Since the last post, I went from being an Archivist to a Museum Registrar. Now, I'm preparing to travel the world for the next 12 months. I'm like a moth to a flame and will be visiting and thinking about many museums, galleries, libraries, archives and more during my next 12 months.
I will be writing about my travels through collections at a new blog, Museum in a Bottle. Be sure to head on over, check out the map of my journey and subscribe. As always, you can catch me on Twitter too. I would love to hear from you if you have any suggestions about collections to visit, or any you would like to hear about.
For the time being, An Archivist Scribbles is on hiatus. As this site holds the kernels of so many of my current interests and ideas, I'm sure I'll return to reference posts and expand on ideas.
Gibbs, Shallard & Co., Burning of the Garden Palace, Sydney, as seen from Macquarie Street, 1882
Did you know most of Sydney’s major museums once burned to the ground? The Art Gallery of NSW, Powerhouse Museum, Australian Museum, State Records NSW - all are phoenix collections.
Richards & Co., The Macquarie Street entrance to the Garden Palace, 1880
It cost £192,000 to build (2 million dollars today) and the dome was over 65 meters in height. It was built in only nine months and would be the venue for the mother of all exhibitions - the first of Australia’s International Exhibitions - a huge showcase of the world’s arts, cultures and technologies of the Industrial Age.
Australia couldn’t manufacture enough steel, so the Garden Palace was built of wood and glass then painted a steely grey. It was innovative for its time, using the first electric lighting in Australia to illuminate construction work throughout the night. The first of Sydney’s now-defunct trams were installed to transport the hordes of exhibition visitors along Elizabeth Street to the Exhibition.
After the Exhibition closed in 1880, the building was converted to “Government offices, records storage, galleries and museums”. Many collections were stored there. Then one night in 1882, it all burned to the ground. The blaze could be seen across Sydney and the heat cracked windows in Macquarie Street.
I was led to this moment in history by my nose for destroyed collections. No photographs of the wrecked collections survive, but many of the charred remains of the building do. I doubt any recognisable collection remains were left to be photographed.
Piecing together what was lost is difficult. Like writing a shopping list by staring at your empty cupboards, it’s hard to know the contents of these collections before they were devoured by fire. 19th century museum records were minimalist and these would have been burned as well. Here are the small threads I’ve been able to salvage about what was lost that day:
Art Gallery of New South Wales
The AGNSW collection was held in “nine rooms near the entrance to the Botanic Gardens.” The AGNSW says their move to new premises was because of “concerns for safety and conservation of works, as well as the fire which destroyed the Garden Palace”. No mention of artworks destroyed.
But historian, Shirley Fitzgerald says 300 art canvasses for the Art Society’s annual exhibition were lost in the fire. These works were government owned and administered by the Art Society. After the fire, both the Art Society and Academy of Arts (the administrative origins of the AGNSW) negotiated with the colonial government for a permanent building to be used as an art gallery. We could say the 300 burned Art Society paintings were the beginnings of the AGNSW collection.
Powerhouse Museum
Today’s Powerhouse Museum was born from Sydney’s International Exhibition. The colonial government purchased the star exhibits and founded the Technological, Industrial and Sanitary Museum, appointing 22-year-old Joseph Maiden as its sole curator.
Maiden was devastated by the fire and his letters describe his grief over the lost collection. But he collected as many remnants as he could. The only salvaged object was a carved graphite elephant from Ceylon which “miraculously survived the blaze despite a 5-storey plunge.” Maiden added some large metal remnants from the Garden Palace building to the Powerhouse collection, including a tram wheel with the words “cast through the Garden Palace fire” inscribed on it.
State Records NSW
Authorities suspected arson to be the cause of the fire and the media believed the destruction of the 1881 Census was a motive. This eliminated key evidence of convict backgrounds in established Australian families.
In the words of Peter Orlovich, Archival Historian, this fire was likely “the most serious event which caused loss and destruction of our historical records in the history of archives in New South Wales.” Many records of the colonial Government were destroyed, including survey plans of pastoral stations in NSW. The loss of so many State Records is still felt by genealogists and historians today, but none more so than the 1881 NSW Census. All of the census forms were housed in the Garden Palace when it burst into flames. None of the census results had been printed and only some tabulated summaries survived.
Australian Museum
Both the technological and ethnographic collections of the Australian Museum were held in the Garden Palace. The ethnographic collections were loaned for the International Exhibition and the technological collection was to become today’s Powerhouse Museum. Over 2,000 ethnographic objects were lost. But by 1883, the Australian Museum had acquired more than that number again and these were soon displayed in specially built ethnographic exhibition halls.
