Meet the Solutionists, with Mark Scott

Who gets to tell the story of Australia?  

This is the question always at the forefront of Michael Dagostino’s mind. Michael’s the Director of Museums and Cultural Engagement at the University of Sydney, meaning he oversees its famous Chau Chak Wing museum. The museum houses tens of thousands of objects, all of which tell a story.  

But how does an object tell a story? And how does the way we collect and house them affect that story?  

Michael shares how art offered him a sense of place and identity as an outcast kid, and how he adopts the mindset of a journalist when curating an exhibition. You’ll also hear from Marika Duczynski, Chau Chak Wing’s Indigenous heritage curator, about her favourite objects in the museum and how they help her connect with women who lived in Sydney hundreds or even thousands of years ago.  

And if you’re in Sydney, you can pay a free visit to the Chau Chak Wing museum. 

Mark Scott  00:01

This podcast is recorded at the University of Sydney's Camperdown campus on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation. They've been discovering and sharing knowledge here for 10s of 1000s of years. I pay my respects to Elders past and present, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people

Mark Scott  00:30

Who gets to tell the story of Australia? Or of Sydney? Who gets to tell the story of well, just about anything? That's a question Michael Dagostino has been considering for his entire career. Michael says art has a special storytelling power that no document, no report, no written history quite has, and as an experienced museum director, he's learned that objects can have that same power as long as the right people are telling the story.

Mark Scott  01:02

Michael's the Director of Museums and Cultural Engagement at the University of Sydney. He looks after our Chau Chak Wing Museum, which houses everything from ancient Greek artifacts to Australian cockatoo displays. I'm Mark Scott, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sydney, and this is The Solutionists.

Michael, you and I might not be talking about museums and the arts if it wasn't for a woman named Mrs. Bateman. Tell me about Mrs. Bateman and her influence on you?

Michael Dagostino  01:43

So I went to Airds High School, which is located in Campbelltown, so 1980s it was a fairly rough place, and I was going through an interesting time. My parents were going through a divorce, and Mrs. Bateman, the most amazing art teacher, would always say, look, just come and hang out in the art room. You don't need to worry about going to economics. You don't need to worry about going to maths. Just come and hang out. She was a really, kind of an interesting person, because at that time, I wasn't really interested in painting, but being kind of one of those

Michael Dagostino  02:04

weird art kids, I was interested in performance art. And she introduced me to artists like Mike Parr, Stelarc and Marina Ambramovic, which was a kind of a foundation for where, you know, where I am today. Mark: Well, your passion for art has clearly driven your career, but your mother wasn't that thrilled about it. Michael: Yeah, so I didn't tell her that I was going to art school. So she was a very traditional Italian mum. Wanted me to become a lawyer, wanted me to become a doctor, wanted me to do one of the professions, which she could hold up to her family and go look at my son. And so I enrolled at Liverpool, TAFE to study art, and I told her, and on that day, she cried. She said things like, how are you going to support yourself? How are you going to support your family? How am I going to tell my family that you're going to become an artist? 

Mark Scott

And were you worried about any of those things? 

Michael Dagostino

I was a teenager, no, 

Mark Scott

So your mother was concerned about you becoming an artist. You went to art school, but you didn't actually become an artist, did you? I mean, what happened? 

Michael Dagostino

So I did. I tried, I tried very hard to become an artist, but I was always curating exhibitions. So I always had this ability to organise shows, to organise exhibitions. And so in second year, we put together a series of exhibitions. And then in third year, I did the same. 

Mark Scott

And what was it about curating and bringing together art under an idea that was exciting for you? 

Michael Dagostino

I think the interesting thing is about curating is you get to be a part of the narrative. You get to be a part of that storytelling. You get to be a part of what artists are doing. And so it was me and another colleague, Michael Lindeman, who kind of set up a little consortium called Michael and Michael Visual Arts Project Management. And it was a play on the kind of the commercialisation that was happening at art during that time. But we really learned how to kind of tell the story of artists and how to kind of look at art in a way that included audiences and community. We're not here talking about telling stories, 

Mark Scott

It reminds me of old journalist colleagues. To what extent is a curator like a journalist? You’ve got to find out what the story is first. 

