‘Hidden from view’?: an analysis of the integration of women’s history and women’s voices into Australia’s social history exhibitions

ABSTRACT

‘Women have mostly been left out of history’, boldly asserted Elizabeth Willis in her exhibition text for The Story of Victoria in 1985. Taking Willis’ statement as a starting point, this article aims to trace firstly how women have been rewritten into Australia’s social history exhibitions focusing on the use of voice as a strategy to do so, and secondly how these voices have changed historical master narratives – by allowing a shift from a big picture history to intimate and deeply personal stories that recast our understanding of the past in ways that are inclusive of gendered experiences. We investigate the use of the curatorial voice as reflected in Willis’ work, aligning it with the notion of curatorial activism, before exploring the changing curatorial practices that expanded the potential for an interpretive approach that incorporated the voice of the subjects themselves as a central component in the telling of history. We then analyse the impact of these strategies on traditional understandings of the past through three exhibitions developed by Melbourne Museum over 30 years: The Story of Victoria, a successor exhibition The Melbourne Story, and their Great War centenary exhibition, WWI: Love & Sorrow.

KEYWORDS:

• Australian history
• feminist history
• women
• exhibition interpretation
• voice

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This article is an outcome of the ARC Discovery Project (DP120100594) entitled ‘Collecting institutions, cultural diversity and the making of citizenship in Australia since the 1970s’.

Notes on contributors

Lorinda Cramer

Lorinda Cramer is an Associate Research Fellow with the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation at Deakin University. She was awarded her PhD in 2016, with her research exploring material culture and identity.

Andrea Witcomb

Andrea Witcomb is a Professor of Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies at Deakin University. Her work focuses on the interpretation of difficult histories in museums and heritage sites and is informed by the recent ‘sensorial’ turn as well as theories of memory. Recent projects include three Australian Research Council funded projects, the most recent of which examines how practices of collecting and display have created knowledge about Western Australia.