EXIT QUEEN VICTORIA
Copyright © Carmel Bird 2002. All rights reserved.
The following essay was published in Meanjin the literary magazine from Melbourne University - December 2001
The trees on the hillsides are ink-dark with memory. Pearl blue the mist hangs over them, a veil, a fine, translucent scrim, cold, damp, lilac. Pearl blue. The town is built among the humpy hills, a place where millions of years ago glaciers ground their way along, carving out shapes, making new paths through a volcanic landscape. The houses of my memory twinkle through the fog. They are airy timber places, joyful, inviting, mysterious, elfin. By contrast, many of the old public buildings are made from Georgian blocks of stone, simple, solid, but faintly over-decorated in a flourish of colonial fantasy. Such a public building is the museum in Launceston. This story is not a straight statement of a philosophy of museums, but a personal meditation on revisiting two museums where I spent many hours of childhood. One museum is the official Queen Victoria Museum in Launceston; the other is an historic house, Entally, on the outskirts of Launceston, a private building turned public.
In August 2001 I went to Tasmania where I visited these two places. I was interested to see how they had changed, how they compared now with the memories I had of them. If the same objects were among the collections, how were these objects now displayed. What had been added, what subtracted. The whole island of Tasmania is in some ways a museum, a piece of the past, a capsule that is partly preserved, partly destroyed, partly redefined, reshaped, displayed here, obscured there. Self-consciously trapped in time, while attempting to move forward. No different in this from thousands of other places in the world, but particular to me, to my life and my memories. I knew that this was a time of change at the Launceston museum, a time of relocation, of redefinition for many of the collections. The captured objects and images of the past have always interested me, and when I was a child living in Tasmania I used to spend hours alone in the museum, in a kind of dream, a fascinated trance. The museum became a familiar and welcoming place, yet a place set apart from the everyday. And I wasn’t the only teenage girl, later on, who would sometimes to go to this special, somewhat secretive place by arrangement to meet boys. But that’s another story.
I am forever deeply affected by, connected to, fascinated with the narratives of Tasmania, and parts of them are told in the museum and in the old houses. I love the early public architecture which sits, serene and still, away from the centres of noisy modern commerce and life. The museum is in a quiet corner on the edge of the little city, and was opened in 1891. It is set back from the street behind Victorian iron railings, among lawns and flower beds and English trees. The park behind it rambles down to the Tamar river where all kinds of small boats bob sweetly, sadly I think, on the water. Across the river rises a steep hillside dark with trees, and through the trees emerge large timber houses, late Edwardian, pale, bright with windows which glint in the sunlight of daytime, which glitter with electricity in the night. Long ago I used to see something dream-like, fairy-like in the vision of those houses which poked up here and there through the enigma of the forest. Sometimes I still see it that way. I know there are really streets running across and winding up the hill among the trees, but from the museum on the opposite bank the houses appear to loom at random from the treetops, promising secret narratives.
The museum has two storeys built in stone, coloured a soft pale peach, frosted with white around the long window frames. The front door, central, arched, the top of the U-shape filled with six segments of clear glass, half a cart-wheel. Above the doorway, one long central window, vertical, above that an empty little tympanum. Four Greek columns, two up, two down, flank the door and window. In a strip of masonry that runs like icing through the cake of the building is the word MUSEUM in elegant upper case. The entrance is so inviting to me; it beckons with the hope and dread of memory. But wait, I am still outside in the grounds.
It was early spring when I was recently there, jonquils and Dutch irises beginning to bloom at the edges of the lawn. Weirdly scattered through the green leaf spears of the narrow flower borders were dozens of cigarette butts. They were like part of the design, part of the decoration, or else they were the buff and white casings of some species of insect. Close to the building there is an old red mailbox, and if you post your letters there they will be postmarked with the words ‘Tasmania’s Oldest Letter Box – Queen Victoria Museum’ inside a scarlet circle. Of course I couldn’t resist posting some letters, and yet something in me rebels against the quaintness of all this, the participation in an impulse to package the past for a quick fix of nostalgia. Then again I would be sad if the letter box was not there. You can’t really have these things both ways. Either the remnants of the past are preserved and labelled, or they are removed, or replaced. In fact the letter box has been brought to the museum from elsewhere – but that’s just part of the preservative function of museums. One of the biggest industries in Tasmania is the tourist industry, and an important part of the resources for this is the commodification of the past which is some sort of fact of modern life. All over the world, and in Tasmania (remote as it is and always has been from where the action is) as well, historic buildings and collections have to keep pace with the needs and expectations of the culture. Those needs and expectations have brought about the present project of moving much of the museum to another place. This Georgian building will be devoted to the natural heritage of Tasmania, and everything else will go to the new site.
