Body and Language: Enlivening Exhibitions of Colonial Women in Australian Museums

Abstract

The representation of women in galleries informs perceptions of women in society. Fieldwork conducted in Australian museums since 2017 has highlighted the discord between understandings of the historical role and autonomy of Australian women and the accurate embodiment of their stories in exhibition spaces. Museum exhibitions are imbued with qualitative cultural information and meaning led by curatorial intent, but also inflected with visitormade meaning. Subtle nuances of language and physicality in curatorial and exhibition design communicate messages, overt or subliminal, to audiences who carry pre-conceived cultural understandings about the world around them. This article addresses how curatorial intent and visitor interpretation produces understandings of Australian womanhood within museum exhibitions, and ways in which the methodology of displays can be adjusted to more accurately portray these women’s autonomous voices and experiences. ‘In this country, there are more statues of animals than there are of real Australian women’, wrote Tracey Spicer in an editorial in The Sydney Morning Herald in September 2017.1 Spicer targeted the physical representation, including language, used to commemorate real (non-fictional, non-royal) women, who have been publicly cast as statues across Australia, and around the Western world.2 She further reflected that women are severely underrepresented, in their own right, in public memorialisation in Australia’s 1 Tracey Spicer, ‘Why Aren’t More Women Immortalised in Stone?’, Sydney Morning Herald, 29 September 2017, www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/tracey-spicer-why-arent-more-women-immortalisedin-stone-20170928-gyqm59.html.