An Opportunity to Rethink my Museum

Samantha Sinnayah, 2011 M&G NSW Mentorship Recipient  
Western Plains Cultural Centre (WPCC), National Museum of Australia (NMA) and surrounding regional museums.

As I work alone at the George Hanna Memorial Museum (GHMM), and have done for the past two years, I was seeking to expand and refresh my curatorial practice. Now in its 16th year, the GHMM is running out of traditional historical topics to cover and will need to rethink approaches if meaningful exhibitions are to be developed in the future.

With this goal in mind, I applied for an M&G NSW Mentorship, funded by Arts NSW, at the Western Plains Cultural Centre (WPCC) and the National Museum of Australia (NMA).

At the WPPC I was very interested to see how this local government museum managed to continually engage its community with new perspectives on Dubbo’s history through exhibitions like People Places Possessions: Dubbo Stories, and Dubbo 10- Community Voices. Likewise, I’d hoped that my time at NMA would provide me with ideas on how to approach my future exhibition proposal, a social history of Botany Bay, from Captain Cook to the present day. Covering four local government areas, this will be a larger project than any I have previously researched and curated.

My placement exposed me to the different approaches, issues and responsibilities these institutions faced. One highlight was witnessing collection and curatorial meetings at NMA. As a curator of a museum that focuses on one small local government area, I assumed the NMA just had a wider area over which to cast its net. I had no idea how complex collecting for a nation is and of the issues that come with that responsibility.

I also discovered the importance of making history relevant in collection and curatorial practice. NMA actively collect the ‘past’ as it occurs in the present, and, during a trip to Wagga, I found that staff at the ,Museum of the Riverina also link their historical exhibitions to the here and now. At the GHMM, our exhibitions are tied to celebrating the past, partly due to our strong ties to our local historical trust. Linking the past to the present is certainly something I am going to consciously consider in the future, especially as I attempt to build new audiences.

During the two weeks, I also took the opportunity to visit a number of regional museums between Dubbo and Albury. Having the chance to see a wide cross section of museums in NSW gave me a strong sense of the sector as a whole and my organization’s place in it. On a basic level, it introduced me to the depth of collections across the state and the resourcefulness of some volunteer run organizations. On a deeper level, it is has made me think more strategically about the resources I have available to me. The volunteer run Cootamundra Heritage Centre was very inspirational and has opened my eyes to how I may be able to utilize our local historical trust. 

All in all my mentorship was an invaluable experience. Thanks to the frank conversations I had with museum professionals, and to the wide variety of exhibitions I saw, I gained far more from my mentorship than can be expressed in these condensed paragraphs.

Samantha Sinnayah
 

Volunteer Rusty in front of Cootamundra’s curiosity chest – the volunteer organization’s inexpensive but effective equivalent of the glass and steel chests at the Museum of Sydney.

A 3-d collage about the history of Cootamundra. These dioramas where produced in cigarette tins by Jack Mullins the local newsagent.