Quentin Cockburn recently visited the Museum at Stromness, Orkney, North of Scotland, (see map below).  He was impressed.

Dear Stromness Museum,
I love you.

I write to you to encourage your excellent work in maintaining the intrinsic wonder, the exploration and child-like rapture your museum presents to us. I am jaded by the certainty of most museums these days.

As a youth I spent countless days wandering through the archives and displays at the Melbourne Museum. (Now re-located and re-named the Museum of Victoria).  It used to be in the heart of the city, it shared its site with the State Library.  As a student entombed within the reading room of the state library, I would wander into the museum to find an engaging diversion from the piles of primary sources, the encyclopaedic hansards, and cleanse myself from the biblical certainty espoused by our celebrated historians.  It seemed apt, a museum and a library together.  One with the voices distilled in time, speaking from the void, the other, artifacts, other stories, described in the touch the feel, the smell, the grittiness of displays, some in cases, others in shelves, to be grasped and examined.  And through it all this sense that the bison tusks, the giant crabs, and the maxim gun mountings from HMVS Cerberus told us about ourselves. The museum had the capacity in its crusty wood paneled and bare concrete interior to describe real life, and inject imagination, for those prepared to just contemplate, of other worlds, and the challenge to find, to seek to discover.

I think also that museums can be counter cultural, almost subversive.  They speak of indulgence in the ancient and educational as fulfilling and rewarding before endless shopping filled that niche.

The Melbourne Museum was a very Victorian institution in Victoria, Her Majesty’s most important “white” colony.

It embraced a colonial view of things.  The objects were all neatly inscribed, and the museum itself suggested, (I think the dioramas had something to do with this), that native Australians, their animals and landscape were to be improved and civilised.  It was a sort of covert social darwinism that made it captivating.  Imagine a diorama, with an aboriginal tribe suitably in possum skins, the ladies demurely clad, a volcano in the background, a few Diprotodons, and the odd macropod, the message, ‘Ancient man, being ancient’, and possibly as the next case revealed, endangered or extinct.  As a group, we Victorians run a close second to our brothers the Tasmanians with a proud tradition of extinction.  The museum, in the nicest possible way, made it entertaining.  Rather like the statues that adorned the Crystal Palace, the primitive dinosaur prototypes tell us about Victorian romanticism and stuff.

Over a decade ago the Melbourne museum was “relocated”. What was once intrinsic and personal was standardised.  The minutiae was taken away, the ships models hived off to the immigration museum, the non standardised stuff, (like stuff from HMVS Cerberus) lost, and the dioramas, destroyed.  It’s a very ‘nice’ building, the architects, (who are now engaged on the new visitors centre at Stonehenge) built a very big space with one of their signature ‘Blades’. There are no longer drawers to pull out and the certainty of no un-anticipated discoveries. You see it’s INTERACTIVE!.

And every year they have a new ‘Blockbuster!’.  Last year it was Pompeii, the year before the Titanic, this year shall be James Bond.  I think they like that, there’s noting really challenging, but it is a very satisfying day and, I’ve been told, a relatively small investment to experience an exhibition schedule that’s Worlds Best Standard.

Of course I’m being facetious, and the reason why is simple.  You, at Stromness, possess a magnificent museum.  You have a magnificent collection intrinsic to the Orkneys, and Scapa Flow.  You endow us, the public, with Nobility, you treat us with respect.  You have not bowdlerised your collection to suit some ‘fly-by tourism consultant power point assessment of core values and market research’.  You have stayed true to the first principle of humanity and ‘let the objects speak for themselves’.  And you have not been deluded by the insecure assumption that ‘Big’ makes the exhibition and experience ‘Valid’, whatever that means.

You have inspired me to do something that other museums do not.

You have inspired me to return.

Thankyou so much, and as an aside, I loved the Kirkwall Wireless museum for the same reason.

Cheers
Quentin Cockburn