We're building a website: We want you now

The Museums & Galleries of NSW website will highlight your museums, galleries and Aboriginal cultural centres to the public.

We want you now!

Our website will be nothing without your participation. The whole public facing side will be profiling your exciting places, exhibitions and events. 

Right now M&G NSW staff are putting basic information about every one of you into our website but we need you to add the colour. Contact us if you would like to be one of the first to get started!

Add content to your profile page

So let's take a look at the profile page. In this case we've built a profile page for the Lady Denman Maritime Museum in Jervis Bay:

Add pictures

Upload images onto your page and create a slideshow. You have amazing collections, objects, works of art, exhibitions and events. We want to see them. 

What makes you special?

Write a description that tells visitors what they'll see and hear and why you stand out from the crowd. How do you reflect your region and your town? 

Connect to your social media

Simply add your Twitter, Facebook or Youtube account and they will feed into these custom built modules.

If you don't belong to social media, no biggie because . . .

Later on: News, Events and Exhibitions

From early September we will want to know everything that's going on at your museum, gallery or Aboriginal cultural centre and how you're connecting with your region. You'll be able to easily send us information with an online form and it will become part of the state-wide Events and Exhibitions database.

We want to hear from:

Aboriginal cultural centres
Community and volunteer-run museums 
Regional public galleries 
Regional museums 

Artist-run initiatives 

We're here to help

To help you through the process we will arrange your signup and link you to your organisation profile page. We'll provide an easy to use Website Guide that shows you how to upload text and images onto your profile page.

If you would like to check out our website (that isn't live yet) and be one of the first to start uploading information please contact us.

Andrew or Katie 

ph: 02 9358 1760 
andrewb@mgnsw.org.au 
comms@mgnsw.org.au

We're Building a Website: Users

I want to begin with a confession. For some time I've felt guilty, perhaps even a little ashamed, about my internet use. I have access to thousands of well-written scholarly articles and interviews at the touch of a button but can't bother committing to read more than a single paragraph. Instead, I feel compelled to click everything feverishly like a five year old with a new toy, onwards and upwards through a labyrinth of pages and hyperlinks and rich media.

What's happening to me? Do I have ADD? Am I lazy? Is the internet making me even more stupid?

As it turns out, I'm just a typical user.

The typical user
When it comes to reading content on the web, we've all got ADD, all a bit lazy. Or rather, we're all task-orientated, enjoy interacting with a range of content, and wish to do everything in the shortest amount of time possible without expending effort thinking about things. Steve Krug wrote a book in 2000 on exactly this topic called Don't Make me Think in which he clearly explains that fundamentally the best user experience is one where everything on a website is self-explanatory and self-evident. 

Where am I? The current M&G Website Experience  
Along with audience research, M&G NSW has spent the last few months reorientating its priorities to learn more about what users want. This has been extremely eye opening for our organisation, revealing the perils of densely written copy, confusing navigation headings, and an unintuitive search function. 

Let's take a look at our current website from a user perspective:

The columned website design with a main menu and second tier sub menu is an effective and simple way of articulating navigation but problems quickly arise. Look what happens if you're in Exhibitions and you click on the Exhibitions Register. All of a sudden you're in Publications. 

Not a big problem but, as Steve Krug writes, confusing people's sense of place on a website is a big no no. Our interpretation of virtual space is analogous to physical space; we look for signposts and directions. This is why "breadcrumbs", the trail that you see at the top of website pages, is so important. Like in the story of Hanzel and Gretel, breadcrumbs provide a path from where you started to where you are. 

Above: An example of "breadcrumbs" on Trip Advisor.

And let's not even get into the label "Publications." What value does this present to you? We're not in the business of publishing so its strange this takes up the ultra premium place in the first tier of our menu. Why wouldn't publications be under "resources"? 

What about the search function? I'll type "Museum" in the search field and see what I get:

Excellent. 

The point I'm making is that every website is made to be USED and when a website like ours has a range of little anomylies that cause momentary confusion or undermine the user's trust, it does not fulfill its fundamental goal. 

So how do we make a usable website?

Designing a website for users
Working with Adrian Wiggins from Pure and Applied we began describing the user experience (UX) visually with simple page layouts called wireframes. These are page schematics depicting the website’s content, interface elements and navigational systems, with a focus on functionality, user behaviour and information architecture. 

Early wireframe of the public homepage. Click to enlarge.

