Museums in Australia

The collecting of Australian natural history and Indigenous artifacts predates by centuries the introduction of formal museum infrastructure into colonial Australia. Whereas the earliest collections amassed by explorers, missionaries, and the like were shipped off to institutions abroad, significant museums were nonetheless soon inaugurated throughout the continent to act as repositories for the newly formed collections and to stand as emblems of the civilized values of the recently imported settler societies. The Australian Museum in Sydney (1827) was thus followed by the Museum of Victoria (1854), the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (1863), and so on. The rapid evolution of Australian museums led next to their subdivision into the more specialized subcategories of art gallery, natural history museum, regional museum, and so on. The foundation of Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria (1861) thus narrowly preceded Sydney’s Art Gallery of New South Wales (1871), the Art Gallery of Ballarat (1884), and so on, with the concomitant shift in collecting priorities that this entails. Today’s ever-expanding network of Australian museums, galleries, art centers, and other related institutions embraces a yet more diverse and dynamic range of both newly formed and long-established organizations of all kinds and sizes ranging from the Museum of Tropical Queensland, Townsville, to the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, and all points in between. The literature on Australian museums begins during its earliest years with catalogues, collection handbooks. and other specialized publications released by fledgling museum professionals seeking to document the explosion of new knowledge concerning the recently settled continent. Next comes the initially small but continuously growing group of official museum histories, represented here by the detailed organizational studies of the National Gallery of Victoria and Australian Museum published by Leonard Cox in 1970 and Ronald Strahan in 1979. The field of Australian museum studies, by contrast, is a yet more recent phenomenon that has tended to follow the establishment of international methodologies, such as the rise of cultural studies and the new museology, as well as the inauguration of Australian university teaching and research programs in these areas more specifically from the 1970s onward (e.g., see the publications cited under General Overviews). Museum studies publications on Australian museums are currently to be found spread across a fully distributed global network ranging from international scholarship of Australian case studies (see Jagodzińska 2017, cited under Australian Art Museums: Regional, State, and National) to Australian publications seeking to situate Australian examples within a broader global perspective (Green and Gardner 2016).