Relics tell a tale in the Touring the Past exhibition

A SMALL exhibition at the University of Sydney's Macleay Museum is dedicated to the way Australians have memorialised their past.

A Dog on the Tuckerbox souvenir cup and saucer.

AT the outset of his novella A True Story, the second-century Greco-Syrian satirist and essayist Lucian discusses the beneficial effects of reading fiction and then informs us that the only true thing about the story we are about to enjoy is his assurance that it is all lies. What follows is an extraordinary series of adventures that includes a visit to the moon and a war between its inhabitants (ruled by Endymion) and those of the sun (ruled by Phaethon) over the question of colonising the Morning Star.

But the story begins with our hero and his friends sailing out of the Strait of Gibraltar, or the Pillars of Heracles as they were known to the Greeks, and into the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean - a voyage not evoked in literature again until Dante's relation of the last voyage of Ulysses, and not actually realised until Columbus, almost 200 years after Dante.

After a long and difficult voyage, they arrive at an island and discover an inscription informing them this was as far as Heracles and Dionysus reached on their own earlier mythical exploration of the West. The inscription is worn and overgrown, but it stands as testimony to a deep instinct to mark boundaries, milestones and significant locations, and to leave messages about our achievement for those who come after us.

When the west coast of Australia was discovered and mapped by Dutch sailors on their way to the East Indies, but sailing at higher latitudes in search of the more favourable winds, it must have seemed at least as strange as Lucian's fictional island. Here, after all, was a part of the long-postulated Great South Land and yet it seemed as barren and unpromising as could be imagined.

All the same, the instinct to mark the first arrival at a distant and otherwise unknown place led Dirk Hartog, in 1616, to inscribe a pewter plate with a record of his visit and nail it to a post overlooking Shark Bay. Three generations or so later, in 1697, another Dutch captain, Willem de Vlamingh, arrived at the same spot and found the plate, exactly as Lucian's characters found the Heraclean inscription. Vlamingh sent the original back to Amsterdam, but copied its inscription on to a new plate, adding his own relation, and nailed up the new composite memorial.

A replica of the second plate is but one of the artefacts - although among the richest and most evocative - in a small but thought-provoking exhibition at the University of Sydney's Macleay Museum, dedicated to the way Australians have looked back on and memorialised aspects of our own past, often surprisingly soon after the events.

A word should be said about the Macleay, which is not very far from the other two university museums that have been discussed from time to time in this column, the University Art Museum and the Nicholson. Named after the owner of Elizabeth Bay House and one of Australia's greatest naturalists, it was originally a museum of entomology and was designed as a fireproof building, since dried insect specimens are highly flammable.

Unfortunately, this purpose-built structure was soon invaded by a shanty-like proliferation of classrooms and offices, and the museum was relegated to the attic, where it is still to be found today, although there are plans to restore it to its original state. But even in its cramped quarters, the Macleay's stuffed animals and specimens in bottles convey something of the wonder of the old-fashioned natural history museum, too often lost in the tinny interactive displays that have taken over bigger institutions in the past few decades.

It is in the middle of its permanent collections that a space has been opened for Touring the Past, which follows a roughly chronological pathway that also takes us through a series of successive themes. Thus after the Dutch plate already mentioned, there is a cluster of material relating to Captain Cook, who has always held a singular place in the national imagination.

It appears that a tree to which Cook tied up the Endeavour when it was beached for repairs in 1770 subsequently became first an attraction for visitors and then a kind of sacred site. The river was named for the ship and the location was called Cooktown. After the tree eventually died, fragments of its timber took on the quality of holy relics, inevitably recalling the cult that surrounded fragments of the true cross in the Middle Ages. Several such fragments are displayed in a glass case.

To a lesser extent, similar associations attached to memorials that marked the points of arrival or departure of the internal explorers who opened up new areas of the continent, like the Explorers Tree at Katoomba, at the point reached by Gregory Blaxland, William Lawson and William Wentworth in their first attempt to cross the Blue Mountains in 1813. Particularly poignant, of course, are monuments to explorers who perished in their journeys.

