Seize the Day

Australians have always loved a good show, as this new collection of essays demonstrates. The significance of exhibitions goes beyond mere entertainment. From the 1850s to the present, exhibitions have been a marketing tool for Australia's advancements in global trade, migration and tourism. They have also been powerful vehicles for conspicuous consumption, civic progress, social status, and identity be it local, national or international. This multi-disciplinary collection presents new research on a fascinating variety of exhibitions from nineteenth-century World Fairs to late twentieth-century Expos. Contributors are leading museum professionals and academics from a range of disciplines including art history, the history of design, literary studies, indigenous history, cultural and social history and the history of science. Seize the Day examines the complex role of exhibitions within Australia's cultural, commercial and artistic histories. Exhibitions are dynamic sites for the construction of national identities and international collaborations, the showcasing of collecting and exhibiting practices, and the expression and contestation of race and gender.Detailed case studies explore the many facets of exhibitions from ethnographic display to artistic competition to intercolonial rivalry to reveal their politics, personalities and astonishingly rich material culture. As the first book to address the exhibition movement in Australia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this book will become the standard collection on this topic for years to come. Numerous black and white images, plus an eight-page colour insert in the print version.

Kate Darian-Smith is professor of Australian studies and history at the University of Melbourne. Her recent books include (as contributing co-editor) Britishness Abroad (Melbourne University Publishing, 2007) and Stirring Australian Speeches (Melbourne University Publishing, 2004).Richard Gillespie is head of History & Technology at Museum Victoria. He is a curator, historian of science and author of Manufacturing Knowledge: A History of the Hawthorne Experiments (Cambridge University Press, 1993).Caroline Jordan is an art historian and has been Australian Research Council postdoctoral fellow at the Australian Centre, University of Melbourne. She is the author of Picturesque Pursuits: Colonial Women Artists and the Amateur Tradition (Melbourne University Publishing, 2005).Elizabeth Willis is a Curator Emeritus in History & Technology Department of Museum Victoria. She is the author of The Royal Exhibition Building, Melbourne (Museum Victoria, 2004) and is an honorary creative fellow at the State Library of Victoria.

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