than thirty years she has worked in museums in Western Australia and South Australia and taught history and Australian studies at Monash University.
Matthew Churchward
'Models for Learning: Practical observations on Victorian gold mining from a Swedish artisan'
In 1857, Professor Fredrick McCoy, founder of the National Museum of Victoria, commissioned the Swedish-born miner Carl Nordström to construct a series of detailed models illustrating aspects of Victorian mining technology. Although originally made for the purpose of public education, the models capture one of the most detailed records of contemporary mining practices during a period when Victorian gold mining was undergoing fundamental technological and organisational changes. Nordström's observations were so sagacious that his models captured details unrecorded in other contemporary written accounts or illustrations and today continue to provide a wealth of insights for mining historians.
Mr Matthew Churchward has worked as a Curator of Engineering and Transport at Museum Victoria since 1994. With a background in mechanical engineering, he has developed wide research interests in nineteenth and early twentieth century mining, manufacturing and transport technologies with a particular focus on local adaptations and creativity.
Ian Coates
'Displaying the remote in the metropolis: The 1928 Australian Inland Mission frontier fete and exhibition'
Collections of objects have the capacity to tether narratives to specific events and places. The Australian Inland Mission's promotional events made it influential in constructing popular understandings of 'remote' Australia throughout the twentieth century. Analysis of a collection of objects from the mission's 'Frontier fete and exhibition' held in the Sydney Town Hall in 1928, generates new understandings of the historical milieu from which they emerge. This paper explores the ways in which the mission represented remote locations to its metropolitan patrons, and the capacity of the collection to reveal the ambiguous relationship between the Australian Inland Mission and Indigenous people in remote locations.
Dr Ian Coates is a Senior Curator in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Program of the National Museum of Australia. He has a long-standing research interest in the history of Indigenous museum collections, particularly their capacity to inform cross-cultural narratives.
Graeme Davison Panel discussion
Professor Graeme Davison has taught at the University of Melbourne, Monash University and Harvard University, where he was Visiting Professor of Australian Studies. He has been active as an advisor to heritage bodies, museums and in public history. His many publications include A Heritage Handbook and The Use and Abuse of Australian History.
Erika Dicker 'Samuel McCaughey was wrong. The truth is in the wool'
Samuel McCaughey was a hugely influential pastoralist, industrialist and philanthropist. He did many things well, but his introduction of American Vermont sheep to the Australian flock in 1886 was little short of disastrous. The wrinkly, greasy, coarse-woolled Vermonts dominated sheep shows for 20 years. Although opposition to the fashion was recorded at the time, it was not until 2007 that McCaughey's detractors were proved right. Last year 1200 samples of Australian wool grown between 1880 and 1900 were tested using contemporary technology. Results demonstrated that it was worth keeping the samples all that time ... just to settle the matter.
Ms Erika Dicker is an Assistant Curator at the Powerhouse Museum. In 2007, Erika documented an extensive collection of over 5000 wool samples from the the Powerhouse Museum's Bill Montgomery Wool collection.
Paula Hamilton
Panel discussion
Paula Hamilton is an Associate Professor and teaches in the public history program at University of Technology, Sydney. She is interested in oral history and cultural memory and jointly edits Public History Review and Locality.
Christine Hansen
'Two way flow: the Koperilya Springs pipeline boomerang'
Created by Albert Namatjira in 1934, this boomerang commemorates the opening of the Koperilya Springs pipeline in central Australia, an event which saved the drought afflicted Hermmansberg Mission from abandonment. Both its form and decoration seem to lead to a simple celebratory statement, yet on closer analysis the boomerang opens a surprising series of narratives that confound expectations. That it was created by Namatjira offers an enticing starting point from which to depart into histories that encompass left-wing political activism, early twentieth century urban artists and the desert adventures of two bohemian sisters from Melbourne.
Ms Christine Hansen is a PhD candidate in the Centre for Indigenous History at the Australian National University, where she is researching Indigenous material culture in south-east New South Wales. She also works in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Program at the National Museum of Australia.
Guy Hansen
'A curator's view'
Mr Guy Hansen is Senior Curator, Collection Development, at the National Museum. He has recently curated the seventh Behind the Lines exhibition of political cartoons, and the exhibition League of Legends: 100 Years of Rugby League in Australia, marking the 2008 centenary of rugby league.
Susannah Helman
'Heirlooms speaking for themselves'
Family heirlooms, particularly those associated with important events, often attain their own kind of mythical status. This paper looks at the process of evaluating an object and its accompanying story against the historical evidence, and how this can also encourage a new, written interpretation of an event. It explores how objects can tell their own stories. As a case study, it examines a sleeveless georgette dress said to have been worn to a ball for the Duke of York at the opening of Parliament House, Canberra in 1927. Its story appeared simple at first, but proved to be more complex.
