National Museum of Australia

So, look I am going to talk today mostly about what I do as a curator here at the National Museum of Australia but I want to draw some generalities from that in terms of a series of curatorial practices, tools, techniques and methods that I think could be of interest to your students and to you in developing extension history courses. I want to talk about what I do as a curator and then from that also talk a bit about the kinds of history that I think museums are particularly good at creating and communicating. I think this is something I would really like to discuss because it is not necessarily very well understood is that I think museums, as Dave insisted by putting up my quote in his slide, create a very particular kind of history. It's not the kind of history that gets created in books or in dating films or in compositions, it's a very particular kind of history that grows out of the fact that museums are centrally interested and defined by their collections. I should say that is not an uncontested view of museums but it is certainly my view of museums. Curators try to understand material culture as an evidence of other people's lives as a means to try to understand other people - what they look like, what they did, how they made a living, what they hoped for in their lives, how they tried to construct their world and why they made particular choices. One way in which curators differ from other historians is therefore in terms of how we interrogate the past, what elements we use to communicate the past. Most academic historians are trained very much in the discipline of words and they concentrate on words still today, although it is changing a little bit. If you go through university history primarily you are encouraged to draw on things like archival accounts, manuscripts and now oral histories, and most of that work is actually promulgated in the form of books. There are also other kinds of historians. Obviously, filmmakers and photographers concentrate on creating images of the world and arranging them in meaningful sequences, but curators attend to objects. We look at objects as evidence of the past and try to arrange objects in meaningful ways called exhibitions.