Yesterday's Tomorrows: The Powerhouse Museum and its Precursors 1880-2005

By Graeme Davison And Kimberley Webber, Sydney: UNSW Press, 2005, 288 pages, paperback, $54.95. Reviewed by Daniel Herborn in the October 2005 issue.

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For a century and a quarter, Sydney's Powerhouse Museum and itspredecessors have focused strongly on the future; the coming technology that would bring with it moral improvement, the industry promising to revitalise the Australian economy or the artistic trend that would restore pride in Australia's natural environment. It is fitting, then, to pause for breath at this juncture and to look back. The new essay collection 'Yesterday's Tomorrows' fills this role admirably.

Editors Graeme Davison and Kimberley Webber have assembled an impressive multi-disciplinary team to tackle the history of these museums. The thematic approach means there is some overlapping material, but the results are generally sound, starting with the editor's own chapter detailing the cultural climate the first incarnation of the museum was built in. In an era when international exhibitions were vital to the image of the fledgling colony, the collection had suitably grand quarters in the spectacular but ill-starred Garden Palace. When it burned down in 1882, much of the collection was lost forever.

Many a soul would have lost heart after the tragedy, but not the inaugural curator, Joseph Henry Maiden. Within days, our man was sending out letters requesting donations for the rebuilt museum. Such wilfull determination was not uncommon amongst the early directors and it is one of the strengths of this volume that much is revealed of the personalities of the museum's founders. Their task was one of no mean ambition as the museum, which was to reopen a decade later in Ultimo, saw itself as a new kind of display, a site where the veneration of the march of progress would inspire and educate the working-classes.

An importance influence in the museum's early direction was curator Arthur Penfold's epiphany at the Deutsches Museum, which he felt vindicated his concept of the museum as a place to present a comprehensive history of mankind. The Ultimo site's German counterpart, he wrote, told 'the story of civilization ... There are no gaps to be filled'. His idea, shared by many of his peers, amounted to a 'belief that humanity is on a straight-line trajectory of improvement, progressively gaining advantage over the world of raw matter'. Further, there was a conviction that this trajectory could be mapped in a way that would enlighten and inspire the working classes in a way that traditional schooling had failed to achieve.

Elsewhere, a worthwhile chapter by Megan Hicks and Martha Sear outlines thedidactic nature of sanitary instruction in the Technological Museum, an example of the focus on health, and, more broadly, the earnest paternalism that characterised the Powerhouse's forerunners. The changing cultural values are neatly tracked from the hilarious prudery surrounding the display of the oddly sexless 'Transparent Woman' (the model was almost detained at Customs during the 1950s) to the controversial exhibition on contraception which the Powerhouse displayed in the mid 90s.

Interspersed throughout the chapter-length essays are two-page pieces on some of the most notable objects, displays, collectors and artisans to have been associated with the museum(s). As an entertaining and occasionally enlightening diversion, they are most welcome. Less successful is a very dry, and not particularly relevant, detour into the history of the Australian wool industry.

Yesterday's Tomorrows may be characterised by the largely celebratory tone familiar to these kind of commemorative publications, but it is to the credit of the editors that there is some criticism of the museums, some recognition of the failures. Roy MacLeod's summation of the pre-Powerhouse period is 'a chapter of hope, promise and hard work, qualified by frustration and limited resources -- producing ... not so much a failure of vision as a vision, failed'. The slow decline of the museum's research program, its ultimate failure to provide the boost to industry it aimed for (particularly the unproductive attempts to kick-start the Eucalyptus oil industry) and the deterioration of the partnership between the museum and the technical college are also well covered.

Having praised the even-handed nature of the book, there are a couple of pointswhere a more critical approach may have paid dividends. The section on ArchibaldLiversidge, a key collector in the early days of the museum mentions his 'liberal imperialism' in passing, but the highly dubious snatch-and-grab schoolof 'collecting' common to most, if not all, museums in this era is left unexplored. Likewise, the one recurring criticism of the museum from academic circles, its unapologetic populism, its determination to chase an audience once crudely described by acting director Margaret Coaldrake as 'C and B graders -- people who don't know a lot' is never really engaged with.

