Currently musingplaces – museums, art galleries, heritage properties/buildings, etc. – are increasingly under intense scrutiny given that they are almost invariably imagined as 'cost centres'. In order to purposefully manage them in a 21st Century context there is pressing need to reimagine them. Many are founded in imaginings of the past – many in a 19th C paradigm – that impinge upon current and changing world perspectives and challenge the status quo. Hubert Humphrey is quoted as saying "if there is dissatisfaction with the status quo, good. If there is ferment, so much the better. If there is restlessness, I am pleased. Then let there be ideas, and hard thought, and hard work. If man feels small, let man make himself bigger."
There is nothing more risky than maintaining the status quo and especially so when it's against the odds. However, there are huge differences between a punt and a calculated risk, wisdom requires that one divines the difference.
CULTURAL FOUNDATIONS
Australia, its continental mainland, the island of Tasmania and the numerous smaller islands that make up 'the nation', come together to form what is currently understood as the world's sixth-largest nation by area. Despite various attempts over two centuries, the cultural landscapes that come together, and reflect, 'the nation', has actually defied the 'melting pot' and all attempts at cultural homogenisation.
Consequently, Australia's musingplaces ought not be understood as if it was from some stable cultural perspective – or as if it was in any way 'true'.
Nonetheless, the cultural underpinnings of a great many of Australia's musingplaces do seem to want to attempt this homogenisation at some level. Moreover, many seem to attempt to 'freeze time' in order to speak from a stable platform in a homogenous cultural landscape. Quite simply this is unsustainable at any level.
Nonetheless, the cultural underpinnings of a great many of Australia's musingplaces do seem to want to attempt this homogenisation at some level. Moreover, many seem to attempt to 'freeze time' in order to speak from a stable platform in a homogenous cultural landscape. Quite simply this is unsustainable at any level.
For at least 50,000 years before the first British settlement in the late 18th century, the continent, and the island associated with it, were inhabited by a myriad of indigenous peoples. They spoke roughly 250 languages and created cultural landscapes that in turn collectively gave them a network of interfacing cultural realities.
All this is in contrast to the colonial Terra nullius assertion – the"nobody's land" assertion. Indeed, it is currently increasingly understood, recognised and believed that these peoples, and their distinct cultural realities, survive as the oldest surviving living culture on the planet.
Australian musingplaces, until relatively recently, have not been good at acknowledging much of this.
European discovery in 1606, and the British colonisation of the eastern half of the Australian continent, were external and powerful forces that have reconfigured and transformed ancient cultural landscapes – primordial placescaping even.
The initial settlement and colonisation of Sydney via the pathway of penal transportation has been at the beginning of serial change and transformation. Understanding Australian cultural landscaping, and the consequent evolving Australian cultural realities, depends upon musingplaces to:
• Interrogate these ‘realities’; and then to
• facilitate the development of new understandings.
• Interrogate these ‘realities’; and then to
• facilitate the development of new understandings.
More particularly, Post WW2, Australian cultural landscapes have changed faster and more dynamically due to new and more diverse cultural imperatives. Currently, these external narratives are increasingly impacting upon what are now ‘Australian narratives’.
These essentially external and globalising forces continue to shape and reshape Australian cultural realities and the landscapes they sit within, and have sat within, over collapsing timeframes – and nowhere more poignantly than in Sydney.
Australia's status as a so-called “developed country” becomes less and less relevant as time passes and as "undeveloped nations" play 'catch-up' in the aftermath of colonialism. Arguably Australia is one of the wealthiest nations in the world given that it can claim the world's 12th-largest economy. In 2014 Australia had the world's fifth-highest per capita income and military expenditure is amongst the world's highest. Globally, Australian cultural landscapes rank highly in regard to the measurement of human development and wealth.
Given the multi-dimensional histories, the diversity of distinct heritages and the multi-faceted narratives reflected in ‘Australian’ cultural landscapes, our musingplaces consequently have new and evolving imperatives. Against this we can measure their raison d’etre when looking ahead, instead of the backward, visioning that many invest so much in.
Australia's musingplaces are increasingly relevant more because of their facilitation of 'future speculations' than their past reflections – albeit both are inextricably intertwined and interdependent.
A PERSPECTIVE
IN CONCLUSION: PURPOSEFUL 21st C MUSINGPLACES
A PERSPECTIVE
Australian musingplaces are many and diverse. They range from stand alone purposeful institutions to heritage sites that take on musingplace imperatives as a consequence of their preservation. Throughout its history Australia has been alert to its heritage even if elements of its colonial history invoke unwelcomed rememberings and point to inconvenient truths in ways that are somewhat analogous to Al Gore's climate change alerts.
