Cultural Heritage & Museum Studies

A Qualitative Research Project designed for Deakin University Subject AIX707, supervised by Associate Professor Singleton (Deakin University). Uploaded for perusal by research participants and Deakin Ethics Council.  Final paper subject to word limit of Assignment task.

Cookbooks are a wonderful example of material culture — they have historic and social value that make them an important part of a museum collection. They provide a range of insights into everyday life such as attitudes towards food, domestic economy and the roles of women. This article focuses on one particular cookbook, an edition of which forms part of the National Museum of Australia's National Historical Collection. Our Cookery Book, written by Flora Pell and first published in Victoria in 1916, was reprinted more than 24 times until the 1950s. A study of the cookbook and the life of its author reveals much about the education of girls, the changing role of women in society, nutrition, nation-building and the power of the temperance movement in early twentieth-century Australia. Flora Pell was a living contradiction who espoused a woman's 'heaven-appointed mission' as a 'wife and homemaker' while forging a career for herself in the Victorian Education Department. Her recipes and 'valuable home hints' were in the press, on the airwaves and in print. She may well have been Australia's first celebrity chef. The authors, a curator and a historian, have tackled the subject from complementary perspectives and offer different interpretations of the cookbook as object and historical text. They conclude with an examination of how this seemingly innocuous, but highly controversial and influential cookbook can be interpreted for a museum audience.

Abstract: Our cookery book is both a culinary and historical source. The ingredients chosen for the recipes provide an insight into food economy and wastage, diet and nutrition, and food preferences in Australia in the early twentieth century. Its popularity – it was reprinted at least 24 times from 1916 to the 1950s – attests to its uptake by at least two generations of women. In the preamble, the author discusses the five components of food ‘necessary to build up the body’. This is the first time that components of nutrition such as protein, fats and carbohydrates are discussed in a cookbook. In the introduction the author, Miss Flora Pell, also draws links between nutrition and nation building. She writes about the important role of women as cooks in building up a nation of strong, fit and healthy citizens who will go on to contribute to community life and national prosperity. Our cookery book is a fine example of domestic feminism, iced with patriotism, which was first published...

Abstract: In 1891, the Presbyterian Church established a mission station on the western side of Cape York Peninsula. They named the station Mapoon. Over the next 72 years, hundreds of children of mixed descent and Aboriginal families came to the mission by force or by choice. One of the reasons Aboriginal people chose to come to Mapoon was the decreasing availability of bush food and the conflict with pastoralists when they tried to hunt, gather and fish on their country. This paper will examine how the first missionaries at Mapoon used food as an assimilation strategy. Through the distribution of rations, the establishment of gardens maintained by Aboriginal people, and the introduction of set meal times, they radically altered the traditional Aboriginal diet and way of life. Food was the fuel that made the Mapoon mission run. It provided work for the Aboriginal ‘inmates’ and the missionaries sold surplus crops, cattle and seafoods to raise funds for the mission. One of the other w...

For the past 20 years in Australia, immigration and refugees have most often been in the news as a ‘problem’ to be solved or an ‘invasion’ to be stopped. It was against this political backdrop that I recently visited the latest exhibition at the National Archives of Australia (NAA): 'A Place to Call Home? Migrant Hostel Memories'. The exhibition drew on a vast archive of over 21,000 photographs from the Department of Immigration which were donated to the National Archives in 2002. Fifty of these photographs were chosen by NAA curator Amy Lay for this exhibition. The others can be viewed, tagged and commented on via the NAA’s website (www.destinationaustralia.gov.au).

In 1916, Melbourne’s George Robertson published 'Our Cookery Book' by Flora Pell. It was so popular that it remained in print until the 1950s and went into at least twenty-four editions. However its author, a long-serving employee of the Victorian Education Department, became a victim of departmental officiousness and was reprimanded and punished for showing initiative and skill. 'Our Cookery Book' was also censured by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) as it contained recipes with alcohol, even though its author shared the same social and moral goals as the WCTU. The vexed history of 'Our Cookery Book', which brought to an end the thirty-five-year teaching career of Miss Pell, is documented in the correspondence, memos and departmental marginalia of a Public Record Office Victoria (PROV) file that is deceptively named ‘Red Cross Special case’.