Michael Dagostino

Yeah. So I've always kind of had this idea that journalists and curators are very similar in the way that they, you know, go along and have their practice. So they need to be able to work with a story and communicate it in a very effective way to an audience. But even before they do that, they need to make sure that the story is relevant to that audience. And so I'm very interested in the way that journalists have to be relevant to the days that they're operating in, and tell that story in a very succinct way that people can understand. And curators need to be working in that way, because if you want to be able to communicate what an artist is doing, or the you know the knowledge within

Michael Dagostino  05:00

an object you need to be a great communicator.

Marika Duczynski  05:10

Let me bring you inside the Chau Chak Wing Museum, just through the entrance doors and opposite the front desk to a relatively small display case. Inside the case are some really significant objects relating to the history of Aboriginal Sydney. They're quite small. They're quite unassuming, and visitors might actually just glance at them, look the other way and continue walking, but I'd want to make sure that you don't miss them, because they're really special.

Marika Duczynski  05:49

My name's Marika Duczynski. I'm the curator of Indigenous heritage at the Chau Chak Wing Museum. I'm a Gamilaraay and Mandandanji woman, and my role really at the museum is to look after the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander collections that sit within the broader umbrella of the Macleay collections, to facilitate access to communities to whom the collections are connected, and to platform their voices in and across the museum as well, and to care for the materials in a way that is culturally respectful and appropriate.

Marika Duczynski  06:32

At the entrance to the museum, we have a display of really important materials in the collection relating to Aboriginal Sydney. Among them are two really beautiful fish hooks that were historically made by Aboriginal women of the Sydney region, but not only women of the Sydney region. They're actually made from the Central Coast, sort of around Port Stephens area, just north of Newcastle, right down to the New South Wales, Victoria border of today. So the shell fish hooks were made from turban shells. And in museum land, we might refer to them as turbo torquatus, but in the language of Aboriginal Sydney, they might be referred to as Burra or Bara, and the fish hooks would be made by Aboriginal women through taking the turban shells and sanding them down to a very fine sliver, and then sanding a circle in the middle of the sliver and snapping the top off, and then further sanding down again to get this really beautiful, quite dramatic crescent shape, or J shape,

Marika Duczynski  07:47

and they would be worn around the necks of women, and not necessarily because they were worn as jewellery, although they were undoubtedly, and are undoubtedly still today, very beautiful to look at. They were worn around the necks of women because they're the most important tools in a toolbox. You know, they're, they're used each and every day as part of people's everyday kind of fishing practices. And there were many accounts, written accounts from the early colony in which people were reporting seeing just scores of Aboriginal women in bark canoes, kind of littered across the bays of Sydney.

Marika Duczynski  08:31

Day in, day out, no matter the weather, no matter the season, no matter the tides, women would be out in their bark canoes, fishing using their fish hooks, and they would take their children. They'd take their babies at the breast, they'd take their nieces, they'd take their nephews. And so they were formidable fisher women, formidable swimmers, formidable divers, just providing sustenance for their families and communities.

Mark Scott  09:09

One of the things that it strikes me about the museum you run and other great museums is that you have that floor space and you have the standing exhibitions that are always there, and the special exhibitions that you put in, but that's just a fraction of it, isn't it? I mean, most of the museum are the collections that you never see. Tell us what's underneath the surface of this iceberg. 

Michael Dagostino  09:42

So there's three collections that have come together, the Nicholson, the Macleay and the visual arts collection. And so they've come together under the Chau Chak Wing Museum banner and building. There's 450,000 objects that are a part of those three collections that have come together. Within that, we have 350,000 insects, our entomology collection is huge. One of the special things that we discovered last year is a South American scientist came to the museum to do research on our butterflies,

Michael Dagostino  10:02

he discovered 220 heliotypes. So it's an amazing thing, and we didn't know we had those in our collection. 