Wireframes
Wireframes represent the interface without getting swamped in design detail, concisely articulating the user experience but allowing for rapid iterations. Adrian made prototypes of pages that offered layout suggestions and also potential types of content. After feedback he would remove, improve and rearrange items. 

In the wireframe above you can see the homepage displays event information, social media updates and quirky items like Object of the Day and Little Known Fact. It also clearly displays access to a map and database of museums, galleries and Aboriginal cultural centres in NSW. 

Our discussions with Adrian ranged from broad conceptual discussions and strategic goals to the nitty gritty details like button placement and menu labels. At every point we needed to meet a simple criteria: Could a user come to our Homepage and know exactly what to do without thinking?

By the end of January, Adrian had compiled an 90+ page document that provided a blueprint for Toben (the designers) and Interaction Consortium (the engineers) to begin building the new website. 

A Typical User?

At the beginning of this post I described the "typical user". Apart from the broad generalizations about UX, most users are an idiosyncratic, contradictory bunch who will respond to webpages in ways that designers and developers never imagined. M&G can hypothesize about user needs till the cows come home but its meaningless until we actually test the website. 

Further information on website user experience:

Steve Krug's website: Advanced Common Sense

Information Architecture for the World Wide Web

Nielsen Norman Group

This blog was updated on March 28 2013.

We're building a website: Audience, assets and content

As promised, I’ll explain the evolution of this drawing by the super-smart Adrian Wiggins from Pure and Applied:

The Digital Engagement Framework

Adrian’s deceptively simple drawing is a variation of an online engagement strategy conceived by Jasper Visser from Inspired by Coffee who ran a Digital Engagement Framework workshop as part of the ICOM Australia 2012 Conference held at the Australian Museum. 

Adrian's picture posits a clear communication strategy for M&G NSW. Connect our audience (the smiley guy on the left) with our assets (all our resources) using content.

It’s no mystery that to successfully engage your audience you need to know who they are and what they want. Except the only way to know what your audience wants is to research them and ask them. M&G's website has two audiences (both with overlapping but also contradictory needs): the public and the sector. 

So what do our audiences want?

Pure and Applied looked at existing data about our audiences and conducted interviews with members of the public and sector. Based on the collected statements and data, we picked out key patterns in their cultural needs, demographics and online engagement and we built 'personas'. Like this one:

As you can see above, Fiona is 35, single, not very wealthy, engaged on Facebook but not Twitter. It's important to realise these personas are not supposed to represent accurate personalities with all their potential for contradiction, idiosyncrasies and subtleties of taste. Instead, they’re a summation of data that allow us to personalise broad generalisations about audience interest and meet those interests online (what would Fiona be looking for online: Opening hours? Educational tools? Collection information?)

Assets

Which brings us to the other side of Adrian's picture: the assets. Your assets could be your café, your educational programs, unique items in for collection, or the volunteers who tell stories. M&G NSW's assets are the aggregation of everything you are doing on a regional and state-wide scale. Our job is to describe the relationships between your organizations, their context, the nearby amenities and overall destination.

Connecting audience with assets: content

As you can see our assets are "wrapped" in content and its the multiple opportunities to display and aggregate this content on the M&G website that has driven the development of the user experience. Our original conception of the new website was a homepage displaying a massive google map of NSW. Instead, when users come to our front door they will be greeted by a selection of stories (interviews, onsite travelogues about regions, exhibitions, festivals, opinion pieces and videos highlighting programs). This content invites users to visit individual museums or galleries or highlights the connections between organisations. Simply put, the front door is like a "magazine" with articles rather than a  searchable directory.

But don't worry . . . 

Visitors will still be able to search for every museum, gallery and keeping place in NSW (by region) with a click of a button. And in the next blog, I'll be showing you exactly how we'll achieve both these aspects when we look closely at designing the user experience. 

Further information on the Digital Engagement Framework 

Digital Engagement Framework 

Audience research:

Arts Council of England's Arts audiences:insight 2011 

CONNECTING:// ARTS AUDIENCES ONLINE

Guess Who's Going to the Gallery? NSW State Report 2011

Culture segments New Zealand

We're building a website

For the rest of the year I will be writing blog posts about the process of building our new website. This is obviously to keep you in the loop though I also hope to develop a sense of the project's opportunities and pitfalls by articulating the whole journey. With these goals in mind, let’s start with the most obvious question.

Why?
For some time, there had been dissatisfaction expressed about our current website both internally and externally (in all fairness the designer built it in 2007). 

