Wanderlust

A journey through the Macleay Museum

Wanderlust was an exhibition of Macleay Museum objects which opened in August 1998 at the Museum of Sydney. Curated by Peter Emmett, this exhibition takes as its starting point some of the most unusual and valuable pieces housed in the Macleay collections. These pieces operate as focal points for the telling of a range of stories about the peoples of Oceania - our past, our place, our nature, ourselves.

The aim of the MoS exhibit is to ‘open up’ the display cabinets and storage spaces of the Macleay Museum to retrace the journeys taken through space and time by the objects within. These objects are ‘liberated’ from their current museological categories and returned to their original geographical locals to form a series of ‘islands’- ‘islands’ which are comprised of Macleay objects collected from particular places by specific expeditions over the past 120 years. While these islands correspond to real places and the journeys, at the same time as aggregations of things exotic, unusual, rare and curious - these localities become mythical places charged with a multiplicity of possible meanings
The exhibition benefited both the Macleay Museum and the University of Sydney in a number of ways:

The exhibition allowed us to increase the current range and number of Macleay objects available for public viewing, and to exhibit these objects in a new and alternative framework. An exhibition of selected items from the Macleay collection at MoS allowed the pieces to be displayed and interpreted in a new framework and allowed visitors at both places to witness the ways in which differing display techniques and environmental contexts affect our interpretation of museum objects. This is especially useful for museum studies students, anthropologists, and indeed anyone interested in how objects of cultural heritage are contextualised within the public arena.

The exhibition, held in a central downtown location, highlighted the unique position and importance of the Macleay Museum and the University of Sydney in the larger history of Sydney. It increased the profile of both Museum and University due to the large number of daily visitors to the Museum of Sydney. This is an opportunity to educate the wider public about the historical significance of Sydney University and to reach out to a larger audiences than the normal target range of the University.