Brian Crozier and Helen Gregory

Creating 'A Lot On Her Hands'

'A lot on her hands - the history of Australian working women' is an exhibition, one of 43 major projects funded through the Queensland Heritage Trails Network program with support from the Centenary of Federation initiative. The Network aimed to create a series of heritage attractions throughout Queensland as a means of preserving and promoting the State's natural, indigenous and cultural heritage and developing educational resources, creating jobs, stimulating development and fostering tourism. This article explores the experience of developing an historical statement in this format, in this context and under the pressures of a consultancy of this kind. It examines the effect of the team approach to projects such as this, which are the cumulative result not only of researchers, but also of designers and preparators. It also discusses the nature of historical argument in the museum context, arguing that the task here is more about evoking the nature of experience than advancing an explanation of historical events and processes. The article notes also that the statements in an exhibition are non-linear and only partly verbal in nature; that this exhibition was also influenced by its setting and the celebratory nature of its sponsorship; and that the aim of the researcher and curator to focus on the particularity of experience of a range of individuals was, in the event, only partly achieved in the final product.

Statements in history, like other statements, are shaped by the medium in which they are made, by their anticipated audience and by the nature of the process by which they are produced. This article is about the development of an exhibition at the Australian Workers Heritage Centre at Barcaldine in Queensland on the history of Australian working women. Opened in June 2002 in the old Barcaldine Primary School building, the exhibition was produced for the Australian Workers Heritage Centre, of which the primary school building now forms part. The project was researched by Helen Gregory, an independent consultant historian, and curated by Brian Crozier, Senior Curator of Social History at the Queensland Museum. The exhibition was designed, constructed and installed by Queensland Museum staff. The entire project was completed in just seven months. The story of the development of the exhibition demonstrates a number of things about the way in which the content of such exhibitions is produced, and therefore about the nature of historical statements in the exhibition format, and about the exhibition process itself. The fact that the exhibition was about the history of working women in Australia also had an impact on the nature of the argument made in it.

Historians in universities, and consulting historians, understand the nature of the medium in which they work. There are well-established ground rules, conventions and professional standards familiar to generations of students, which govern the production of written history for a primarily academic audience. Likewise, historians reincarnated as curators work in a field which has a well developed literature on the nature of exhibitions as a distinctive form of communication, both conceptual and in terms of the process of exhibition development.¹ Curators provide the key concepts embodied in exhibitions, and are responsible for the information explicitly provided and the objects which are displayed, but exhibitions are produced by teams, which gives their authorship a certain anonymity. Exhibitions are also part of an official culture, which speaks directly to the general public. In doing so, they command a certain authority. As Gaynor Kavanagh points out:

Museums are part of a set of official apparatus that people use to find information. Histories in museums have automatic credibility as a result. This equips museums with considerable power and influence on how the past should be remembered and understood. Where, for example, museum histories discriminate and omit, they further legitimize discrimination and omission. Where they commemorate and celebrate, they permit commemoration and celebration. Where they question and consider, they promote questioning and consideration.²

The fact that museum exhibitions normally have no acknowledged author with whom to dispute an argument or interpretation assists this process.

Museum historians also work in a different environment from their academic or consulting colleagues. These differences affect the questions with which museum historians deal, the nature of historical production in museums, the nature of the museum audience, and of the exhibition medium.

In museum exhibitions the questions are different from those explored by text-based historians. Museums deal with objects. Ideally the purpose of historical interpretation in museums is to define a context for each object or group of objects. The relevance of this to larger, document-oriented, questions may be incidental. A 1930s gas stove may or may not tell you much about the Great Depression, but if its provenance is available it may well tell you a lot about the person who owned it. In an exhibition, it and its owner might then become a link between the viewer and the past from which it came. Museum history has a lot to do with forging this connection between the present and the past, between people now and people then, in a way that has cultural meaning, meaning that may not have much to do with explanation as historians normally understand the term. Objects like the 1930s gas stove often speak to us more about the nature of experience than about the explanation of historical events and processes. Since the pasts with which exhibitions deal often extend well beyond memory, the conversation between history and memory in museums is essentially about the quality of experience, about not only what happened but what it was like. The role of the historian in this context is, in effect, to extend our consciousness of the past by incorporating a sense of past experience in present memory, thereby making it an active part of our contemporary cultural imagination.