Our concerns with the website went far beyond the look or feel. They were about our online strategy and it’s expression in our style and content.

Clearly our strategic goal was to advocate the visitor experience of museums, galleries and keeping places throughout NSW and yet our current website seemed obsessed with our organisation. Even when it was blatantly obvious we should be communicating with you, we seemed to be talking about us to somebody else (I don’t know who). 

We have a dream
We envisioned an easily searchable website representing every museum, gallery and keeping place in NSW to the public. This website would tell the collective stories of volunteer museums, show the programing strength of public galleries and unveil the hidden stories of collections everywhere. Organisations would be able to update information themselves or in partnership with us. 

Original website ideas and concepts for reference committees and potential partners.
Design by Katie Duncan.

And we wouldn’t stop there. There’d be a new, improved sector facing site with accessible resources and online opportunities for collaboration and discussion. 

Simply put, we wanted to make a website that didn’t represent M&G, it was M&G.

Easy, right?

Nope
It’s taken a year from this original impetus to actually procure the design team. During this year, we researched “competitors”, developed a digital strategy with Stuart Buchanan from The Nest and consulted our wise and clear-headed reference committees to explore the project’s risks and opportunities. Late last year we finally procured the services of the Interaction Consortium, Toben and Pure and Applied. 

Adrian Wiggins from Pure and Applied has just completed the user experience and wireframes for our new website: a process that encompasses questions around everything from communication strategies, social media platforms to what exactly you should call the button that takes you to Exhibitions and Events (“Exhibitions and Events” as it turns out).

A few weeks ago, just after Christmas, Adrian drew this picture on our whiteboard:

And in my next post, I’m going to explain exactly what we’ve been doing with Adrian and why this picture is key to everything we’re planning on doing on the website.

P.S. I welcome comments, questions and ideas throughout this process. Also, we're currently looking for someone to be a big part of our online journey. For more information click here.

A Night to Celebrate: The 2012 IMAGinE Awards

All photography by Mimi Kelly.

By all accounts the 2012 IMAGinE Awards presentation was a huge success. With a 20% increase in the number of nominations, a revised presentation format and bubbly enthusiasm expressed by over 100 guests, who enjoyed the hospitality of White Rabbit Gallery – it was certainly a night to remember.

The evening commenced with an Award that recognised Uncle Roy and Aunty June Barker’s Liftetime Volunteer Contribution, having devoted their lives to the preservation and sharing of Aboriginal history and cultural knowledge. The award was accepted by members of their family following a moving tribute given by Steve Miller, M&G NSW’s Manager of Aboriginal Programs.  Queanbeyan and District Historical Museum Society were then announced as winners of the Volunteer Collection Management Category, closely followed by an Award given to the Corrective Services Museum, Cooma, in the Collection Management Category for 1-4 paid staff.

Western Plains Cultural Centre’s recently completed de-accessioning project saw some 1000 items removed from the collection. Such was the manner in which this project was undertaken and given the sustainable advantages it bestowed to ongoing WPCC programs, our judges had no hesitation in giving the Collection Management (5-20 staff) Award to Dubbo.

The exemplary programs developed by Port of Yamba Historical Society were acknowledged by giving the volunteer run Exhibitions & Public Engagement Award to their World War II at Home exhibition. Goulburn Regional Gallery won the same category for 1-4 staff and Sydney University’s The Nicholson Museum won the 5-20 staff award category.

The 21+ staff award for Exhibitions and Public Engagement was hotly contested. Following detailed consideration the judges settled on awarding it to The Australian Maritime Museum for their hugely popular Nawi – exploring Australia’s Indigenous watercraft exhibition.

Category 3, for Education and Audience Development 1-4 paid staff, was given to Grafton Regional Gallery for their Towards the Stratosphere drawing project. It involved six local schools in the production of a 25 square metre drawing that reflected known and unknown aspects of the environment. The 4-20 paid staff award in this category went to Lake Macquarie City Art Gallery and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, won the 20+ staff category for their Bella Room project.

The individual achievement categories were also hotly contested with the paid staff category being shared between Dr Nick Lomb, from Sydney Observatory and Elizabeth Ann Macgregor OBE, Director Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. The volunteer award for Individual Achievement proved hugely popular for its recognition of the work of Ken Smith, Past President and Secretary of the Parramatta and District Historical Society.

The evening ended with hearty congratulations to all winners and a renewed enthusiasm for the way museums and galleries involve and support their communities throughout the state. 

