This paper was originally published on the Museums Australia website, following a presentation at the Museums Australia National Conference themed ‘The Other Side’ in Perth 25-30 May 2003. Museums Australia (MA) is now called Australian Museums and Galleries Association (AMAGA).

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people should be aware that this paper contains images of someone who has died.

Introduction

Botanic gardens are living museums and throughout my career I have taken every opportunity to promote them in the museum context, including setting up a Museums Australia (MA) Botanic Gardens Special Interest Group (BGSIG). The current definition for a museum by International Council of Museums (ICOM) is:

‘A museum is a non-profit, permanent institution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment.’

Museums, botanic gardens, zoos and other cultural and collecting institutions are primarily public places. As such, those of us employed in them have a responsibility to serve the community that funds our organisations regardless of whether that community covers a local area, a state or even a whole nation. While our visitor profiles are quite predictable, do they represent the diverse mix of cultures, ages, socio-economic and language groups that make up the community we are accountable to? And do we display and interpret artefacts in such a way that they reflect our diverse community’s values?

I therefore pose these challenges:

How good are we at reaching the community we are supposed to serve?
How do we strengthen our civic role?
How do we get our institutions to reflect their social and cultural settings?
How do we get whole communities to value our collections and take them to their hearts?

Forming partnerships

Part of the answer lies in forming partnerships – with individuals, community groups, organisations and other professional service providers. Partnerships enable societies to exercise ownership of their cultural heritage and develop a real appreciation of its worth. Partnerships enable the sharing of workloads, costs and responsibilities. Forming partnerships has additional relevance in the current political and economic climate where most organisations are being asked to do more with less.

Partnerships differ from consultant/client relationships because they are about creating a working environment of mutual trust where decision making, management, benefits and costs are all shared. Partnering organisations may have different missions and run independent businesses but when they come together for the purpose of a common goal, they become accountable to each other. Neither could achieve the desired outcomes as efficiently, or effectively, alone.

The nature of partnerships is that they are built to last a long time. These become professional friendships and can lead to open relationships where strategies and problems can be discussed frankly and frequently. Reviews should be conducted annually and mechanisms put in place to enable clearly defined roles and responsibilities to be modified in the light of changing circumstances.

It is also good to include representatives from the diverse community in our partnerships. They have a vested interest in us and we in them. They might be individuals or representatives of community sub-groups or local government.

What follows are some examples of successful (and award-winning) partnerships set up in a botanic garden, the Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney, that demonstrate the above principles. Similar case studies can be found in other types of cultural institutions.

Partnerships with individuals

Over 400 people volunteer their services to the Royal Botanic Gardens and Domain Trust (Trust) in Sydney. Volunteers provide valuable assistance in community education programs (tour guiding and on-site interpretation), in the Herbarium (mounting herbarium specimens and assisting staff with the curation of particular plant groups) and horticulturally, by maintaining specialist collections and assisting in bush regeneration. About half of the volunteers work directly for our Friends’ organisation, one of whose roles it is to raise funds through catering, activities, art exhibitions, plant sales and book sales. These funds are then donated to the Trust to be allocated to worthy projects unlikely to be funded by government allocations.

Like any personnel in any organisation, volunteers bring different personalities, skills and talents to the workplace and systems need to be in place to accommodate their differing needs and expertise. Systems are in place to encourage participation of as diverse a representation of the community as possible. To this end we prepared a Volunteer Policy with position descriptions outlining responsibilities in a wide range of program areas.

Volunteers can choose the areas that suit them best. They then receive training and professional development and are appropriately supervised. They do meaningful work and, in all respects (except for monetary payment), volunteers are treated and valued like paid staff. A Volunteer Working Party with key stakeholders has also been set up to facilitate policy and program review and to oversee the implementation of any new initiatives.

So, who volunteers? The traditional stereotype of the volunteer is a middle-aged female ‘do-gooder’. This is far from the reality of today (or ever). The Olympics experience and the International Year of Volunteers in 2001 showed that participants in modern volunteering are:

>60% are in full-time employment
55% female 45% male
range in age from 15 to 60+years
60% are under 44 years of age

Far from purely doing good, today’s volunteers are motivated to rally together for a common cause – often for a short duration, and for a desire to contribute to the ‘bigger scheme of things’. For this reason, cultural institutions must stand for something and clearly articulate this in their mission and values. Today’s volunteers also enjoy working with others and feeling a sense of belonging, and they embrace the opportunity for new experiences and skill acquisition. It is important that we acknowledge that people volunteer for their reasons, not ours.