In exhibition production, curators are not individual operators, but are part of a cross-disciplinary team, including researchers, designers, preparators, education staff, marketing staff and so on. This has an effect on the concept of authorship. Since an exhibition communicates through design as well as through the words on the panels, attribution of responsibility for the whole package may be difficult, and an exhibition may look different from the vision of any one team member. It may be based on a curator's concept and an historian's research, but the final result is the product of a team.

Museum audiences are also different, at least from the specialist audiences often assumed for academic history. They may not know much about post-modernism or semiotics, but as human beings they know something about the fundamental facts of our human life, of love and pain and death. In this way, the evocation of the past has at least as much cultural resonance as explanations of past events. A good museum exhibition will therefore communicate, not only historical interpretation, but also an enactment of past experience.

The exhibition medium is non-linear: that is, museum visitors do not expect that ideas will be communicated in the exhibition in a particular sequence, since they will more often than not move in different ways around the exhibition. An exhibition is also only partly verbal in content: as well as labels there are objects, images, and sounds. The information these communicate has to do with the recreation of environment and the evocation of ambient mood, which are, in fact, part of the argument being advanced by the exhibition. Indeed, the placement of the visitor within an environment is an important part of exhibition craft, and an important part of the evocation of past experience.

'A lot on her hands' is the final title of an exhibition of which the working title was 'The history of Australian working women.' It was commissioned by the Australian Workers' Heritage Centre at Barcaldine, which was itself established to recognise Barcaldine's status as a sacred site in Australian labour history, the focus of the Shearers' Strike in the 1890s, and thence as the birthplace of the Australian political labour movement. As summarised on its website, the Centre

plays a key role in defining our national character ... it is a major outback heritage attraction, where visitors can experience the hardships and the victories of the workers who helped build this nation.³

'A lot on her hands' was the first stage of the Centre's Women in Australia's Working History project which was predicated by the Centre on the concept that

Women are the unsung heroes of Australian working life. The Working Women project seeks to redress the imbalance in our history, and to celebrate the lives, work and contributions of women past and present who have helped build our nation.⁴

Funding for the exhibition was provided by a major Centenary of Federation program in Queensland, the Queensland Heritage Trails Network, which through its projects aimed to bring 'to life stories, legends, evidence of incredible feats, epic events in history, rich landscapes, colourful tales and characters that have shaped Queensland.'⁵ Therefore, while the exhibition was produced by a state museum, with the historical underpinnings researched by a consulting historian, the project had, at least for its sponsors, a more overtly celebratory and didactic purpose than is normal for museum exhibitions. Certainly, the producers needed to be conscious of the exhibition's setting and how it would be read in the context of the Centre as a whole.

Unusually, the exhibition was commissioned in three parts — the research and concept development for which we were responsible was one part, the design of the exhibition was the second, and the construction and installation were a third.

The nature of the production was to some extent conditioned by circumstances. The source of the commission and the venue for the exhibition made it essential that the story of Australia's working women be placed within the rhetorical framework of the kind of labour history represented at the Australian Workers' Heritage Centre. And because of the unusual commissioning strategy it was a project which essentially had no leaders — like the shearers we proceeded by pure democracy. Unlike the shearers we reached a conclusion with which we were more or less satisfied, with some qualifications.

This project had had a somewhat difficult past before we came to it, which meant that it had to be achieved in a very short time frame. There were just seven months in which to complete it, including research, writing a substantial essay on the history of Australia's working women, design, construction and installation. And it had to be done in a school, the old Barcaldine State Primary school in western Queensland, a fine example of 1960s school architecture, in very good condition, but not specifically designed for this purpose. Nonetheless, it was important that the appearance of the finished exhibition was consistent with this setting. The exhibition also had to be researched, developed, designed and built in Brisbane, for installation in Barcaldine, more than 1,000 kilometres away.