Mark Scott

I mean, it must feel like a heavy burden looking after these hundreds of thousands of objects that have been collected over such a long period of time. Can you describe an object in that that has a special meaning to you?

Michael Dagostino

Yeah. So being in the job for the last 18 months, I think the most interesting objects that we currently are custodians of at the Chau Chak Wing Museum are the Gweagal spears. In 1770 Captain Cook arrived at Kamay Bay. They fired gunshots, which made the Gweagal people flee. After scavenging around the camp, Captain Cook and his men stole 40 to 50 spears and a shield, as he assumed these spears were going to be used for fighting, but they were actually used for fishing. And when he returned to England, they were donated to the Trinity College and then ended up at the Cambridge University Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology, where they lived for close to 250 years.

Michael Dagostino  11:09

So these spears were taken by Captain James Cook, and a few years ago, they were on exhibition at the National Museum of Australia. So the Gujaga Foundation and La Perouse Local Aboriginal Land Council worked together to intensify the lobbying of Cambridge University to have the spears returned.

Michael Dagostino  11:28

It was a momentous occasion where the Gujaga Foundation and the Local Aboriginal Land Council had negotiated their return.

Michael Dagostino  11:36

It was the culmination of efforts to bring the spears back home that was started by Elders decades earlier. So we're custodians of the spears. We don't own them, and we're only looking after them until a new cultural facility and community centre is built on country in Kurnell in Sydney. So we worked quite closely with the La Perouse community when they were returned to make sure that they were housed correctly, to make sure that the right people had access to them, and to make sure that their history in the way that they were spoken about was on their terms.

Michael Dagostino  12:10

I see these objects as time travelers. They tell this story of Australia in a very, very deep way. They tell the story of colonisation. They tell the story about how these kind of objects were taken to another place. When they were returned, they're actually shorter because they'll cut down because they couldn't fit into the display cabinets. And they talk about how museology in Cambridge University kind of operated. 

Mark Scott

It's also an example, isn't it, of the debate that's taking place around the world is kind of reckoning around ownership. Yeah, you know, objects that are stolen or were they donated, and the questions that are asked today. I mean, how do you think through our collection and now the process of collecting? 

Michael Dagostino

So a large number of the objects that we have were collected in ways that would be seen today as being completely unethical, you know, from markets in Egypt, and then traveling to London, you know, to be kind of assessed, and then coming back to Australia without any permits or any recourse for the local communities that were taken from. Also, we have a large amount of human remains that we care for at the museum. And again, these are people that were traded in a way that wouldn't be respectful to do that in today's world. So a part of our colonial burden is to repatriate some of these objects, to look at the ways of collection practices from the past, and then make adjustments to build a level of reconciliation and atonement.

Mark Scott

Yeah, there's also that sense hearing you talk that you think more in terms of being a custodian than an owner of these we are. 

Michael Dagostino

So collections are managed through an asset management model, which is almost contrary to the way that museums should be operating. So the way that we manage assets, you know, they're done from a financial perspective. It's about storage, it's about insurance, it's about all these different types of things, but where we should be looking at it from a knowledge based perspective. So collections hold so much knowledge, and we're only custodians of a part of that knowledge where a lot of the knowledge that the community holds is much more vast and should be incorporated into those objects.

Marika Duczynski  14:25

I guess the reason why they're special to me is because they're a women's object. And as I said, there are an abundance, often, of men's hunting tools and things like that, but much less so representations of women. And certainly we have lots of weavings and jewellery and things like that that were and are still contemporarily made by women. But these fish hooks are things that you might look at and not necessarily regard them. You might just look at them and walk past and not really see or understand the

