Full steam behind: tragedy as Powerhouse Museum downsizes

Illustration: Eric Lobbecke

On April 25, 1920, as he prepared to return to Britain, Sir Ronald Munro-Ferguson, governor-general of Australia, attended the Anzac Day service in the NSW town of Inverell, before spending the afternoon with more than 20 returned soldiers from the shire who had lost their legs in the war.

Not everyone regretted Munro-Ferguson’s impending departure. Having served as governor-general from the war’s outset, Munro-Ferguson had developed a close — some said too close — relationship with Billy Hughes, strongly supporting the conscription referendums that had torn the country apart.

Adopting the style that was to become the ALP’s hallmark, Melbourne’s Labor Call newspaper described the outgoing governor-general as a “pimp” who “no more understands the Australian than a housefly comprehends the trunk of an elephant”.

But for all the insults hurled at him, Munro-Ferguson passionately believed in Australia’s ability to develop a craftsmanship of its own, putting to good use the beauty of its natural resources.

Now, the stunning works of native timber whose production he encouraged, including several he designed, are likely to be consigned to dusty warehouses, rarely exhibited and even more rarely seen.

Nor will they be the only victims of the Berejiklian government’s determination to close Sydney’s historic Powerhouse Museum, sell its valuable site and transfer its remains to a far smaller building in Parramatta.

Gone will be the Powerhouse’s unique Steam Room, which hosts a priceless 1785 Boulton and Watt steam engine that, along with other equally remarkable engines, is powered by live steam generated in a boiler in the museum’s basement.

Gone too will be the space needed to properly exhibit the museum’s holdings, which stretch from gorgeous glass works to some of the most important artefacts in the history of computing.

And gone, most of all, will be 150 years of Australia’s heritage, with its unbroken link connecting today’s Powerhouse to the great International Exhibition of 1879, which heralded Sydney’s ­emergence as a global city and spawned an integrated cluster of cultural and educational institutions in the area of Sydney that is now Ultimo.

To understand those institutions is to understand the Australia that gave birth to the Anzacs and laid the foundations for our prosperity.

Shaped during the long reign of Queen Victoria, its lodestar was progress — that “something marvellous”, as Henry Gyles Turner called it in 1882, thanks to which the immense difficulties of living in a land of “hardship and weird melancholy” would be “swept away by the impetus of a patriotic ambition that will permeate all classes”.

Underpinning that optimism was the conviction that, in the words of TH Huxley, the “most distinctive feature” of the era was the “wonderful improvement of old technical processes and the invention of new ones, accompanied by the even more extraordinary development of new means of intercommunication” — developments thanks to which “the most salient characteristic of life in this latter portion of the 19th century is its SPEED”.

And if it was taken for granted that progress would dramatically improve the lot of “the skilled mechanic, the labourer and the artisan”, it was because of the certainty, best expressed by John Stuart Mill, that as universal education spread, the modern world would be one in which “human beings are no longer born to their place in life but are free to employ their faculties to achieve the lot which may appear to them most desirable”.

At a time when sermons outsold novels, and in which as intelligent a woman as Queen Victoria could inquire anxiously of her chaplain about whether clothes were worn in heaven, all those beliefs rested on a solid religious foundation.

Nowhere was that truer than in Australia where evangelical Christianity, with its message of equality and progress, was particularly powerful.

“Salvation is offered to you,” an evangelical news sheet proclaimed in 1886. “It is offered to all without distinction, poor as well as rich, beggar as well as king, men of all climes, all complexions, all ages.” And it was not merely devotion that opened the gates of salvation but earnestness, diligence and unceasing self-improvement.

In short, a new, entirely democratic society had arrived, combining a deep-seated belief in the glory of the “Anglo-Saxon race” with an equally fervent orientation to the future.

The institutions formed out of the International Exhibition were intended to epitomise its ethos. They were to be monuments to industry, technology and design; they were to welcome ordinary people, rather than turn them away, as foreign museums routinely did; and especially, they were to educate, not just by facilitating training in the “useful arts” but by demonstrating the splendour of what human aspiration had achieved.

Little wonder a set of “Useful Rules to Keep in Mind” could, without fear of ridicule, remind visitors to “bring a notebook”, “see slowly, observe closely, and think”, “discuss what you’ve seen” and, most importantly, let the museum be “an advanced school of self-instruction”.

For generation after generation, that is precisely what visitors did, as did the students of its sister institution, Sydney Tech, imbibing the supreme virtue of combining a “skilled hand and a cultivated mind”.

None of that is to suggest that we ought to hanker for that era. Nor could anyone claim the museum was always well-funded and well-managed.

But growing out of the same 19th-century soil, it is as much an element of our shared inheritance as the Anzac legacy that we celebrate this weekend. Properly reinvigorated, it could be a landmark rivalling Britain’s Victoria and Albert Museum, showcasing its treasures not merely in Sydney but on the national and international stage.

To allow its building to be destroyed, its collection effectively disbanded and its connection to Ultimo severed would therefore be an appalling waste. Yet even worse than that, it would be the surest sign that we no longer value the culture that helped make this a country worth fighting for.

Unfortunately, that seems set to happen. Unlike the great art museums, the fate of our finest technical museum lacks the glitter to mobilise Sydney’s rich-listers and its cultural elite. As for the political class, its incessant references to innovation all too often disguise indifference to its practical reality.

And ignoring Edmund Burke’s warning that those who do not look back to their ancestry will not look forward to their posterity, the Liberal government is mesmerised by the dollars to be earned from property developers intent on building another Barangaroo.

Closed for the lockdown, the Powerhouse may have seen its last Anzac Day. When the exhibits are dismantled, the steam turned off and the doors permanently shut, a fragment of Australia will be lost forever.