“Lies, damn lies and statistics”: a history of museum visits in Australasia

ABSTRACT

While a great deal of attention has been paid to museum visit data in the last few decades, very little is known about long-term trends. This article examines the distinctive history of museum visits in Australasia through a comparative study of eight key institutions from across the region. Archival research was undertaken at each institution to compile as complete as possible a data set of annual visitation from opening until present day. Any stated changes in funding, admission charges, buildings etc. were also recorded, along with comments indicating contemporary explanations for fluctuations in visitation. Sources included official documents such as annual reports and trustee minutes, as well as visitor books and attendance records. We provide an initial overview of the quantitative and contextual data we collected from the case study museums focusing on a number of key questions: How have museums in Australasia been counting and reporting visit data over the past 150 years? What does this reveal about changes over time in the perceived value of visit data and museum attitudes towards their visitors? What are the key trends in museum attendance at the local, national and regional level in Australia and New Zealand? What contemporary explanations were given for fluctuations in museum attendance and are they supported by a long-term, cross-institutional comparison of the data? The study provides insights into historical shifts in thinking about the importance of visitors, appropriate methods for recording visitation, and the value of this data. The findings are also relevant to how museums today interpret attendance figures. The ways in which visit data were included or excluded from historical narratives about the value of museums highlights the constructed nature of visitor data and raises questions about the role of visitor research in contemporary museums.

KEYWORDS:

• Museums
• New Zealand
• Australia
• visitation
• historical
• visitor research

Notes on contributors

Lee Davidson is a senior lecturer in the Museum and Heritage Studies programme at the Stout Research Centre, Victoria University of Wellington. Her research interests include museum visitor studies; international touring exhibitions; visitor experience at natural & culture heritage sites; and cultural/heritage tourism. Her latest book is Cosmopolitan Ambassadors: International exhibitions, cultural diplomacy and the polycentral museum, co-authored with Leticia Perez-Castellanos (Vernon Press 2019).

Conal McCarthy is the Director of the Museum and Heritage Studies programme at Victoria University of Wellington. His research focuses on museum history, theory and practice, and the indigenous engagement with heritage in the South Pacific. His latest book, co-edited with Philipp Schorch, is: Curatopia: Museums and the future of curatorship (Manchester University Press 2019).

Notes

1 We plan to undertake further analysis of the archival sources to explore related issues such as these. As for religion, while in Wellington the Colonial Museum opened on Sundays in 1878, claiming to be the first museum in the British Empire to do so, in Auckland in the 1880s a petition was presented to the Museum opposing this very move.

2 For the first four weeks, the estimated total was 80,000, followed by an estimated weekly average of 3,000, making an estimated total of 170,000 for the first seven months (National Art Gallery and Dominion Museum, 1937).

3 Following Woollard (2018) we have regarded an increase (or decrease) of more than ±15% from one year to the next as significant in the sense that this degree of change has a considerably lower probability of being the result of chance.

4 Peaks in the late 1990s coincide with blockbuster exhibitions Pompeii and Egyptians, and in 2013 they staged the very successful Alexander the Great exhibition.

5 The Annual Reports for the three years prior to the closure of the museum for its reincarnation show visitation averaging around 250,000 (Davidson & Sibley, 2011).

6 These concerns are also supported by a body of critical literature. See for example Bennett et al. (2009), McCarthy (2013), and Lynch (2011, 2017).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Victoria University of Wellington University Research Fund.