There are tensions present in Australian musingplaces that have a kind of 'placedness' that is at once global, idiosyncratically local and nonetheless Australian.
There are tensions present in Australian musingplaces that have a kind of 'placedness' that is at once global, idiosyncratically local and nonetheless Australian.
For example, Tasmania, because of its size, the distribution of its population and its contested histories, has musingplaces that hold within them a myriad of stories. Consequently they are settings for the kind of story telling that gives substance to the various idiosyncratic cultural landscapes to be found on the island. In a way they are simultaneously a part of the cultural mapping, the 'placescaping'. Likewise they are mirrors of the social cum cultural dynamics that shape and have shaped 'place'.
For the most part, Tasmanian musingplaces are reflective of and focused upon what was, rather than what is or what might be. Alongside this there are cultural paradigm shifts at work that call into question musingplaces’ relevance to current circumstances.
Information technologies are in part fulfilling the roles physical musingplaces once played and in other ways these new digital knowledge systems are the catalysts for dynamic change within musingplace programming, administrations and the networks they depend upon for relevance.
Overlay all this with the need to reimagine the world in the context of the social, economic and cultural, indeed political, paradigm shifts at work internationally. Then the inevitability of, and the need for, reimagining musingplaces' purposefulness becomes clearer.
MUSINGPLACES' SOCIAL RELEVANCE
Musingplaces' very existence in a community says something significant about the community's social capital.
While an individual may assemble a collection for the purpose of her/his own benefit/musing/contemplation, typically large collections require the dedicated work of whole communities working collaboratively and cooperatively over time.
Musingplaces reflect an institution's/community's/region's/nation's sense of itself but importantly its sense of wellbeing. These collections, in order to exist at all, require a kind of collective consciousness of a 'place's' communal wellbeing, or in an individual's case, a wellbeing (power?) aspiration and the promotion of it plus the sharing of it.
It is argued that a community's wellbeing, its social indicators, can be measured using sets of descriptive statistics, or statistical constructs, categorised as social concerns. The indicators connected with human welfare throughout people's lives consist of selected indicators at major stages from birth to death and include family relationships, education, employment, interpersonal relationships, community engagement, and health, etc.
Musingplaces' purposes for being are typically bound up in some way with social dynamics given the underlying concern of making sense of the world and generating new understandings.
MUSINGPLACES' CULTURAL RELEVANCE
In significant ways institutions – communities, regions & nations also – hold cultural capital in their musingplaces. The knowledge and belief systems, skills, education, and advantages that a person has, which gives them identity, status and authority in society was once translated into power and authority in the Kunstkammers and Wundekammers of 15th C Europe – 21st C musingplaces.
Parents provide their children with cultural capital by transmitting the attitudes and knowledge needed to succeed in the current educational system and social networks. At a personal level, later on the resources available to an individual on the basis of honour, prestige and/or recognition are added to the mix and cultural capital comes in three forms – acquired, objectified and institutionalised.
Cultural capital is both consciously acquired and passively "inherited". It is the properties of one's self that are received over time, usually from the family through socialisation and the embrace of traditions. It is not anything that's transmissible instantaneously as it takes time to be acquired and it embodies itself in language, character and idiosyncratic ways of thinking.
The objectification of cultural capital comes about through the physical objects that are possessed – tools, costumes, scientific instruments, chattels, works of art. Cultural objects can be transmitted both for economic profit and for the purpose of "symbolically" conveying the cultural capital – say to a musingplace.
Nonetheless, while it is possible to possess objectified cultural capital it is only possible to 'consume' it by understanding its meaning/s in its cultural context/s and, only then if beforehand there is a foundation of conceptual and/or historic knowledge to build upon. When an object is sold the transmission of culture does not automatically accompany the sale.
Likewise, when an object enters the collection of a musingplace the realities of its cultural existence does not automatically follow it. Indeed, very often cultural objects become somewhat 'zombiefied' and change irrevocably. At the very least in many musingplaces they die as active objects.
Institutionalised cultural capital is invested in institutional recognition – sometimes by musingplaces – and most often via the academic credentials or qualifications, of the cultural capital held by an individual. The institutional recognition process eases the conversion of cultural capital to economic capital by serving as a measure of a kind that sellers can use to describe their capital and buyers can use to describe their needs. In significant ways institutions/communities/regions/nations hold cultural capital in musingplaces.
MUSINGPLACE INTERFACES
In contemporary Australia musingplaces manifest themselves in various ways and in many contexts. Public musingplaces hold collections that reflect Australia's cultural capital. Likewise, they are invested with the cultural property of a diversely layered Communities of Ownership and Interest.
