Everyone knows that Canberra hosts the nation's premier art collection at the National Gallery of Australia. We know that our history is showcased at the National Museum of Australia and at the Australian War Memorial. And that cutting-edge scientific research discoveries are exhibited at CSIRO's Discovery Centre. We love Questacon for delighting our kids through hands-on learning. At this time of year, we delight in the changing colours of our living museum of trees at the National Arboretum.
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But few people realise that exhibitions displayed in these places are the tip of the iceberg. This week is a perfect chance for us to look under the hood our treasured institutions. We might even discover some lesser-known collections hiding in our universities.
Because while it is federal budget week, 18 May is also International Museums Day (IMD). This year IMD focuses on the potential for museums to unlock knowledge. Its theme is "Museums for education and research".
University collections in Canberra are harder to discover than those housed in large, endowed museums like the Chau Chak Wing Museum at Sydney University. But they are still valuable. They contribute to the innovation and knowledge that shapes Australia's future workforce and industries.
University collections are the building blocks of disciplines like archaeology and art history. They are by-products of research and teaching that show us how and why research was done and valued at different times.
ANU, for example, has over 50 collections. They include pollen and spore samples, meteorites, an 18th-century piano, and cultural material from the Pacific. The Classics collection even has an ancient vase looted by art thieves. These are all repositories of knowledge that preserve artefacts, information, data, and connections.
All collections, even ones that are hard to access because they don't have a museum, have a physical presence. Some Canberrans may remember scratching their initials into the timber desks at the Fenner School. They may have studied in the wood library called a xylarium . They may have even been involved in the abduction of the Thai elephant from its foyer. These items are all now part of the ANU's diverse collection of timber-related materials.
ANU also has a mid-century furniture collection that stores the furniture produced by the ANU's Design Unit. The sleek modern design featured in this collection was the perfect image for a new university dedicated to educating the nation's future leaders. It reflected the post-war optimism that motivated the creation of the university in 1946. The furniture was given pride of place in the Chancelry building and University House. Pieces from the same designers were also made for the Reserve Bank, the National Library, and the Prime Minister's Residence.
The ANU's visionary designers were not the only futurists in town. Less reliably tied to the history of the institution's educational mandate than ANU's furniture designed by Derek Wrigley and Fred Ward, many people will recognise Futuro House (aka "the UFO") at the University of Canberra's Bruce Campus.
Futuro House was designed as a tiny portable house in the late 1960s by Finnish architect Matti Suuronen. It was connected to economic growth of the 1960s and to new ideas about the role of technology in industrial design and fabrication. It has a Jetsons-style playfulness that contrasts with the modernist design of the ANU's heavy wooden desks.
Information about how exactly the Futuro made its way to the University of Canberra remains a mystery, although it is believed to have landed in Canberra in 1972.
Futuro House and the ANU's mid-century furniture are examples of collections that would be as comfortable in a museum as they are in a university.
Beyond their buildings and furniture, Canberra's universities (I have only mentioned two) hold many other collections. They include millions of pieces of information, intangible heritage, and data sets. They are often harder to access than big physical objects.
Some universities - like Yale, in the US - have digital platforms that link collections and let users search millions of items for free. This kind of infrastructure is too expensive for many university collections to develop.
However, the inaccessibility that results from outdated systems makes it harder for everyone to explore and benefit from the collections. This includes people looking for information about family histories or other personal projects. It also slows the progress researchers can make in solving urgent national problems such as the decline in Indigenous language loss, or how to manage bio- and cyber-security risks.
This week is all about budgets and museums. Jump online to explore a university collection, for example at: anu.edu.au/research/research-infrastructure/anu-collections.
By engaging with lesser-known collections you help those of us working in the field make the case for improved resourcing. These forms of knowledge generation and management urgently need it.
- Professor Kylie Message-Jones is the director of the ANU Humanities Research Centre.
