International Museum Day Opinion Piece by Alec Coles, CEO WA Museum

On May 18th we celebrate International Museums Day.

Since 2020, the theme for this annual celebration has supported the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. This year’s theme Museums, Sustainability and Well-being, focuses on the following three goals:

• Goal 3: Global Health and Well-being: Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages, in particular concerning mental health and social isolation.
• Goal 13: Climate Action: To combat climate change and its impacts, adopt low-carbon practices in the Global North and mitigation strategies in the Global South.
• Goal 15: Life on Land: Protect, restore, and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, amplifying the voices of indigenous leaders and raising awareness on the loss of biodiversity.

This could not be more timely for the Western Australian Museum as it was only last year that we, adopted the UN Sustainable Development Goals as a blueprint to guide our 2022 – 2026 Strategic Plan, Past, Present, Future.

I am pleased to say we were able to map our activity against a good deal more than three of the 17 goals. However, this year’s International Museum’s Day gives us the opportunity to focus on the three above, and consider how we contribute to each.

At the WA Museum, these considerations are part of our ‘business as usual.’  For many people, however, the concept of museums as critical and transformational players in the global commitment to a safer, more sustainable planet, and kinder, more considerate societies, may seem novel.

As the International Council of Museums stated in its Resolution “On sustainability and the implementation of Agenda 2030, Transforming our World” at its Triennial Meeting in Kyoto, in 2019 “…all museums have a role to play in shaping and creating sustainable futures.”

With respect to Goal 3, Global Health and Well-being, Museums are social places where people meet and interact with each other, either by accident or design.  Much vaunted as safe places for difficult conversations, the conversations do not have to be difficult – and they will always be easier in the Museum than outside. 

These opportunities to socialise, meet and consider issues, sometimes weighty, sometimes not, are invaluable ways to calibrate our lives, stay in touch, and contextualise our place in the world.  In short, Museums can play a major role in supporting good mental health for individuals and communities.

Museums also provide a place where people can explore their identity and their own sense of place.  ‘Identity politics’ has become a polarising term these days, being blamed for everything from social isolation to xenophobia and worse. But in a country where nearly a third of the current population was born overseas, identity matters: it connects us with our families, home and communities.  Many - probably most - Aboriginal Australians will begin an introduction by describing the Country and language group from which they come. Their Country, mob and families are central to their sense of self.

Good museums provide us with opportunities to explore our past, question our present, and shape our future.  They help us understand ourselves and each other. They also allow us to express ourselves.

The creation of the WA Museum Boola Bardip in Perth was informed and driven by the voices of over 54,000 people, all of whom had something to say: about the building, the content, and about themselves and their place. It was an engagement exercise unprecedented in scale and ambition, amongst Australian museums.  This was backed up by the principle that we would not speak for people who would speak for themselves.

The result has been astonishing, with so many people finding stories, media and collections that belong to them and their heritage.

By the same token, our regional museums, spread across a radius of over 600km, play a vital role in their local communities.  Trusted spaces where people can meet and share opinions, thoughts and occasionally frustrations (!), they play an important role in hearing and presenting the authentic voices of individuals and communities.

Goal 13, Climate Action, is to use the vernacular, a ‘no-brainer’.  What sensible business does not have sustainability at the heart of its strategic plan? Museums are no different, and we, at the WA Museum, like our contemporaries the world over, are focused on limiting our own emissions and waste. We are also working with visitors and users to identify and understand the challenges that we face, and to seek ways of addressing them together. 

Net zero seems a long way off, right now, but it is clearly not an option. Only today, the United Nations issued dire warnings that global temperatures are rising faster than even pessimists had predicted. There is clearly no time to waste. Our buildings must become greener and our operations more sustainable.

One of the most popular exhibits in the WA Museum is a large interactive wall that allows visitors to investigate the impact of their actions on our planet.  Greatly loved for its multi-user function and its interactive vibrancy, it has important points to make.  This exhibit sits in a gallery called Changes, charting the extensive impact that human occupation, over millennia, has had on the West Australian landscape, and how that impact has accelerated in the last 200 years.

Within the Changes gallery you can see the determination people have sought to harness the landscape, the success with which they often managed it, the destruction that was sometimes caused, and the future potential that could be the planet’s salvation. It is, perhaps, ironic that the vast agricultural plains that appeared after brutal deforestation can now be the home to novel research and extensive trials into the development of arid climate crops that may, one day, help feed the world and its growing population.

Goal 15: Life on Land occupies a special place in the heart of the WA Museum.  Working away behind the scenes, mainly at our Collections and Research Centre, just south of Perth, in the suburb of Welshpool, is a team of scientists who are charting the biodiversity of our enormous state and the extensive seas around it.

“What are those people in Welshpool doing?” I am regularly asked, “Saving the World”, I reply, and I mean it.  In a state with an area exceeding 2.5 million square kilometres, with significant climate issues of its own (drought and flooding at different times, in different places), and massive resources and agricultural industries, it is essential that we understand our environment. 

We need to know which species are there, where they are, and how they fit into the web of life. We need to know if they are, on the one hand, under threat; or, on the other, whether or not they may become a pest species.  If they are threatened, how do we conserve them; if they are pests, how do we control them?

Humans’ increasing impact on ecological systems is now so profound that we need this knowledge to understand our environment and conserve it. We even need it to exploit our natural resources: how many species possess biochemical or genetic characteristics that might help us solve medical or nutritional challenges? Even now, researchers are focussing their attention on tissues of a native marine sponge held in our collection in Welshpool, which offers hope of providing active natural agents that may be used in treating breast cancer.

In the WA Museum alone, the number of new species discovered every year is extraordinary – that is, new species to science: animals that have never been seen and named before.  The knowledge created is astounding, and that is in only one museum!

Think how this is multiplied many-fold across all the world’s museums.  This impact is the focus of a paper that appeared in the prestigious journal Science recently, in which my colleague Diana Jones and I were co-authors, with many colleagues from across the world. Entitled A global approach for natural history museum collections , the paper makes the case for the importance of continuing to build and sustain natural science collections as a vital resource and a critical piece of our research infrastructure for the future.

As you can see, the theme of Museums, Sustainability and Well-being is not just a platitude: it is an affirmation of the diverse and important ways in which museums worldwide contribute to the health and understanding of ourselves and our planet.  More importantly, it is a call to action for us all to do more.

Wherever you are, there will be a museum near you – large or small; old or new; private or public.  And whichever it is, to some degree, it will help us – help you – explore the past, question the present, and shape the future; because that is what good museums do.