From all of us at M&G a big thank you goes to all nominations for the way in which programs and projects are conceived and undertaken. 

Michael Rolfe
CEO

The Standards Program kicks off for another year

The finale of our road trip around the long paddock was a workshop in Wagga Wagga on Friday, introducing new participants to the 2012 Standards Program. Held at the Old Council Chambers at the Museum of the Riverina, it was a day to meet everyone who we will be working with this year, and let them know exactly what they have got themselves in for!

Ten museums from the Eastern Riverina have signed up for the program of self and peer review this year, and the program is definitely off to an excellent start. Each museum had a chance to share with the group a bit about their museums, and it was great to hear what a diverse range we have on board.

We were lucky to hear from Myfanwy Thompson, who kindly joined us from the Old Courthouse Museum in Batemans Bay. Her museum completed the Standards program last year and successfully made it through in one piece! It was reassuring to hear of their museum’s experiences in going through the program and everyone really appreciated her lively and encouraging presentation.

We are looking forward to the next get together in August, in the meantime we know everyone will be very busy getting stuck into the program activities!

Thanks heaps to the staff at the Museum of the Riverina for all their help in running the workshop and making it such a successful day.

Catching up with Mark Lipscomb and David Mathieson from Adelong Alive Museum.

.

The team from Tumut Historical Society and Sandra West from the Up to Date Store with Rachael Vincent, Regional Museum Officer.

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.

At the Frontier with John Holden, Demos

At the Frontier, the joint Museums Australia, Interpretation Australia conference began yesterday here in Perth.

Following a moving Welcome to Country, we had a powerful keynote from Professor John Holden of Demos, a UK based Think Tank that in John's words is "not politically aligned but very well politically connected" According to John, Demos aims to bring together people who wouldn't normally get together to look at issues, they undertake a lot of research and writing on a range of topics, including culture.

John's paper, titled Next generation Culture: Why culture, organisations and leadership are changing, looked at the tension between what he sees that the three spheres of culture- Art, popular culture and home made culture- and the huge shift that has occured in the last ten or so years in this relationship.

Through changes in technology including the advent of the internet, cheaper technology (including musical instruments, cameras and scanners) and the development of software, far more people are able to create their own art, blurring the lines between home made, popular culture and Art. John pointed out that not only are more people creating their own work but they have become curators of their own work both what we consume and what we make. He pointed out that technology such as ipods have become personally curated spaces where each individual selects the music, images and other material for inclusion.

John believes that not only has this changed the relationship between cultural institutions (such as galleries, museums and theate) and their audiences but has placed culture in a more central position within the community and political spheres. If everyone is engaged in culture, be it high end, popular or home made, then it is in his words the second ecosystem of humankind and a central part of everyone's life. John believes that there has been a real blurring between creator and audience in the last few years which is now being addressed in the way a number of cultural organisations are starting to operate. Visitors:

• Sometimes want to sit and listen (or look)


• Sometimes want a social experience


• Sometimes want to produce things for themselves (and may want help with this)

The blurring of the line between the audience and creator is certainly well recognised in Australia, but perhaps we haven't yet thought about the impact this has on the place of culture, and its three spheres upon the political landscape, certainly food for thought. John was interviewed on Art Works last Sunday, the audio of that interview can be found on the ABC's website.

Chatting with the IMAGinE 2011 winners

Below short videos that showcase winners of the 2011 IMAGinE awards and recipients of the 2011 IMAGinE highly commended certificates.

In our first video, IMAGinE award winners share their stories of excellence and innovation with us.

In our second video we talk with M&G NSW board member and gallery director, Belinda Hanrahan, about the significance of Special Achievement recipient Edmund Capon AM, OBE to our sector. 

 


Bob McKillop from Willoughby District Historical Society talks about their winning exhibition, 'The Tales of Flat Rock Creek' that explores the impact of urban development on a pristine natural environment since the European settlement, through the eyes of Willoughby residents.

The Bundanon Trust briefly explain their digitisation project for which they won the IMAGinE award for Collection Management- 5-20 paid staff.

Sharni Lloyd from The Glasshouse Regional Gallery discusses the exhibition People Of the First Sunrise, winner of the IMAGinE award Exhibitions and Public Engagement 1-4 Paid Staff. This exhibition was made in partnership with Port Macquarie TAFE, MCA and the Gallery.

To download a special brochure on the winners and highly commended click here.

If you've published anything electronically about the 2011 IMAGinE awards we'd love to post it!

