WALKING THROUGH HISTORY
Sydney’s new Chau Chak Wing Museum
THE HISTORIC SANDSTONE Quadrangle has long been the first, and most impressive, thing people notice when entering the grounds of Sydney University. But, with the opening of the Chau Chak Wing Museum, housed in a sleek concrete box designed by Sydney design practice JPW, it is having to share the spotlight. And while traditionalists might tsk tsk at the audacity of encroaching on the sight line of such venerable and storied buildings, it is hard not to see a lovely symmetry (intentional or otherwise) in the two strange bedfellows: the divergent architectural styles are both resolutely of their time; the sharp, modern exterior of the new building is softened at ground level by emulating the same warm sandstone tones as the ‘Quad’ and they both share a common purpose of increasing knowledge through the study and consideration of history, art, science and the natural world.
The museum, named after the Chinese-Australian entrepreneur Dr Chau Chak Wing, who contributed $15 million towards the $66 million it cost to build (other benefactors include Penelope Seidler, wife of the late Harry Seidler, and the Ian Potter and the Nelson Meers Foundations), has provided a spacious, light-filled new home for three of the university’s most important collections: the Nicolson, the largest collection of antiquities in the southern hemisphere at more than 30,000 artefacts; the Macleay, the oldest natural history collection in the country, and its art collection of some 3000 pieces by artists including Emily Kame Kngwarreye,
Jeffrey Smart, Lloyd Rees and Imants Tillers.
Standing in the central atrium, the floors above and below are laid out in clear sight, joined by zigzagging stairs and flooded with light from a wall of double-height windows. Galleries branch off this space, with the first one housing Object/Art/Specimen, a curiosity shop of pieces curated by the museum’s deputy director Paul Donnelly, who is my guide during my visit. He walks me past modern and traditional artworks, taxidermy, tribal masks and trays of butterflies, many housed in large, traditional display cases within the modern space.
The assemblage is a perfect example of the diversity of the artefacts owned by the university. But gathered together under six themes, it also illustrates how objects are perceived differently by individuals, and how they inform our unique view of the world.
As we make our way through the gallery, Donnelly points out the many highlights of the museum, from Egyptian mummies and assorted ephemera (scarabs and amulets and mummified feet and a dubious mummified cat) collected on archaeological digs and donated by souvenir hunters, to entomology displays and ancient tablets engraved with the language of a long-gone civilisation.
Time is also spent wondering at a detailed Lego rendering of Pompeii, contrasted with real relics of the Roman city, a perfect metaphor for the old-meets-new focus of the Chau Chak Wing Museum that plays out inside, as well as out.