Guest editor for Vol 12 No 1 Museums on the Edge. This edition was founded on a perception of a lack of any quantity of readily available material on the Australian and New Zealand experience of museums.
Andrew Andersons is, and has been, engaged to contribute to many of Australia's leading art museums as well as to other public buildings and spaces. His work might be described as adaptive; accommodating to the style and typology of the major buildings on which he has worked as well as responding to the varied views of curators with whom he has co-operated closely when designing galleries.
One of the things which continues to fascinate me about museums is how, despite the vast amount of talk about displaying material culture, the often personal, often idiosyncratic, often haphazard decisions about departments are very rarely mentioned. Yet these decisions are central to much of the museum's collection, display, exhibitions and research programme.
Daniel Thomas provoked a distinct murmur at the 1990 CAMA Conference when he suggested that art museums have a greater capacity to disturb and move people than other cultural museums. If this is true and I think it is.....
I am particularly troubled about debates such as those illustrated by the publications 'What Price Heritage? - Finance 1989' and 'What value Heritage? DASETT 1990' and Professor Donald Horne's article 'Weekend Australian Jan 4-5 1992' on museums, because there is nearly always truth on all sides.
On 23 October 2002, yet another Council of Australian Museums Associations (CAMA) ran down. Conferees were already half deep in thought about melting credit cards and distant work site desks stacked high with urgent files. Well Not exactly CAMA...
In the first project of its kind, private investors will provide half the money needed to build the Museum of Victoria at a new site on the Yarra River.
The South Australian Museum has the world's largest and most comprehensive collection of Australian Aboriginal material culture. It also has a vast archive of information about that material and about other aspects of Aboriginal life in the form of photographs, films, audio tapes, diaries and other records.
Museums are complex social phenomena and valuable resources. There's an ecological analogy there; if you mess with even apparently trivial elements of a complex system, the results can be unpredictable, powerful and are most often catastrophic.