Author: George Main

As part of the Food Stories project, we’ve been working with Moonah Primary School in Hobart, and with Reuben Parker-Greer from the Museum of Old and New Art, or MONA. Reuben runs a scheme that supports kitchen garden initiatives at schools located near MONA, including Moonah Primary. As the National Museum and MONA share an interest in the amazing work that Moonah Primary has achieved in their school kitchen and garden, we decided to...

Last weekend, as the sun dropped behind the Murrumbidgee River at Narrandera in southern New South Wales, hundreds of people gathered to watch Haunting, a major projection artwork developed by the Museum’s artist-in-residence Vic McEwan. Haunting considers the dramatic transformation of the Murrumbidgee region and much of southern Australia from grassland and bush into a modern agricultural landscape, and the still unfurling consequences of past actions for people, other species, places and climate. The performance was part of...

What meanings arise when we return historic objects to the active terrains that marked and shaped them? Over the past couple of weeks, during one of the coldest Canberra winters in a decade or more, I’ve been working at night with Vic McEwan on the banks of the Murrumbidgee River, where pioneering wheat breeder William Farrer undertook experiments that helped transform the grassy woodlands of southern Australia into modern farmland. 

National Tree Day, on Sunday the 26th of July, is an opportunity to celebrate the value of trees in our lives, a value that arises from the historical and ecological networks to which trees, and people, are inextricably bound. A range of collections held here at the National Museum of Australia record the respect and love felt by generations of Australians towards trees and their varied qualities. On display in the Landmarks gallery is a well-worn tree planting...

How might the particular features of a piece of agricultural machinery record profound ecological ideas? At the National Landcare Awards in September, former prime minister Bob Hawke presented farmer Colin Seis with the prestigious 2014 Bob Hawke Landcare Award. The award celebrates Colin’s revisioning of agriculture as an ecological activity, and recognises the significance of ‘pasture cropping’, a revolutionary new method of grain and pasture production developed by Colin on...

Last week I had the great privilege of meeting Mrs Elma Pearsall, esteemed Ngunnawal elder, 93 going on 63, at her home in Boorowa, on the southern tablelands of New South Wales. Over coffee and sandwiches, she told stories about the long careers of her father and four brothers, all shearers with Leonard Brothers, a large contracting firm based in nearby Yass, which serviced sheds throughout New South Wales in the 1940s...

We’ve uploaded some fascinating new pages onto the Museum’s Food Stories website. The pages feature a stump-jump plough, and reveal its close ties to Majura Primary School, our Food Stories partner school in the ACT. Majura Primary School students live in houses built upon paddocks and scientific plots formerly managed by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), which operated the Dickson Experiment Station on the lower slopes of Mount Majura between 1940 and...

How might a place inform our understandings of historical objects? The National Museum of Australia yesterday launched The Springfield Collection, a new online feature that illuminates an extraordinary set of objects with intimate ties to a particular locale near the inland city of Goulburn in southern New South Wales. About ten years ago the National Museum of Australia began negotiating the acquisition of a collection generated by the establishment and operation of Springfield, one of Australia’s oldest...