Winner
Cairns Historical Society
Reimagining Cairns Museum
The reimagining of the Cairns Museum was a seven-year project for the Cairns Historical Society and represented an enormous undertaking for the volunteer-run Society, supported by funding from Cairns Regional Council. The process included external consultation and volunteer workshops that resulted in key themes for a renewed Cairns Museum and a vision, ‘To reveal the past and engage with the present of Cairns as a tropical city’.
The Museum opened in July 2017 and now operates with 2.4 paid staff and ongoing support from Council.
The strategic planning process for the ‘reimagining’ investigated the role of a Museum in a regional city, the existing cultural infrastructure, and the significance of the existing CHS collection. It created a contemporary thematic framework ‘Living in the Tropics’ that became the foundation for delivering a Museum that was about the past and the present of Cairns as a tropical city, rather than a more generic Museum about the olden days.
In addition to the extensive work around the existing collection, the project also engaged with two Traditional Owner groups and supported a volunteer curator who worked with a number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island families for more than two years to bring their stories into the Museum, to be told and be displayed in Cairns for the first time.
Finalists
Yugambeh Museum Language & Heritage Research Centre, Beenleigh
The Bunyip Story
The Bunyip Story is a two-person theatrical play based on the Aboriginal stories and historical accounts of the Yugambeh language region in south-east Queensland, as a way of telling the land’s stories to connect generations and communities, and preserving them for ‘mobo jarjum’ (tomorrow’s children). The performance piece was produced in partnership with professional artists, Goat Track Theatre.
The content of the play – Bunyip stories from the Yugambeh language region – was determined through Aboriginal community consultation over the last fifteen years and research conducted by the Yugambeh Museum. The collaboration between professional artists, Goat Track Theatre, and community organisation, Yugambeh Museum, resulted in the development of a high-quality Aboriginal theatrical piece.
Utilising theatre as a storytelling platform, the Yugambeh Aboriginal community had the opportunity to share their local stories with audiences in the community and with the education sector. The production toured to local schools, and future regional and national touring opportunities are currently being explored.
Museum of Brisbane
Robert Andrew: Our Mutable Histories
Museum of Brisbane engaged Robert Andrew, a Brisbane-based installation artist and descendant of the Yawuru people of the Broome area in the Kimberley, Western Australia, to create three new artworks for the exhibition, Our Mutable Histories. The exhibition explored Robert’s Australian Indigenous cultural heritage and his personal histories that had previously been hidden, distorted or denied.
The artworks included kinetic elements and new technology, and combined traditional materials such as red ochres and oxides with binary language and computer operated machines – using technology as a tool with which to speak. Our Mutable Histories was Robert Andrew’s most ambitious exhibition to date. It explored a central theme of erasure, which was defined through the physical process of scraping back or washing a surface to reveal and understand what ‘lies beneath’.
Across a five-month period, Museum of Brisbane welcomed more than 115,000 people to the exhibition, and visitors were able to hear from the artist in a series of talks about how his family history inspired the artworks created for the exhibition, and the complexities of identity and the varied and inconsistent nature of history.
Gold Coast City Gallery
Signs of the Time
Exclusive to Gold Coast City Gallery, Signs of the Time was an exhibition of street art by world-renowned, national and local artists from the collection of Ken McGregor and an anonymous collector. The exhibition featured works by urban-art megastars, including Banksy; Bambi, Britain’s best-known female street artist for her iconic Amy Winehouse portrait Amy Jade; the godfather of stencil art Blek Le Rat’s statement self-portrait The Man Who Walks Through Walls; Iranian street artist A1One’s anti-corporation work East Resist; and Swoon’s social-struggle print Milton, inspired by 17th century English poet John Milton’s epic Paradise Lost, about the struggles of life.
Combining wit with high technical skill, the selected artworks tackled poverty, war, injustice, the cult of celebrity, importance of place and the symbolism of animals.
In addition to the main exhibition, 32 different artists were given opportunities to showcase their work across the Signs of the Time activations. These artists came from a diverse range of disciplines including visual artists, street dancers and choreographers, live musicians and DJs, photographers, musicians and interdisciplinary live performance artists.