The National Library visits Australia
Mae Adams recounts some of her experiences with travelling National Library exhibitions around Australia ‘A National Library is a place where a nation nourishes its memory and exerts its imagination—where it connects with its past and invents its future.’ Pierre Ryckmans, 1996 For almost two decades, the National Library of Australia has been developing exhibitions from its vast collections and displaying them to the public in Canberra.Their popularity is relatively easy to measure; visitors have a physical presence in the Library building, and they have an opportunity to express directly their appreciation and ask questions about the exhibition. Curators’ talks, guided exhibition tours and support publications are all easily accessible, enhancing the visitors’ understanding and enjoyment of the items that they are seeing. The exhibitions sit within the commanding structure of the Library’s marbled walls, where they assert their authority and are proudly presented in the context of institutionalised scholarship and enquiry. While viewing original items on a regular basis is a privilege with which many city dwellers are familiar, this is not generally the case for people living outside Australia’s major cities. For those in smaller cities, and regional and remote areas, the perception of their local library as an exhibition space is a relatively foreign concept. As part of a wider strategy aimed at increasing access to its collections, the Library has over the past decade established an energetic travelling exhibitions program. With funding assistance from the Australian Government initiative Visions of Australia, the Library has toured a wide range of exhibitions to every state and territory. Drawn primarily from the National Library’s collections, the travelling exhibitions program has assisted the broader community to view original material in an exhibition context, in addition to the already established online access and direct community resources so well provided by regional libraries.
As with exhibitions held at the National Library Gallery in Canberra, the travelling exhibitions program engenders a high incidence of repeat visits, with a lengthy visitor viewing time. People are interested and intrigued when they have an opportunity to see original items. This is an enriching experience that cannot be compared with the saturation of screen-based imagery so dominant in our daily lives. Mirroring the diversity of its collections, the Library’s travelling exhibitions cover a wide subject range. The titles themselves suggest this: The Flower Hunter: Ellis Rowan; Between the Sheets: A Century of Australian Music; Follow the Sun: Australian Travel Posters 1930s–1950s; Burke and Wills: From Melbourne to Myth and a small-scale exhibition designed for remote and regional areas titled Bunyips. All of these exhibitions have been travelling in Australia over the past four years and, between them, have reached communities from as far as Darwin in the Northern Territory to Hobart in Tasmania. Each exhibition is unique and each has been enjoyed by thousands of people who would, in most cases, previously not have known that their National Library has such a broad and comprehensive collection. The exhibitions encourage interest, interest stimulates enquiry, and we progress through fostering greater understanding of our shared history. Through taking a closer look at several of the Library’s travelling exhibitions, this grand claim may be substantiated.
The Flower Hunter: Ellis Rowan was the first retrospective of the remarkable Australian-born flora and fauna painter, Marian Ellis Rowan (1848–1922), who travelled extensively throughout Australia, New Zealand, New Guinea and North America searching for rare and exotic birds, butterflies and wild flowers to paint. The exhibition brought together a wide range of her artistic works, including hand-painted ceramics, exquisite watercolours (for which she is best known), oil paintings and publications. As with so many women artists, Ellis Rowan’s extraordinary works had slipped from public recognition for almost a century. The exhibition reasserted her position as one of Australia’s leading artists working in the botanical tradition. The Flower Hunter travelled to Mornington and Castlemaine in Victoria, Launceston in Tasmania, Adelaide in South Australia and Perth in Western Australia, following as much as possible the route of Ellis Rowan’s travels. Between the Sheets: A Century of Australian Music reveals aspects of Australian social, political and economic history through popular music. Enlivened by music CDs, oral histories, video and live performances, this exhibition has charmed its way into the hearts of visitors across the country. People start tapping their feet in the gallery, singing along to songs with infectiously irrepressible melodies written by musicians and songwriters whose main interest was to relate simply how life was in the last century. A comment often made by visitors to this exhibition is, ‘I didn’t realise that the National Library actually collects all this old music, I have a suitcase in the shed … ’ .
Between the Sheets travelled to Townsville, coinciding with the North Queensland Chamber Music Festival, to Wangaratta in north-east Victoria for the 2003 Festival of Jazz, to Western Australia during the 2004 Perth International Festival of the Arts, and will be shown in Brisbane in mid-2005 in conjunction with the Queensland Biennial Festival of Music. Follow the Sun: Australian Travel Posters 1930s–1950s featured original lithographic posters from this short period of history, a time of great optimism and the concentrated ‘sell’ of Australia as a tourist destination. The posters were designed by leading artists, who were commissioned by travel companies and state government tourist bureaus to promote the image of a modern country. Australia’s vast interior, the unique colours of the landscape and the promise of a healthy and adventurous vacation were prominent themes, along with the promotion of recent advances in transport and technology such as the Holden car and the Kodak camera. Some visitors to Follow the Sun recalled taking trips organised by the travel agents featured on the posters, companies that in many cases no longer exist in the now globally commercial world of tourism. Follow the Sun travelled to every state and territory in Australia from the year 2000 to 2004, completing its long journey at the State Library of Tasmania in Hobart in July 2004. The Bunyips exhibition was a departure from the Library’s usual practice as it did not contain original collection items. Free from the necessary but limiting controls required for collection care, Bunyips was especially designed for display in small libraries, primary schools and other community venues, where it could be enjoyed by visitors who would not normally frequent galleries or museums. A prominent feature of Bunyips was an animated website that included stories, games and images of the mythical creature, drawn from the Library’s Folklore and Children’s Literature collections. The Library received both development and touring grants from Visions of Australia to support Bunyips, which travelled to 25 venues across Australia over a three-year period.
National Library travelling exhibitions have received consistently positive comments from visitors across Australia, with many requests for future exhibitions to be made available. A major challenge for the Library sector, now that the public interest has been established, is how to meet this demand. It is a costly and resource-hungry process to organise travelling exhibitions, especially in a country as geographically diverse and expansive as Australia. The distances and changes in environmental conditions can be extreme. Long-term planning is essential and usually spans several years. Government support such as Visions of Australia is essential for maintaining this important access for Australia’s communities. National collections belong to everyone, regardless of where they choose to live, and to enjoy access to them is part of our collective cultural heritage.
Over the next three years the Library will be undertaking a national leadership role for an ambitious travelling exhibition, developed through a partnership with the Council of Australian State Libraries. Entitled National Treasures from Australia’s Great Libraries, this exhibition will include significant items from the collections of the National Library of Australia and state and territory libraries and will reflect Australia’s history and people. Following its initial showing at the National Library Gallery in Canberra from Applications from libraries for funding to assist with touring exhibitions are welcomed by the Visions of Australia program. Information about the program can be obtained at <www.dcita.gov.au/visions>, or by phoning (02) 6271 1455. MAE ADAMS was the Manager of Travelling Exhibitions at the National Library of Australia from March 2001 to February 2005 |
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