Curate Your Own Adventure

Sweet Addiction is the inaugural exhibition of the new Calyx venue in the Royal Botanic Gardens. For a small fee, you can step inside one of the most beautifully curated exhibition spaces to learn the history and art of chocolate. It is a truly aesthetically pleasing and informative space that once you enter, you’ll find difficult to leave. There were four main aspects of the exhibition that are worth mentioning.

1. Layout of the Exhibition

The exhibition was easy to navigate. This was mainly due to the fact that it was effectively separated into distinct areas through the placement of large exhibition panels. These panels displayed both photographs and text. Whilst there was a didactic way to follow the exhibition, it also allowed for a more free-form wander. You could select which path to follow depending on whether you were interested in the panels or more interested in seeing the plants.

2. Aesthetics

There have been a few times when I have walked into an exhibition space and was immediately amazed by how it appeared. The audio guide said it best – this is a living art gallery. The plants add such natural beauty to the exhibition space. They are not simply there because it is the Royal Botanic Gardens, but, they have been curated very thoughtfully. For example, my favourite part of the exhibition was the green wall that was filled with hidden messages and surprises. Right at the end of the exhibition space, the wall has an arrangement of flowers that mimic chocolates in a chocolate box. It is not until you read the panel (or this blog sorry for spoilers) that you realize their significance. You can see from the photograph below what it looks like!

Another exhibition design element that was wonderful to see were jars filled with various ingredients displayed on shelves. These represented the different additives that can go into chocolate. Something so simple worked so well. My favourite was the jars of citrus fruit that looked so colourful and fresh.

3. Integration of Content

As my friend Emma stated, the exhibition successfully integrates messages of sustainability, history, mechanical processes and botanical elements. All of these themes were well interwoven and supported each other in creating a larger story of chocolate.

This was achieved particularly well in the final stages of the exhibition. Shelving units with the ingredient jars, thematic panels on some relevant historical topics, an outline of the mechanical processes involved in manufacturing chocolate, and fun fact cacao pods you could lift to find interesting snippets of information were all included in the same space. I loved the pod titled Bad Medicine? Underneath was the fact that “chocolate was once prescribed for dysentery, flatulence, gout and even smallpox.” If you listen to the audio guide whilst weaving through the different areas you can also hear about issues of sustainability surrounding the farming of cacao.

Even the information on the other exhibition panels was well organized. Each panel was divided into different segments so you could focus on one or two quotes, or on paragraphs of information. The use of visuals was fantastic with my favourite being the timeline of the chocolate bar. Of course, the section on Aztecs was also a highlight. I felt the panels had just the right amount of text and, combined with the audio guide, provided a great overview.

4. Audio Guide

Whoever narrated the audio guide, well done. Nothing is worse in a museum than listening to an annoying voice on an audio guide. Anyway, this audio guide was great. Each section was about 2 minutes max meaning you weren’t lingering in the same place for too long. There were options to hear further information or continue with the tour. I thought the information complemented what was on the panels and did not just simply repeat the same stories etc.

Overall, the exhibition was an absolute delight. It was curated to be a calming environment that honestly makes you want to stay and read/listen more. The only advice I would give is to try and avoid it on a really hot, humid day. The sun was beaming down on us for the majority of our time inside and this paired with the humid conditions inside the room meant it was a little uncomfortable. There are, however, plenty of spots to sit in the shade.

Just when you think it can’t get better, you can help yourself to some quality Lindt chocolate at the end. It is truly an exhibition that you will leave content.

Last night was an amazing opportunity to experience a museum not only outside normal hours, but, from a whole different perspective. I have visited the Australian Museum prior to the Jurassic Lounge event and can confidently say that people dressed up as zombies and Eleven from Stranger Things don’t normally walk the halls. I will preface the entry by stating two facts about myself: 1. I love Halloween, 2. I don’t have a problem with museums wearing different hats to try and attract new audiences. In fact, I think the opposite.