To see the article on the posthumous honour of Glen Johns click here:

http://www.boorowanewsonline.com.au/news/local/news/general/top-honour-for-boorowa-man/2316585.aspx

To see the article on the Australian National Maritime Museum win click below:
http://anmm.wordpress.com/2011/10/07/imagine-award/
  
And the Grafton Regional Gallery received a trophy and a highly commended:
http://www.artsmidnorthcoast.org/grafton-regional-gallery-wins-at-the-2011-imagine-awards/

Arts Northern Rivers e-magazine covered the award and highly commended picked up by Grafton Regional Gallery
http://www.artsnorthernrivers.com.au/pages/news-latest-news-news-grafton-regional-gallery-wins-at-the-2011-imagine-awards

An Online and Offline conversation on the role of Digital in the National Cultural Policy

Last Thursday Andrew Brettell and I attended a day of conversations and presentations on how the new digital worlds could feed into, and be integrated into, the new cultural policy. 

Organised by Senator Kate Lundy and her office, this was the third public sphere conversation. These conversations happen online and also in a real word meeting - usually supported by live presentations that are streamed. There is the use of hashtags on twitter and a wiki to collate and capture ideas before, during and after the event.
Though the biggest trending story on Twitter that day was the passing of Steve Jobs, #publicsphere was ranked third – showing a wider engagement than those who were just in the room.
There were presentations from 5 key areas followed by group discussions. They were:

• Games Development - the future of games development in Australia from independent to major studios and publishers.
• Film & Animation - the future of film and animation in Australia within the context of digital culture.
• Media & Music - the future of music and media culture creation in a digital world.
• Digital Arts - looking at digital arts, how they contribute to our national culture landscape.
• Cultural Institutions - exploring how cultural institutions right across Australia, from regional galleries, libraries, archives and museums to national institutions can collaborate on public access and participation in our culturally diverse heritage through digitisation, online engagement such as crowd sourcing and emerging technologies such as augmented reality.

Key issues that came up in the discussion with the participants from the GLAM sector were: 

• the role that digitisation plays in building engagement at a local level
• the provision of services to assist the small to medium organisations in Regional Australia who may have the will but not the resources
• the need for an over-arching peak-body  for the GLAM sector, as a balance to the roles Screen Australia and The Australian Council for the Arts play for their sectors as a policy advisor to government  and research voice for the sectors.
• the model of DigitalNZ http://digitalnz.org/ 

and

• the change in organisations’ roles as part of this process from Keepers to Sharers to Distributors to Facilitators.

You can read the collated notes at http://digiculture.wikispaces.com/ and contribute to the discussion until the 15th October when it will be closed and finalised as a submission to the National Cultural Policy consultation by the 21st October 2011.
Just a reminder that if you haven’t already commented on the National Cultural Policy, submissions for that close on Friday 21 2011 http://culture.arts.gov.au/discussion-paper/developing-a-vision

 Michael Huxley

IMAGinE Exhibitions Nominations

The 2011 IMAGinE award nominations have closed and as always we have been inundated with entries from throughout NSW. Over the next four weeks we'll highlight the nominees in each category as we warm up for a glamorous night of canapes, wine and awards at the Australian Museum's Terrace Room.

This week we're concentrating on the Exhibitions and Public Engagement. We've had so many nominations we need to split this category in two. This week we're looking at volunteer run organisations and those organisations run by 1-4 paid staff.

Without further ado, here are the nominations:

EXHIBITIONS & PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT - VOLUNTEER ORGANISATIONS

Australian Railway Monument
Stories from former Werris Creek rail employees a well as original footage from the days of steam up until modern day diesel and electric. This theme is believed to be unique in the Australian context and is based on the fact that Werris Creek is the first and last railway town in NSW.



Glenalvon Museum
This was a program of changing displays on local heritage themes whilst interpreting Glenalvon, classic Georgian two-storey town house located in Campbelltown and simultaneously undertaking a progressive upgrading of the room displays to create the experience of life during the last 180 years.


Port Macquarie Historical Society
A series of temporary exhibitions themed to link to local, statewide and national history festivals, other celebrations and visiting exhibitions. Each of the temporary exhibitions also included a public program event, usually an open day with free or gold coin entry and coffee morning with curatorial speaker or other relevant local guest speaker/s.