Marika Duczynski  15:00

amazing craftsmanship that's gone into making them, the many hours that has gone into making them, and also how they would have been used, and the methods as well, I mean, women of Aboriginal Sydney were not using these fish hooks in the kind of like Western fishing tradition that you might expect. So bait, for example, was shellfish that was chewed up and spat out on the water's surface, and a stone would be attached to the hook as the stinker, and then the lure would be just the luster of the shellfish hook itself, because it has this beautiful, kind of rainbow pearlescent sheen, which would have doubtlessly attracted fish and then just been very beautiful to look at, and the fact that really prominent women of Aboriginal Sydney, or the history of Aboriginal Sydney, like Barangaroo, for example, were formidable fisher women and knowledge holders, and passing on that knowledge to the younger generations. These are all stories that I think we need to know about this place where we live and celebrate and I guess for me, personally, as a new mum of twins, the idea of women's steadfast devotion to their families, to go out in blustering winds and driving rain or the beating heat of a hot Sydney summer day and fish, it just really resonated with me. And I can absolutely picture myself doing something like that, you know, for my own family, because, of course, we do anything for our families, and so the fish hooks have always kind of stayed with me, and I've always hoped that that one day their stories and the women who made them would be a little bit more celebrated.

Marika Duczynski  16:59

The fish books came to be in the collection through a very generous donation by Father Eugene Stockton, who is a retired Catholic priest and was a lecturer in Geology here at the University. And he donated over 3500

Marika Duczynski  17:18

objects from various archaeological digs that he was a part of. And I think he participated in some 60 archaeological digs in the Blue Mountains alone. And he really was interested in the concept of deep time here in Sydney, and interested in Sydney's past from an archaeological perspective and what archaeology can reveal to us, and to marry that with the oral histories of Aboriginal communities today. And the reason why that was significant in the 50s and 60s, when Father Eugene Stockton was doing this, is because the centre of archaeology was certainly not in Australia, it was in Europe and the Middle East, and so it was kind of looked down upon to be so interested in archaeology as a discipline, through the perspective of what the Australian continent can offer in that regard. So we were fortunate to receive a really significant donation from him. Amongst some of those 3500 objects was a really significant hand axe that is also on display at the museum in the same display case as the shellfish hooks, which thermoluminescence dating has revealed to be approximately 50,000 years old, which actually dates back to the last glacial period, and I think really paints a picture of that deep time dimension to Sydney.

Mark Scott

Before you came to the University, you were Director of the Campbelltown Arts Centre in South Western Sydney, and you've reflected that there was one exhibition that had a special impact on you. Tell me about that. Tell me about With Secrecy and Dispatch? 

Michael Dagostino

So when I started at Campbelltown Art Centre, I spoke to an Elder, Auntie Glenda Chalker, and she was like, so what are you going to do about the massacre? And I was like, what do you mean massacre? And then she went on to describe what the massacre was and how it happened, and that she was related to descendants that were killed on that night.

Michael Dagostino  19:42

So 17 April, 1816, marked a significant day in Australia's history. I'm just about to read out a quote to set the tone.

Michael Dagostino  19:52

So this quote is taken from the diaries of Lachlan Macquarie, the governor at the time, and in this diary entry, he's planning violence towards Aboriginal

Michael Dagostino  20:00

people, it's quite graphic. Listeners might find this distressing. I know I do.

Michael Dagostino  20:07

There were skirmishes happening in the south west on Dharawal country, and on April 10, 1816, Macquarie wrote in his diaries:

"I've directed as many natives as possible to be made prisoners with a view of keeping them as hostages until the real guilty ones have surrendered themselves or have been given up by their tribes to summary justice. In the event of the natives making the smallest show of resistance or refusing to surrender when called upon to do so, the officers commanding the military parties have been authorised to fire upon them to compel them to surrender, hanging up on trees the bodies of such natives as they may be killed on such occasions, in order to strike the greatest terror into the survivors."