General view of the 'A lot on her hands' exhibition in the old Barcaldine Primary School.
The exhibition is in a space created by merging four classrooms.
Photo: Brian Crozier

The curatorial plan was conceived in full awareness of the demands for celebration and didactic instruction implicit in the exhibition's placement at the Australian Workers Heritage Centre and in the nature of its funding. The aim for the exhibition was, however, to avoid rhetoric and generalisation, and to focus on the experience of a range of individuals, who included not only 'heroes' but also a number of people representative of ordinary life, dotted across the time scale of Australia's post-settlement history. Our thinking was driven by a sense that, since the exhibition environment itself is an experience, the exhibition communicates not only information and interpretation but a sense of past experience as well. The enterprise was, therefore, not only about presenting an argument, but also about presenting an experience (the nature of the experience presented was itself an argument, of course, though most people might not recognise it as such.)

We did set out to overtly present one argument. This was the proposition, at last well recognised in the feminist discourse, that work should not be fashioned into the narrow paradigm whereby remuneration must be paid in order for the endeavour to be called 'work'. Twenty years ago, McMurchy, Oliver and Thornley's useful study made the point that

We will only be able to arrive at more accurate and useful descriptions of economic life once women's work, paid or unpaid, is viewed as central to our analysis and not peripheral.⁶

The idea that work properly occurs only in the framework of wages and conditions, rather than in the sphere of voluntarism or the domestic realm was an inevitable product of early feminism, with its 'she's as good as he' drivers. It also accommodated quantification urges among historians — everything from exports to salaries was thought to be more comprehensible if assigned a dollar value.

Our success in presenting the experience of women and work as an argument was limited by the fact that we saw the exhibition as finally about a number of personal stories rather than objects. The key to the production was not so much a collection of objects to be interpreted, or environments recreating personal experience — though to some extent it was both — but an accumulation of personal stories, an aggregation of personal experiences over time, told in words. The choice of women determined the selection of objects and other visual media. In the end, therefore, the concept was a verbal one — personal experiences defined in words and illustrated by photographs and objects. Typically, therefore, the exhibition was based around modules in which the story of an individual was told in a text panel with illustration both by images and by iconic objects that reified the experience thus narrated. The section on Grace Munro, for example, was labelled:

Grace Munro

Self help for country women

Grace Munro was a campaigner for rural women and a founder of the Country Women's Association.
Grace worked to improve the lives of rural women and communities through better health services, recognition of women in government planning, and self help. Among other achievements, in April 1922 she became the first President of the Country Women's Association, when the CWA was formed at a conference she had organised on conditions for rural women. The Queensland CWA was formed in August 1922. The establishment of the CWA followed the formation of similar organisations, known as Women's Institutes, in Canada and the UK. By 1926, when Grace stepped down, the CWA had 4500 members. She died in 1964.

Illustrations included a portrait and a photograph of an early Country Women's Association hall. Objects used were a CWA cookbook and a set of baby scales

Grace Munro — one of the personal stories which make up the 'A lot on her hands' exhibition
Photo: Brian Crozier

Similarly, the career of the Queensland entomologist E.N. (Pat) Marks was illustrated by a portrait and a photograph of her in the field, along with two iconic objects — her old Army soup ladle with which she collected mosquito larvae, and her field microscope. By contrast, the story of former Victorian premier Joan Kirner was illustrated by a portrait, a poster of her as rock star (recalling her well known performance on television), and political cartoons. The objects chosen were symbolic — they included a blowtorch with the following label:

Political Blow torch

Politics can be a challenging career, with plenty of contests between Governments and their opposition. Joan Kirner became well known for her determination to apply a blowtorch to her opponents.

