Each year it is my privilege to provide an overview of the activities and achievements of the Museum, in pursuit of our goal to bring the world’s cultures to Australia and present Australia’s history and culture to the world.
This year saw the Museum launch its Master Plan to 2030, delivering an inspired vision of a national museum at the crossroads of material and digital realms, embracing both. Each element of the Master Plan is fundamental to serving the interests of the Australian public: building the Museum’s base in Canberra to provide the hub for its collection, services and programs, while ensuring that touring programs, outreach and online services are active points of engagement delivering value across the nation and abroad.
Throughout 2018–19, the Museum has continued its focus on strategic partnerships and collaborations, both in terms of its fundamental remit of building and maintaining the National Historical Collection, and in finding new ways to engage audiences to tell the nation’s rich stories.
The Museum’s partnership with the British Museum has resulted in four major exhibitions in London and Canberra over the past four years, this year producing our blockbuster Rome: City and Empire. High demand over the summer holidays helped us to exceed visitation targets by 20 per cent, with consistently positive audience feedback throughout the four-month run. More exhibitions from the British Museum’s world-renowned collection will come here over the next five years under a new agreement announced by the two institutions.
The Museum’s international strategy has also seen us tour major exhibitions of Australian Indigenous culture to Asia, with Old Masters: Australia’s Great Bark Artists opening at the National Museum of China, Beijing, in July 2018, the start of a year-long tour of China. In partnership with the South Australian Museum, the Museum also toured Yidaki: Didjeridu and the Sound of Australia to Japan as part of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s ‘Australia Now’ program.
Australia’s Ambassador to China, Jan Adams, remarked at the opening of Old Masters in Beijing that the exhibition was a cultural diplomacy milestone. Her Excellency also took the opportunity to thank the exhibition’s corporate sponsors: our Major Partner, Australia Post; and Supporting Partners, De Bortoli and the Australia China Council; and commented on the critical role public partnerships have in ensuring touring exhibitions like Old Masters become a reality.
For each of these international exhibitions, the Museum has supported Indigenous artists to travel to major events to share their expertise and knowledge with the local audiences, facilitating cultural exchange and forging deeper connections and understanding of this rich and complex material.
We were very pleased to reciprocate international cultural exchange by hosting The Historical Expression of Chinese Art: Calligraphy and Painting from the National Museum of China in Canberra from April to July 2019. Visitation of over 65,000 and a reported high degree of satisfaction suggest that exhibitions of this kind have a very receptive audience in this country.
The Museum has also entered into several new partnerships focusing on scholarship and capacity building, including staff exchanges and fellowships with leading Australian and international institutions. The Museum worked closely with the Alastair Swayn Foundation to develop a new curatorial centre focusing on Australian design. The goal of the new centre will be to increase public connection to and appreciation of Australian design, through collections, collaborations, exhibitions, events and research.
The Museum’s commitment to the history and cultures of the First Australians underpins many of our partnerships and programs. Substantial work was undertaken on the Museum’s Endeavour 250 project, which is a three-pronged program to mark the 250th anniversary of the voyage of the HMB Endeavour up the east coast of Australia, comprising:
- the national flagship exhibition in the 2020 anniversary year, communicating both Indigenous and non-Indigenous perspectives on the voyage and its legacy
- the Cultural Connections program, which will facilitate community-led cultural projects in east coast locations that were key sites of encounter in 1770
- the Encounters Fellowships program, which provides professional development for six Indigenous cultural workers through a hands-on program with placements at cultural institutions in Australia, the United Kingdom and France.
Attracting private sector support is inextricably tied to developing and maintaining the Museum’s relationship to the broader Australian public. Over the past two years, the Museum has strengthened its focus on building partnerships with corporate and philanthropic interests. I would like to thank all of our partners and donors for their continued support. The Museum has also worked assiduously to build sustainable and mutually beneficial collaborations with public sector institutions and agencies in Australia and abroad. The initiative to develop a Cultural and Corporate Shared Services Centre (CCSSC) clearly demonstrates the Museum’s commitment to better utilise Commonwealth resources and build on the relationships that exist between the national collecting institutions. This year has seen the CCSSC successfully transition its first partner agency to receive payroll services, with more to follow.
