A Companion to Australian Art. Группа авторов

3 Public Art Museums in Australia: A Brief History

      Gerard Vaughan

      The European settlement of Australia began in 1788, when Britain established a penal colony in and around what is now Sydney. Within a few decades large numbers of free settlers began to arrive, establishing themselves in different parts of the country. Victoria, in the south-east corner of the Australian continent with Melbourne as its capital, separated from New South Wales as a self-governing colony in 1851, the same year as vast deposits of gold were discovered in the interior. Melbourne, enriched by gold, prospered rapidly, attracting hundreds of thousands of “diggers” seeking their fortune, drawn not only from Britain but from practically every country of Europe, and many beyond, particularly China.

      Whether successful or not, a high proportion opted to stay, to forge a new life in the different Australian colonies and, paralleling experience in the United States, there was a real and very conscious sense of creating a new “European” society in the Antipodes. Right from the beginning – and in Victoria in particular – a growing sense of optimism and ambition, of civic progress and the civic pride which accompanied it, dictated a policy of creating educational and cultural institutions which would drive forward the sense of achievement in every field of endeavour, with ideas about opportunity, learning and self-improvement assuming a particularly important role.

The creation of a system of public museology began at a surprisingly early stage, particularly in Victoria, where the Anglo-Irish judge Sir Redmond Barry, who assumed the role of leading promoter of arts and culture in the colony, drove the establishment in the 1850s of a new public library and then university, followed by the establishment of a museum of art in 1861; this evolved into the National Gallery of Victoria, formally established by act of parliament in 1869. Museological practices in colonial Australia consciously reflected the growth of the new museum culture, including art museums, both in London and in the new, developing industrial cities of northern England; Melbourne and Sydney were regarded as being amongst the great new economic powerhouses of the Empire. Americans are often surprised to learn that the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), Australia’s first public art gallery – funded by the state following the British model – was established nearly a decade before America’s first major public art museums, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, both established in 1870 and funded through the private sector.

      The range and function of today’s system of public art museums in Australia reflects Australia’s three tiers of government: national institutions in the new, planned national capital in Canberra, all opened in the late twentieth century; older institutions in the state capitals¹; and regional public art galleries established and supported within a local government system, ranging from large provincial cities to small towns.

      Given that Australia only emerged as a politically united, independent country in 1901, when the six individual self-governing British colonies chose a federal model (imitating above all the Canadian model of 1867 with 10 provinces and three territories), its nineteenth century culture of art museology was surprisingly developed and accessible.

      The Nineteenth Century Background

      While the creation of a system of public art museology in nineteenth century Australia was inevitably in direct imitation of Britain’s new museum culture, it was necessarily adapted to local conditions. New ideas on the social and educational outcomes of access to museum collections, and the necessity of providing teaching in art and design to both artisans and art students for the improvement of public taste, were of course stimulated by the global impact of London’s Great Exhibition of 1851, and the subsequent founding of the South Kensington Museum (renamed the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1899).

      In 1879–1881 Sydney, and then Melbourne, hosted significant international exhibitions, and in 1888 Melbourne alone presented its huge Centennial Exhibition, commemorating a century of British settlement and the progress made in the Australian colonies. In all three exhibitions, with Europe’s most powerful manufacturing nations contributing significant products and produce, collections of contemporary fine art proved popular with the public. The fact that in 1888 Melbourne, by far the wealthiest and most socially and culturally advanced Australian city, felt sufficiently confident to challenge Sydney by going it alone, set the agenda for much subsequent cultural policy, and Australia’s two major cities compete to this day in developing arts and museological infrastructure.

The Early Colonial Period

      Even in the early nineteenth century, within decades of the first colonial settlements, there is evidence of a desire to improve taste and cultural experience through public access to art collections and exhibitions, always underpinned by a parallel discourse on the importance of broadly available art education and training in design.

      Perhaps the earliest reference to the idea that Sydney might aspire to possessing a fine art collection accessible to the public is found in an article published in the Sydney Gazette on 20 July 1829, which identifies the itinerant colonial artist Augustus Earle – resident in the colony of NSW 1825–1827 – as having set up an apartment containing an art collection he had put together specifically with the intention of making it freely available to the public.

      The author of the article, John McGarvie, described this as the first picture gallery in the colony, and noted that Earle had hoped it would form the nucleus of a larger public collection supported by others. “It served for a time to recall the noble picture galleries in the mother country.”² However, the gallery did not survive after Earle’s departure from NSW, and McGarvie’s language was unspecific in identifying precisely what Earle’s collection consisted of – whether just his own pictures, making it essentially a commercial promotional exercise, or including other artists active in Sydney, or bringing together miscellaneous artworks representing other cultures or periods.

      Nearly three decades later, in 1857, the Sydney-based editor and writer Joseph Sheridan Moore published two articles in The Month on the necessity of establishing a broad program of art education in Australia, quoting Ruskin on the social duty to provide art training for artisans. Moore recommended at the same time the adoption of new, more democratic and advanced approaches to such training, reflecting ideas recently developed in other European countries, especially France and Germany – the antithesis of the traditional fine art academy. He saw this as an essential prerequisite for establishing a new Australian school of painting, proposing not only a government funded Australian Central Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Sydney, but also the creation of professorships of painting, drawing and design “in every Municipal town in the Colony, possessing a Mechanics’ Institute.”³

The role played by Mechanics’ Institutes in colonial Australian society, in promoting not only technical training but also cultural engagement, should not be underestimated. Many of Australia’s first fine art exhibitions were organized in this way, and several regional examples, each quite separate from developments in Melbourne and Sydney, can be selected to demonstrate how the system worked. Ann Galbally has pointed out that the role of the Mechanics’ Institute in colonial Australia was markedly different from Britain where such institutions were firmly focused on improving the training and expertise of working men. In Australia, by contrast, they were enthusiastically taken up by the emerging middle classes, as repositories of libraries, and venues for cultural activities and exchange.⁴

      In 1860, in Launceston in northern Tasmania, the opening of its new Mechanics’ Institute building was celebrated with a fine art exhibition.⁵ The event was locally significant, with 551 works of art contributed by citizens of Launceston and its surrounding area. Engravings, photogravures, apprentices’ models and other items