Seize the Day: Exhibiting Australia

The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, held at London’s purpose-built Crystal Palace in 1851, marked the commencement of the great nineteenth-century international exhibition movement. A ‘motley collection of uncoordinated items represented New South Wales (NSW) and Van Diemans Land’, to be supplemented by a late exhibit displaying specimens of the first gold found in Australia (Young 2008, 12.3). Despite this modest beginning, Australians enthusiastically embraced subsequent international exhibitions, at home and abroad. Exhibitions have been a marketing tool for colonial and national advancement in global trade, migration and tourism from the 1850s to the present. The complex politics, personalities and astonishingly rich material culture of the exhibitions across two centuries examined in this collection reveal how public forms of display have continued to define us to ourselves, as citizens of Australia and of the world.