Linda Young

The conjunction offered by a conference on historic houses and conservation of cultural heritage gives me a platform to demonstrate the practical application of a project I have been working on for some years. It is the history of historic houses as a species of museum, which I problematise with the simple question, ‘why?’ Why does western culture museumise houses? A brief answer is framed by the perspective that the social function of museums and heritage is to focus ideological projections of cultural identity. Museums and heritage are particularly efficacious as national identity representations, or in microcosm, local identity representations. House museums are a subset of museums with the notable characteristic of bringing the domestic domain of private life into the public sphere of attention and discourse. This is not a benevolent act of inclusiveness (though some house museums stress this approach today). Rather, I read house museums as a deliberate channelling of the cultur...

The history of history's institutions can offer a gritty context in which to understand historical production. A wide spectrum of influences, from the personal to the intellectual to the political, can be seen at work in shaping the history made and communicated at Blundell's Cottage over the years. Even though it has always been a humble participant in the project of history, its products probably reach some of history's larger audiences. Hence it is worthwhile to review fifty years of historio-museography.

... Senator the Hon. Rod Kemp Minister for the Arts and Sport viii Page 9. ... Qantas, News Limited, SBS, ABC Local Radio, Animal Logic, Hoyts and Sofitel all made important contributions towards the exhibition's development and tour. ...

Burke & Wills: From Melbourne to Mylh. Curated by Tim Bonyhady. National Library of Australia, 27 March—2 June 2002. Art Gallery of South Australia, 22 June—18 August 2002. State Library of Victoria, 13 September—24 November 2002.

Abstract The cultural dimensions of globalisation will have, indeed are already having, a profound impact on the rationale of museums and on their everyday operations. Large questions about globalisation, cultural domination or assimilation, and the survival of ...

... Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/2123/3638. Title: Let them see how like England we can be : an account of the Sydney International Exhibition 1879. Authors: Young, Linda (Linda Elisabeth), 1953-. Issue Date: 1983. ...

... figuring of the volume of these garments suggests that Mrs. Hilton would have required an entire chest of drawers (three wide drawers, one deep, two small) to herself, and Mr. Hilton would have ... For the children, there were two small chairs, one of them a closed-up potty-chair. ...

... Today, the intersection of museum villages with the managerialist pressures of local economy enhancement and modern professional standards of heritage management challenge most villages' survival. Articles that cite this article? ... Website © 2010 Publishing Technology. ...

... For nations which have not been subject to armed military invasion and conquest for a century or more, the kinds of heritage destruction now ... it is recently reported, a similar organisation is forming to keep alive the tradition of Turkish coffee in the face of cappuccino and espresso ...

Villages of relocated buildings now constitute a phenomenon of the world’s repertoire of heritage. They go by a multitude of names depending on particular inflection: open air museum, folk museum, living history museum, heritage village, museum village and so forth. This paper reviews the context of the form of the genre’s manifestation in Australia, where it is often known as the ‘pioneer village’. They are the fruit of a populist vision of national history which celebrates white rural settlement as its central theme. In practice, the villages manifest a deep commitment to collecting and saving old buildings as the meaningful construction of a favourite historical identity. But the generation that established Australia’s villages has been overtaken. Today, the intersection of museum villages with the managerialist pressures of local economy enhancement and modern
professional standards of heritage management challenge most villages’ survival.

This book shows how the museum-presentation of homes embodies an agenda of exemplary politics. It argues that the act of transforming a house into a museum – museumization in shorthand – introduces the distinctive ‘museum way of seeing’: the objectification of the house and all it contains and refers to, relative to the visitor.  Thus the house museum projects a purposeful story into the public sphere, usually in a national frame of reference, or sometimes in the microcosm of the local. The conventional domestic scope of the house emerges as the vehicle of larger narratives about the character of the nation or the locality.  In practice, a visit to a house museum produces knowledge grounded in the common experience of home, which contributes to collective identity and affirms national or local characteristics. Thus house museums make the abstractions of nation personal, material, visible and visitable in the familiar form of home. Visitors actively choose (or may decline) to identify with the presentation, and to acknowledge (or not) a shared heritage. This agenda, I argue, is the major frame of house museums in the transnational Anglo tradition.

Dwellings inhabited by writers were the first house museums founded in the UK, and writers still dominate the vocations of culture heroes whose houses continue to be museumised today. This paper contextualises house museums in museology and heritage, reviewing the professionalising strategies and rhetoric of the genre. It surveys  commentators' ideas about writers' house museums, mainly the work of journalists and scholars, influential in shaping public ideas about literary houses. The experience of non-specialist visitors is considered in the light of contemporary cultural heritage tourism. These sources throw light on the future of writers' house museums.

Writers’ houses constitute the largest and oldest segment of historic house museums dedicated to famous persons in the United Kingdom. Litterateurs tend to ascribe ‘lit houses’ to the ineffable magic of readers’ connections to writers. By contrast, my analysis deploys the analytic of cultural politics to suggest that writers’ house museums can more fully be understood as assertions of national identity. The elision of language with national distinction is subliminal in everyday life, but can be brought to prominence by historicising the nations of the British Isles, and the practice of writing in English.

Close evaluation of the standards of authenticity in house museums can make a rational person very uneasy. Considering the houses of famous people, we find many dubious cases touching on the actual building, or the time period, when the great resident inhabited the house. Likewise in houses conserved for the sake of outstanding design or aesthetics, and even in the preserved houses of collectors. Structures have often been altered considerably since the time of famous occupation, or design and construction, to the point of demolition and/or major reconstruction – yet they have been deemed suitable for museumization. Further, we often find that if one famous house is worth museumization, so are more with the same associations – this is evidently not a problem in the museumizing process. After all, how many house museums does a national hero or heroine/famous designer merit, and how many does the public need? And if we query how and why a great collector has managed to see his house into institutional survival as a museum, we uncover many peculiar stories.

