Today was International Museum Day, and this year's theme was 'Museum and Memory'. Ever since I was a kid on summer holiday in Sydney with my grandmother, i've loved visiting museums - they are a big part of my memory of travel & general nerding in my childhood years. During high school when I travelled less to Sydney over the summer I lost touch with my love of museums somewhat, and it was only in my last couple of years of high school it was rekindled on a trip to Brisbane to a few of the Uni of QLD museums (one of which I ended up working in years later) and to the Queensland Museum (...where I also ended up working years later).

When I started my Bachelor of Arts degree in 2000 at the University of QLD, I was heading headfirst into it all with the intent of majoring in archaeology when I was seduced by the nerdy side - an introductory anthropology course, and a tour through the gallery & storage areas of the University's Anthropology Museum. Objects were everywhere, of all different types and materials and origins. And even when you barely scratched the surface information that went with these objects (be it exhibition text or folders of information in filing cabinets), there were so many stories that went with these objects that I became fascinated with the power that objects can hold, what they tell us, and the absolute place that material culture has in our lives.

So as I went onward with my anthropology studies, the further I went into connecting culture with objects, and museums with what objects tell the visitor about culture. It was incredibly rewarding, taking one discrete object, picking up a thread from its history and following it for long enough that you can weave it back into a story. One of my earlier research projects (for my Material Culture course) was a wild goose chase to find out the history of a particular musical instrument (a bamboo thongophone to be precise). And it wasn't just general information about this type of instrument, how it was made/used, and by who - but the history of this specific instrument; how it'd come to be in Australia, Brisbane specifically, and how it'd come to be in the Anthropology Museum's collection. My research took me trawling through archives at the State Library, over to the music library on campus to listen to records of Papua New Guinean folks bands that used this instrument, and clambering up ladders in the collection stores to inspect/measure/take notes on the thongophone itself.

(Let me tell you, when a student a few years later decided to use that instrument in the annual anthropology museum class exhibit, I just about burst with excitement.)

I ended up researching more objects - for collection records, for University assignments, for exhibitions - and it never got old. Every new museum I visited I saw more and new objects that fascinated me with their origins, history and what they told me. Whether it's a general example of a type or object, or something very specific, it's all something that will teach me more about the world through experiencing an object.Natural history, ancient cultures, social history, ethnography - I dig it all. I especially love the stuff that mixes it all, like when a technically scientific specimen is loaded with history and culture too!

Don't get me started on museums themselves as objects or I may turn your faces inside out with the excitement of it all! Ha. I said on Twitter earlier today that using objects to tell stories is a really key museum theme to me; and every little bit of memory that an object/specimen has from the point it came into being right through its journey into a museum is one of the greatest currencies that museum collections have. I'm glad I got to blog a little about my memories of museums, and how objects and their histories/stories are an important part of the theme of museum and memory to me. It's a pity that I didn't get to spend International Museum Day in a museum, but i'm sure i'll make up for it soon enough.