Port of Yamba Historical Society

A special exhibition, titled Nursery-Rhymes Exposed – Delve Deeper than the Ditty, depicted thirty-one Rhymes. Each was displayed alongside a colourful illustration and information labels explaining background and historical context, sourced from hours of research. Surrounding each was a collection of items. eg ‘Polly Put the Kettle On’ featured a collection of tea-sets and pots; ‘Baa-Baa Black Sheep’ - wool and shearing equipment.



Thredbo Ski Museum

The Kiandra Story which endeavours to display to the visiting public through historical photographs, DVDs, skis, apparel, historic newspaper articles, the rich story of organised alpine skiing beginnings in Australia and arguably ,the world to acknowledge and celebrate the 150th Anniversary of organised alpine skiing in Australia, beginning at Kiandra in 1861.




Willoughby District Historical Society Inc
The Tales of Flat Rock Creek exhibition explores the impact of urban development on a pristine natural environment since the European settlement through the eyes of Willoughby residents. The story is told through three primary themes: the Rugged Landscape to the 1930s; the Ruined valley resulting from industrial waste, the Willoughby Incinerator and the garbage tip that impacted on the downstream landscape, flora and fauna; and its Reclamation, which explores the rehabilitation of the area and restoration of the incinerator as public recreational facilities and a bushland walkway.
EXHIBITIONS & PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT - 1-4 PAID STAFF

Coffs Harbour Regional Museum

The Museum Pop Up was devised when the museum was flooded and closed in March, 2009.It was of vital importance to be able to reassure local residents the collection was in good condition and that their history was intact and was being managed in a responsible way although the objects were in storage. The "Pop Up" museum concept was embraced by the community.


Cowra Regional Art Gallery

The project was the co-curated presentation of the touring exhibition There’s a War On!  World War II at Home . The Cowra component was curated by the Gallery Director Brian Langer and showcased visual art and craft objects, photographs and memorabilia from community and private collections in Cowra that were linked in various ways to the works and curatorial themes of the touring exhibition.




George Hanna Memorial Museum

Audacciousville: the Story of Dacey Garden Suburb’ explored the history of Australia’s first public housing estate. Daceyville, as the suburb is known today, began construction in 1912 and was a product of the first labor government in New South Wales. Unfortunately, due to World War I and a change of government, the finished suburb was a fraction of its planned size.


Glasshouse Regional Gallery

People Of the First Sunrise was a project in partnership with Port Macquarie TAFE, MCA and the Gallery. Over a 9 month period, Aboriginal TAFE students developed a curatorium and selected works from the MCA Collections under the mentorship of Keith Munro, Curator Aboriginal projects, MCA. 24 works by 17 renowned Indigenous artists from eastern Australia were selected exploring current issues about identity and place

Goulburn Regional Art Gallery

GW Bot: the long paddock A 30 YEAR SURVEY is a solo survey exhibition of past and recent work by GW Bot and includes some new work. As one of Australia’s leading artists her printmaking, sculpture and painting is justly exhibited on its own. Bot’s unique visual language and imagery offers alternate ways of viewing the familiar.



Grafton Regional Gallery

The project involved two exhibitions Fire, Form and Fruition Geoff Crispin: a regional practice in clay and An Artist’s Influence on the Collection presented simultaneously in September 2010 at the Grafton Regional Gallery. Form examined the interactions between an artist and local and remote communities with in Australia and overseas. An Artist’s Influence demonstrated the interaction between an artist, Geoff Crispin, working in a regional area and his impact on the collection development of their regional gallery.
Macquarie University Art Gallery

India ─ Past, Present and Abroad provides broad access to the understanding of our multi-cultural nature of Australian heritage, by presenting the perspectives of local photographers and historians on the contribution of Indian culture. Travel photography and newspaper heritage is made accessible for audiences to conduct similar research.



Peacock Gallery

Auburn Youth Art Showcase-"Own it"- An exhibition of works by local young people aged 12-24 during Youth Week and School Holidays ( 1 April to 1 May 2011) at the Peacock Gallery, Auburn Botanic Gardens. The strategies used resulted in the provision of an engaging exhibition and public programming aimed at engaging youth in the arts



UNE Heritage Centre, University of New England
THROUGH THE COLLECTORS LENS - DISSECTING BOOLOOMINBAH exhibition at NERAM exhibition provides an opportunity to use a large `museum standard' exhibition space to explore the diversity of collections held by the university and to introduce them to a general audience. The project was to develop an exhibition which could use scientific and cultural collections to explore a common theme which would be interesting to a general audience