The Meaning of ‘Significance’
The one thing all recipients of Community Heritage Grants have in common is a collection considered to be of ‘national significance’. Kathryn Favelle considers what that means Australia’s heritage collections are an important national asset. While many millions of documents and objects are held in the collections of national, state and territory libraries and archives, millions more are being cared for by local councils and historical societies, community groups, professional associations, museums, schools and public libraries. Together, this material tells the story of Australia, in all its diversity, providing a rich understanding of who we are as a nation. The Australian Government recognises that Australia’s heritage collections are spread across the country and that the often small, community-based organisations caring for them may need assistance to do so. For 13 years, the Community Heritage Grants program, administered by the National Library of Australia, has been providing financial assistance and training for the preservation of nationally significant, locally held heritage collections across Australia. Funded by the Australian Government, through the National Library of Australia, the Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, the National Archives of Australia, the Australian Film Commission and the National Museum of Australia, the program has provided over 400 projects across Australia with more than $1.6 million in funding. Last year, 76 organisations received preservation training and project funding of up to $10 000 each. From the North Bondi Surf Lifesaving Club in Sydney to the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association in Alice Springs, from the Cairns and District Chinese Association to the Broome Historical Society, the organisations manage an extraordinary range of heritage material, including photos, documents, a deserted mining town, steam engines, Indigenous artworks and pottery. One thing they all have in common, however, is that their collections have been recognised as being of ‘national significance’.
What does this term ‘national significance’ mean? How do you know if the collection you manage is ‘nationally significant’? For historian Roslyn Russell, a member of the Community Heritage Grants Assessment Committee, how well this issue is addressed is often critical to the success of a Community Heritage Grant application as each applicant, is required to describe the ‘national significance’ of their collection. ‘Significance refers to the historic, aesthetic, research and social values that an object, document or collection has. It doesn’t just refer to the appearance of an object but includes its context, history, uses and its social and spiritual values,’ Roslyn Russell explains. ‘Determining the significance of a collection is about putting it into a broader context, connecting the items in the collection to the stories behind them. And if a collection is nationally significant, it must contribute to our national stories. ‘For example, war is one of the great themes in Australian history and many communities hold letters and items relating to war in their collections. But for those collections to have national significance, we need to know more about them. Were the letters written by or to a famous or important Australian? Who owned the objects and what do we know about that person? What role did those particular objects play during wartime? Are they the only objects of that type known to be in a collection?’ Roslyn Russell recommends that applicants for Community Heritage Grants should consider the significance assessment criteria developed by the Heritage Collections Council (available online from sector.amol.org.au/publications_archive/museum_management/significance) and the Australian Heritage Commission publication, Australian Historic Themes: A Framework for Use in Heritage Assessment and Management, before preparing their grant applications. ‘The challenge is for people who often aren’t trained as historians to think like historians. The significance criteria help those who are responsible for collections to think more broadly, both in terms of applying for Community Heritage Grants but also in relation to determining collection management priorities. I recommend a significance assessment for every collection. Everything else—cataloguing, preservation, acquiring new material, deaccessioning material, developing collection management and exhibition policies—flows from it.’ Describing the significance of the Eskbank House and Museum collection, managed by the Council of the City of Lithgow, was daunting but made more manageable by the use of the significance criteria. Recently appointed to the position of Museum Administration Officer, Kristie Cooke faced an uncatalogued collection of more than 5000 items. The collection includes over 2000 pieces produced or associated with Lithgow Pottery, the Sutton Family Crazy Patchwork Quilt dating from 1893, 60 items relating to the Lithgow Woollen Mills, furniture, a fully restored Hansom Cab, books, jewellery, household paraphernalia, and a photograph and document relating to Sir Joseph Cook, prime minister of Australia between 1913 and 1917, and later high commissioner of Australia in London. While the items in the Sir Joseph Cook collection are of national significance because of their connection to the former prime minister, the Eskbank House and Museum collection also offers insights into the development and history of the ceramic and textile industries in Australia and the trade union movement. ‘Having grown up near Lithgow, I was very aware of our local history and understood what made Lithgow significant in a national context,’ says Kristie Cooke. ‘But I had to find a way to reconnect the pieces in the collection to their stories.’ Some published sources were available to assist. The Sutton Family Crazy Patchwork Quilt, for instance, is a rare example of the late 19th-century craft of crazy patchwork quilting and had been featured in Australian Quilts: A Directory of Patchwork Treasures by Jenny Manning. The significance of the Lithgow Pottery Collection, which dates from 1877 to 1906, had been well assessed by Judy Birmingham in Lithgow Pottery. The collection, which represents the Lithgow Pottery catalogues of 1889, 1895 and 1906, is considered to be one of the most extensive and intact collections relating to pottery in Australia. But identifying the significance of other items in the Eskbank House and Museum collection is more difficult. First, the provenance of the items needs to be identified. ‘I have been lucky to be able to speak to many members of families who donated or have a connection to items in the collection. So much of the collection was donated by the community and they are the keepers of the collection’s stories. But trying to provenance the items can be difficult.’ Lithgow City Council has received a Community Heritage Grant to undertake a preservation survey of the entire collection, which is housed in the first house built in the Lithgow Valley. Kristie Cooke, however, recognises that the grant offers other benefits. ‘As well as helping us to preserve the collection, the preservation survey will assist us to develop collection management policies and enable us to provide greater public access. But the grant also proves to the community that they have something here which is of national importance.’ The custodians of the Warmun Community Art Collection at Turkey Creek in the East Kimberley region of Western Australia have long understood its significance. The collection, which dates from 1979, consists of over 300 items, including paintings on board, canvas, corrugated cardboard, wood, and plywood, as well as woodcarvings and smaller cultural items made by the Gija community of Warmun. The items were created for use by Gija community elders to pass on Gija culture, language and law to students at the local Ngalangangpum Catholic School. The collection has strong aesthetic significance as it represents the beginnings of the Indigenous art movement and includes works by leading first generation Indigenous artists such as Paddy Jaminji, George Mung Mung, Hector Jandany, Jack Brittan, Queenie McKenzie and Rover Thomas. Christina Davidson from the Sydney College of the Arts at the University of Sydney has been Consultant Art Historian to the collection managers, and recognises that the collection holds much more than aesthetic significance. ‘The objects in the collection are far more than aesthetic objects—although many of the artists are represented in major Australian and international collections. The objects have historic and cultural significance. As teaching tools, they represent the beginnings of the “two way” education movement, a grassroots movement to ensure Indigenous cultural knowledge is included in the education system. They are also associated with the movement towards self-determination. And it is a unique collection in that it is one of the few “two way” collections still residing “in country”. The Turkey Creek community’s determination to keep it “in country” indicates the collection’s spiritual and social importance.’ Last year, the collection was awarded a Community Heritage Grant to undertake a significance assessment. ‘A significance assessment is a very useful way of recording for a community why a collection is significant. It’s designed to be a way of talking about the importance of a collection that addresses many different points of views,’ says Christina Davidson. ‘In the case of the Warmun Community Art Collection, I hope the significance assessment will be able to reflect the views of the Gija community, the artists who created the objects, the students who have learned from them, the Nuns of St Joseph who have run the local school and cared for the art works, and the wider arts community that has shown great interest in the collection over many years.’ The significance assessment will have a much broader role also. It will, thinks Christina Davidson, become a mechanism for ‘brokering information about the collection with the outside world’ and, with the collection about to move into new premises that will offer improved opportunities for community access, the significance assessment will help to guide collection management and preservation decisions.‘ I hope too that it will sow little seeds—that it will encourage community involvement in the research and use of the collection.’ Of course, not all collections or items within a collection will be of ‘national significance’. Some may be significant for the local community, shedding light on how communities across Australia have evolved. But documenting the context and stories of items in your collection before those stories disappear or are forgotten is essential if our heritage collections are to continue to have meaning for the communities in which they reside and for the wider Australian community. Without that knowledge, we risk our heritage collections becoming little more than curiosities of a time gone by. Applications for the 2006 Community Heritage Grants close on 9 June. For more details on how to apply, visit the Community Heritage Grants website (www.nla.gov.au/chg). Kathryn Favelle is currently on leave from the National Library of Australia, where she works in the Publications and Events Branch |
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