A miniature wombat (exemplifying Ms Kirner's collecting interest) and a selection of materials from Emily's List, an organisation she founded to support women in politics, completed the object list. These groupings of objects, photographs and text presented our analysis of the constant interweaving of work with life in women's experiences as stories, a way of encouraging museum visitors to enter others' lives with imagination and empathy, curiosity and respect.⁷

The modular format also recognised the non-linear nature of the visitor experience in exhibitions. Unless the design gives them no choice, visitors explore exhibitions by different routes, so it is hard to develop a sequential argument in these settings. A cumulative, modular format recognised this and freed visitors to find their own ways through the exhibition. Written history usually sits more comfortably within a linear framework, rather than the kaleidoscopic view which is the museum exhibition's particular province. However, the tumbling ideas of the kaleidoscope were particularly suited to bringing out the richness of the concept that work in women's lives is multi-faceted and many dimensional. By focussing on individual stories and experiences, it was possible to take visitors on excursions around the concept that people cannot be conceptualised or portrayed in terms of their occupations, irrespective of the route any one visitor chooses to take through the exhibition.

To this extent the intention of the curatorial team was successfully achieved — the exhibition comprises a range of different stories about specific women, both the famous and the unknown. Taken together they comprise a cross section of Australian female experience. No conclusions were drawn, but the balance of stories was a careful one. The impact of the exhibition was thus intended to be multi-faceted and cumulative, and based in the experience of real women and real experience.

In the event, the design concept both supported and undercut this intention. As indicated above, the venue for the exhibition was a 1960s school. The building was essentially unchanged and its identity was unmistakable. The exhibition was placed in four classrooms opened up to form a single space. The design challenge was to use the building to support the exhibition rather than create a conflict between the building's clear earlier use and the purpose to which it was now being put. The challenge was met by the use of school desks as the basis for the modules based on individual women. The visual impact of the exhibition therefore included school desks as a recurrent idea, and these created a unity between the perceived original usage of the building and its new role as exhibition space.

'Desks' like this were the primary modular unit of the 'A lot on her hands' exhibition and established a link between the exhibition and the former use of the exhibition space as a school.
Photo: Brian Crozier

At the same time, the short time available for the development of the exhibition, and the lack of a project manager, meant that different developmental stages, which would normally have proceeded in sequence, happened simultaneously. Consequently, there was less discussion than might normally be the case with a project of this sort. These circumstances led to the development of rather more generic elements than the curatorial team had expected to see. The entry to the exhibition featured generic women from different eras, at particular moments in their lives, commenting on their experience. A present day Year 12 Barcaldine school girl was used as a commentator throughout the exhibition, appearing initially as an anonymous figure, whose identity was revealed later in the presentation. In design terms, these ideas created a certain symmetry, but one which was at odds with the curatorial concept, based as that was, not on generic imagery, but on the accumulation of real experience.⁸

The development of a museum exhibition is in a way a kind of performance — it depends on the successful completion of a sequence of tasks and is based on concepts and ideas which are established early in the process and which have a pervasive effect on the end result. Exhibitions are therefore shaped not only by the research and ideas which go into them but also by the nature of the interactions which take place during their development. As participants in the performance, we can look back and draw conclusions from how the performance was played out and relate that to the final product. At the same time, the nature of the historical thinking which we brought to the exhibition is worth exploring as a product in its own right.

As historians, we went at least part of the way to redressing the situation in which — as Janet McCalman puts it — historians have become preoccupied with 'practices, structures, the acts of naming, the archaeology of discourses' and have lost interest in 'dramatised concepts and interpretations, in experience as lived in time'.⁹ Writing women into national and cultural histories has broadened historical dimensions in subject matter, and in opportunities to create 'cultural connection' through stimulation of imagination and memory through presentation of lived experience. Australia has been well served by the work of Miriam Dixson, Anne Summers, Ann Curthoys, Kay Saunders, Mary Murnane, M. McMurchy and a plethora of others who have rescued women's place from the ignominy of a 'great forgetting'. As the American historian, Gerda Lerner, puts it, 'all in all, the vitality of Women's History as a field, and its ability to critique and constructively challenge established theory, has been proven over and over again'.¹⁰ It certainly challenges the parameters of labour history.

