National Museum launches $25m environmental history gallery with help of US design whiz kids Local Projects
The National Museum of Australia turned to American design superstars as it tackled its biggest project – a $25 million environmental gallery.
Few people who have been attacked by a saltwater crocodile and forced into a death roll have lived to tell the tale. Environmental philosopher Val Plumwood did just that, despite being rolled three times by the same croc while she was canoeing in Kakadu National Park in 1985.
Plumwood’s ordeal began with the unsettling sensation she was being watched as she paddled along the East Alligator Lagoon, looking for Aboriginal rock art. In a 1996 essay, Being Prey, the philosopher wrote that while “rounding a bend, I saw ahead of me in midstream what looked like a floating stick … As the current moved me toward it, the stick appeared to develop eyes. A crocodile! … I was close to it now but was not especially afraid.’’
The canoeist’s casual confidence soon turned to terror, however, as the croc repeatedly rammed her canoe, which was almost 5m long. She tried to leap into the branches of a paperbark tree when her tormentor erupted from the water and dragged her down to the muddy depths. The death roll, she wrote, “was a centrifuge of whirling, boiling blackness, which seemed about to tear my limbs from my body, driving water into my bursting lungs’’.
In the extended life and death struggle that followed, the crocodile had her in its jaws and dragged her under twice more. “I did not imagine that I would survive,’’ she wrote. Despite her despair, Plumwood escaped by digging her fingers into a steep mud bank and hauling herself out of danger. She stumbled and crawled along the lagoon’s banks for hours before she was rescued.
The environmental activist passed away in 2008 and now, her “flimsy craft” – a rust-red fibreglass canoe – is on public exhibit, along with a newly-preserved saltwater crocodile and her favourite hiking boots, in the National Museum of Australia’s new Great Southern Land gallery.
Promoted as the museum’s biggest redevelopment since it opened in 2001, this $25m gallery pairs cutting-edge interactive exhibits and Imax-like curved screens with more than 2000 traditional and digital objects. Great Southern Land tells the environmental and geological story of the Australian continent, from deep time before plants and animals existed to Indigenous land management, white settlement and industrialisation, through to the climate change challenges of the present.
Star objects include a huge metallic drill that has bored 1.2km beneath Antarctic ice, life-size replicas of Orca whales, an explorer’s caravan made from a water tank and a fossilised stromatolite, or rock, from the Pilbara that dates back almost three billion years. Taking Review on a tour of this unusually theatrical, multi-sensory gallery, which accounts for roughly one-third of the NMA’s exhibition space, museum director Mat Trinca says: “What we’ve tried to do here is to reinvent the museum gallery for the 21st century.’’
The new gallery has been designed by American firm Local Projects, which earned international acclaim for its work on the National September 11 Memorial and Museum (also known as the 9/11 Memorial and Museum) in New York, which commemorates those killed in the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. Speaking over Zoom from the US, Local Projects founder Jake Barton tells Review he is New York “born and bred” and that the memorial design project, which featured testimonies from more than 417 people about that history-changing attack, “definitely had a lot of personal resonance for me”.
Widely recognised as global rock stars of 21st century museum and gallery design, Local Projects have also worked on Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum and created a 13-metre touchscreen featuring 4000 art works at the renovated Cleveland Museum of Art. They cheekily christened it “please touch the art”. In another design first, they recreated an underground, ancient Roman temple in the form of a hologram at London’s Mithraeum museum.
The Americans were hired to come up with a design for the NMA following an international tender process. Says Trinca: “We were very struck with the breadth of their vision that would make this gallery both aesthetically delightful as well as emotionally affecting. I am so pleased that Local Projects were engaged, because I really think they’ve pushed the museum. In the process we’ve actually established what I think is a new standard about how museums and galleries like this one might be thought about and imagined in the future.’’
That new model, he says, involves “large object arrays with big investments in immersive multimedia showcasing Australian environments and some big set pieces. They’re quite theatrical in nature and of course the story is compelling – it’s the story of our relationship to the Australian landscape.’’
Barton says that when tackling this assignment, his designers asked: “How do we make a new type of experience that can touch on a subject as epic and vast as an entire continent and an entire peoples, in a way that’s personal, engaging, emotional and surprising? … We’re not afraid to make an experience that’s both serious and playful.’’
Back at the new gallery, which officially opens on September 15, Trinca says most of the 2300 or so objects and digital exhibits “haven’t been on public display before’’. He directs Review to a map touch table made from satellite images of Australia – you press on a particular location and sounds of species and phenomena from that area come alive. “I’ll find my house,’’ Trinca volunteers, with the enthusiasm of a nerdy kid let loose in a gaming shop.
To develop the scientific ideas that underpin this sleek yet bustling space, NMA curators collaborated with the Australian Antarctic division, the Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO, as well as Indigenous communities and film companies.
The grave threat Australia faces from climate change is a theme that runs through the new space. A phone box partly melted by the bushfire that devastated the small NSW town, Cobargo, on New Year’s Eve, 2019, resembles a prop from a horror film. Bits of melted plastic and metal dangle from it like dead animal skin. Along with a thick metal pole bent in half by Cyclone Tracy and Plumwood’s canoe, the phone box also reminds us of the often brutal force of nature.
Dr Martha Sear, who led the NMA’s Great Southern Land curatorial team, picks up the extraordinary story of the canoe and Plumwood’s survival. The senior curator says the crocodile attack “substantially changed the way that she thought about herself in relation to nature. … All of those slightly arrogant thoughts that she had had; that she was a human and she was above the rest of nature and superior in so many ways, had got completely dashed by being seen purely as a piece of meat by the crocodile. So for the rest of her career, Val Plumwood wrote and thought really deeply about how that moment had changed her relationship to the rest of the world.’’