My visit to the museum was a swift lesson in how some things change and some things stay pretty much the same. Change is the price for having some things saved. I am struggling to be philosophical and rational here, to be thoughtful and generous about the experience, and not to give in all at once to sadness and regret. I knew that the old atmosphere of hushed mystery, in which the past is contained and partly revealed, would not be there when I got inside – the red letter box and the cigarette butts were a kind of warning to me to expect a place I could barely recognise.
Well, once beyond the front entrance proper I was confronted with the modern glass sliding door. Then there was the shop. Of course there was, there has to be. But this shop doesn’t sell much that is related directly to the museum itself – very few postcards of objects or paintings from the collections, no history of the museum. I found this very interesting, that there was no history of the museum. Did this mean that the place suffers from low self-esteem, that it doesn’t think it is interesting in itself? There were some books about Tasmanian flowers and animals and shipwrecks, but nothing of any scope about what is to be found in the museum, or even much documentation about the city. There was a tiny pamphlet giving the hours of museum opening, decorated with a few coloured images of what you can expect to see – a stuffed thylacine, a chunk of crocoite which is a glorious orange mineral, mesmerising in its bright crystalline beauty. Mostly the shop sells plastic insects and toys and games for the amusement and mild intellectual stimulation of children. To be fair, the place is undergoing dramatic change, for it is in the process of being largely re-located in new buildings in another part of town. Many of the collections were not on view because they were being packed up ready to move. So it was really an interesting moment that I happened to be there.
One of the most vivid memories I have from early childhood visits to the museum is of a Victorian musical box. Parts of my memory are clear, and parts are vague. It was a large glass box on legs which I thing were made from mahogany. Inside the box was a collection of toys - monkeys, golliwogs, dogs – I don’t know. I remember the monkey. What used to happen was that a museum official had to be summoned and requested to play the thing. I think there had to be at least three children there before he would do it. He had a brass key which he inserted into the side, and then he wound it up, and the tune it played was ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’. The toys were animated in response to the music, and the monkey clashed a little pair of brass cymbals. Perhaps one of the dolls was a weasel, one a cobbler – I don’t know. It was a wonderfully grotesque toy, and used to have us entranced and a bit hysterical.
I asked the people at the desk in the shop about this musical box, but they had never seen it or heard of it. Perhaps it wore out, or was stored away a long time ago and lost. It is so strange to think of all that frenetic tinkly activity and sound being now an absence. Perhaps when the collections move to their new home, it will be resurrected. The musical box is linked in my memory with the Joss House, although the only real connection between the two is the fact that they co-existed in the museum, and were my favourite things.
The Joss House is a Chinese temple which originated in Weldborough. This is still in the museum, although it will be re-located eventually. It is visible through glass, a collection of sacred objects locked in a small room, behind a brilliant red door. When I was a child that door was always locked, but you could enter the Joss House, as was correct, by the side. To open the central door would be to allow the entry of evil spirits. Perhaps the glass walls were put in place because people touched things, harmed them, destroyed them, stole them. Now the whole thing is all locked up, and because of this, the specific feeling of mystery and holiness attached to it is altered. The objects behind the glass are truly dead. It seemed to me that a little breath of evil spirit had blown through the place.
As a child I used to move in and out of the banners on poles, amazed and transported into an exotic world of which I had no understanding beyond the magic of the colours and the fabrics and the wholly foreign images. (I also used to nourish my love of the exotic by going to the Chinese greengrocer where I would buy not vegetables but little white china horses, embroidered handkerchiefs, and bright satin pincushions like pumpkins surrounded by small seated figures with pigtails.) There were very few intimations of faraway places, and the Joss House and the greengrocer were two of them.
The town of Weldborough in the north east of Tasmania was a tin-mining centre during the nineteenth century, and was made up of an almost entirely Chinese population who built there a Joss House. But devotions declined, and eventually it became clear to the Joss House keeper, Hee Jarm, that it would soon be impossible to look after the treasures. So in 1934 the Joss House was packed up, moved to Launceston, and donated to the museum as an exhibit. It retained its atmosphere of a sacred place, but this has now been largely lost. It is now a collection of things in a glass case, valuable but not so holy. Kind of still and sad and academic. But of course I am pleased it is still possible at least to see the things through the glass.