After a period of steady growth over the past few years, the Museum has again shifted gear to renew and diversify its revenue-generating activities, lifting its retail and commercial operations and introducing new fee-paying programs. This year the Museum’s own-source revenue comprised nearly 20 per cent of total gross operating revenues, with catering, events and venue hire achieving their best-ever results.
Following a successful season at the Western Australian Maritime Museum, the 360° virtual reality film The Antarctica Experience was launched on 3 January by David Templeman, the Western Australian Minister for Culture and the Arts; Alec Coles OBE, the Director of the Western Australian Museum; and Briege Whitehead, the film’s creator. Since opening here at the Museum, more than 36,000 visitors have experienced life and work at Davis Station, one of Australia’s permanent research bases in Antarctica.
The Museum continues to experiment with new ways of making our collections accessible and engaging for our audiences. This year we launched The Studio: Collections Up Close, which combined object displays with workshops designed to encourage participants to have a creative response to the collection. During NAIDOC Week, the workshops focused on the newly acquired tjanpi sculpture installation representing a scene from the ancestral Seven Sisters story, and included poetry and storytelling, visual and fibre art, Indigenous language and music and dance.
In 2018–19 our signature program Defining Moments in Australian History became the most popular component of the National Museum’s website, with close to one million views during the year. Defining Moments programming included three panel discussions broadcast on ABC Radio National’s Big Ideas program and the launch of the first stage of a new audio tour. The Defining Moments Digital Classroom education program, generously supported by a major donation from Gandel Philanthropy in 2017–18, is on track for launch in 2020.
The Museum is also keen to embrace new forms of audience participation and engagement as it forges ahead on infrastructure projects outlined in the Master Plan. The new Forecourt will provide a heightened experience for Museum visitors as they arrive, and is due for completion in September 2019. The sounds of local native wildlife, the inclusion of tactile and scented plants, local Indigenous artworks, places to sit and rest, and striking architectural elements will reinforce the Museum as a place of national significance. The project team has also worked closely with the Museum’s curators and representatives of local host nations to develop interpretive material to inform visitors about the Forecourt’s design, plantings and artworks. The Museum’s ambitious gallery development program has also seen significant progress towards the new Discovery Centre and major gallery of environmental history.
There is no doubt that the organisation must garner additional public and private funding support to realise the full extent of its Master Plan. Like many of its counterparts, the Museum faces challenges in regard to its collection storage accommodation, as noted over a decade ago in an Australian National Audit Office report. The Museum considers that the shared services framework offers opportunities for the Canberra-based collecting institutions to come together to build a shared, purpose-built collection storage facility. The Museum made a submission to the Australian Parliamentary Inquiry into Canberra’s national institutions which focused on the importance of the national cultural institutions to Australia’s identity and understanding of its past, present and future.
Throughout the year the Museum’s governing Council has continued to guide and champion our endeavours to grow our business for the benefit of our audiences and the nation. Under the stewardship of its Chair, David Jones, Council is actively engaged in the strategic oversight of the Museum, and I thank all our Council members for their ongoing commitment and support. I would also like to thank the new Minister for Communications, Cyber Safety and the Arts, the Hon Paul Fletcher MP, for taking the time to visit the Museum soon after his appointment, as well as the former Minister, Senator the Hon Mitch Fifield, and the Department of Communications and the Arts.
Overall, it has been another great year for the National Museum of Australia, as we work tirelessly to find new ways to invest, challenge, explore and connect across all aspects of our business. I am proud to lead a team of dedicated professionals and volunteers whose work enables the Museum to achieve such great results.
[Signed by]
Dr Mathew Trinca
Director, National Museum of Australia
September 2019