Tag Archives: Australian Heritage

The Holtermann Museum Gulgong – it takes a community to build a museum.

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I have been taking pictures since I received my first Kodak instamatic camera at age 13. I’m not really interested in post editing images – I aim to photograph what I see with the naked eye – the subject, the light and the emotion that goes with capturing an image at a single point in time. Perhaps that is why I connected so strongly to the photographs and digital images at the Gulgong Holtermann Museum – a permanent exhibition showing part of the Holtermann Collection relating to Gulgong, NSW and which documents 19th century Australian life in the goldfields.

Gulgong Holtermann Museum (photo: Lyndall Linaker)

Behind the heritage walls, the museum’s contemporary exhibition space is engaging and entertaining for all ages. The text panels and interpretation are well done and further enhanced by wonderfully knowledgeable guides. The touchscreens and mounted photographs enable visitors to become completely immersed in the restored and digitised black and white prints from the collection. 

Thematically as the visitor moves through the building, they can see the town and its people in 1872, learn the story of the men responsible for the images, and can find out more about the wet plate photographic techniques that they employed, the photographic equipment that was used, and the ‘discovery of the collection’ in 1951. There is also a comprehensive display of cameras from the earliest box and bellow-types up to the present and a film showing the restoration of the heritage buildings.

Gulgong Holtermann Museum heritage shopfronts (photo: Lyndall Linaker)

I came across the museum by accident while researching a member of the family who was an “ironmonger, oil and colourman” and had a shop in Herbert Street, Gulgong. I believe that it is one of the best small museums that I’ve visited world wide. There’s a great story behind its creation, because without a driven and committed Gulgong Community that fundraised over a million dollars to save two of its heritage buildings and a sleuthing Photographic magazine editor who asked the right questions to the State Library of NSW, the Gulgong Holtermann Museum may never have been born. 

The images are amazing, but the fact that the glass plates used to make the images have survived at all, is a story in itself. Keast Burke was Editor of the Australian Photo Review when he enquired to the Mitchell Library in NSW about the existence of some glass plates associated with Bernard Holtermann. These particular plates showed panoramic views of Sydney in the 19th century. As a result, in 1951, 3500 or more glass plates (including the Gulgong plates) were unearthed from a garden shed in Chatswood, NSW. The glass plate negatives were donated to the Mitchell Library in 1952 by Holtermann’s grandson and became known as the Holtermann Collection. 

Merlin and Bayliss photographed literally everything in the rapidly growing towns of Gulgong and its surrounding villages – including diggings, businesses, the buildings, street scenes, panoramic views and the local people.The images were distinctive because of the groups that they photographed casually standing in front of the buildings – owners, workers and passers by – providing a microscopic view of life in a classic Australian gold rush town. 

Armed with finger stalls for digital screen use in the time of Covid-19, visitors move through the exhibition spaces.

Quite apart from the technical expertise required by Merlin and Bayliss for such a massive undertaking, it is their haunting images which capture the essence of each subject so beautifully and engage with the visitors to the museum. They bring Gulgong to life and create a real sense of the way that people survived in the goldfields at that time. Even in the harsh winter environment of 1872, the subjects are captured in their finest clothing, photographed with their prized possessions or in front of their shops or outside basic dwellings which were constructed from locally found materials. The photographer needed the subjects to be still for 8 seconds and so you can observe that many of the children have their heads held by a grownup or ghostly animals and people appear in the frame because unfortunately there was movement during that 8 seconds.  The Holtermann collection is deemed so important that it was included on the UNESCO Australian Memory of the World register in May 2013.

Thanks to the support of the State Library of NSW and a range of sponsors, the Gulgong Holtermann Museum is the only detailed and permanent exhibition of the unique Holtermann collection. It is a contemporary museum housed in two beautifully restored 1870’s gold rush buildings situated in Mayne Street, Gulgong. These two buildings along with many others were photographed in 1872 by Merlin and Bayliss and later acquired by Holtermann to form part of the UNESCO listed Holtermann Collection of photographs. So much of the town is still recognisable today from the digital collection and it’s an added bonus to stare into the faces of the people who lived in Gulgong in the 1870s and experience both evocative and humbling.

Holtermann with his nugget – photo: Merlin and Bayliss c.1872

Bernhard Otto Holtermann was a man of many talents, but for me, his most important role was that of wealthy gold miner and philanthropist who commissioned travelling photographer Henry Beaufoy Merlin, ((founder of the American and Australasian Photographic Company (A & A Photographic Company)) to photograph a massive piece of reef gold found in his mine before it was sent to be crushed. This meeting led to an amazing photographic partnership, Holtermann offering land for Merlin’s studio in Hill End and then sponsoring the work of Merlin and his young assistant, Charles Bayliss to photograph Hill End and Gulgong. Holtermann, a German migrant, supported Merlin’s quest to document the settled areas of New South Wales and Victoria and wanted to present these photographs of Australia overseas as part of an International Travelling Exposition to advertise the colonies and encourage migration.

The people of Gulgong 1872 – Museum Courtyard (photo: Lyndall Linaker)

After Merlin’s death in 1873, the project was continued by his assistant, Charles Bayliss and the collection, amounting to around five hundred glass plate negatives, was purchased by Holtermann to add to his own collection of previously commissioned works by Merlin and Bayliss. Only a small percentage of the A&A Photographic Company’s output has survived, but 3,500* small format wet plate negatives (including extensive coverage of the towns of Hill End and Gulgong) and the world’s largest wet plate negatives, measuring a massive 0.97 x 1.60 metres, are held by the State Library of New South Wales.

You can see more of Merlin and Bayliss’s work just over an hour away at the Hill End historic site which is managed by National Parks NSW. The Heritage Centre is located in the restored 1950’s Rural Fire Service Shed and also displays images from the Holtermann collection showcasing the Hillend goldfields. It adds value to your site visit making it easy to reimagine the scenes outside from Merlin and Bayliss’s images in your head.

Post Office at Hill End (Photo: Lyndall Linaker)

*Merlin retired as manager of the NSW branch of A&A Photographic Company in February 1872 and sold the business to Andrew Carlisle. Unfortunately, Carlisle sold all the view negatives of the company in September 1872, so it seems all the views taken throughout Victoria and NSW by Merlin and Bayliss in 1870 and 1871 were destroyed at that time. Some reports of 17,000 images.

Extra notes

In 1875, Holtermann and Bayliss produced the Holtermann panorama – a series about Sydney taken from the tower of his home in North Sydney,  which was an impressive 10 metres in length and received the Bronze award at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition of 1876 and a Silver Medal at the Paris Exposition Universelle Internationale in 1878.

The advertising below states that Beaufoy Merlin also created 800 views of Parramatta but sadly this collection does not appear to be intact. There are some of his images in the Sydney Living Museums and Historic Houses Trust Collections, J.K.S. Houison collection held by the Society of Australian Genealogists. Anyone with glass plate negatives in their shed, please come forward now.

Excerpt from Sydney Morning Herald, 21 September 1870 – Advertising 

https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/13219139

Further Reading

Creating with Communities/Make Museums Matter/The Museum of the Future https://themuseumofthefuture.com/2017/12/19/creating-with-communities-make-museums-matter/

Intangible Cultural Heritage and Museums/The Museum of the Future https://themuseumofthefuture.com/2019/05/15/intangible-cultural-heritage-and-museums/

Perspectives on Digital Engagement with Culture and Heritage by Jasper Visser in Inspired by Coffee https://inspiredbycoffee.com/ibc15par/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Visser-Summer131.pdf

Museums of the Future – Selected Blogposts about Museums in times of technological and social change. Jasper Visser https://themuseumofthefuture.com/download/1594/

Active Participation: Museums Empowering the Community by Marilyn Scott on Museum-id https://museum-id.com/active-participation-museums-empowering-community-marilyn-scott/

https://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/stories/henry-beaufoy-merlin-australian-showman-and-photographer

https://geoffbarker.wordpress.com/2018/11/25/beaufoy-merlin-showman-and-photographer/

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PbGMMCa5nGlHphpsVhX9EoiIb4IHbwp9/view

A modern vision – Charles Bayliss Photographer, 1850 -1897 https://www.nla.gov.au/pub/ebooks/pdf/A%20Modern%20Vision.pdf

The Heritage Dilemma

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I worry about the preservation of the world’s “cultural heritage”. To me, it’s a dilemma on a grand scale. I personally value cultural heritage – not just my own, but what I have seen in my travels and learned from others with different backgrounds. I also value art galleries and museums and all kinds of cultural institutions, but what about all the people who don’t? Is there a way to connect a higher proportion of world’s population to their heritage and does it matter in the long term?

Blue Mountains National Park, NSW, Australia

I have just completed an online course with FutureLearn called Cultural Heritage and the City from the European University Institute which got me thinking about cultural heritage in the first place. What does it mean to people and how can policy can be developed or improved in order to protect heritage for future generations? Ask yourself – “Who is responsible for protecting the world’s cultural heritage?” The course defined heritage as “the past which informs the present and the relationship that a community constructs with that past”. This includes specific places, religious or cultural practices and traditions where heritage provides a framework within which people are socialised.

Washington D.C., USA. The Post Office has been leased to Trump Hotels for 60 years. This heritage site has been renovated and repurposed but will not be lost to the State’s heritage portfolio.

On the world stage, cultural heritage is about more than just protecting sites, buildings and objects. There is also an “ intangible” facet which helps to build community through language, music or ritual which may be part of the local way of doing things (e.g. food preparation, welcome ceremonies, wearing of significant clothing etc.) I believe that everyone has a stake in the protection of heritage whether it’s on our doorstep or far away in places which may more vulnerable to destructive forces outside the control of the local population and heritage authorities.

Bluestone Lane cafe has started business in a New York church.

I concede that Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs comes into play when considering why people value and connect to cultural heritage. People are time poor, under financial and personal stress, others are barely surviving in war zones or refugee camps or living in areas where they feel disconnected to their surroundings. Why would the preservation of cultural heritage be at the the top of their “list of priorities” even if UNESCO says so? Why is heritage important to us anyway?

Brighton Beach, Melbourne. These heritage beach boxes have become valuable real estate but are also a big tourist draw card.

In a homogenous society like Japan where the greatest proportion of residents have shared cultural values, is it any easier to develop protection and promotion strategies for the preservation of cultural heritage? The culture in Japan is ancient and deep rooted but after the Great Fire in Tokyo and WWII, the process of modernisation conflicted with some of the old values set by the declining aristocracy and religious authorities. Emiko Kakikuchi Ph.D writes, “After WWII, Japan’s heritage was treated as a national asset, but remained a relatively small part of society for a long time. However the importance of heritage values has recently been increasingly recognised and protection measures diversified as Japan has matured in terms of its society and economy. Today heritage is being integrated and linked closely with community development, and its protection is being carried out not only by government but also by various stakeholders.”

Indigenous Australian Rock Art in the Flinders Ranges, South Australia dates back thousands of years before Colonial settlement.

In my own country, Australia, there are contentious layers of cultural heritage and so who takes responsibility for its preservation overall? The Indigenous Australian layer dates back more than 40,000 and possibly 60,000 years. Aboriginal cultural heritage has historically been inextricably tied to the Australian landscape with Indigenous Songlines having been coded and embedded into the natural environment and passed down over time through stories, dance and song by community elders.

Carriageworks, Redfern, Sydney – repurposed train sheds now used  for events, as an exhibition and for weekend markets.

A second colonial heritage layer was laid down after the British established a penal colony in Sydney in 1788. Over time, other settlers arrived and became established, adding to European cultural heritage and introducing an ever changing built environment which is less than 230 years old. Such changes have directly and indirectly caused major damage to Indigenous Australians’ heritage (“tangible” and “intangible”) in inverse proportion to the growth of the European population in Australia.

More recently, a third layer has come into play – a newer migrant layer represented by many different cultures including Greeks, Italians, several waves of Lebanese migration, Maltese, German, Vietnamese, Chinese, Indian and others from Afghanistan, Syria, Africa, Iran, Sri Lanka etc (too many to mention actually). I’m calling this the multicultural layer of heritage. Each group has brought distinct languages and their own cultural heritage to be worked into the existing Australian heritage tapestry.

The course modules explored ways to protect, enhance and engage with communities in the future, as urban environments change and eat into historic built environments and significant natural landscapes? How can newly arrived migrants and refugees be connected to the heritage of the country that they are now living in, the country that they now call “home”? Have they brought their own heritage values in the “intangible” sense and left the “tangible” behind? Will they be willing to engage with new values in the future?

Some migrant connections to Australian history are real and “tangible”. For instance, both Parramatta and Sydney can demonstrate historic connections to Indigenous Australians, Colonial Australians and other migrant communities. There is both archaeological and material evidence to support these historical links in found objects, social history collections (clothing, utensils, letters etc.) as well as written research (newspapers, photographs and paper records from the past). We know that many First Nations people were well known in the colony. Bennelong and King Bungaree slipped back and forth between two cultures. Pemulwuy was notorious for his resistance activities against colonial settlement.There were Chinese market gardens in Parramatta and Sydney during colonial times and the colonials imported tea, silks and porcelain from China.They also accessed Indian cottons, muslins and spices for everyday use. There is evidence that Indian nationals came to Australia from British colonies in India as staff of the Colonial Government Officers. The Lebanese also came to Australia in colonial times as hawkers and traders who sold ribbons, lace and cloth for women’s and men’s clothing.

The trick is to find ways of connecting contemporary life with existing cultural heritage and formulating appropriate policies for the protection of heritage into the future. There may be special places which merit absolute protection under law, such as “intact” wilderness areas or particular and significant built areas. In urban settings, I believe that it is also possible to develop heritage strategies which allow for new urban development through the repurposing of some heritage spaces, finding new uses and new connections with the past enabling the community to value heritage in a more vibrant and attractive city.

There are many examples of cultural heritage capacity building using events which have been integrated into the strategies of cities. These may range from large events (such as the Olympics, World Expositions, Biennales and Triennals) to smaller events such as festivals held in Australia, for example – Chinese New Year, Parramasala, Festival of Sydney, Sculpture by the Sea or the Vivid Light Festival. The increased number of festivals in Australia and overseas demonstrates ways that we can celebrate our existing heritage as well as creating new cultural heritage for the future. Such events can be compared to an exhibition in a museum or art gallery. You may have regular attendees but you want to be more “inclusive” and attract new audiences to share with you. The “festival audience” is attracted by the content or theme, but in attending that festival might learn more about a different culture or heritage place which they would not normally embrace. Inadvertently, some of that cultural heritage may be infused into festival goers but it was not the original draw card.

“Disruption” is a buzz word heard in the business world but it can also be applied to heritage places and cultural institutions. I like the way that the “Off” movement was created in parallel to the European Capital of Culture programme in Marseille in 2013. “Off” challenged the official discourse of the ECC project, running grass roots and paradoxical programmes harnessing the cultural heritage of Marseille. The aim was to direct the audience towards appreciating Marseille’s cultural heritage by being “inclusive” rather than elitist.

I think that more cultural institutions, heritage organisations and festival organisers need to think about opening their doors to wider audiences to start conversations about heritage without making people feel uncomfortable about attending events. Museum Hack has been a disruptive force within the museum sector in the USA by enticing a new and different kind of audience to visit cultural institutions. They have managed to break the mould and attract “atypical” visitors into a range of institutions who were not reaching out to millenials.

A number of public events and festivals are open to the public free of charge. Behind this idea is the fact that cultural heritage belongs to everyone and should be accessible to people regardless of the socio-economic status of the community being focussed on. Even institutions that rely on permanent entry fees and special exhibition fees to stay afloat, occasionally offer free entry days to the public in an effort to broaden their audience reach. Communities that have faced the heritage dilemma head-on have reported that developing a strong heritage policy has helped them to build community by educating local people to feel a part of their history and to build a common future. Heritage protection has contributed to regional job creation and economic growth worldwide. There is growing emphasis on the economic impact of heritage activities and that by protecting cultural heritage, cities can boost their local economy through the provision of hospitality as well as cultural services.

Harbour Sculpture Exhibition at Clarke’s Point, Hunters Hill connecting business and community. Artists aim to present, support and encourage contemporary Australian sculpture that reflects the history and place of sculpture in Australia.

Celebrating Chinese New Year 2017 at Sydney Opera House. Bringing the population of Sydney together with overseas tourists to the heritage icon to celebrate the year of the Rooster on Sydney Harbour.

Chinese Year of the Rooster at Sydney Opera House 2017 attracted many visitors to the city.

Repurposed  Industrial heritage at Ballast Point Park, Birchgrove. Between 1788 and 1800, the point was used as a fishing and hunting ground for European settlers and as a source of ballast for ships returning unladen to Europe. The A$16m project included demolition and decontamination of the derelict industrial site with construction of steel stairways, recycled building rubble walls, artworks, shade structures, wind turbines and Australian native gardens.

The Tramsheds at Harold Park in Sydney, Australia – a repurposed industrial site which housed the former historic Rozelle Tram Depot. This restoration includes a dining precinct as well as 7 community-based retailers. The site now attracts local community as well as visitors from other parts of Sydney.

The heritage dilemma must be faced head-on if we are to manage the sites and traditions that remain in an uncertain world under pressure from an ever increasing and shifting population worldwide. I guess that the heritage dilemma can not be sorted out in a single blog post.

Useful further reading: UNESCO report on Culture and Sustainable Urban Development – understanding how the tension between heritage preservation and urban development has been resolved in practicehttp://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0024/002459/245999e.pdf

Archaeology – subdivision and the loss of historical contexts

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Over time, Australia’s amazing indigenous, maritime and cultural heritage is being uncovered via numerous archaeological investigations, many of which pre-date The Heritage Act 1977. I was amazed when I visited an Open Day in Parramatta for the Centenary Square development to see the incredible history which lay under the Post Office and surrounds in Macquarie Street. Strangely, although this site had been built on in the interim, there was a large amount of archaeological evidence still visible from the earliest times such as the footings of pre-existing colonial buildings and a variety of everyday objects uncovered by  Casey and Lowe’s meticulous dig. I wondered whether we had lost the context for the earliest land use of the site because it had already been disturbed? I guess that the most recent dig will be the last opportunity to research Parramatta’s past from the Centenary Square site because once the underground car park has been excavated – the existing layers of history in the substrate will be lost.

 

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That isn’t really why I was writing the blog post. The point I was actually thinking about after my Centenary Square visit was that if we continue to subdivide Parramatta and other parts of urban Australia into tiny blocks (which seems inevitable), then what happens to the layers underneath? If the colonial subdivisions are double, triple or quadruple the size of the modern land holdings, what will happen to the archaeological material and the context of where that material is located below the surface? The size of indigenous Australian history layer will be even greater. If an archaeological survey is required by  a developer before an underground car park is excavated, are we only getting part of the story from the archaeological report? Are we looking at half a house, quarter of a hotel or a miniscule portion of a larger landholding such as market gardens, farm, factory or place of indigenous significance? Considering that the layers of earth below the surface can reveal so much about our past  and that suburbs like Parramatta are a significant part of the history of Australia, I really hope that some very important person with vision or the Office of Heritage and Environment or local council responsible has all this in hand before the evidence and context is destroyed for all time.

P.S. After I posted this I noticed some posts by @gmlheritage on Instagram showing items from the archaeological dig of 200 George Street, Sydney, reinterpreted for use in the foyer of Mirvac’s new headquarters. Great to see the objects used along with some explanatory text about the site’s history supported by a wonderful artwork by Judy Watson on display in the public foyer instead of being archived in boxes and stored out of sight.