An appropriate understanding of the meaning of women's work and the economic and political positioning of women's history in general is one such challenge to established theory. In the economic and political context, 'work' has generally been fashioned into a narrow paradigm — some kind of productive endeavour for which remuneration is paid. This paradigm has been gradually widened in recent decades in general discourse to include volunteer work and everyday tasks. Many would now recognise that work is what you do, not just what you get paid for. However, the broader paradigm is not yet fully realised in either the historical or economic literature. In fact, in Australia and overseas, women's history is generally placed in that serviceable carry-all, 'Social History'. However, a more realistic view places women's history in a wider basket — economic and political history — as well as social history.

The 'women's work' framework is well suited to interpretation in a museum setting, which is essentially about experience, rather than explanation. Work is very much part of women's whole life experience. The idea of work as conducted in one place, away from either the domestic or leisure setting, is a male construct. This separation is foreign to women's experience. The museum format also puts vitality into history to create an active interaction between audience and practitioner which should drive the cultural process.¹¹

Museums are also about education, something of a double entendre in this particular exhibition. Part of women's work is inevitably educational in the broadest sense — the education of children, of other women, of fellow workers, and of men. This exhibition was about that. It was also about educating and informing a wider public through the interpretation of the experience of the women we featured. However, this didactic purpose was secondary to the essential purpose of enlivening imagination and emotional response through the experience of other lives. As Lerner says,

A meaningful connection to the past demands, above all, active engagement. It demands imagination and empathy, so we can fathom worlds unlike our own, contexts far from those we know, ways of thinking and feeling that are alien to us. We must enter past worlds with curiosity and respect.¹²

The complex intertwining of work in the entirety of women's lives suggested the essential approach to the exhibition. There were to be no stereotypes, no archetypal 'Rosie the riveter' or 'Daisy the domestic'. The approach sought deliberately to tell a series of stories to present the history of Australia's working women cumulatively across class, time and space.

This iconoclastic approach also meant a conscious attempt to avoid another paradigm — the 'famous woman' who almost rivals the 'famous man' in distorting historical experience. Historians have generally avoided the trap of concentrating on formulaic 'women who win' but this is not always easily done in the context of work. As mentioned previously, work is often constructed to mean material success or achievement of more elevated status. However, to be faithful to the comprehensive view, it was impossible to ignore women who achieved material success or fame, some of whom became a kind of feminist 'ruling elite'. Emma Miller is a case in point.

'Mother' Miller

Grand old woman of Queensland labour

Emma Miller, trade unionist, advocate for equal pay, anti-conscriptionist — so feisty she once stuck her hat pin into the Police Commissioner's horse during a police charge on demonstrators during a general strike — became so well loved that a bust, funded by public subscription after her death, still sits in Trades Hall in Brisbane.

Nevertheless, class is a troubled concept in the history of women's work. Until very recent decades, expectations of women subsumed class divisions in a global prescription that the primary female role was care of home and family, and for the better placed, charitable endeavours for the less fortunate. None of this was considered to be 'work'. Yet these expectations are often illusory, and the effect of present work on the future is not always discernible, as the story of Mary Barry demonstrates:

Mary Barry

Goats produced education

Mary Barry, isolated on remote North Queensland goldfields early in the twentieth century with a charmingly profligate husband and eleven children, raised the money to educate her brood to tertiary level from the proceeds of her goat herds — meat, milk and skins — turning a familiar domestic occupation into a profitable business.

Certainly, upper-class women and many in the middle class were able to delegate much domestic work to servants, and thus one of many contradictions in the history of women's work arises. Domestic responsibility and child-rearing were, on the one hand, not regarded as being 'work'; yet on the other, were among the few roles considered appropriate for women who needed to work for wages. 'Need to work' is another judgement, which blurs our usual understanding of class. What of the affluent women who wished to use their brains and to contribute to society?