I thought the National Library of Australia had backed a sure winner with its latest exhibition, City of Trees. Trees are something everyone has interacted with: whether you’ve kicked piles of autumn leaves, sought their shade in summer or climbed one in the school yard. Trees are ubiquitous in Canberra – the exhibition title rings true. So why did this exhibition leave me feeling flat and disappointed? City of Trees is made of six content elements. Firstly, as you walk into the exhibition, there are two light boxes, beautifully constructed from wood, with large, backlit photographs taken by the British artist and curator of the exhibition, Jyll Bradley. The colour photos show sunlight pushing through a dense collection of tree trunks, branches and leaves. There are several photographs layered on top of each other and some are upside down – why? Is it intended to make me look twice at the photo, or a sign of the artist’s playfulness? Is this meant to tell me something profound that ...

To mark the 100 years since Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) fought the Gallipoli campaign of WW1, Alison Wishart, Senior Curator of Photographs at Australian War Memorial, explores the remarkable photographic record left by the soldiers. Made possible by the birth of Kodak’s portable camera, the photographs give a rare and intimate portrait of the soldier’s day-to-day life away from the heat of battle.

After World War I, war memorials multiplied in Australian cities
and towns. They were, as Ken Inglis said: sacred places, holy ground and
focal points of family and community grief. One hundred years later, the
commemoration of the Great War has heralded a mushrooming of virtual war memorials.

There are a growing number of websites which seek to gather photographs and information about all the ANZACs who served in the First World War. Some of these websites are sponsored by government bodies - like Discovering Anzacs a joint project of National Archives of Australia and Archives New Zealand; and Lives of the First World War created by the Imperial War Museum in Britain. Others are developed by private individuals and the RSLs. Many of these websites are virtual, digital memorials.

This paper will compare and contrast the purpose of, and community response to, virtual and physical war memorials to the First World War. What is the relationship between virtual and physical memorials? Are online memorials more ‘authentic’ because they are built through crowd-sourcing or are they less authentic because the information they contain is sometimes not validated by more objective researchers? Can virtual memorials be places of pilgrimage and community building? Are online websites, where people can create tributes to their ancestors, more about the contributor’s search for identity than their need to remember the service of their relative? Or are they just a sign of the times – a natural response to the digital, online age?

If, as Marshall McLuhan says, the medium is the message, what do we gain and lose through virtual war memorials? What purposes do physical memorials to the Great War, which are fixed in one place, serve in the digital age?

On 27 May 2017, Australians will celebrate the 50th anniversary of a landslide victory.  In 1967, 90.77% of Australians, the largest majority ever, voted to change the constitution to allow the Federal government to make laws which included Indigenous Australians and for them to be counted when ‘reckoning the population of the Commonwealth’.

May Gibbs is one of Australia’s most popular and enduring children’s book authors and illustrators. Her picture books have delighted successive generations for over 100 years. She drew her inspiration from her childhood spent visiting the bush south of Perth, and later from her large garden in Sydney’s Neutral Bay and bush walks in the Blue Mountains.

An early environmentalist, she urged her readers to ‘be kind to bush creatures’. This illustrated talk will examine the enduring influence of Gibbs' artwork and books, her charitable work and how she built her career.

Stories of long distance relationships permeate our popular literature, films and music. Using examples from library collections, this talk will show how the tangible evidence of long distance love has changed over the past 130 years, from hand-written letters and carte de visite portraits to the digital era, which has had a profound effect on the nature and style of communication.

After World War II, travelling for love became an international phenomenon, when an estimated 15,000 Australian war brides crossed the seas to join the men they had met during the war. While Internet-based communication is popular and more immediate, it is not necessarily more intimate nor satisfying.

Napoleon Bonaparte is credited with saying: ‘An army marches on his stomach’. One of the key roles of the military is to provide its personnel with nutritious food and sufficient clean water to enable them to fight and fulfil their non-combat roles. Neither Napoleon nor Sir John Monash would recognise the provisions that are provided to today’s armed services. Some advances in food technology – such as preserving food in cans and compressing carbohydrates into cereal bars – came about because the military needed to find a way of providing long-life meals high in nutrients and low in weight. These innovations in food technology came too late for the Allies who served in the First World War. Using excerpts from diaries and letters held at The State Library of NSW, and official records held at the Australian War Memorial, this paper will argue that the lack of a palatable, nutritious diet played a greater role in the tragedy of the Gallipoli campaign than has been discussed. It will then examine how the Australian Defence Forces provisions armies today by looking at the provision of food to Australians serving in Afghanistan in 2013.