The Immigration Museum is about our identity and place in the world. We are a place that inspires hope and possibilities for today and the future. We are shaped by the intersection of people and ideas through collaborations with communities, artists, and thinkers from Victoria, Australia and around the world. Together we seek to create empathy, understanding and impact through the diverse experiences that we share. Identity: yours, mine, ours is an exhibition that explores being and belonging in our modern world. It explores the complexity and fluidity of identity across culture, language, faith, sexuality, gender, and generations. Presenting a social history of our inherited prejudices and biases, it addresses racism in contemporary society and suggests some first steps in contributing to a safer, more inclusive community.

Lauren is the Exhibitions Manager at the Immigration Museum, facilitating collaboration between the museum and a range of community groups and diverse cultural practitioners. She’s worked for Museums Victoria in a variety of roles focused on community co-creation and new audience development. She spent just over 2 years working for a ethnographic museum in Luang Prabang, Laos, and undertook an Asialink arts management residency in Hong Kong in 2011. She’s currently serving as the President of Museums Australia (Victoria).

How is Australia racist?

Lauren Ellis talking to cardies on Saturday 15 July 2017 cardi party at the Immigration Museum / Photographer: Nik McGrath

Racism and identity in Australia is a broad and complex topic, and a tall order to cover in less than an hour, however Lauren Ellis rose to the challenge, providing many references and ideas for cardies to take away and think about. Lauren was invited by newCardigan and Museums Australia (Victoria) to introduce this topic before taking cardies to explore themes in the Identity: yours, mine, ours exhibition.

As we knew this topic would raise more questions than providing answers, July’s theme for GLAM Blog Club was identity, giving cardies who attended the cardi party as well as our online community a chance to expand on some of these concepts and ideas, as well as considering their own identities in the GLAM world. I recommend reading Nathan Sentance’s blog exploring what it means to be Indigenous in Australia, working in GLAM and the portrayal of Indigenous culture in GLAM institutions.

Lauren opened by respectfully acknowledging the traditional owners of Melbourne the Boon Wurrung and Woi Wurrung language groups of the greater Kulin Nation. The Immigration Museum is on the site of the old Customs House, a multicultural site with no treaty, first contact between first peoples and Europeans occurred metres away from the Immigration Museum. Customs House is part of the complex history of colonisation. A significant Indigenous site in the Birr-arrung (Yarra River) where a waterfall was destroyed by colonists is a short walk from the Museum.

Is Australia racist? This question is constantly asked by the Australian media, but really it is a fixation we need to get past as a society. Instead Lauren posed the question, how is Australia racist? This very topic has been explored in Beverley Wang’s podcast series on Radio Nation, It’s Not a Race, highly recommended by Lauren.

‘How many people feel race is relevant to their work? How many people identify with one race? I’m white, do I have a race? See filmmaker Whitney Dow’s Whiteness Project, a documentary exploring how people who identify as ‘white’ in America experience their ethnicity. Who feels comfortable talking about race?’ Are some of the questions Lauren asked the audience, responses revealing that we often feel unsure and uncomfortable when talking about race, perhaps amplified as the session was recorded for our podcast CardiCast.

‘Be prepared to make mistakes’, Lauren offered. ‘What makes you feel uncomfortable?’ The audience responded with being privileged and not fully understanding how that manifests in response to discussions about race. Another member of the audience mentioned that race is a loaded term, and that perhaps it is better to use ethnicity instead. The language around words such as ‘race’, ‘ethnicity’ and ‘nationality’ have loaded meanings and related social history. Language is a barrier – ‘person of colour’, ‘non-white person’, ‘new arrival’. Lauren’s advice is to be individual and specific, listen first and use the language of the community you are working with, but of course this is not always straight-forward.

Lauren raised a number of theoretical concepts as a framework for the discussion, defining privilege as a ‘set of unearned socially conferred exclusive benefits’, linked to ‘white privilege’, ‘gender privilege’ and ‘economic privilege’. Peggy McIntosh’s White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack is recommended baseline reading.

American activist Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality, defined by Lauren as ‘any one person’s identity or social position is fluid’, a concept which was born from feminist politics. Intersectionality exposed issues for white women but did not consider issues faced by women of colour. It’s worth watching this Ted talk by Crenshaw.

White fragility, a concept theorised by Robin DiAngelo, defined by Lauren as a ‘lack of stamina to stay in conversations about race, power and privilege’, with ‘people responding defensively and desperately looking for the good inside themselves’.