Contradiction was also apparent in the circumstances of those who 'needed to work'. The usual advocates of the working class, the unions, were absent from duty. Indeed, the unions ignored domestic work, and took only a passing interest in the abuse of all union principles represented by piecework. This reinforced the status quo, ensuring that women's wages were kept low and that avenues of opportunity were closed to them. But there are contradictory issues to be considered, too, when representing the role of piecework. The exhibition featured the business enterprise of Mary Sutherland, in which piecework is an essential part, as well as providing a convenient money earner for rural women.

Mary Sutherland

Woolly Teddies in Tambo

In 1993, after the last prolonged drought when sheep were being shot all over Australia, Mary Sutherland and two friends started a business turning wool into Teddy Bears, dressed in Akubra hats and Drizabone coats. The business grew rapidly. Various parts of the manufacture are carried out in women's homes all over the Tambo district, providing women who cannot easily leave their farms with an income. Tambo Teddies has become an export success, and a major tourist attraction.

Presenting such contradictions was only one of our methodological and design challenges.

It was not easy to vanquish completely the historian's passion for organisation. A 30,000-word essay was part of the commission and the brief. The essay on the history of Australia's Working Women was to underpin the exhibition, and mould the Workers' Heritage Centre's development of future exhibitions drawing out more detail on women's work. It was not intended as an original contribution to women's studies. Its purpose was to inform the design team and, through them, depict experiences of work in order to suggest questions in the minds of the audience. The essay is, therefore, a 'survey' of existing scholarship to set women's working experiences in the context of Australia's socio-political history.

In keeping with the celebratory terms of the brief, four apparently simplistic and ahistorical thematic areas — striving and achieving; producing and making; caring and communicating — were selected to act as umbrellas under which to place carefully chosen individual women's stories. The deliberate layering of historical interpretation emerges in the selection of the women, the absolutely ordinary and unknown as well as the more famous and celebrated, while the concentration on the specific rather than the generic in the accounts offered of them balances the celebratory tone of the themes as defined. It was a requirement of the brief that Queensland be emphasised in the choice of women featured in the exhibition, to reflect the origins of the majority of visitors. Apart from this the women were chosen to prompt more familiar historical questions in the minds of the audience and to introduce debates on gendered workplaces, inequality of opportunity, the suppression of Aboriginal women by the dominant white socio-political culture, and the place of women in the professions and the rural economy. An apparent misplacement of some women in their theme group was intentional to facilitate the exhibition's aim of raising questions and challenging accepted views.

Firstly, striving and achieving. The notion behind the choice of this thematic term was to interpret an idea which, although almost a cliché, remains true — women endeavouring to improve the conditions, and communities, in which they live, and to ensure a better future for their children and the generations which succeed them. There are many arenas of struggle — from factories to the maze of government policies, from small businesses to the parliament, from sporting contests to community engagement — all set against the unending battle to fit all into one day, or one lifetime. Sharan Burrow, President of the ACTU, and Vicki Wilson, champion netballer, are two of the women featured in this group.

Secondly, producing and making. Workers make and produce a limitless variety of goods and services — agricultural produce for sale, horticultural produce for the family table, music for the pleasure of others, objects for consumption or admiration, publications for edification or amusement. The idea was to demonstrate that makers and producers can be found in the largest factories, or the smallest houses, in parliaments, or standing at easels, in boardrooms, or working in laboratories, at Saturday morning street stalls, in saleyards and kitchens. The stories of poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal and Mary Sutherland (described above), who began a booming rural business during a drought, indicate the breadth of this idea.

Thirdly, caring. The idea informing this choice was to suggest to audiences, unfamiliar with recent scholarship, that 'care' is not women's lot in life; it is the work of nurses and unionists, publicans and hostesses, nuns and military officers, mothers and conservationists, scientists and suffragettes, volunteers and veterinary surgeons. Dr Pat Marks, the entomologist, was an iconoclastic choice to demonstrate the breadth of 'care'

Lastly, communicating. Communication adopts many guises in the world of work. Stories are told in many ways, and messages are variously transmitted. The communicators' media include paintings and managerial memos, lessons, lectures and legal arguments, poetry and telephone calls. Communicators keep social networks vibrant, ensure that ideas are heard and allowed to stimulate others, and enable arguments. Joan Kirner and the teacher, Bid O'Sullivan, were placed in the communicating group.