An interesting category of memorials - represented here in photographs - concerns the Aborigines. Examples include a cairn dedicated to the exploration of Western Australia, but which also marks the grave of an Aboriginal leader in the area. Another monument, set up in Fremantle in 1913, commemorated explorers killed by "treacherous natives"; later in the century, in 1994, a second inscription was added beneath, declaring that the original one represented only the viewpoint of the white settlers and not that of the indigenous inhabitants.

Another important category of materials deals with convicts. Attitudes to these early and involuntary settlers have always been complex, partly depending on whether one was related to them, although this was generally something to be brushed under the carpet until recent decades.

From early in the colony there was a movement to abolish transportation and to stop filling Sydney with undesirable types; and there was much debate about whether the stain of bad blood would persist in the later development of an Australian people. As has been mentioned before, this anxiety helps to explain our national preoccupations both with education and with sporting prowess.

In any case, what is remarkable is how soon after the reality disappeared the myth began to flourish and inspire a kind of prurient fascination. Thus no sooner had the Port Arthur jail in Tasmania closed than it began to attract visitors. The government considered demolishing it to obliterate the memory of a shameful past but found it was too popular as a destination for tourists. And then a succession of bushfires turned the church into a picturesque gothic ruin, so the site only became more romantically sinister.

Meanwhile, a group of enterprising businessmen went further and constructed their own convict ship as a floating museum. Originally a merchantman, the Success had been purchased by the Victorian government to use as a floating jail but had never been strictly a convict ship; it had then spent decades as a floating warehouse, so the supposedly authentic convict ship opened to the public in 1891, as so often in these cases, was a simulacrum rather than the real thing.

Nonetheless, filled with chains and leg-irons and other terrifying evocations of the hardships of convict life, the ship was enormously popular and was apparently Australia's first important commercial tourist attraction. There were waxwork figures - Madame Tussauds museum had been popular in London since its inauguration in 1835 - re-enactments of convict life, which were no doubt highly melodramatic, and even a replica of Ned Kelly's armour. There were also printed guides and souvenir booklets, several of which are included in the exhibition.

The Success had an extraordinarily chequered career; it was scuttled by its owners after the first season in Sydney proved a failure, but was taken over by new entrepreneurs, refitted, and went on to travel around Australia and even internationally. It sailed to England in the mid-1890s, promoting an image of Australia that our incipient commonwealth government wanted to put firmly behind us, and then in 1912 it went to America to spend the remaining years before World War I doing the same thing there; many years later, it met a sad end, burned at moorings in Lake Erie, Ohio, in 1946.

The presence of Kelly's armour on the Success represents a conflation of unrelated elements typical of the way the tourist business turns history into kitsch.

Kelly wasn't a convict (although his father was), but his representation as a sort of Robin Hood is evidence of the same elements in the Australian character that make us sympathise with the convicts and insist on believing that most of them were unfairly treated by the courts of their times.

Courts in England did hand down harsh penalties for relatively small crimes in those days, but transportation, as it has been pointed out, was the humane alternative to the death penalty and in practice it offered most of those who came to Australia the chance for rehabilitation - unlike incarceration today. But it is a denial of reality to ignore the likelihood that many convicts were thoroughly unpleasant types.

Perhaps the most striking thing about the exhibition, again, is how early we began to conceive a nostalgia for our past. The word itself comes from two Greek roots, nostos, meaning homecoming, and algos, meaning pain; thus nostalgia is the pain of longing for home. This feeling could quite reasonably be felt for ancestral homelands in the British Isles or elsewhere, but it is more surprising to discover the spontaneous appearance of what we could call an internal nostalgia.

From the end of the 19th century, artists start to discover the charm of old and dilapidated parts of our cities, such as the Rocks area in Sydney, or the elegance of our Georgian architecture.

But more curious, and more specifically Australian, is the nostalgia for small and unremarkable regional towns, evident in the proliferation of "back to" festivals held from the 1920s. It was, for example, as part of the Back to Gundagai festival in 1932 that the Dog on the Tuckerbox monument was unveiled.

In part this phenomenon must reflect the urbanisation of Australia; people who by now lived in Sydney or Melbourne felt a sentimental longing for the town in which they had grown up or in which their parents had lived. The fact that their families had probably not lived there for more than a couple of generations only made the attachment more poignant: with so little depth of memory in this land, none of what there was could be suffered to evaporate into the emptiness.

Touring the Past: Tourism and History in Australia 
Macleay Museum, University of Sydney, to February 15