I called in to the State Library of Victoria to see their small free exhibition The Irish Rising: A Terrible Beauty is Born which is on show until 31 July 2016.  It is indeed a small exhibition, taking up only one wall and a small number of cases in the small room outside the Manuscript Reading Room in the Cowen Gallery.  There’s quite a lot in it, though, with a strong Australian, and particularly Melbourne, focus.

The exhibition starts with a quick chronology of the Uprising, and there is a video presentation of images taken from an Irish book that was rushed off the presses shortly after the Uprising, showing the destruction of central Dublin.  The booklet was accessioned by the Library in October 1916, some six months after the events and would have no doubt been of great interest given the large Irish-born population in Melbourne.  There is a 1917 reprint of the proclamation of Irish Independence, the only one known in Australia, and copies of newspapers, both Irish and Australian, reporting the news.

I was fascinated by a lengthy film (some 80 minutes) that was thought to be funded by John Wren, the Catholic underworld figure and ‘entrepreneur’  as his ADB entry delicately puts it. The film, which had been abridged by the censors cognizant of the sectarian ill-feeling stirred up by the conscription debates in the War, has been restored to the full version. It  shows the 1920 St Patricks Day March, where 100,000 Australians, including returned soldiers, demonstrated their support for Irish independence.  Archbishop Mannix, who played such a pivotal role in the conscription debate, plays a large part in the exhibition.

Fourteen Victoria Cross Heroes forming guard of honor to Dr Mannix, St Patrick’s Day Celebration 1920,  State Library of Victoria

http://handle.slv.vic.gov.au/10381/87200

As I say, it’s only a small exhibition that doesn’t take much more than half an hour to view, unless, like me, you become transfixed by the images of the photos and the film and end up spending far longer than you planned.

The other drawcard that lured us to Canberra last week was the Encounters exhibition at the National Museum of Australia which was also slated to close on 28 March 2016.  Once again, to my regret I find myself writing about an event that has already concluded but I wanted time for my thoughts to percolate about it before putting fingers to keyboard.

Encounters presents a large, beautifully curated exhibition of artefacts sourced from the huge British Museum collection, supplemented by current-day responses crafted by living indigenous artists and craftspeople from the regions where the artefacts were originally ‘collected’. I use the inverted commas deliberately: some were given as a sign of respect; some were purchased, and others were quite clearly stolen and appropriated.

It is a very well-mannered exhibition.  As you enter, there is a large video welcome and introduction by representatives of the many tribal groups who have been involved, and it has truly been a continent-wide consultation process (as you would hope it would be). The artefacts come from twenty-seven communities right across the country, reinforcing the ‘national’ nature of the museum.  The explanatory panels surrounding the artefacts are very well done, describing the mobility of the object and explaining the means by which it came into the British Museum’s collection. In many cases, artefacts are accompanied by a video with a present-day community member explaining the importance of the artefact as a reaffirmation of identity or as prompt to new learning about production techniques that had been forgotten or changed in the generations since the object was first collected.  Several of the speakers expressed gratitude that at least the object had survived to be seen by later generations, an ironic consequence of its appropriation and removal to the museum environment.  Others expressed joy at the continuity of knowledge within their community, despite a policy of repressing traditional language and crafts. Others again mourned for the loss of the object and yearned to have it literally re-placed and brought back to where it came from.

The most discussed item in the exhibition is the shield collected by Captain Cook in 1770, dropped by a Gweagal man after the ‘encounter’ on the beach turned sour. The hole in the middle of the shield was caused by a spear, generations of White custodians and curators told themselves.  I’m not convinced.  That hole speaks volumes.  The sight of it literally made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

Much of what this exhibition did was done very, very well. But what of my comment that it’s a ‘well-mannered’ exhibition?  Many questions bubbled under the displays: how many of the people of the community are going to see this artefact?  Why does it belong to the British Museum? Why does it have to be returned?  The questions were asked sotto voce but the exhibition was too polite to ask them out loud.