In the context of globalisation, communities the world over:
• Reflect the values of multiple cultural expressions;
• Mirror a diversity of cultural realities; and
• Project the knowledge and belief systems attached to the places in which they are found.
In 19th & 20th C context musingplaces in the Western world tended to privilege Eurocentric cum Anglocentric cultural imperatives. This applied in Tasmania somewhat more overtly than elsewhere in Australia given the island's somewhat 'gothic' colonial histories and what was imagined/understood to be at stake.
Nonetheless, with the increase in cultural diversity that has come about as a consequence of the international population interchanges driven by social conflict and economic imperatives the ground has shifted somewhat – in Tasmania as much as elsewhere in Australia.
In this context, musingplaces play a role in:
• Making sense of new cultural imperatives, in new 'homeplaces';
• The facilitation of new understandings – Australian understandings;
• Articulating globalised understandings alongside regional understandings –and others still.
THE RESEARCH ROLE
Musingplaces have a significant role as research institutions that is all too often overlooked. Firstly their collecting typically requires investigation and interrogation in order that they are well understood prior to exhibition and publication.
Research priorities should be determined by musingplaces' Communities of Ownership and Interest – those who directly and indirectly fund the institution and/or the research.
Much time could be spent rationalising musingplaces' research agendas, suffice to say that within the institution this research's purpose is to make sense of the collection.
Beyond that there are wider imperatives to do with the interfaces of musingplaces' other roles and the institutions themselves. Generally, the research roles' of musingplaces is poorly understood.
THE PEDAGY ROLE
Traditionally musingplaces have played an important supplementary pedagogical role. They have been able to offer experiences education institutions have been unable to offer, given the imperatives informing collection building. Whilst this remains a significant role it is arguably a diminishing one.
Alternatively, musingplaces may well have enhanced pedagogical roles in their potential to provide and store cultural capital thus enabling the transitions that need to be navigated in contemporary cultural realities.
Looking ahead it is clear the ways people are educated is going to be quite different. Without doubt education will be delivered quite differently.
It is highly likely that there will be institutional change and changes to the modes of delivery. However, more to the point here, while musingplaces may well remain, if they are to be relevant they will need to change at a similar pace as other social institutions – schools, universities, et al. Currently, the imperative to adopt and adapt to such change is very often missing in many musingplaces.
Again traditionally, musingplaces have been siloed – art galleries, science museums, heritage museums/house natural history museums, maritime museums and an infinite number of alternatives. Somewhat curiously the silo divisions seem to be eroding as knowledge and belief systems expand and boundaries become blurred.
No longer are audiences – musing visitors! – satisfied as 'passive receivers' of predetermined narrow interpretations of meaning. Rather they are expecting active engagement with and participation in the musing experience towards the discovery of self determined meaning/s – multidimensional, multifaceted and multilayered meanings.
THE TOURISM ROLE
Alongside all this there is tourism which is in essence a social, cultural and economic phenomenon. Tourism involves the movement of people outside their homeplace environments. However, at the same time they typically seek to 'feel at home' in the new unfamiliar environments where they find themselves – perhaps an exotic, bizarre, glamorous or mysterious environment.
These people are travelling for personal or business cum professional purposes. They are imagined and understood as 'visitors' which in turn generates expectations of hospitality on both sides of the engagement.
Typically tourism has to do with the visitors' activities, some of which implies expenditure by both host and visitor.
As such, tourism has implications relevant to the economy, the natural environment and the built environment. The local population, the tourists themselves, and very often musingplaces too, potentially require navigation aids in this cultural enterprise.
Given the wide spectrum of Communities of Ownership and Interest involved in or affected by tourism, there is a need for a holistic approach to the tourism facet of musingplaces. There is a need to formulate and implement purposeful strategic plans that interface with national, regional and local cultural development policies.
There needs to be dynamic interfaces between the 'the elsewhere people', and mostly rhizomic interfaces, and musingplaces. In search of 'success', it is especially so in respect to the interfacing of the research, pedagogical and tourism roles.
Information technologies are in part fulfilling the roles physical musingplaces once played and in other ways these new digital knowledge systems are the catalysts for dynamic change within musingplace programming, administrations and the networks they depend upon for relevance.
Overlay all this with the need to reimagine the world in the context of the social, economic and cultural, indeed political, paradigm shifts at work internationally. Then the inevitability of, and the need for, reimagining musingplaces' purposefulness becomes clearer.
MUSINGPLACES' SOCIAL RELEVANCEMusingplaces' very existence in a community says something significant about the community's social capital.
