2003

23rd October 2003 - March 2004

This exhibition on Tourism includes material that shows how we Australians have promoted ourselves to others at various times in the past.

It provides some intriguing insights into how tourism has evolved, not to mention the strangeness of seeing familiar places in the past. For example there are some fascinating and rare guide books giving people tours of Melbourne and suburbs in 1870's and 1880's.

5 June - 29 September 2003

Reading fiction set in Australia from the early nineteenth-century to the present is a way of understanding our pre-occupations and national characteristics. It presents a rich field of study and research and is also a still-affordable field for collecting.

The exhibition covers our national output of fiction from 1845 to 2000 and includes such rarities as Ned Kelly, the ironclad Australian bushranger, published in 1881, less than a year after his execution; Henry Lawson's first book, Short stories in prose and verse (1894); and Melbourne and Mars (1889), an early example of Australian science fiction.

19th December - 5 May 2003

An exhibition of colourful and curious magazines dating from the seventeenth century to the present.

Magazines give us an intimate snapshot of the culture and time that produced them - for example, it's not likely that we will see a 2003 edition of New Idea repeating their November 1963 headline: "101 ways to be a happy housewife!".