One of the exhibitions is the Dja Dja Wrung bark etchings which were last seen in Australia in 2004 as part of the Etched on Bark exhibition under the auspices of the Museum of Victoria.  As that exhibition drew to a close, activists Gary Foley and Gary Murray launched a series of emergency declarations under the 1984 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Heritage Protection Act in an attempt to keep the etchings here in Australia.  Eventually a court decision found in favour of the British Library and the etchings returned to London.   There’s an interesting article written by the curator of that exhibition in 2007 here.

It comes as a surprise, then, to see the Dja Dja Wrung etchings back in Australia again, just over ten years later. An act of good faith on behalf of the British Library perhaps?  Or a provocative gesture now made from within the safety of the Protection of Cultural Objects on Loan Act of 2013? This Act was initiated at the behest of Australian cultural institutions that wanted to be able to give a water-tight guarantee to their international counterparts that items would unequivocally return to the lending institution. The etchings have travelled here because the British Library knows that they will be returning to London.

In an article in Overland (21 March 2016), Eve Vincent reflects on the display of the Dja Dja Wrung etchings:

Also on display are the Dja Dja Wurrung bark etchings that last visited Australia in 2004. They were on display at the Museum of Victoria when Dja Dja Wurrung activist Gary Murray joined with Gary Foley and others to prevent them from leaving the country. The fact that Dja Dja Wurrung representatives ‘unsuccessfully’ sought to stop the return of these objects to England is carefully acknowledged. Press a button and Murray’s soft voice starts talking about his aspiration to have the bark etchings stored in Melbourne, closer to home. ‘We beg the British museum to return our cultural materials.’

And then the visitor moves to the next exhibit.

This exhibition is actually one half of a matching exhibition called Indigenous Australia: Enduring Civilisations  which was on show at the British Museum in London between April and August 2015. An excellent article by Penny Edmonds in The Conversation in 2015, reviewing the British exhibition,  highlights the curatorial challenges faced by in the British exhibition for a British audience. The British Museum is not unfamiliar with disputes over provenance and custodianship – after all, they’ve been fighting over the Elgin or Parthenon Marbles for decades and decades.  While the issues of collection and colonialism, ownership and custodianship were discussed in the abstract in London, there was an expectation (fear?) that the conversation would be more pointed when the Australian exhibition opened.

But it hasn’t happened in this strangely decontextualized exhibition which says little about the international politics, or the emotional and intellectual motivations in act of ‘collecting’ that lie at the heart of this particular display. I think that it is an opportunity lost. It was almost as if we were on our best behaviour, not wanting to cause a fuss. I’ve read a few articles about the “conversation” that is being had here about such issues, and it evokes for me the insistence by the Irish government on the “maturity” of the discussions surrounding the commemoration of the centenary of the Irish Rising this week. No-one wants to seem “immature” and the  insistence that things are kept within the bounds of “conversations” and “dialogues” are curbs that can only be made from a position of power.

So, my response to the Encounters exhibition? Beautifully curated and thought-provoking but at its core timid and polite.

But maybe I speak too soon? Now that the exhibition is being packed up and taken away again, the whispered question is being voiced aloud- see a recent article in the Guardian here;  on The Conversation website here and an ABC report from the very day I am writing this here.  Perhaps, now that it’s finished, we don’t have to be on best behaviour any more.

Other articles:

Quentin Sprague The Monthly ‘Bringing Them Home’

Oil Paint and Ochre: The incredible story of William Barak and the De Purys, Yarra Ranges Regional Museum 29 August 2015- 22 November 2015. Free.

Historian Jan Critchett reminded us in her excellent book A Distant Field of Murder (my review here) that ‘the frontier’ was a very local phenomenon and that

The “other side of the frontier” was just down the yard or as close as the bed shared with an Aboriginal woman (p. 23)

As we can see in this excellent exhibition, the frontier could also be just across the river. The de Pury family ‘took up’ (to use the euphemism) land adjoining the Coranderrk reserve where William Barak and his cousin Simon Wonga led a community of Daung wurrung and Wurundjeri indigenous people in an independent and largely self-sufficient community managed by European John Green. This exhibition displays photographs, letters and artefacts donated to the Yarra Ranges Regional Museum by the wine-growing de Pury family that reveal  the neighbourly interaction between Barak in particular and the neighbours across the river.

