Nation, History, Museum: The Politics of the Past at the National Museum of Australia
The National Museum of Australia opened its doors to the public on 11 March 2001. Located in Canberra, the federal capital, the Museum was the centre-piece of celebrations marking the centenary of Australia’s federation. As such, the Museum’s director, Dawn Casey, described the AU $155 million, state-of-the-art institution as ‘a gift to the nation’. But for some, this was not the sort of present that Australia wanted. In officially opening the Museum, the Prime Minister of Australia, John Howard, seemed somewhat under-whelmed, struggling to find anything positive to say about the new edifice. In his speech, the Prime Minister parsimoniously claimed that ‘Whatever may be said and whatever has already been said about the Museum … [it] will change in a very profound way the enjoyment of life for people who live in the national capital’ (Howard, 2001).
Intruders in the bush : the Australian quest for identity
This treatise challenges the bushman legend and presents evidence that discontented white Australian intellectuals of the 1890s romanticized the bushman and his notions of companionship. The text has been revised to include a number of major new essays.
Paying Attention: The Duration and Allocation of Visitors' Time in Museum Exhibitions
The amount of time visitors spend and the number of stops they make in exhibitions are systematic measures that can be indicators of learning. Previous authors have made assumptions about the amount of attention visitors pay to exhibitions based on observations of behavior at single exhibits or other small data samples. This study offers a large database from a comparative investigation of the duration and allocation of visitors' time in 108 exhibitions, and it establishes numerical indexes that reflect patterns of visitor use of the exhibition. These indexes—sweep rate (SRI) and percentage of diligent visitors (%DV)—can be used to compare one exhibition to another, or to compare the same exhibition under two (or more) different circumstances. Patterns of visitor behavior found in many of the study sites included: (1) visitors typically spend less than 20 minutes in exhibitions, regardless of the topic or size; (2) the majority of visitors are not “diligent visitors”—those who stop at more than half of the available elements; (3) on average, visitors use exhibitions at a rate of 200 to 400 square feet per minute; and (4) visitors typically spend less time per unit area in larger exhibitions and diorama halls than in smaller or nondiorama exhibitions. The two indexes (SRI and %DV) may be useful measures for diagnosing and improving the effectiveness of exhibitions, and further study could help identify characteristics of “thoroughly-used” (i.e., successful) exhibitions.