Treasures of the Museum spans the familiar and the unfamiliar, the priceless and the everyday. This superb book features exquisite photographs of the Museum Victoria's most treasured objects, and as well as fascinating insights into each by curators, collection staff and eminent Australians. This outstanding collection, chosen from 16 million items from Australians and their environment, are not just of interest to those from down under but the anecdotes and background stories relate to all who have ever had a family or lived in a community or a nation. Art, memorabilia, children's toys, scientific instruments, broken pottery and fossils are all included in the Museum's treasures and are displayed in this book to reveal a living history of Australia.
National treasures from Australia's great libraries brings our national memory to life, for the first time showcasing more than 170 treasures that have helped define our nation -- where we come from, who we are and what sets us apart. Both a guide and a lasting record of a remarkable exhibition, this richly illustrated catalogue reveals the magnificent collections of Australia's National, State and Territory libraries.
The Art of Science presents the best of Museum Victoria’s remarkable collection of natural history artworks, currently on a national touring exhibition of the same name. Based on the museum’s collection of rare books, field sketches, art works and taxonomic studies, the book features some of the most exquisite, rare and important illustrations of flora and fauna ever created. In addition to the artworks, which tell a story of exploration, discovery, painstaking research and documentation, the book also traces the lives, curiosities and observations of the artists and explorers, whom throughout history often worked against the odds to gather and record. The Art of Science is a unique collection of exquisite images that will enrich our understanding of the history of art and science, the natural world, and the miracle of human perception.
We live in a "museum age," and sport museums are part of this phenomenon. In this book, leading international sport history scholars examine sport museums including renowned institutions like the Olympic Museum in the Swiss city of Lausanne, the Babe Ruth Birthplace and Museum in Baltimore, the Marylebone Cricket Club Museum in London, the Croke Park Museum in Dublin, and the Whyte Museum in Banff. These institutions are examined in a broad context of understanding sport museums as an identifiable genre in the "museum age", and more specifically in terms of how the sporting past is represented in these museums. Historians explain, debate and critique sport museums with the intention of understanding how this important form of public history represents sport for audiences who see museums as institutions that are inherently reliable and trustworthy.
“Our hearts were greatly cheered when our first soul sought salvation. This dear fellow had travelled all the way from Melbourne in search of the gold that perishes. He failed to find this, but found instead the pearl of greatest price!” So wrote George Lonnie of the earliest days of his work in Southern Cross, Western Australia, in 1893. He and his companion, Captain Charles Bensley, had walked 152 kilometres east over four solid days from the end of the railway line to that mining settlement in hot, dry, and dusty conditions. Having built their own accommodation and a meeting hall using saplings cut from the bush, hessian, and discarded wooden crates, it took seven weeks of faithful teaching, preaching, and caring for the needs of the prospectors there before that first soul sought and found the lasting treasure of salvation. Lasting Treasure shares the story of George Lonnie and Jennie Hammer, who made the same great discovery: lasting treasure more precious than gold—a relationship with God through Jesus Christ. First individually, and then as a couple, they shared their discovery by proclaiming the gospel and alleviating human needs through Christian ministry in the Salvation Army in Australia and New Zealand. In so doing, they experienced precious strength to face privations, illnesses, bereavements, and disappointments—as well as exciting times of great joy. The story of their resilience and courage is both challenging and inspiring. “What courage and dedication the whole story is immersed with. It is a history largely lost to modern Salvationists, and so your recording of it is so important.” —Major Campbell Roberts, New Zealand “George and Jennie Lonnie’s singleness of mind and commitment to their calling and the mission of The Salvation Army is truly inspirational.” —Major Garry Mellsop, New Zealand
While much has been written on the history of psychiatry, remarkably little has been written about psychiatric collections or curating. Exhibiting Madness in Museums offers a comparative history of independent and institutional collections of psychiatric objects in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United Kingdom. Leading scholars in the field investigate collectors, collections, their display, and the reactions to exhibitions of the history of insanity. Linked to the study of medical museums this work broadens the study of the history of psychiatry by investigating the significance and importance of the role of twentieth-century psychiatric communities in the preservation, interpretation and representation of the history of mental health through the practice of collecting. In remembering the asylum and its different communities in the twentieth century, individuals who lived and worked inside an institution have struggled to preserve the physical character of their world. This collection of essays considers the way that collections of objects from the former psychiatric institution have played a role in constructions of its history. It historicises the very act of collecting, and also examines ethical problems and practices which arise from these activities for curators and exhibitions.
South Pacific Museums: Experiments in Culture is a collection of outstanding analyses of museums in the South Pacific, written by cultural, museum and architectural critics, and historians. A series of snapshots introduce the reader to key museums in the region and longer essays explore these museums in broad terms.Over the last 50 years, museums have been regarded by many scholars and cultural critics as archaic institutions far from the cutting edge of cultural innovation. This judgement is being proved wrong across the globe, with innovative museums staking out new territory. Nowhere is this more striking than in the South Pacific where new and redeveloped institutions have included the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, the National Museum of Australia, the Melbourne Museum, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, the Museum of Sydney, the Gab Titui Cultural Centre in the Torres Strait, the Auckland Museum, the Centre Culturel Tjibaou and the Vanuatu Cultural Centre.South Pacific Museums make sense of these museums as part of the complex field of heritage, where national economies meet global tourism, cities brand themselves, and indigeneity articulates with colonialism. The effect is one of cultural experimentation. Part One, 'New Museums', introduces three different museums in distinctive national contexts - Te Papa, the Centre Culturel Tjibaou and the National Museum of Australia. Essays in this part grapple with the role of these museums in the nation at particular historical moments under specific political pressures. Part Two, 'New Knowledges', documents practices and exhibitions at the point of tension between indigenous and non-indigenous interests in the museum. Part three, 'New Experiences', explores the ways in which museums in the South Pacific are producing that ineffable cultural phenomenon - experience.
An exciting journey to thirteen buildings that capture the essence of the British imperial experience, painting an intimate portrait of the biggest empire the world has ever seen: the people who made it and the people who resisted it, as well as the legacy of the imperial project throughout the world.
In this exuberant celebration of the world's museums, great and small, revered writers like Ann Patchett, Julian Barnes, Ali Smith, and more tell us about their favorite museums, including the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York, the Mus'e Rodin in Paris, and the Prado in Madrid. These essays, collected from the pages of The Economist's Intelligent Life magazine, reveal the special hold that some museums have over us all. Acclaimed novelist William Boyd visits the Leopold Museum in Vienna -- a shrine to his favorite artist, Egon Schiele, whom Boyd first discovered on a postcard as a University student. In front of her favorite Rodins, Allison Pearson recalls a traumatic episode she suffered at the hands of a schoolteacher following a trip to the Mus'e in Paris. Neil Gaiman admires the fantastic world depicted in British outsider artist Richard Dadd's "The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke," a tiny painting that also decorated the foldout cover of a Queen album, housed in the Victorian room of Tate Britain's Pre-Raphaelite collection. Ann Patchett fondly revisits Harvard University's Museum of Natural History -- which she discovered at 19, while in the throes of summer romance with a biology student named Jack. Treasure Palaces is a treasure trove of wonders, a tribute to the diversity and power of the museums, the safe-keepers of our world's most extraordinary artifacts, and an intimate look into the deeply personal reveries we fall into when before great art.