While an individual may assemble a collection for the purpose of her/his own benefit/musing/contemplation, typically large collections require the dedicated work of whole communities working collaboratively and cooperatively over time.
Musingplaces reflect an institution's/community's/region's/nation's sense of itself but importantly its sense of wellbeing. These collections, in order to exist at all, require a kind of collective consciousness of a 'place's' communal wellbeing, or in an individual's case, a wellbeing (power?) aspiration and the promotion of it plus the sharing of it.
It is argued that a community's wellbeing, its social indicators, can be measured using sets of descriptive statistics, or statistical constructs, categorised as social concerns. The indicators connected with human welfare throughout people's lives consist of selected indicators at major stages from birth to death and include family relationships, education, employment, interpersonal relationships, community engagement, and health, etc.
Musingplaces' purposes for being are typically bound up in some way with social dynamics given the underlying concern of making sense of the world and generating new understandings.
In significant ways institutions – communities, regions & nations also – hold cultural capital in their musingplaces. The knowledge and belief systems, skills, education, and advantages that a person has, which gives them identity, status and authority in society was once translated into power and authority in the Kunstkammers and Wundekammers of 15th C Europe – 21st C musingplaces.
Parents provide their children with cultural capital by transmitting the attitudes and knowledge needed to succeed in the current educational system and social networks. At a personal level, later on the resources available to an individual on the basis of honour, prestige and/or recognition are added to the mix and cultural capital comes in three forms – acquired, objectified and institutionalised.
Cultural capital is both consciously acquired and passively "inherited". It is the properties of one's self that are received over time, usually from the family through socialisation and the embrace of traditions. It is not anything that's transmissible instantaneously as it takes time to be acquired and it embodies itself in language, character and idiosyncratic ways of thinking.
The objectification of cultural capital comes about through the physical objects that are possessed – tools, costumes, scientific instruments, chattels, works of art. Cultural objects can be transmitted both for economic profit and for the purpose of "symbolically" conveying the cultural capital – say to a musingplace.
Nonetheless, while it is possible to possess objectified cultural capital it is only possible to 'consume' it by understanding its meaning/s in its cultural context/s and, only then if beforehand there is a foundation of conceptual and/or historic knowledge to build upon. When an object is sold the transmission of culture does not automatically accompany the sale.
Likewise, when an object enters the collection of a musingplace the realities of its cultural existence does not automatically follow it. Indeed, very often cultural objects become somewhat 'zombiefied' and change irrevocably. At the very least in many musingplaces they die as active objects.
Institutionalised cultural capital is invested in institutional recognition – sometimes by musingplaces – and most often via the academic credentials or qualifications, of the cultural capital held by an individual. The institutional recognition process eases the conversion of cultural capital to economic capital by serving as a measure of a kind that sellers can use to describe their capital and buyers can use to describe their needs. In significant ways institutions/communities/regions/nations hold cultural capital in musingplaces.
MUSINGPLACE INTERFACESIn contemporary Australia musingplaces manifest themselves in various ways and in many contexts. Public musingplaces hold collections that reflect Australia's cultural capital. Likewise, they are invested with the cultural property of a diversely layered Communities of Ownership and Interest.
In the context of globalisation, communities the world over:
• Reflect the values of multiple cultural expressions;
• Mirror a diversity of cultural realities; and
• Project the knowledge and belief systems attached to the places in which they are found.
In 19th & 20th C context musingplaces in the Western world tended to privilege Eurocentric cum Anglocentric cultural imperatives. This applied in Tasmania somewhat more overtly than elsewhere in Australia given the island's somewhat 'gothic' colonial histories and what was imagined/understood to be at stake.
Nonetheless, with the increase in cultural diversity that has come about as a consequence of the international population interchanges driven by social conflict and economic imperatives the ground has shifted somewhat – in Tasmania as much as elsewhere in Australia.
In this context, musingplaces play a role in:
• Making sense of new cultural imperatives, in new 'homeplaces';
• The facilitation of new understandings – Australian understandings;
• Articulating globalised understandings alongside regional understandings –and others still.
Musingplaces have a significant role as research institutions that is all too often overlooked. Firstly their collecting typically requires investigation and interrogation in order that they are well understood prior to exhibition and publication.
Research priorities should be determined by musingplaces' Communities of Ownership and Interest – those who directly and indirectly fund the institution and/or the research.
Much time could be spent rationalising musingplaces' research agendas, suffice to say that within the institution this research's purpose is to make sense of the collection.
Beyond that there are wider imperatives to do with the interfaces of musingplaces' other roles and the institutions themselves. Generally, the research roles' of musingplaces is poorly understood.