Still, the museum is entitled to some degree of back-patting as surveys have showed an impressive 97 per cent of visitors surveyed indicated a willingness to return. Not only has the Powerhouse performed well in this kind of visitor evaluation, it has become a world leader in the field and one of the busiest museums in Australia in terms of public programming. While Arthur Penfold's vision of a museum where 'every new development should be seen at once' has long become unfeasible, the Powerhouse has determinedly kept up to date with wider social trends. As one essay here demonstrates, the three main phases of the museum 'fall neatly into three periods of Australian social and economic history, in which the exploration and exploitation of natural resources and the integration of a manufacturing economy have given way to ... what became a service economy'.

Perhaps the outstanding chapter here is by Pascall Prize-winning architecturescribe, Elizabeth Farrelly, who contributes an essay on the 'absolutely 80s-geist' design of the Powerhouse. Her piece shows an acute awareness of theimpact a museum's architecture has on the way it interprets objects and projectsitself to the community. She writes of the museum building as 'a built catalogue,a spatial ordering device designed for the repose and three-dimensional re-confabulation of official cultural memory'. Again, this essay is very strongon the personalities involved in dreaming up the vision for the Powerhouse and putting the audacious plans into action. Farrelly profiles the 'three major creative egos' involved -- Premier Neville Wran, architect Lionel Glendenning (also interviewed here) and director Lindsay Sharp, a headstrong, talented triowhose verve and 'preparedness to ignore, override and exclude bureaucracy' brokethrough the inertia of previous attempts to get the new museum off the ground.

She ends by noting the museum has long been 'beset by the orientation dilemma'and advocates a plan to reorient the museum to capitalise on the increasingly tourist-based clientele it draws while also updating the internal layout in line with new thinking on how museum orientation effects the interpretation of the objects. After reading of the numerous bureaucratic brick walls successive directors have run into trying to realise the museum's lofty vision, one is not terribly optimistic about thePowerhouse attracting the funding and support to rework the building's design inline with this latest paradigm shift. Cynics may well predict that by the timesuch renovations were completed, the dominant paradigm would have been subverted again.

Another outstanding contribution is Richard White's chapter. Here, the Sydney historian traces the development of the social history bent which became so pronounced in the museum during the 1990s: the ironic referencing of the past and playful use of the icons which would later prove so controversial at the National Museum of Australia. The trend towards the 'self-conscious historical pastiche' was a marked departure from the reverence and optimism which once defined the displays. One writer here quotes the Sydney Morning Herald on the coming of the steam age: 'With the introduction of railways will follow in quick succession a series of social, moral and material advantages'. To trace the route from the naivete and optimism of this sentiment to the irreverence of the contemporary displays is to map how our understanding of our collective past has changed.

In the closing chapters, some of the writers speculate on future directions for the museum, sometimes favouring vague and buzzword-smitten purple prose over anything resembling practicality. Noting that the museum 'will have to create ever-evolving scenes for investigation, interpretation and speculation' is allwell and good, but what would this actually entail? More persuasive is the conclusion by current director Kevin Fewster, who links his future vision for the museum to its initial themes: innovation, broad appeal and an interest in the applied sciences in all their diversity. Handsomely illustrated throughout, Davison and Webber's book is a lavish production and one that will be especially useful to museum studies students and anyone interested in how all yesterday's tomorrows were both envisaged and memorialised by this fascinating museum and its precursors.

Citation

• Daniel Herborn. 'Review: Yesterday's Tomorrows: The Powerhouse Museum and its Precursors 1880-2005 by Graeme Davison and Kimberley Webber' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), October 2005. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 30 July 2010].

Back Cover Blurb

• A richly illustrated and engaging book that looks at the Museum's fascinating history and beyond. Founded in 1880, the Powerhouse Museum is one of the oldest state museums in Australia and world renowned for its diverse and significant collection, state-of-the-art exhibitions, research and publishing.

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