State Heritage Convention

Dr Gary Morgan
Executive Director, Western Australian Museum
"15 billion years young: heritage and the Western Australian Museum"

This paper explores the Western Australian Museum and where it fits with heritage in Western Australia. The Museum has been around since 1891, making it one of the oldest scientific and cultural organisations in the state. I am going to begin a little earlier than that: fifteen billion years earlier to be precise - or imprecise if one gives or takes a billion years or so.

In a recent edition of Time magazine, there was a nice article on the end of the universe. There is now close to total acceptance amongst mathematicians and scientists that the universe began in a Big Bang, about 15 billion years ago. Prior to the Big Bang, all the mass of the universe - the galaxies, the billions of stars, billions of square kilometres of dust and so forth - occupied a space smaller than a pinhead, indeed smaller than an atom (of which several million can fit on a pin head). In fact, the universe occupied an infinitely or infinitesimally small space.

After the Big Bang, everything in the universe was sent on its mad rush which we are still on, moving at thousands or even tens of thousands of kilometres per hour away from each other. Thus, we have the expanding universe. But there have been various views regarding how the universe would end. Would gravity eventually slow down the expansion, and everything would collapse back in on itself? Or would it continue to expand forever? As reported in Time, the latest strong evidence is in, for ever-increasing speeds of expansion. This strongly suggests that the universe will simply expand forever - getting bigger and bigger and darker and colder until everything is black and nothingness will be everywhere. Truly the void of Biblical terms.

So the story of the universe is from infinitely small to infinitely large: space that cannot be imagined either for its lack, or for its boundlessness. Another notion about space is that there are many dimensions in which we operate, not just the three we can interpret. Space itself can curve. Gravity curves it for example so space curves around a sun or planet. Giant stars called red giants curve space a lot. Black holes have so much gravity and distort space so much that nothing - not even light - can escape their pull. But how does a 3-dimensional totality curve? What dimension does it curve into? Time itself is not an absolute either - it can speed up and slow down in this infinite and curved universe. These are very hard concepts for most of us. I find them chastening. It is hard to imagine where we are in that sort of universe. How do you plot your location? And plot it relative to what, when everything is moving relative to everything else?

Let me start another story.

Modern human beings - Homo sapiens - evolved in eastern Africa at least 200,000 years ago from earlier species of humans or hominids. They moved into Europe and Asia, and thence to the Americas and Australasia, cohabiting with earlier species like Homo neanderthalis in Europe and possibly Homo erectus in Asia. There is a counter theory that various enclaves of Homo erectus evolved to sapiens at many places around the world, but as a biologist I find that hard to believe. That isn't the normal process of evolution.

As humans expanded across the globe, they defined their space in various ways. Locations for sheltering, hunting grounds, territories - all were marked in various fashions. Even in a nomadic hunter-gatherer culture, signposts and locations are very important. Humans probably never have wandered aimlessly. They were always checking for orientation points, points of reference, things to be remembered and used again for way- finding and positioning. The physical environment for early humans, and still for modern humans, is that part of the world they occupy. Early reference to celestial space was largely mythical and astrological - ancestors and the future in the stars - and only relatively recently have we begun to understand what our place in the universe may be.

The inverse of knowing where you are is being lost. Being temporarily lost is a common enough human condition. Most of our earliest European arrivals were effectively lost. They certainly weren't where they wanted to be when they hit the rocks or cliffs of our western seaboard. You only had to be a 100m or two in the wrong direction. Frederik Houtman in 1619 marked the islands bearing his name by the Portuguese expression "Abri voll olos" or "Keep your eyes open". Never was a group of islands more aptly named as the crew of the Batavia and other ships found to their dismay.

Today we know our physical world reasonably well, at least in a broad sense. There is much we still do not know. For example, how many species of animals are becoming extinct each day that have never been described by science. The Southwest corner of WA was recently described in the prestigious science journal Nature as one of the world's biodiversity hotspots. Biodiversity is of course the diversity of life around us - at genetic, species and community levels. Western Australia has a very diverse fauna and flora, many of which are endemic, meaning they are found nowhere else. The SW corner of the state is akin to the Amazon for its variety of life. Yet, like the Amazon, most of the invertebrate species are unknown and undescribed. As habitat changes, we are losing them before we know we have them. This is like burning books we have never read.

But compared to the past we do know the lay of the land and many of us have traveled over a fair chunk of it. Our place in the infinite universe is more challenging because we have fewer reference points. In space, not only can no one hear you scream, but as we have seen, everything is relative.

So how well do we define ourselves in cultural space? As humans we are more than just matter, most of it water, taking up a certain volume of physical space. If I were to ask any of you who you were, you would not reply, I am the person occupying this space at this time. You would answer with your name, and then expand by your place of residence, your job, and if asked, possibly your ethnic background and so forth. These are all cultural constructs. We define ourselves culturally. So our meaningful space for human-human interactions is culturally defined and hence we can think of cultural space.