The dominant colour is red, and there are also turquoise, green, blue, yellow in the embroidered hangings. Looking through the window, I see red flags, silken scrolls, the central altar on which stand the fourteen doll-like figures, as on a stage. The central figure is the Joss himself, seated on a throne, guarded by all the other figures. They wear vivid embroidered silken robes – much red and green and gold. All around the room are banners on poles, banners inscribed with the teachings of Confucius. The horse of this Joss is a traditional rocking horse, set to the side of the altar, with the sword belonging also to the Joss. The children of Weldborough were permitted to ride this horse. There are incense urns and vases of peacock feathers, and everlasting flowers. Cymbals, lute, drums, trumpets, gongs. Images of white cranes, lotus flowers, peach blossom, peonies, chrysanthemums, bats, fish, dragons, fruits decorate the silk hangings. There are silk umbrellas for the Joss. Gilded woodwork, carved with sacred scenes. Mounted on eight long cedar poles are eight flat boxes, as thick and as square as a large bible. They represent the eight immortals, seven men and one woman. There are two set of these, one covered with gold embroidery, the other with the blue feathers of kingfishers. One of the images I have carried with me forever is of those massed gleaming overlapping iridescent turquoise feathers. I loved them. They amazed me.
I have described the contents of the Joss House as it now is. And that is all it is, a room with a red door and two glass windows, filled with the dusty remnants of the holy place from Weldborough. It is possible that my memory of a magical space which I could enter, where I could imagine I heard the movement of the wings of the kingfisher and the distant sound of a Chinese gong is a false memory, a wishful thought. But I don’t think that is the case. I believe that the Joss House had something special and sacred about it when it was open, and that this thing has fled. The guard in his dark uniform who used to play the musical box on request could also be persuaded to strike one of the brass gongs in the Joss House. That was something to hear. No more.
I drove out to the place where the new museum will be located. It is a reclaimed swamp, where I suppose there will one day be lawns and trees and flowerbeds and a museum where, perhaps the Joss House will be established, and where also, perhaps, the musical box will come to light and play ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’. Or maybe this is not the place for these things, maybe they will stay behind, maybe they would never fit in a modern museum, maybe they are too musty and fusty and out of tune. Right now the new museum land is strangely desolate and forlorn, occupied by a motley of rusty sheds. I can’t tell you how it will be; I can’t even imagine it.
I drove away from this strange place, away from the emptiness and the sounds of lonely seagulls, out to the historic house museum, Entally, to garden beds and ghosts.
Entally House was built on the outskirts of Launceston in 1820, and when I lived in Launceston as a child I liked to go there. It was open to the public. These were early days for the industry of early colonial Australian houses, and people were free to roam through the grounds and rooms of Entally without guides or barriers or security cameras. Like the Joss House at the museum, Entally was naively open to the touch. Modern museums now have much that can be touched, much that encourages interactivity between visitors and exhibits. It is a very different kind of interactivity from the old-fashioned kind whereby you could play the piano at Entally if you wanted to. Obviously modern tourism and education can’t allow that kind of thing, and I am not arguing one way or the other – I simply record the way things used to be, and note the way things are. At Entally some time in the nineteen fifties I engaged in a particular kind of interactivity, as I will explain.
There was a seductive air of sadness and nostalgia, and I enjoyed lingering under the huge English trees, in the stables where there were old carriages, and in the sparse little chapel. I should explain that I did all this by myself; I didn’t know anyone else who would be interested. The facade of the house was quaintly gabled, the edges of the gables simply decorated with a little frill. Although this was a rather grand estate in colonial times, the scale of the house is small; it seemed to me, even when I was a child, that the people must have been tiny. You could have Devonshire Tea in the conservatory, but there were not really many visitors.
I was fascinated (to the point of being entranced, delivered into a dream as I was in the Joss House) by the atmosphere of past lives which I could feel at Entally as I went slowly from drawing-room to kitchen to the pinched and narrow staircase which wound up to the second floor. I am sorry to say I never saw the ghost that used to appear on this staircase. My visits all took place in the daytime, and the ghost, an Indian wearing a turban, or else a Lascar with a head-scarf, comes out only at night, after a sharp drop in the temperature on the stairs. He has apparently appeared only to women, one of whom went mad as a result.