Before delving down that rabbit hole, here is some information about what myself and some friends (shout out to Vanessa, Rachelle, and Emily) did last night and how we enjoyed Jurassic Lounge. Basically, the whole of the Australian Museum was transformed for Halloween with light shows, music, and special events on every floor. Every exhibition was open which was probably the most exciting thing for me to experience. A true night at the museum.

We started by visiting the new Spiders exhibition. There is heaps of information and interactives available in the exhibition space. I personally enjoyed seeing the live spiders. Speaking of live spiders, towards the end of the exhibition was spider milking. Probably the most dramatic part of the night was seeing the seemingly dead spider wake up from its anaesthetics and try to run away. Luckily, it was captured. They are pretty remarkable animals and as long as they stay away from my bathtub I am content.

After spider milking, we had a quick walk around the Wild Planet exhibition where we spotted Cleopatra and Julius Caesar inside.

Next on the agenda was listening to a couple of ghost stories. The ghost tour company founded by Jack Sim in Brisbane is starting tours in Sydney that look pretty interesting. For my sixteenth birthday I went with his company on a ghost tour of Toowong Cemetery. It was quite scary but mostly filled with interesting historical facts so well worth doing!

I was then determined to visit the “Plan your own Funeral” craft station where I made a mummy. You could also create your own tombstone and add it to the miniature cemetery. Last, but not least, we visited the Canyon Road murder mystery room where we watched a live performance of a Wolf Creek-style murder.

That provided a very quick summary of the night!

Going back to a point I made in the introduction, what I noticed was that a large majority of visitors were actually walking around the exhibitions, reading the panels, commenting on the displays etc. Saying that these events commercialize the museum at the expense of education, risk oversimplifying what happens during the event. Rather than being pure entertainment, or purely educational, these nights occupy a sort of gray area. I am very glad I went and saw a different side of the Australian Museum. These events do raise much broader and more difficult questions such as what is the role of the museum?

If I have learnt anything from the last 18 months of my Masters degree it’s that placing museums in a pigeon-hole is not only impossible, but, can be dangerous. There is great potential out there for museums to venture down new and creative paths, tackle controversial issues, and reinvent themselves. Each museum has a different set of agendas etc so some ideas might not work as well for some. With that knowledge, it is always exciting to see the next step a museum may take and think about what exactly is the museum of the future.

Although I have been working on Cockatoo Island for just over a year now, I’ve never truly taken the time to walk through the Shipyard Stories exhibition. The exhibition is set in a beautiful sandstone structure that was originally the superintendent’s house from 1839 to 1859. Its various rooms have been recently transformed into gallery and museum spaces.

A quick history of the house. It was built by Charles Ormsby, the first superintendent, in 1840. He was a pretty awful individual. When he was fired, the second and final superintendent, Gother Kerr Man, moved in along with his twelve children. Needless to say the house required an extension and was transformed into the large building it is today.

What I enjoyed most about this exhibition was the level of collaboration between the curators and those who worked on the island in the shipyard from the 1960s to the 1990s. What was excellent to see at the end of the exhibition was a book where people could add their own stories and experiences. I flicked through some of the entries and what has been documented is amazing. I think including the community in this way will yield some great and diverse insights that could potentially be incorporated into our tours or other exhibitions in the future.

What else was interesting to see were the thematic panel boards and display cases manufactured from parts of old machinery and ships left on the island. To provide some context, Cockatoo Island was a shipyard from the convict era until 1992. In 1992, the Australian Government withdrew their building contract and the island was abandoned. Ten years later the Sydney Harbour Federation Trust took ownership of the island. A wonderful team of volunteers have since followed including some who once worked in the shipyard. They have done amazing work restoring old machines and utilising scraps etc to create the panels and cases for this display. It was an addition to the exhibition space that had great impact.

Each room in the house was uncluttered and easy to manoeuvre with photographs hanging down the wall and, at most, one display case in the corner. The photographs were a fascinating mix shedding light on both work on the island and also, more broadly, life on the island. There was even a little display concerning love on the island.