‘Systemic racism in Australia is often the result of inherited biases. If you are part of a dominant group due to your education, culture, gender or economy – these biases may be invisible to you’. Lauren makes the ‘optimistic assumption that people in the room are not bad people’. Identity: yours, mine, ours exhibition attempts to ‘unpack some of these issues with a process of critical thinking. The core objective of the exhibition is to make the world a safer and more inclusive place.’

Identity: yours, mine, ours exhibition, Immigration Museum, cardi party, Saturday 15 July 2017 / Photographer: Nik McGrath

The Immigration Museum opened nearly 20 years ago. The first 10 years exhibitions explored multiculturalism through migration stories. Themes about multiculturalism were looked at more broadly, which led to the Identity: yours, mine, ours exhibition. Designed for secondary school students, Lauren notes that adults also get a lot out of the exhibition. The exhibition was created in consultation with community and co-creation including guest curators. Many individual stories are told throughout the exhibition.

The exhibition can be broken down to a number of themes. The first theme is being and belonging, explored in the entrance by Australian filmmaker Lynette Wallworth wan an installation exploring feelings of being welcomed, judged and excluded.

Cardies viewing an exhibit in the Identity: yours, mine, ours exhibition, Immigration Museum, cardi party, Saturday 15 July 2017 / Photographer: Nik McGrath

The next theme is visible difference, based on ‘explicit judgements the result of social training’. To test your biases Lauren recommends taking the Harvard Implicit Association Test.

The social history of racism is another theme explored. For example, Lighten Up, an exhibit which explores cultural mimicry and appropriation, such as Wog Boys and Redskins lollies.

The final theme of the exhibition provides starter tips for practical action in anti-racist work. The Tram Scenario in the exhibition is a video installation depicting a racist incident from different perspectives, from the person’s perspective who is targeted, the white saviour, the racist perpetrator, and the perspective of another minority person looking on. This Tram Scenario was based on research from the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission.

An ARC project led by Deakin in collaboration with University of Melbourne and Museums Victoria, Identity: Yours, Mine, Ours – Exhibition Research Project Evaluation Report, evaluated the impact of the exhibition on students.

Lauren offered to continue the conversation via email by contacting Nik McGrath. For those who were unable to be at the cardi party the CardiCast will be posted when it’s available, so look out for that.

On International Archives Day (IAD), Friday 9 June, newCardigan filled the back room at Loop Bar until we could fit no more. Everyone was in a festive mood as we celebrated IAD, newCardigan’s second birthday, and horror film archives with guest speaker, archivist Mel Begg.

At 19 Mel became a flight attendant. A year into flying Mel decided to go to uni to pursue her passions, so she enrolled in an undergraduate degree and honours in film and media. I met Mel while we were both completing our Masters in Information Management at RMIT. We connected over many things, being two archivists interested in photographic and audiovisual collections brought us close together.

Mel and I both worked at ABC Archives. On a contract, I catalogued the Natural History Unit physical media assets and the ABC’s South Australia branch photographic collection (1940 – 1990). Mel worked in the Collections team as the Video Tape Librarian as well as working on records management projects during ABC’s move from Elsternwick to Southbank. Members of the Collections team were made redundant, including the film archivist. The Melbourne branch of ABC no longer has a film archivist, as the ABC film archives have been moved to Sydney.

Being a wonderfully enthusiastic person, Mel met many great people at ABC, which led to her current position as News Librarian at Channel 9. As well as being incredibly enthusiastic, Mel is incredibly busy, she also works in the cinemas at ACMI, is Operations Coordinator at Monster Fest, and since the start of 2016 has been a co-organiser at Melbourne Horror Film Society (screenings on the last Tuesday of every month).

The News Library at Channel 9 has three qualified librarians working in the newsroom with 30 second turn arounds to get vision for stories! An electric environment for an archivist to work in. The News Librarians catalogue everything that has gone to air that day to ensure that it is immediately accessible.

In 2014 Mel did her industry placement as part of her studies in the Masters of Information Management degree at the Hugh M Hefner Moving Image (HMH) Archive at the University of Southern California (USC). Hugh Hefner donated substantial funds to the Archive; it’s not a Playboy Mansion! During Mel’s research about where to do her placement, she was impressed with the number of famous horror film directors who had studied at USC. Dino Everett, Hugh M Hefner Archivist, was a punk rocker, as well as a type who sticks it to the man, which impressed Mel no end. Archivists who break down stereotypes are our heroes. During Mel’s month-long placement she worked on prepping films for screening, such as the Dark Crystal, amongst many other films. Dino taught Mel how to repair films, a skill rarely taught to archival students in Australia.