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All our organisations can benefit from having volunteers who perform duties that increase productivity and give honest feedback (from a community perspective) on our programs and sites. Society in general benefits, because volunteers represent a familiar presence to those sectors of the community that identify with them. This makes our venues more appealing to a wider clientele and our organisations come to be regarded as part of the local, social and cultural fabric.

Partnerships with communities

Cadi Jam Ora – First Encounters (Cadi) is a relatively new display in the Royal Botanic Gardens that remembers and acknowledges the Cadigal – the original Indigenous inhabitants of Sydney's city centre – and their relationship with this land and the plants that once grew there. The Royal Botanic Gardens on Farm Cove has long acknowledged its European heritage and the place where the first farm was cultivated in Australia. However, only now does a display exist that presents an Indigenous perspective of Sydney’s history.

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Front end evaluation of Cadi targeted the local Aboriginal community who made it blatantly clear that the project would only succeed if it had input from, and was driven by, the community itself. To this end an Aboriginal Education Officer was employed to work with the project team and represent the Indigenous voice. John Lennis came on board in this capacity in June 1999 and provided a valuable conduit for any ideas and events the Indigenous community saw as essential for inclusion in the Cadi display.

For the 50m long Storyline that transects the display beds and outlines Sydney’s history from Dreaming to the present, John conducted over 40 personal interviews with the Indigenous community and obtained relevant contemporary quotes that show Sydney has a continuing and vibrant Aboriginal culture.

Indigenous people identify strongly with the Storyline and encourage all sorts of people to visit the Gardens who might otherwise not come. They now use Cadi as a meeting place and already one Indigenous wedding has taken place there.

John continues to work with the Community Education team to establish an extensive public program of guided walks with Indigenous guides, children’s holiday activities with Indigenous themes, bush food and interactive drama lessons for schools. He also takes the Trust’s messages beyond the walls with public talks and advice to schools and local communities on establishing bush tucker gardens. John is perfect in this role because he represents two voices: that of Trust management and that of the Indigenous community.

Despite its Eurocentricity and highly contrived landscape the Royal Botanic Gardens has real meaning for the Indigenous community and they feel a sense of ownership towards it. A highlight was having Aboriginal Elders telling traditional stories as part of our holiday activity, Dreaming Stories of the Cadigal, to audiences that included Aboriginal children.

Community and staff alike take pride in the creation of the Cadi garden and it was selected as the winner of last year’s National Interpretations Australia Award for Excellence in Heritage Interpretation. This award is industry recognition for interpretation projects that demonstrate best practice. As said by one of the assessors:

“This project has many outcomes beyond mere visitor interaction; the involvement of many people/groups, particularly Indigenous people, scientists, horticulturists, schools build ownership and relationships. It also makes a very real commitment to reconciliation.”

As this workshop photo shows, it is important to really involve the community in one’s business activities rather than acknowledge them tokenistically.

Collectively, our biggest challenge must surely be to establish governing Boards of Trustees and staffing in our institutions that reflect the diversity of the community we serve (or more accurately, should be serving).

Partnerships with other agencies

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The Trust’s Community Education Unit has always had a commitment to taking its services out to where the people live through educational outreach programs. These are the means by which we can promote the importance of plants and take conservation of biodiversity messages beyond the garden walls. By taking place where the people live, local environmental issues can be addressed and resolved, and attitudes and behaviour can be modified to promote lifestyles compatible with the sustainable and equitable use of resources.

Since 1982 the Education Unit has been running annual programs, such as Arbor Day and RBG goes West, to green up school grounds but in 1998 we took an interest in connecting with the wider community, in particular socially disadvantaged groups.

Gamadagal ‘Spirit of Place’ – an annual three-day workshop with Aboriginal facilitators.

In August 2000 a formal partnership called Community Greening was set up between the Royal Botanic Gardens Sydney and NSW Department of Housing (DoH) to establish community gardens and green the urban environment. Both agencies operate state-wide and the aim of the initiative was to encourage residents in DoH estates and associated school communities in urban and regional NSW to take ownership of their local environment, develop an understanding of sustainable horticulture and make friends with people from a diversity of backgrounds. As a tenant, originally from Malaysia and now living in the Waterloo Housing Estate in inner Sydney, said:

“I had a Russian neighbour who couldn’t speak English very well. She lived next door for ten years – but we never talked. Now we garden together and we’ve become good friends.”