I don’t know why this ghost is there, but the explanation for his exotic nature lies in the fact that the family of Entally (incidentally descended from a convict, Mary Reibey) were ship-owners trading with the East. The ghost had somehow wandered from the commercial life of the family into their daily lives, taking up (why?) his position in the gloomy shadows of the stairs back staircase. To me, the flavour of mystery and violence and dusky slaves and adventure on the high seas, not to mention the story of the woman who went mad, was quite stimulating. I just used to hang out there, and somehow breathe it in. My memory and imagination are furnished with images of dark brown velvet curtains at the foot of the stairs, looped back with a golden cord.
I used to like going up the stairs, conscious that I was treading in the footsteps of the Lascar or the Indian, to the nursery where there were old cots and prams and dolls. Faded black and white photographs of young children in elaborate clothing, frilly bonnets and button boots, stared solemnly from silver picture frames. The floorboards shifted and clattered beneath the faded blue rug. The silence was strange; the solitude was somehow rich in possibilities. I was alone in the presence of the past, in the company of the ghosts of children. As far as I knew, the children grew up and moved on, but there was a haunting sadness in the nursery, a sense that the children in the pictures had one day set down their toys and fallen into a sleep from which they had never awoken. In those days places like Entally didn’t give you much documentation – so I was perfectly free to invent the narratives of the house from the evidence before my eyes.
I wanted to invent, and I did so, but I also wanted to find a way to interact with that narrative, to somehow enter the story. One thing you can do, in those circumstances, is take something away. This is the principal of the souvenir. But they did not, as they now do, sell souvenirs at Entally where you can buy jam and lavender and so on. And I didn’t steal anything. The other possibility is to leave something behind, such as graffiti. I didn’t do that either. I don’t know how I came up with the plan for what I did, but here it is.
One day at home I made a very very tiny rag doll, about as big as your little finger, with real hair, an old-fashioned pinafore and an embroidered face. She was called Isabella, and was meant to resemble closely a doll that might have belonged to a child who might have lived in the nineteenth century, to be perhaps mistaken for such a doll. The next time I went to Entally, I took this doll, and I lifted the blue rug, and then I lifted a loose floorboard and I placed the doll in the space, and replaced the board and the mat. The room looked the same as it had before, the rug was flat, the faded faces stared unblinking from the picture frames. I felt marvellous. Isabella was in place, an insertion into history, a false clue.
On my recent visit I saw with no surprise that progress has brought about change, has added a souvenir shop and safety ropes and probably security cameras. The narrow staircase was just as I had remembered it. The plain wooden floor of the nursery was polished now, and covered with a different rug. The cots, the prams, the dolls, the photographs were all there for me to see, but the doorway was blocked off with iron bars. I searched for Isabella among the small treasures in glass cases. She wasn’t there. Well, perhaps she has been eaten by rats. Perhaps she has simply rotted away. Or perhaps she is still there, waiting beneath the floorboard to be discovered when the time comes. All I could do was take a few photos through the bars across the doorway. No doubt another illegal act of interactivity.
I also took pictures back at the museum, pictures through the glass of my beloved Joss House. And a picture of a portrait of Queen Victoria, painted by Robert Dowling in 1862. The Queen looks young and serious. She is seated, wearing a frothy white evening gown with bare neckline, and heavy robes of state, necklace, earrings, and crown. There is a lovely pearly sheen on her skin and clothes. She stares candidly straight out at the viewer. The portrait hangs at the turn in the main staircase, alone on an otherwise empty wall. And above it, printed in bold white letters on a green sign is the word ‘EXIT’ and an arrow. Australia is not yet a republic, but the significance of the portrait in proximity to the sign is quaintly prophetic of change. Other paintings, such as the works of John Glover, have already disappeared from the walls of the museum, are I suppose packed and ready to go to the new site. But Victoria is riding it all out at the turn of the stair. When she exits, where will she go? It’s not a great portrait, not some great work of art, and right now it just floats there, below the EXIT sign, waiting for something to happen. Waiting for a ghostly guard in a dark uniform to come along with his key and to activate the musical box so that the monkey and all the other creatures will dance, and the mechanism will play ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’.
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