When Dino started working at the HMH Archive he wanted to find John Carpenter films, he had heard of Captain Voyeur, and found it within a year. He found a box labelled O’Bannon. Dan O’Bannon is famous for writing Alien and Total Recall, amongst other films. This was a start, but Dino had other films he was searching for in the archives. Dino was putting together a feature film of student short films.

In 2011 a book was published entitled Shock Value by Jason Zinoman. After reading the book, Dino knew that Zinoman had seen the films he was looking for, so he contacted Zinoman who said he had got the films from Dan O’Bannon’s wife. Diane O’Bannon had copies of all the films at home that Dino had been search for over three years in a box labelled Blood Bath in her shed, and was happy for Dino to have the films. As described in Zinoman’s book, Dino couldn’t believe when watching these student films how much they informed and influenced their later work, and the work of other filmmakers.

Shock Value The Movie, a compilation of student short films from the UDC School of Cinematic Arts, compiled by Dino, included the work of Charles Adair, John Carpenter, Alec Lorimore, Dan O’Bannon and Terence Winkless. Mel showed our cardies a trailer, which you can view here: https://vimeo.com/106537871. Did you get the creeps?

In 2016, Mel curated three screenings at Melbourne Horror Film Society (MHFS) including short films from the HMH Archive.

Screening 1 – Voyeur Night:

• Good Morning Dan, short film written and directed by Dan O’Bannon, camera work by John Carpenter, 1968
• Captain Voyeur, short film written and directed by John Carpenter, 1969
• Body Double, feature directed by Brian De Palma, 1984

The archive films were popular with MHFS audiences, which was encouraging to Mel and for the continuation of her curated program over the next two screenings.

Screening 2 – Back to the USC Archive for Christmas in July:

• Judson’s Release, highly acclaimed short film by Terence Winkless and Alec Lorimore, starring Dan O’Bannon, 1971; influenced films such as Halloween, Black Christmas, He Knows You’re Alone, When a Stranger Calls and others. Mel pointed out that the first 20 minutes of When a Stranger Calls is effectively Judson’s Release
• Black Christmas, feature directed by Bob Clark, 1974

Screening 3 – Dead Night:

• Blood Bath, short film written and directed by Dan O’Bannon, 1961
• The Demon, short film written and directed by Charles Adair, and credited as the first of many Night of the Living Dead remakes
• Return of the Living Dead, feature directed by Dan O’Bannon, 1985

With Dino’s permission, Mel showed our cardies short films from the HMH Archive, John Carpenter’s Captain Voyeur and Lady Madonna, and Dan O’Bannon’s Blood Bath. Mel described Carpenter as the ‘master of horror’, making films such as Halloween, The Thing, Escape from New York, and Big Trouble in Little China. Funds granted by the US National Film Preservation Foundation made it possible to preserve Captain Voyeur, a black and white short (17 minutes), original 16mm. ‘Many of Carpenter’s ideas for Halloween are evident in Captain Voyeur’, Mel shared with cardies. Lady Madonna, Carpenter’s 20-minute thesis film, is sadly missing its vision, only the sound and production book have been found. Like many filmmakers, Carpenter doesn’t want his student films released. Mel is unsure if Carpenter has the vision for Lady Madonna (Charles Adair – editor, Kathy Maynard and Dan O’Bannon – actors, Marc Stirdivant – sound).

Dan O’Bannon’s Blood Bath (no prints as yet, 2k scan of neg A & B rolls), Mel told a great story about Carpenter walking past a screening of the film and hearing ‘raucous laughter from the audience and he thought, I need to work with this guy’. ‘John Carpenter is very good at working with the right people and taking things they do well and making it his own’ Mel went on to say. Dan O’Bannon is ‘unsung, he worked on many projects. He was uncredited for his work in creating space characters for Star Wars films. Dino wanted to highlight O’Bannon’s talent and work, and get it out there’.

Dino’s aim is to have all of the films preserved properly. Most of the films are only 2k scanned, but with more funding and resources, HMH Archive can preserve these important student films for future generations. Film has an expiry date, and requires digitisation and preservation now, to save films for the future. Film archives in Australia are also vulnerable to loss over time, and require more funding and resources. The ABC film archives have been transferred to Sydney, so we have no ABC film archivist in Melbourne. NFSA and ACMI outsource a lot of film archive work. There are warehouses filled with film archives, the volume is overwhelming when undertaking digitisation and preservation work, but this incredibly significant and valuable cultural heritage must be saved before it’s too late.