As recently as 1999, some Australian Museum objects were identified as survivors of the Garden Palace fire. A group of ‘man’ arrows were found to be acquired well before the Garden Palace was built. They would have been stored at the Garden Palace as part of the ethnographic collection. With no other ‘man’ arrows acquired by the Museum, these objects are certain to have passed through the flames of 1882.
Some less well-known Sydney Museums were nearly wiped out too. Around 50,000 specimens in the now-defunctMining and Geological Museumwere lost (although an early earthquake machine survived). The gold in this collection was another suspected reason for the arson – to hide its theft. The Linnean Society stored its library, equipment and specimens across two rooms of the Palace and lost them all.
A Positive Note
The Linnean Society’s first President, William Macleay, donated his natural history collections to the University of Sydney in the years after the fire. The University constructed a fire-proof building to house them, a lesson learned from the Garden Palace tragedy. Today we know this as The Macleay Museum.
This post may seem like a litany of lost and destroyed collections. The fate of the Garden Palace was a pivotal moment in Sydney’s history, unifying its landmark museums. It was also the most destructive moment for the city’s Museums and its impact is still felt today. But all collections survived and burgeoned in the following decades. Thanks to the efforts of staff – curators, registrars and archivists - who worked to rescue the remnants, start again and keep collecting for future generations.
Garden Palace Memorial Gates, Royal Botanic Gardens & Domain, Sydney
The new Director of the Art Gallery NSW, Michael Brand, confessed this week to walking out of blockbuster exhibitions because of crowding. If the new doyen of Australian art institutions can’t handle a blockbuster, what hope do the rest of us have at surviving these experiences?
I naively declared I would read Caspar Friedrich Neickel’s Museographia a while ago. Turns out, it was written in German and only recently translated into Italian. Despite it being Museum Studies 101, you can’t read it in English.
This one’s simple. Picasso at the Art Gallery of NSW is a brilliant exhibition. You should go.
It’s Picasso in the White Cube - the iconic artist and gallery space of the modern era brought together. The galleries have been stripped back and all elements – design, interpretation and objects – come together in harmony. It sings
I’ll come clean. I had no intention of seeing Harry Potter: the Exhibition at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum. At 11am on opening day, I was enjoying a quiet weekend breakfast in a cafe, suburbs away. But 3 little girls were next to me, happily waving wands and clutching Harry Potter gift shop boxes. They’d already finished their blockbuster museum experience.
"I collect nothing - with a passion. That is to say, I collect hardly anything that is collectible, not a thing anyone else would wish to collect, but at the end of the day, having myself wanted all these unwanted things, having procured them and organised them - filed, boxed, arranged, and fussed over them - I have a collection."
Collections of Nothing, William Davies King
People think I'm obsessed with rubbish. There are others like me - I’ve previously written about the Master Collector of Ephemera, John de Monins Johnson, here. But I don’t agree with those who think we’re obsessed.
A generous designer friend has helped me tart up An Archivist Scribbles. After too many changes of outfit, I’m ready to step out and get on with the task of writing better posts.
I’ve also created a Facebook page for all the other great articles, news reports, YouTube clips and collection related thoughts and tidbits I find along my way. Clearing that clutter should leave An Archivist Scribbles to showcase the meatier posts. In effect, An Archivist Scribbles and its Facebook page have different content – you should sign up for both.
An exhibition of documents and books is tough to pull off. You’d be surprised at how little real and constructive published discussion there is on this topic, because frankly it’s a damn difficult task when trying to engage an exhibit visitor. As the great Jim Traue said, “to exhibit them in a gallery as if they were specimens, artefacts, or works of art, is a denial of their basic function”. They’re simply not designed to be put on exhibition – their message is hidden between the covers, they’re not visually striking or made to be looked at by more than one person at a time.
But I don’t think this is a reason to give up before you get started (although some have been known to deny it’s even possible!). Quite the contrary, you have to work harder to think outside the box, find new ways to get creative and draw in visitors. The rewards promise to be so much greater, with new and original exhibition concepts created and curated.
The most under-rated aspect of Sydney is its inadequate army of taxi drivers. A majority of them have something compellingly interesting to say. It’s not always something you’ll agree with; keeping the conversation on convivial terms is often an exercise in diplomacy or just simply keeping your trap shut. But if you have this skill, you will learn about the changing face of suburbs and communities of Sydney in a way you never imagined. Other times, you’ll see a window into another part of the world, from a perspective that our evening news will never provide.