Traditionally musingplaces have played an important supplementary pedagogical role. They have been able to offer experiences education institutions have been unable to offer, given the imperatives informing collection building. Whilst this remains a significant role it is arguably a diminishing one.
Alternatively, musingplaces may well have enhanced pedagogical roles in their potential to provide and store cultural capital thus enabling the transitions that need to be navigated in contemporary cultural realities.
Looking ahead it is clear the ways people are educated is going to be quite different. Without doubt education will be delivered quite differently.
It is highly likely that there will be institutional change and changes to the modes of delivery. However, more to the point here, while musingplaces may well remain, if they are to be relevant they will need to change at a similar pace as other social institutions – schools, universities, et al. Currently, the imperative to adopt and adapt to such change is very often missing in many musingplaces.
Again traditionally, musingplaces have been siloed – art galleries, science museums, heritage museums/house natural history museums, maritime museums and an infinite number of alternatives. Somewhat curiously the silo divisions seem to be eroding as knowledge and belief systems expand and boundaries become blurred.
No longer are audiences – musing visitors! – satisfied as 'passive receivers' of predetermined narrow interpretations of meaning. Rather they are expecting active engagement with and participation in the musing experience towards the discovery of self determined meaning/s – multidimensional, multifaceted and multilayered meanings.
THE TOURISM ROLEAlongside all this there is tourism which is in essence a social, cultural and economic phenomenon. Tourism involves the movement of people outside their homeplace environments. However, at the same time they typically seek to 'feel at home' in the new unfamiliar environments where they find themselves – perhaps an exotic, bizarre, glamorous or mysterious environment.
These people are travelling for personal or business cum professional purposes. They are imagined and understood as 'visitors' which in turn generates expectations of hospitality on both sides of the engagement.
Typically tourism has to do with the visitors' activities, some of which implies expenditure by both host and visitor.
As such, tourism has implications relevant to the economy, the natural environment and the built environment. The local population, the tourists themselves, and very often musingplaces too, potentially require navigation aids in this cultural enterprise.
Given the wide spectrum of Communities of Ownership and Interest involved in or affected by tourism, there is a need for a holistic approach to the tourism facet of musingplaces. There is a need to formulate and implement purposeful strategic plans that interface with national, regional and local cultural development policies.
There needs to be dynamic interfaces between the 'the elsewhere people', and mostly rhizomic interfaces, and musingplaces. In search of 'success', it is especially so in respect to the interfacing of the research, pedagogical and tourism roles.
Against the backgrounding laid out above there is a need, very much a 21st Century need, to consider the 'purposefulness' of our Australian musingplaces.
What and why are two of the vital questions in organisational work. What are we trying to do? And, why are we trying to do it?
What and why are two of the vital questions in organisational work. What are we trying to do? And, why are we trying to do it?
A purpose statement provides a brief, definitive justification statement for the activity or organisation involved and acts as a logical starting point to determine other organisational requirements.
EXAMPLE: What we want is a bridge over the river (What or mission) because we need to be able to shorten road travel distances for commuters, businesses and emergency services (Purpose). From this we can see that putting a rail bridge in will not be valid, nor will increasing travel distances to get around private land.
An organisation without purpose is one that has no reason to be in existence. A clearly defined purpose statement saves time, establishes priorities and shows other people how important the organisation is and why. Another essential function of a clear purpose statement is that it provides a tool that helps align disparate organisational groups to co-ordinate and act together to achieve the wider organisation's goals.[References]
Australia's musingplaces very often operate without a statement of purpose, a raison de'tre. Instead they operate within some subjectively assumed mindset that is driven by aspirations and promises – typically remotely determined. That isn't however a universal assumption as the Australian Museum has a clearly stated purpose – LINK.
References:
- Clemson. B. Cybernetics A New Management Tool ABACUS PRESS 1991
- Hitchens. D. Putting systems to work WILEY 1992
- Lobovitz. G. The Power of Alignment WILEY 1997
Ray Norman – Artist, Metalsmith, Networker, Independent Researcher, Currently a Launcestonian, Cultural Theorist, Cultural Geographer and a hunter of Deep Histories ... Ray is Co-Director of zingHOUSEunlimited, a lifestyle design enterprise and network offering a range of services linked to contemporary cultural production and cultural research. Ray is also engaged with the nudgelbah institute as a cultural geographer. That institute's purpose is to be network of research networks and to be a diverse vehicle through which place oriented scholarship and cultural endeavours can be acknowledged, honoured and promoted.... LINK
I've read it through Ray and despite the interruptions of my class found the article intriguing to say the least. I would have thought that others may have had the common sense to take advantage of the ideas raised in support of their cause but as you said the other day "horses and Water" and all that.
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