This paper surveys the history of a number of house museums. Having reviewed the evidence, it suggests that the concept of authenticity contains a spectrum of meanings in various contexts, stretching between the poles of faith and science. What matters, therefore, is less an absolute standard of ‘authenticity’, and more an understanding of the expectations brought by visitors to each site. In the light of inconsistent practice, does the notion of authenticity matter?  JM Barrie’s fairy tale Peter Pan and Wendy suggests a solution.

A pdf of the slides associated with this talk is uploaded on this site, too.

This paper presents the implications for conservation of analysis showing that houses are preserved as museums for distinctive reasons, which impact on the ways in which they are subsequently conserved, presented and interpreted. For example, the houses of culture heroes (sometimes referred to as ‘celebrity’ houses) possess the aura of sacred places, and hence I argue their conservation should be oriented to retention of the magical character of all original elements. By contrast, houses museumised for their design qualities (interior and/or exterior) are more similar to artworks – walk-through artworks – and I suggest it is appropriate to clean and restore them to conventional museum standards of integrity in order to display the rationale of their preservation. In another contrast, the multi-generational accretion of contents, building and landscape typical of British country houses requires the modulation of historical judgment in restoration and conservation decisions. This kind of decision-making is even more called for in the modern genre of historic process or social history houses, which may be all or part re-created for interpretive purposes. Thus the spectrum of conservation intervention in historic house museums stretches from maintenance of as-found condition to replacement or reinvention of a significant portion of contents and building. Despite this logic, understanding the motivation to transform a house into a museum and undertake appropriate conservation treatments can be, and often is, over-ridden by contemporary needs. This paper calls for conscious consideration of the initial purpose of the house – its cultural significance, in heritage management terms – in coming to appropriate conservation decisions.

My paper takes as its starting point the view that most modern forms of museum (the urban middle class kind, which dates from the early-mid-19thC) function as places of materialised myth, where the foundations, morality and values of nation states and their town or locality microcosms are exhibited for ritualised acknowledgement by citizen-visitors, producing the solidarity of collective identity. This is a pretty obvious (though not uncontested) interpretation of national museums. Less obviously, I think it applies also to the species of historic houses that get museumised, houses that have been extracted from normal use as dwellings, preserved and transmogrified into symbolic subject-hood.

The idea of the ‘nation personified’ in the form of a national hero generates a spectrum of museum expressions. The character of nation attributed to individuals spans the leadership of a king or president; the creative expression of a great writer, composer or artist; and the exploits of military leaders, explorers, and pioneers in various field. The relics of these national personae are exhibited in national history museums; their portraits and art collections hang in national galleries. And the houses they inhabited are transformed into museums of private lives said to represent the nation at home. 
Practically all house museums are enacted in nationalist frames, or in the local microcosm of the national. In fact, the dwellings of national or local heroes constitute the largest and oldest category of house museums. Other categories present expressions of national style or design; nationally-acknowledged private collections; and the demotic national of social history, in which ordinary people’s houses are presented as a parallel of the anonymous to the famous. This paper focuses on the houses of heroes, identifying the traces of relic-worship, civil religion and post-modern celebrity that inform the production and consumption of their house museums.

Have you been to a historic house museum and quivered there?  Felt a frisson of delight, recognition, communion? Alternatively, you may have visited a house museum and felt in the presence of a beautiful, or possibly stark, corpse. Observed a fine environment, meticulously preserved but without a spark to animate it. Is the frisson or its absence in you, or in the house? What is the allure of the dwellings of great persons, that we preserve or recreate them? There is a plethora of historic houses dedicated to writers, composers, artists, thinkers, scientists, inventors, not to mention a myriad houses of military and political heroes... Access to their homes implies insight into something personal or intimate about their ways of life, something not to be known through their work or achievement, which is usually the source of the fame that inspires the museumisation of their houses. This paper explores a nest of cultural values and practices turning on the phenomenon of making sites of intimate life into public spectacles.

Around the world, individual houses have been musealized for a range of purposes since the 1830s; collections of houses since the 1890s; and complex historic sites (often including houses) since the 1960s. In this history, the tension between the preservation of elite culture houses and more humble specimens generates on-going changes in the range of house museum stock. All these genres have established a specialised house museology, framed by disciplinary perspectives such as decorative arts, social history, and archaeology, which have produced vigorous techniques, such as managing the integrity of intact collections, enabling aesthetic experience in the historic environment and reinstating traditional housekeeping.
Somewhat separate from the broader sphere of conventional museums, house museums still engage with their typical modern conditions, notably the pressure to generate more income; the conviction that education is the primary function of museums; the impact of cultural heritage management on historic buildings and sites; the ‘new museology’ response to post-modernist intellectual challenges. The paper reviews the strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and threats affecting building and place museums in the 2000s.

Three generations of settlers, convicts and emigrants occupied the valley of the Molonglo River for eighty years before Canberra was planted there in 1913. Stretched between the great houses of Duntroon and Yarralumla, they lived in some twenty cottages, almost all of which were demolished as the city centre and suburbs developed. This book recreates a lost world via archival sources that describe the land and houses, geneaological records showing the inhabitants and their family relationships around the district, and the work of official photographers and amateur artists who recorded the landscape as the city grew.