Floating the museum: A cultural study of the Australian National Maritime Museum

This dissertation seeks to bring together museums, popular culture and cultural studies. It does so by focusing on one particular museum - the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney's Darling Harbour. In many ways it works around discourses of change - not only in museums but also in museological practices, intellectual cultures and the economic, technological and policy contexts which surround and inform them. I argue that these new contexts are best understood by seeing the Australian National Maritime Museum as a point of convergence between new articulations of nationhood and global flows, new relations between corporate and popular, and new understandings of commerce and culture.

The dissertation is motivated by a desire to bring together the knowledges and perspectives of museum workers and cultural critics. Historically, this relationship has been a fraught one. Museum curators have tended to assume that cultural critics do not know what they are talking about while critics tend to assume that museums are static institutions which are resistant to change. In building bridges between these two very different worlds I hope to show that the intellectual resources of both can illuminate the work of each. This means that methodologically this dissertation does not privilege theory above practice or `text'. It accords the same status to both.

The dissertation is organised in three parts. The first sets out to situate the National Maritime Museum in Darling Harbour and within professional attitudes to museums. The second part moves inside the museum, analysing changes in curatorial and display practices while always being careful to articulate these changes to the outside contexts which inform them. The third part moves away from the museum and reconsiders the way in which museums are usually thought about by revisiting the historiography of nineteenth century museums. The aim is to suggest that many of the changes which museums are currently going through do not represent a radical break but take up on tendencies which were present at the birth of the modem museum.

The dissertation is thus a reassessment of the way cultural critics have usually thought about museums. It does so through an engagement with the transdisciplinary approach of cultural studies while at the same time questioning the way museums have figured in many of its analyses.