The exhibition tells two intersecting stories: those of Barak and the Coranderrk community, and that of the de Pury family and winegrowing generally in the Yarra Valley.  At times the stories come together in photographs and paintings, but there is also confluence of the narrative in de Pury’s presence on the ‘Board of Enquiry into the future of Coranderrk instituted by the Central Board Appointed to Watch Over the Interests of Aborigines in the Colony of Victoria’, which in effect brought the community to a close.  De Pury had initially declined to sit on the board, but later did so, in a reminder of the power relations that constrained ‘neighbourliness’, after all.

Coranderrk was a particularly visible indigenous community which attracted photographers and artists and which in turn churned out souvenir paintings and carvings  for purchase. One of the objects that fascinated me most was a painting that Barak did of the de Pury vineyard, long after Samuel de Pury had left for Europe, on the back of which he wrote:

The English name is Bald Hill this is all your Vineyard and trees this all belong to you there your house above with the vineyard where you yous to stop before… I send you this paper I still remember you all the time…

This is a beautifully curated exhibition in a well-funded, purpose-built building.  The exhibition was of particular interest to me because my family ‘took up’ a Crown Land grant at Chum Creek, near Coranderrk on what would have been assuredly a tribal resting-place and food source on the river flats of the Chum Creek at much the same time that Coranderrk was established. The two events are, I’m sure, related – a fact which I find uncomfortable.

A handsome book has been produced to accompany the exhibition. There’s a very well-presented exhibition upstairs on the Yarra Valley, and a very good cafe downstairs overlooking the park.  The exhibition is on until November, so don’t miss it- it’s beautiful weather for a trip to the hills!

Well, it’s not Winter anymore but the NGV exhibition of Masterpieces from the Hermitage is on show at NGV International until 8th November 2015.

I must confess that I wasn’t particularly anxious to see this exhibition and I came away from it feeling somewhat jaded.  It evoked in me that ambivalence that Australian tourists tend to feel when you’re visiting one of the ‘big’ Art Galleries overseas. You’re all too conscious that you’re not likely to pass this way again soon so you mentally ‘tick-off’  the famous pictures that you’ve seen in books all your life. Eventually you feel deadened by the surfeit of masterpiecedom (another Rembrandt?) and you too quickly leave, thinking that you’ve “done” that gallery.  Well, that’s a bit how I felt after the Hermitage exhibition without even leaving my own home town.

That said, the focus in this exhibition is not so much on the paintings (famous and masterpieces though they may be) but on the act of collecting itself.  Catherine was a patron of the arts, but was not an artist herself. Her buyers sourced collections that in many cases had been collated by others and bought them as a job-lot,  if that’s not too crude a term to use for such magnificence. The first room contains her collection of cameo gems, architectural drawings and her 797-piece Sevres dinner set. Thereafter the exhibition rooms are organized by country of origin: the Italian Room, the French Room, the Flemish Room.  There is a beautiful website that follows the layout of the exhibition and features particular objects under the ‘Themes’ heading on the exhibition website: http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/exhibition/masterpieces-from-the-hermitage/

My favourite pieces were found in the China room, most particularly the silver filigree work in (one of) her dressing table sets.

The label said that Catherine had ordered that diamonds and pearls be added to it. Were they real diamonds on it? It felt strange to catch sight of my own reflection in the mirror and to realize that Catherine would have seen herself in it too.  Of course, this was just one of her dressing-table sets. Such wealth; such excess.

You can download Virginia Trioli’s commentary on the website. It’s not particularly closely tied in with the exhibition, focussing more on Catherine herself and her collecting habits.  It’s an engaging podcast nonetheless.