This cultural space is not so different from the physical space of the universe. It is clearly multidimensional. Each axis or dimension can be a cultural attribute. Language group, ethnic background at various levels, social environment, family relationships, education - all can be thought of as axes in this space. Of course many of these things are not linear so we can think of cultural space as curved as well. Each of us impacts on the culture around us so we curve our cultural space much like planets or suns curve the universal space around them through gravity. (We might even recognize that some individuals have more 'cultural gravity' than others. These might be regarded as 'cultural red giants'. It is open to speculation who the equivalent of 'cultural black holes' might be.)

Many of these attributes can equally be seen as 'heritage'. Heritage by dictionary definition is 'what is or may be inherited', that is, what is passed on to us. There is a prevailing attitude amongst the greater public and a good many decision makers and power brokers, that 'heritage' equates to 'old things'.

An example that illustrates this and which I find particularly galling is one of association. How often have I heard a conversation that goes,
"The old such and such building has outlived its usefulness. But it is a lovely old building. How can we use it? Of course … let's make it a museum."

Old buildings for museums that hold old things. A perfect heritage match. In part as a result of this rationale, the WA Museum has more than its share of old buildings. They are of varying charm. Some are exquisite such as the Hackett Hall, one of Perth's great buildings. It was the library of course. When the library moved out, the museum got it. So too when the art gallery moved out, the Museum inherited (ah, heritage) the Beaufort Street wings.

Old buildings (or OBs) can be quite evocative for people. I am something of an amateur student of architecture and enjoy observing the evolution of buildings. I have a particular interest in art deco and art moderne styles. OBs may seem warm and homely. Many of the Museum's old galleries are still non-airconditioned so in summer they are indeed very warm. They also carry a host of problems in upkeep, repairs, and in design not suited to many of the new approaches to public experiences. And that is for the galleries that at least were designed for exhibitions! When you have to use old buildings that had completely different original purposes, it is, frankly, often sheer murder to make them work for exhibition spaces.

The old stereotype is reinforced. Heritage buildings for a heritage organisation. Old building, old things, old ideas - dust, must and rust.

Good museums today are at the cutting edge of exploring new ways to engage the public in learning. The new breed of museums are housed in new state of the art buildings. Te Papa Museum of New Zealand, the Museum of Melbourne and the National Museum of Australia are examples. Their buildings were designed for what they have to deliver for a contemporary audience.

Don't mistake me. I am not averse to old buildings in museums. But I do not want to cultivate the association, the notion that the two are somehow complementary or worse obligatory, and I do want to provide people in Western Australia with the type of new age experiences that are reinforced in new galleries. The new Maritime Museum in Fremantle will have those facilities to explore the maritime part of our heritage. We also need that type of facilities to explore the natural and broader cultural heritage of the state.

Heritage to me is not old things or old ideas. If it were, it would be a detached study of something already dead, like an extinct animal. Museums are not thylacines, and the Australian Museum in Sydney is demonstrating that by doing research that might one day bring the thylacine back!

Heritage to me is the cultural platform we build upon. It is as much contemporary as it is past and it leads seamlessly into the future.

In a cultural sense, human beings continue their movement out of Africa. We continue to explore our environments, and our place in them. Just as we move through a changing universal space, our cultural space is changing daily. Our cultural heritage is what we can use to define ourselves in that new space.

Just as museums are not about old buildings, heritage is not about old things. Heritage is about keeping cultural contact alive. We may use old things to assist in that, but they are just part of the formula. It is the connectivity provided by ideas and knowledge that weaves the stories that are culture.

Museums are about assisting people to find themselves in their cultural space. Think again on the snatches of stories I have touched on here:

The Western Australian Museum undertakes research and interpretive programs in all of these fields, all of these areas of heritage.

In this extraordinarily diverse array of disciplines, we attempt not to preach and if we teach, it should be in a primarily constructivist way, enabling people to piece together their own stories and their own knowledge. They should be able to use their own heritage in doing this.

The new generation of museums, in modern buildings, is setting different agendas for the visitor. People are visiting to contact their heritage and see spectacular and interesting objects, but they are also going because the spaces are lovely and the cafes serve good coffee and food, and there are areas for the kids to play and learn in, and the overall impression is not of age or dead things- it is of youth and vitality and life.

So, my call is to throw out the dictionary definitions of heritage and move onto Einsteinian physics where time is not an absolute and travel through time as well as space is possible. Heritage is about young things. Young ideas that continue to evolve and change, and young people who take what has been developed before them and maintain the evolution.

It is our intention at the Western Australian Museum to make the Museum that sort of multidimensional cultural space.