Robyn Stacey    |    house - authors

house focuses on three Sydney properties, Elizabeth Bay House, Vaucluse House, Rouse Hill Estate and the Caroline Simpson Library & Research Collection. These particular homes and grounds were selected from Living Museums Sydney property portfolio because of their nineteenth century history, their architectural merit, and their connection with the Caroline Simpson Collection. All were large households with extensive grounds, (unfortunately the grounds of Elizabeth Bay House no longer exist)) comprising material collections ranging from furniture, ceramics, silverware, fabrics, trade catalogues and the list goes on.

Co-authored with Peter Timms, who has held curatorial positions in a number of public art galleries and museums around Australia, including the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney. Peter was awarded a Churchill Fellowship in 1984 to study in Europe, and an Australia Council Senior Writers’ Fellowship in 1994. The editor of Art Monthly Australia for five years and the art critic for The Age, he has published a dozen books, including Making Nature, What’s Wrong with Contemporary Art?, Australia’s Quarter Acre, Private Lives: Australians at Home since Federation and Hobart.

In house his essays provide a fresh perspective on the properties. As he says, “Today, as we tap our credit card numbers into Amazon.com or MyShop.com, we might think back to these people, ordering their Indian transparent crepe cloth curtains from James Schoolbred and Co’s latest catalogue, and reflect that, although we have adopted a new language, we are part of the same story.”

There are four visual chapters in the book, one for each of the three properties and one focusing on the catalogue collection of the Caroline Simpson Library & Research Collection. The curators from Living Museums Sydney have written introductions to each property as well as interesting historic information about each object showcased in the book.

I spent four years working with the Living Museums Sydney and had access to more than 29,000 objects held inside the properties. The book presents more than 650 rarely seen objects and household ephemera that reflect the times and customs of nineteenth century Sydney.

house - background

From the earliest accounts of the colony, real estate and fashion were the dominant topics of conversation in polite society in New South Wales (Sydney, Tim Flannery). Little has changed, Australians as a people, see their homes and lifestyle as inextricably intertwined, and a great deal of time, money and emotion is lavished on house and garden, interiors and furnishings. Grand Designs the British series about building your dream home had its highest global ratings in Australia and despite it becoming increasingly more difficult home ownership remains the great Australian dream.

house reveals the Australian desire for betterment, through the transport of taste and knowledge systems (as evidenced in Living museums collections and properties). The industrial revolution and rise of new capitalism, technology and mass production, meant that classical Greek statuary, mosaic walkways, and marble pillars were no longer the domain of the rich and noble in Europe but could be found in homes around the harbour of Port Jackson.

Apart from souvenirs brought back from England and the continent on grand tours the domestic environments of colonial New South Wales were furnished via proxy, mostly through catalogues. Thanks to our geographical position, all imported goods were at least one season behind and the catalogue provided the perfect way to market seconds to the colony, selling lines of goods that had not been successful in the European speculative marketing system.

The domestic interior needs to sustain the individual’s private illusions, hence the role of desire in the shipping of material refinements from Europe, a mixture of the need to re-create what had been left behind, and the aspiration to make a new and better world centered on the home dweller. The catalogues and sample books sumptuously demonstrate the colonial desire to shop. The creation of an Australian style evolved through the notions of Empire and colony.

Traditional museum display methods impose a series of separations onto the object. There are separations in terms of media, time of production, maker, rarity etc in order to create a correct taxonomical index. This process de-natures and de-personalises the very object that once existed amongst a vast array of other domestic goods. In house I have used the still life tradition to re-work the traditional museum display and return the objects to an approximate albeit fictional reality, creating a sense that people are never far away, that the settings have just been left momentarily. These images are about the traces of inhabitation.

Collections reflect the habits, thoughts and aspirations of a society. They bear witness to new senses of direction, changes and trends in a community and help us to understand how we as a society arrived at where we are today. The house museum does this at the most intimate and personal level, as it provides access to people’s private worlds.