In a couple of the rooms were audio visual displays. One was a loop of archival film footage of the shipyard. The other room had a projection of still photographs. I didn’t spend much time in these rooms as I enjoyed walking through the house and seeing the photographs on the walls. I found the timeline near the beginning to be very helpful in contextualising the photographs and some of the panels. It was also lovely and colourful so catches your eye on entering the space.

Two more things to mention before wrapping up this post. I got way too excited seeing some areas of wall that had been scraped to reveal the different layers of paint colour. I remember learning about this technique at Brighton in the Regent Town House. The original cream colour now covers the walls.

Finally, one of the rooms contains contemporary paintings or visual memoirs by Bill Nix who worked on the island during the 1960s and 70s. His work captures aspects of his time on the island including the areas he worked and the machinery he used. They depict how he viewed the island both then and now. It added another method of interpretation to the exhibition and, in the space of one room, communicated the significance of this era continuing today.

As the convict buildings on the island are what draw crowds in, it was great to see this other history represented and displayed. It’s a nice exhibition if you find yourself on the island wanting to actually see what life was like when it was a shipyard. Even if you’re not interested in shipbuilding history, there will be at least one photograph that ignites your imagination.

Today marked the last day of my twenty-day internship at the Trainor/Owen Archives within the Australian and New Zealand College of Radiologists. I am so grateful I had the opportunity to intern with another medical collection! This post is basically going to summarize what I did over the past twenty days/ten weeks. To start, I would like to say a huge thank you to my supervisor Eva Stokes-Blake for her support. It has been a very valuable internship for learning archive-specific skills and I hope to apply and develop these further in my new job.

Throughout the internship, my main role was to catalogue all objects in the collection. This included not only objects held in the archives, but also, those scattered around the College. In total, there were just over 400 individual objects. These were all described, measured, photographed, and categorized. On top of this, I also compiled a mini condition report for each object. In the near future, these objects will be uploaded to the online database system, eHive. I am so excited to see the collection digitized and displayed to a wider audience.

Over the last two days of my internship, I curated a small exhibition titled “Tools of the Trade”. On display are a range of radiology kits from the 1900s to the 1960s. My favourite kit is the silver slide and developer kit on the top shelf. This is mainly because its inscriptions were all in German and I was able to translate quite a large chunk of the information booklet. A great way to refine my German skills while at work! I had a lot of fun developing this exhibition, especially selecting the objects and theme.

I started this entry with a photo which is amazing for a couple of reasons. It is not from the collection, but, one I found online. After working with a historic radiology collection, I can now identify a few of the objects. The man standing is looking through a fluoroscope. These machines passed X-ray beams through a body part and transmitted the image to a monitor. It essentially allowed for a live-stream of your bones. The other reason I love the photograph is because it shows how some of the objects were used/stored. It is so interesting to see glass X-ray tubes hanging at the back of the photo. I’ve included a few more historic photos because they wonderfully communicate the history of the profession and the types of objects I was handling.

Where to from here?

I have a major essay to complete on an aspect of my internship. I am hoping to focus on a few particular objects in the collection and what light they can shed on the development of the College and of the specialty. I’ve also made the decision to return to the archives as a volunteer. I am going to see my project through to the end which should be really exciting!

Until then, I have a lot of University work and other work to get through. It is going to be an intense couple of weeks. I am ready to get through the work and enjoy a nice holiday at the end!!

Images (in order of appearance):

• (By William J. Morton – Downloaded 2007-12-23 from William J. Morton and Edwin W. Hammer (1896) The X-ray, or Photography of the Invisible and its value in Surgery, American Technical Book Co., New York, fig. 54 on Google Books, Public Domain)
• By Internet Archive Book Images [No restrictions], via Wikimedia Commons
• Via Wikimedia Commons
• By J. P. Hoguet [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
• By Noble M. Eberhardt [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons