Tasmania has more than one world class museum. Readers will know about the Mona miracle so there’s no need to go into that, except to say its creator, David Walsh, has recalled spending many long hours as a child in our state museum, the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, or TMAG.
Dating back to the early 1840s, this museum is the country’s second oldest, after Sydney’s Australian Museum. It is special in another way. Unlike all other states Tasmania has its scientific, historical and art collections integrated in the one institution.
And now, through no fault of its own, TMAG is in trouble.
Walsh’s TMAG story didn’t end in childhood. In 2006, looking around Australia for a designer who could implement his unique, theatrical vision, he found the creative talent he wanted right here, in TMAG’s own exhibition designer Adrian Spinks.
This story is personal. In 1980 I sat alongside TMAG’s then-designer Jane Burrell on the panel that picked Adrian to take on the design and production of exhibitions for our state museum.
I’m proud to say we got it right. Adrian was instrumental in TMAG’s metamorphosis from a respectable colonial art and science institution into the cultural hub that it is today with interests and responsibilities covering art and culture, history, science and the natural environment. On his watch and since, TMAG has become one of our state’s crown jewels.
In the early 2000s I had the pleasure of working with Adrian as an adviser for “Islands to Ice”, a new TMAG exhibit about Antarctica and the Southern Ocean. That innovative, immersive exhibition caught the attention of David Walsh as Mona was forming in his mind. He head-hunted Adrian, and the rest is history. Adrian’s illustrious career ended when he retired last July.
TMAG and Mona have played off each other in ways that have immensely enriched Tasmania. The difference is that Mona is an individual’s enterprise while TMAG is a collective one, whose exhibitions and collections are expressions of our community’s life and times.
That story covers two centuries of colonial and post-colonial Tasmania, tens of thousands of years of pre-colonial Lutruwita, and millions of years in which our island’s unique flora, fauna and landforms evolved after its separation from the southern supercontinent, Gondwana.
TMAG’s brief as the state museum is to reflect and enhance our state’s values. Its success is due mainly to a skilled, dedicated staff and the tireless efforts of a large cohort of volunteers, building on a long history of community involvement with the museum’s work.
TMAG exhibitions are a fraction of its functions and responsibilities. Its collections, now around a million items, represent the things that make our island special: its unique geology and and life forms and its human story, including fine and decorative arts, before and after colonisation.
This is a huge responsibility. By law, TMAG is the state repository for the things we choose to keep, a tiny fraction of which is on display. The fruits of nearly two centuries of collecting, housed in purpose-built sites at Rosny and the University of Tasmania, rely on active care and attention. The recent loss of Tungatinah power station shows what can happen when that is withdrawn.
And this has come at a bargain basement price for government. Colin Thomas, chair of the TMAG Foundation, pointed out last week that the government spends nothing on acquiring art and historical artefacts. All of that has come from donations and fundraising.
Now, with state coffers running on empty, rumours are flying that museum jobs are to be cut by nearly a third. The government denies this but has acknowledged “efficiency measures” and voluntary redundancies.
The departmental entity that encompasses TMAG has just been rebranded from Department of State Growth to Building Tasmania. All governments aspire to eternal growth, but in especially constricted times both these names are the ultimate in wishful thinking. Now, to conceal financial problems, the government is cutting off what it sees as low-hanging fruit.
Early this century then-premier Jim Bacon rationalised state funding for a new home for the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra by declaring TSO to be a state icon, on the basis that that a financial bottom line is not the only measure of value. Thanks to that, we still have our orchestra.
Which takes us to the core of the TMAG dilemma. Oscar Wilde wrote that cynics are people who know the price of everything and the value of nothing. Our government of cynics knows nothing about this venerable institution except its budget bottom line.
Desperate to conceal a financial emergency, the government is now playing roulette with things that really matter. The concealment is bad enough, but inflicting this damage on TMAG is unforgivable.