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| Part of the Greek community display at Hurstville Museum & Gallery |
We recently hosted a workshop at the Australian National
Maritime Museum
The exhibits in this space are community-led and reflect a collaboration
between the local community of the St George region and staff at the Museum and
Gallery. Although it’s just a small space – with three dedicated cases - it
plays an important role in crafting particular stories of identity, belonging
and in showcasing diversity. At Hurstville, as elsewhere, the community gallery
is also vital to the generation of community events – as Gemma Beswick, the
Historical & Cultural Services Coordinator at Hurstville, explained in an
interview with us, the openings of exhibitions in the community gallery often
turn into a festival, a party. And it doesn’t take much to understand why a
celebration of your community, a chance for you to see yourself in a museum, to
have some sort of input into this type of institution, this type of
representation, would be so popular.
This type of dedicated community-led space is essential to
modern museums – not only does it celebrate specific communities but it also has
the potential to increase participation. Our research is interested in how this
space is able to include new voices in the museum and open the museum up to the
community. We are particularly focused on how museums today can best balance
the tensions between telling local history, celebrating achievements and
reflecting critically on sometimes difficult stories of diversity and its
significance. Spotlight spaces like that at Hurstville are key to understanding
the role of museums in twenty-first century life and we will keep you up-to-date
about our research project as it develops.
Dr Nina Parish (University of Bath
Dr Chiara O’Reilly (University of Sydney
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