New Melbourne Museum surfs the cultural tide

By GILBERT WONG arts editor

If you want the soundbite verdict on Melbourne's new state museum try Te Papa without any paintings.

Museum director George F. MacDonald has only himself to blame if that is the over-riding impression left with visitors.

It was he who when discussing the just-opened $A290 million museum's philosophy described it as an attempt to blur the boundaries between a museum, zoo, art gallery, cinema and theatre. Te Papa, which cost $317 million in 1995 dollars, has a similar scale and the same earnest desire to appeal.

That philosophy is embodied in the courageous architecture by Melbourne firm Denton Corker Marshall, responsible for the giant red cantilevered pillar that threatens to topple onto the motorway from the airport.

According to principal John Denton, the building, with its soaring glass flanks, determinedly off-plumb walls and signature multicoloured "children's museum" box at the back, is part of an attempt to capture the late-20th-century notion of "sampling." This is architecture designed for channel surfers and lovers of drive-through fast food. Instead of oppressive corridors, the 16,000 sq m of display space form a series of mini-museums laid out like a campus or a theme park.

In a steady Melbourne drizzle, the great verandah, positioned five storeys high, that runs to the museum's main entrance from the street front, acts more as statement than shelter, forcing visitors to keep their umbrellas opened and raised. The interior is concrete, left unclad or painted in all its monolithic honesty. The walls and rampways run slightly off-plumb, as if the 90 deg angle was banned. The builders must have cursed the famous architects.

Walk too quickly and in the cavernous interior the askew horizon ahead can leave the unwary disoriented and even dizzy.

The Melbourne Museum opened on October 22 to much fanfare and a cream-pie-in-the-face attack on Victorian premier Steve Bracks by a rogue world trade protester. It remains a work in progress.

Up and running are the Bunjilaka Gallery, the Aboriginal heart of the museum; Te Pasifika, a gallery looking at Pacific Island cultures; and the Australian Gallery, which looks largely at state, Melbourne and non-indigenous social history.

By April 2001 the museum will have installed a Forest gallery; the Children's Museum Big Box Gallery and three final galleries focused on the Mind and Body, Science and Life, and Evolution.

What is finished emphatically recalls the way Te Papa has chosen to transform our ideas of a museum. In the same fashion the Melbourne Museum makes paramount the concept - whether that is a snapshot of pop history or the politicisation of an issue - rather than the object.

So in the Bunjilaka Gallery the Koori Voices exhibit features the story of those of the Stolen Generation, that sorry episode when Aboriginal children were separated from their parents and given to white couples in a paternalistic act of misguided charity.

There are aural reconstructions of how Social Welfare would come knocking. "Gladys, we're from the welfare department," says a nameless actor. From behind her door Gladys cries sotto voce for her children to "run away and hide."

Bold quotations are inscribed on the walls: "Please would you kindly allow me to have my two girls with me for my heart is breaking ... " - Margaret Harrison, 1884.

A reconstruction of a child's hidden bedroom with empty cot features shutters which you pull open to read statements such as: "One in 10 Aboriginal children was taken from their family."

It is so intentionally emotive that you leave feeling manipulated.

The Te Pasifika Gallery is not a patch on the collection at the Auckland Museum.

The Australia Gallery on the first floor, separated from the liberal guilt spawned by the Bunjilaka Gallery below, is by contrast all Advance Australia Fair.

Pride of place goes to Phar Lap or his stuffed remains with the slightly jingoistic inscription: "His huge heart is in Canberra, his skeleton is in New Zealand but it is here that the mighty Phar Lap stands." The famed horse is determinedly Australian property, his New Zealand connections an accident of birth.

The exhibit that draws most attention perfectly exemplifies the new museum's focus. In a glass case stands a mannequin wearing Charlene Ramsay's apricot silk with ivory chantilly lace wedding dress, as worn by actor and singer Kylie Minogue when she married Scott Robinson (Jason Donovan) on the episode of Neighbours screened on July 1, 1987. As at Te Papa, the objects on display are sometimes not meant to be as interesting as the concepts they convey - which would be fine if the ideas were interesting. A collection of swatches is on show next to a Victorian grandfather clock. A plaster model of the Melbourne Cricket Game is complete with a Tom Thumb-sized streaker. There is no indication of the importance or provenance of either. They become statements open to multiple interpretation or idle rather than informed curiosity.

The only exhibit that suggests the museums of the past is a work by installation artist Janet Laurence. In Stilled Lives she has filled traditional glass display cases with items from the 16 million objects in the former Victorian Museum's collection. Here, arrayed in pseudo-scientific order, are brilliant seashells, preserved sea anemones, corals and gemstones. Laurence's artist statement reads: "These evocative objects 'live' dislocated by their history, stilled in time."

Whether it is the quality of the art or the intrinsic interest in what the cases contain, Stilled Lives proved a real crowd-pleaser. Throngs of parents hovered over the display cabinets with their children. "Look at that!" their kids were saying.

Children were banned from the museum's first major temporary public exhibition, Body Art, a self-described "edgy" exhibition of tattooing, piercing and body modification. Those over 18 could wander behind heavy curtains, like those used in video shops to screen off the pornography, and sit in a recreation of a tattooist's studio, complete with biker mags, polaroids of hollow-cheeked women with butterflies on their breasts and men in leather showing off the surprise work on their nether regions.

Deeper into the exhibition there were close-ups of genital piercings, causing viewers to wince depending on the power of their imaginations. Another display showed the sad silicon mounds of breast implants and plastic prosthetics for nose jobs.

Bondage gear hung on fearsome mannequins featured along with traditional Maori and Samoan tattooing tools in an exhibition that was as wide as it was poorly focused. One left with a sense that the curators were trying so hard to be hip that they did not realise that the hip don't try.

The Melbourne Museum captures where museums have ended up at the end of the 20th century, beset by the need to reshape themselves, hiding their scientific and cultural origins as they struggle for relevance in a landscape where pop culture is queen and the past is portrayed as a foreign country rather than the continuum that are our cultures.

* Gilbert Wong visited Australia as a recipient of the Australian Government's Cultural Award Scheme.