Just metres away from Plumwood’s patched canoe, schoolchildren cluster around a cabinet containing a rare specimen of a Tasmanian tiger preserved in wet solution. “There’s not that many that show the complete animal,” Sear says. “This is one of them. It probably dates to the 1920s.’’
As you enter the new gallery, a group of enormous resin bunya trees and a pulsing soundtrack suggest a primeval forest – in fact the trees were cast from contemporary specimens growing in Queensland’s Bunya Mountains. “The cones are as big as a footy and they’re full of these amazing, rich, beautiful tasting nuts.’’ For thousands of years, “this is what drew Aboriginal people to the bunya forests,’’ says Sear.
Artists worked with local Indigenous communities to wrap the trees in silicone and take impressions for the models. “They’re a very ancient form of tree; they go back to when Australia was part of the big Gondwanaland mass. The ancestors of these trees lived there with the dinosaurs,” the curator explains.
Further underlining the complex natural history of our continent is a huge display case featuring 230 different rocks and minerals – their contrasting hues resemble a jewellery shop window, from glittering rhubarb reds and icy whites to bold yellows. Yet they come from one place – Broken Hill in outback NSW. “That’s only a snapshot of what you can get out there,’’ says Sear.
Another key exhibit features life-size models of orca whales dramatically suspended from a high ceiling. They are replicas of three whales that lived near Eden on the NSW South Coast in the early 1900s. In a life-is-stranger-than-fiction story, they helped Indigenous and white whalers hunt humpbacks and other whales.
These days whales are, of course, protected and on a huge curved screen visitors can watch these magnificent mammals floating on their backs and calling to each other with low, plaintive cries. Local Projects say museum-goers are meant to “feel like you’re sitting in the ocean watching these whales go by’’.
There is a strong Indigenous presence throughout the gallery, from an Uluru installation to the recreated bunya forest and a magical-realist film that imagines a river filled with schools of spiralling fish. “You can’t talk about our relationship to the Australian continent without putting the First Peoples at the very forefront of that story,’’ says Trinca. “They know it better than any of us. They’ve been here for 65,000 years at least.’’
As we pass a gigantic lump of coal sourced from a Queensland mine, Trinca says he hopes this object will soon be seen as a historical “relic”. Great Southern Land is not a climate change gallery, he stresses, but aims at reminding visitors of “their love for and their responsibilities towards these landscapes as we confront these very compelling (climate) challenges. In that sense it’s a gallery for these times.’’
The new gallery foregrounds the role of science at the NMA, which is known primarily as a history museum. Its past blockbuster shows have ranged from Ancient Rome and Ancient Greece exhibitions sourced from the British Museum, to a landmark local exhibition, Encounters, on Indigenous-white settler relations since 1770. “Yes, science is present here but so is the way that human beings have lived, related to and operated in Australian landscapes. That’s really the story of this gallery,’’ says Trinca.
Developing the 2500sq m exhibition space during a once-in-a-century pandemic has not been easy. Covid-related restrictions including border closures delayed the official opening of Great Southern Land for more than a year, says Trinca. “In some instances we couldn’t get materials,’’ he explains. “In others we couldn’t get contractors to undertake the building work here. Our own staff were home – we had shutdowns that affected the program. It’s had a big effect.’’
Assistant NMA director Katherine McMahon says the pandemic prevented Local Projects designers from travelling to Australia during construction, meaning they did most of their work remotely, from the US. “It’s funny to look back now and think that we got through it all,’’ she says with a slightly incredulous laugh.
“(Getting) the project from design to implementation has been a slow skid over approximately 2½ years,” agrees New York-based Brook Anderson, who headed the Great Southern Land design team for Local Projects.
This is the firm’s second Australian project – from 2019 to 2020, they gave Sydney’s Hyde Park Barracks, a World Heritage site and colonial history museum, an $18m makeover. Anderson says that given how “we haven’t really been able to be there physically in person”, the NMA’s delivery of the new gallery this month is “quite remarkable’’.
While $25m was spent on the gallery, there were some additional building costs and $8m went towards creating the Tim and Gina Fairfax Discovery Centre, a state-of-the-art indoor play and education space for young children. “We’ve got extraordinary value for money when you look at other comparative developments going on in cultural institutions around the country,” Trinca says pointedly.
Great Southern Land is being road tested by the public before its official opening and the director says the feedback has been “overwhelming. People love the gallery. Actually, I think it’s changed their view of the museum entirely.’’
One objective of the renovation is to make it easier for visitors to navigate the previously maze-like galleries inside the NMA building. A new mezzanine has been built, while original architect Howard Raggatt was re-engaged to design a tinted glass-covered staircase that offers a commanding view of Lake Burley Griffin, bathed in red. “It has become a great selfie spot,” says Trinca.
Great Southern Land’s innovative design, he declares, “is suited to what publics are looking for. If we don’t do this, if we’re not prepared to rethink what the museum is as a form and to rethink the way we do galleries, we’ll lose relevance over the course of this century. We’ve got to build the audiences we want for the future and this gallery’s an investment in that.’’
Local Projects’ Anderson says the NMA have been “incredible collaborators”, while Barton confirms his company is talking to other Australian cultural institutions about future collaborations. “We seek out things that are populist within the context of museums because museums should be popular,’’ he says. “We want people to go! We also believe that museums are a civic good, whether you are in America or in Australia … Doing something that competes actively with people’s phones, whether you are 15 or 50, is really important.’’
The National Museum of Australia’s Great Southern Land gallery officially opens on September 15.
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