Michael Dagostino  21:00

Aunty Glenda Chalker came up to me and said, you know, what are we going to do about the massacre? How are we going to commemorate it? It's its 200th anniversary in 2016 and what are we going to do? I went to the local high school, and it wasn't taught there, and it wasn't spoken about within the Campbelltown community. So I see exhibitions as a tool to kind of do something as a way of making something happen. It's not just an experience for audiences, but it has the capacity to do more. So I asked the Elders, what would you like to see happen? And they had three things. We want it taught in schools, we'd like to raise the profile of it, and then we'd like it to go on the New South Wales State heritage register. And so we're putting together the exhibition. And they were talking about this idea that colonisation didn't just exist in Australia, but it happened globally. And the English had this kind of colonial handbook that they would roll out across the world. And so we put together an exhibition that invited six Australian Aboriginal artists and four Canadian First Nation artists to talk about the brutality of colonisation. The curators were Tess Allas and David Garneau, and it gave a really, really universal perspective on the idea of colonisation from a very local event. And so using that, we're able to embed it into the local schools. We're also able to lift the profile of it, and it went onto the state register in 2022. Mark: So that's the power of art. Michael: It's the power of art and the power of curation. 

Mark Scott

What impact did it have? Tell me about the reaction of an audience member to that exhibition? 

Michael Dagostino

So one of the most powerful things that came from it is one of the descendants of Captain Wallace attended the exhibition, found out about it and wanted to meet Aunty Glenda Chalker. And there was a level of reconciliation that happened between Aunty Glenda and this person, which kind of really shook my world. It's the only way I can describe it. You know, you had one person who was the coloniser and an Aboriginal woman who was descendant from people that were killed on that night, and for them to come together and have a level of reconciliation was just a fantastic outcome.

Mark Scott  23:10

Do you curate for an audience? Michael, is there an ideal audience? 

Michael Dagostino

We do have a broad audience that engages with a museum, but I think knowledge holders, so holders of the knowledge that exists within those objects. So for example, the Gweagal spears engaging with the local La Perouse community is really, really important. So for me, the idea audience is around the ones that are holding that knowledge and that can actually lift up these objects into a new place. At the Chau Chak Wing Museum, we have three pillars, access, equity and authorship. Access is how we open the door. So how do we create a welcoming museum? Equity is who comes through the door to make sure that everybody's welcome in that museum. And lastly, the idea of authorship is who gets to speak in the museum once they're inside. And I think these three pillars are really, really important when we're thinking about a contemporary museum and how it operates with the colonial burden that we carry.

Marika Duczynski  24:13

A lot is said around this word decolonisation, the idea of decolonising museums, and although I understand, of course, the concept of decolonising, it's really hard to decolonise. For example, the museum institution in which I work, which is kind of founded on a colonial collection, the museum itself is born from the colonial project, I mean, it's, can you ever really decolonise this kind of thing, or can you really just work, work with what you've got, but work to reimagine these spaces and really transform them and really make them

Marika Duczynski  25:00

to suit the expectations of First Nations communities today and to make them welcoming and to make them accessible.

Mark Scott  25:17

I'm Mark Scott, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sydney, and that's Marika Duczynski, the curator of Indigenous heritage at the Chau Chak Wing Museum. You also heard from Michael Dagostino, the Director of Museums and Cultural Engagement here at the University. If you're also interested in hearing more about the transformative power of the arts, you'll love our episode with Sophie Gee on literature and how it helps us deal with complexity. 

Sophie Gee

I think that storytelling is one of the most important, perhaps even the most important, way to have access and equity to new pathways. So if you're able to tell your story, you're able to change your life.

Mark Scott

You can find that episode now in The Solutionist feed, and while you're there, leave us a review and a rating and follow the podcast so you never miss an episode.

Mark Scott  26:08

The Solutionist is a podcast from the University of Sydney produced by Deadset Studios. This episode was recorded at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences media room, and our thanks to the technical staff here.

The Solutionists is podcast from the University of Sydney, produced by Deadset Studios. Keep up to date with The Solutionists by following @sydney_uni on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. 

This episode was produced by Liam Riordan with sound design by Jeremy Wilmot and sound recording by Harry Hughes. Executive producer is Madeleine Hawcroft. Executive editors are Kellie Riordan, Jen Peterson-Ward, and Mark Scott. Strategist is Ann Chesterman. Thanks to the technical staff at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Media Room. 

This podcast was recorded on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation. For thousands of years, across innumerable generations, knowledge has been taught, shared and exchanged here. We pay respect to Elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.