Dr Susannah Helman completed a PhD at the University of Queensland on collecting in early modern England. She has worked in the National Museum's curatorial team since 2004, presently in Australian Journeys which is a new exhibition exploring the voyages which connect Australia to the world.
Matthew Higgins
'Snowy Scheme objects'
The Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme is one of Australia's great engineering achievements. The scheme significantly developed Australia's manufacturing and technical capacity and helped create a multicultural Australia through the many thousands of migrants who worked on the it. The National Museum of Australia has run a targeted collection project on water, focusing particularly on the Snowy. Objects range from hard hats, drills, scientific testing equipment, workboots and a gelignite box, to a model of Guthega Dam and a world-tunnelling record medallion. The collection can be used as material evidence along with written and oral sources in telling the story of the Snowy Scheme.
Mr Matthew Higgins is a Senior Curator at the National Museum, where he has worked since 2004. He is presently attached to its Centre for Historical Research, where he is completing a book, Mountain Days, Mountain Ways, a history of the Australian Capital Territory's high country.
Dr Philip Jones
Dr Philip Jones, a fifth-generation South Australian, has been curator of Aboriginal history at the South Australian Museum since 1984. He developed the brief for the museum's Aboriginal Cultures Gallery, the world's largest and most comprehensive exhibition of Aboriginal culture, which opened in 2000. His book Boomerang: Behind an Australian Icon was published in 1996. His latest book is Ochre and Rust: Artefacts and Encounters on Australian Frontiers, which explores the material culture of frontier contact. It would be of interest to students of the historical interpretation of objects. Philip is a member of the editorial board of reCollections: Journal of the National Museum of Australia.
Alison Mercieca
'Digging up history using Hmong agricultural tools'
This paper illustrates the potential to reconstruct histories from objects using the Museum's Chai Vang and Por Ye collection, a suite of Hmong agricultural tools. Before the 1950s the Hmong language was without a written form, making material objects a very important record of Hmong life and experiences. In this paper I will examine how studies of agricultural tools provide an insight into not only work practices, but also the connections of Hmong in Australia to their history, family and place, revealing the cultural continuities and changes brought on by the migration experience.
Ms Alison Mercieca studied archaeology and history at the Australian National University. She has worked at the National Museum of Australia since 2005 as an Assistant Curator.
Fred Myers
'An anthropologist's view'
Fred Myers is Silver Professor and Chair of Anthropology at New York University. Author of Painting Culture: the Making of an Aboriginal High Art, Myers began working with Pintupi-speaking people in 1973 and is interested in new formations of the production and circulation of art and culture.
Maria Nugent
Panel discussion
Dr Maria Nugent is a Research Fellow in the Centre for Historical Research at the National Museum of Australia, where she commenced working in early 2008. She is the author of Botany Bay: Where Histories Meet and the co-author with Denis Byrne of Mapping Attachment: A Spatial Approach to Aboriginal Post-contact Heritage.
Karen Schamberger
'Re-presenting Little Red Riding Hood'
Walking through a dark fabric forest, Little Red Riding Hood is watched by a hungry furry wolf. The stories of three women are woven together through this forest scene that Olga Basylewycz, a Ukrainian refugee, created on a blanket. However, the story emphasised each time the object is displayed and written about varies, including in its latest incarnation in the new Australian Journeys gallery. The many versions of the Little Red Riding Hood story provide a metaphorical way to explore the varied interpretations of this object since its donation to the National Museum of Australia in 1991.
Ms Karen Schamberger is an Assistant Curator at the National Museum of Australia. She has a MA in Public History and has previously worked at the Australian National Maritime Museum and the Australian Museum in Sydney.
Mike Smith
'An archaeologist's view'
Dr Mike Smith is a Senior Research Fellow in the National Museum of Australia's Centre for Historical Research. He is an expert in the human deep past of Australia's deserts.
Peter Stanley
Dr Peter Stanley is the Director of the Centre for Historical Research at the National Museum of Australia. His publication The Remote Garrison (1986) is one of twenty books he has written in the fields of Australian, military, imperial, medical and social history.
Craig Wilcox
'Percy Faithfull's quiet red coat'
Surely something as visually eloquent as the red coat which advertises this symposium must be historically eloquent too? But this artefact of an articulate social mainstream from the recent past struggles to say something useful beside the torrent of words and images which shaped its passage from conception to creation, even when time has reduced that torrent to a trickle. Perhaps the best way to use such artefacts as evidence is to measure the distance they record between design and use, as ideals fell short and practicalities took over.
Dr Craig Wilcox studied the red coat from the Faithfull family collection while a visiting fellow at the National Museum earlier this year. The study informs a chapter of his coming book Red Coat Dreaming, about the place the British army occupied in colonial Australian hearts.
