Beginning in Bendigo - at the Post Office Gallery, a satellite space of the Bendigo Art Gallery, in the Information Centre, Pall Mall, Until August 14
As a small and stylish foray into Bendigo’s commercial history, Beginning in Bendigo is provocatively more-ish. We are enticed into a room of echoing voices, but in the end must strain to hear them.
Those echoing voices are the people behind the enterprises which had their beginnings in Bendigo: from the Danish Cohn brothers who arrived on the goldfields in 1853 right through to the woman who set up Fernwood women’s health club in 1989, Diana Williams.
It’s a mix of the well-known and the not so well known. As one visitor to the exhibition said to her friend, "I knew the Chiko Roll started here, but I didn’t know Leggo’s was from Bendigo too."
Curator of this show and also of City History and Collections at the Bendigo Art Gallery Sandra Bruce says one of the reasons for developing this exhibition, the second to be shown in the new Post Office Gallery space, is to disturb, ever so slightly, the notion that Bendigo’s social history is all about – or only about – gold.
"It is extraordinary to consider that the limitations of Bendigo’s geographic location … have not prevented the development of such thriving industry," Ms Bruce says.
On the walls and in the glass cases of the gallery, she has displayed objects, photographs and documents relating to half a dozen businesses, accompanied by brief histories.
Starting with Cohns brewery, we move through the 20th century, touching on the establishment and growth of H.M. Leggo & Co, Bendigo Preserving Company, the McKay Harvester Company (creators of the Sunshine Harvester), Abbott Supply Company’s Barblok wire, Myer, the Bendigo Knitting Mills, the Chiko Roll, Fernwood and the Australian Turntable Company.
That last company is not included in the catalogue, but there’s a display of photographs in a cabinet in the gallery: so its inclusion was a late one.
In fact, in the catalogue, Ms Bruce included this company that has developed huge weight-bearing turntables for building and warehouse use (revolving restaurants, for example) in a list of businesses she could have included, space permitting. Others to have missed out include Four ‘n’ Twenty Pies, the Bendigo Pottery, and Eco Villages Worldwide.
For my money, inclusiveness is less important than insight, and it would have been good to have a little more of that in this exhibition.
For instance, while Ms Bruce tells us how the Myer brothers set up shop and about their "innovative approach to attracting customers, through eye-catching window displays and sales-based marketing" , this does little to help us imagine just how fabulous that first Myer shop must have looked on Bendigo’s main street.
You do have to draw the line somewhere, of course: social history can unfold endlessly, edge on edge, panorama on panorama, echo on echo. But those Myer brothers (they were actually the family Baevski, but adopted the surname Myer, a note in the catalogue tells us, from the second name of the oldest brother, Jacob), don’t come alive within this exhibition. You hardly hear their voices, as you read about their business and look at the objects they sold in that early shop.
Even with something as contemporary as Fernwood, you might be left with little sense of the people behind the business. Only in the video prepared for the exhibition do we hear voices, and it was probably at this point, in the final corner of the show, that the city this is all about begins to stir, shift, pulse with life.
So: the good news is that Bendigo now has a first-class social history curator with a small but lovely space in which to display the city’s heritage.
The first show at Post Office Gallery was a ripper, tracing the way the city got its name. The second show is cleverly conceived to warn us not to expect the predictable from this space.
Both shows already make a little dint in the work that is just begging to be done, turning the raw materials of history into the narratives of our collective experience. Once a little more of that groundwork has been done, perhaps we can add in what I think is missing from this particular show; interpretive voices and writings that help us flesh out these memories.
What’s missing is the poetry of these lives, and the meanings behind the billboards advertising beer and corsets.
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