Ruth Hegarty, chosen as one of the women under the 'caring' umbrella, is an Aboriginal writer and worker for reconciliation. She is also a former domestic servant, a victim of 'missionisation', a member of the stolen generation, a mother, a grandmother and a committed member of her local church community. Louisa Lawson, in the 'striving' group was a piece-worker, writer, newspaper publisher, campaigner for women worker's against the male Printers' Union, and, only incidentally, the mother of Henry.

As much as possible, the exhibition was designed to allow the 25 women to speak for themselves. They are women of many cultures and circumstances, living in tiny towns, large cities or places undefined by geographic location, of many interests and enthusiasms, and various prejudices and passions.

There are risks in all exhibitions. Much must be left to the visitors' imaginations, perceptions, inherent biases and experience, and their own ways of processing images, sounds and objects to construct stories. However, we were content to leave the results and impacts of our work in the minds and hearts of others, trusting with Gerda Lerner, that:

All human beings are practicing historians. As we go through life we present ourselves to others through our life story; as we grow and mature we change that story through different interpretations and different emphasis. We stress different events as having been decisive at different times in our life history and, as we do so, we give those events new meanings. People do not think of this as 'doing history'; they engage in it often without special awareness. We live our lives; we tell our stories. It is as natural as breathing.¹³

Endnotes

^1.� See for example: E.P. Alexander, Museums in Motion: an Introduction to the History and Functions of Museums, AASLH Press, Nashville, 1979; Sheldon Annis, 'The Museum as Staging Ground for Symbolic Action', in Gaynor Kavanagh (ed.), Museum Provision and Professionalism, Routledge, London, 1994; M.G. Belcher, Exhibitions in Museums, Smithsonian Institute Press, Washington DC, 1991; L. Ferguson, C. Maclulich, and L. Ravelli, Meanings and Messages: Language Guidelines for Museum Exhibitions, Australian Museum, Sydney, 1995; I. Hodder, 'The Contextual Analysis of Symbolic Meanings', in S. Pearce (ed.), Interpreting Objects and Collections, Routledge, London, 1994; I. Karp and S.D. Lavine (eds), Exhibiting Cultures: the Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington DC, 1991; D. Miller, 'Things Ain't What They Used To Be', and Susan Pearce, 'Behavioural Interaction with Objects', in Susan Pearce (ed.), Interpreting Objects and Collections, Routledge, London, 1994.

^2.� Gaynor Kavanagh, History Curatorship, Leicester University Press, Leicester, 1990, p. 127.

^3.�http://awhc.alp.org.au/about.htm

^4.�http://awhc.alp.org.au/wiawh.htm

^5.�http://www.heritagetrails.qld.gov.au/network.html

^6.� M. McMurchy, M. Oliver, J. Thornley, For Love or Money: A Pictorial History of Women and Work in Australia, Penguin, Melbourne, 1983, p. 4.

^7.� Gerda Lerner, Why History Matters: Life and Thought, Oxford University Press, New York, 1997, p. xii

^8.� See Janet McCalman, 'Histories and Fictions: Reclaiming the Narrative', Australian Historical Association Bulletin, no. 84, June 1997, p. 32, for the need to replace, or at least modify, historians' recent preoccupation with 'practices, structures, the acts of naming, the archaeology of discourses' with 'dramatised concepts and interpretations, in experience as lived in time'.

^9.�Ibid.

^10.� Lerner, Why History Matters, p. xii.

^11.� Brian Crozier, 'Historical Sensibility', Australian Historical Association Bulletin, no. 91, December 2000.

^12.� Lerner, Why History Matters, p. 4.

^13.�Ibid., p. 199.

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