The relevance of Community Greening to community renewal was acknowledged with a Silver Award in the Social Justice Category in the NSW Premier’s 2002 Public Sector Awards.

Recently Community Greening received external funding from the Premiers Department’s Community Solutions Fund to enable further expansion and we now have two full time education horticulturists employed on the program. They work seamlessly with DoH’s Community Renewal Unit and Regional Coordinators on the 42 community gardens either in development or established on DoH or Council land, in churches or in schools throughout NSW.

Raquel Carvajal (DOH), Murray Gibbs and Stephen Paul (RBG)

Interest in the program and partnership continues to grow and local and state government bodies as well as industry and the commercial sector are very supportive. Community Greening has its own dedicated vehicle – covered in logos of the various sponsors who contribute seeds, plants, landscape materials, signage, water saving devices etc for use by community groups.

It is all too easy for cultural institutions to sit in isolation and wait for visitors to come to them. Community Greening has taught us the value of working collaboratively with the community in the community. Programs developed in such a way help change negative perceptions about cultural institutions as alienating environments and raise awareness that the collections belong to the people.

By donating ‘collections’ surplus to our needs (plants, cuttings and landscape materials) to community gardeners for their use, the Royal Botanic Gardens Sydney also fulfils its own commitment to recycling and sustainability.

Probably the most important lesson learnt is that community renewal initiatives won’t work unless they come from the community itself. The Trust and NSW Department of Housing (or town planners and architects) cannot determine where and how many community gardens will be incorporated into the urban environment. However, if there is one individual in the community (‘a dynamo’) who is highly motivated and keen to implement the idea, and if that person is supported and encouraged, then the rest of the community becomes involved. Government departments, local businesses and industry can then provide materials and the essential education required to ensure horticultural success and a deeper understanding of ecological sustainability. Help can be given so that the community achieves what the community wants, rather than what the bureaucrats want or think the community needs.

Support the community ‘dynamos’

In essence, it is all about letting the community find their voice in our institutions. We must help the community use our (or, more accurately, their) collections to understand the past and sow the seeds for the future. Long standing collections will only have relevance to today’s society if we make them accessible for reinterpretation by the community. For example, many botanic gardens have tamarind trees (Tamarindus indica) that were probably collected and planted early last century to see how they might fare in the colonies and if they might have any economic potential. Today, Indian and Asian communities could be invited to harvest the fruits (pods filled with a pleasant acidulous sweet reddish-black pulp) that they like to use in cooking. Whole cultural festivals could be run around such occurrences, if the ethnic community saw value in that.

Partnerships with other professionals

Finally, I would like to mention the joint programs cultural institutions can run by partnering with each other. Despite different locations and collections, all of us employ curators, scientists and educators; have Friends and volunteer support groups; have obligations to provide school and other public programs as well as raise revenue and sponsorship etc. Why not share advertising and promotion costs, bookings and marketing procedures in situations when we are targeting the same market?

The following examples relate specifically to education programs but institutional partnering is equally applicable in the scientific field or for e-commerce projects. In Sydney’s CBD there are three museums (natural history, technology and history), a State art gallery, a botanic garden and library and, nearby, a zoo. The Trust’s Community Education Unit has successfully united with these sister institutions to meet the curriculum needs of schools and to enrich experiences for the visiting public.

For example, with the Museum of Sydney we offer day-long programs of activities for both primary and secondary students of History focusing on Indigenous Peoples, Colonisation and Contact History. At the museum, students handle archaeological objects from the site of the first Government House and interact with secondary source materials such as researching computerised photographs and records in the Aboriginal gallery, Cadigal Place. Outdoors at the Gardens, the students recreate the lifestyles of the Cadigal people and convict settlers. The success of the Contact program was recently acknowledged when the Historic Houses Trust and Royal Botanic Gardens & Domain Trust jointly won the Energy Australia National Trust Heritage Award 2003 in the Education (Corporate/Government) category.

In addition, a joint program on biodiversity is offered with Taronga Zoo and the Australian Museum and we are currently working with the Art Gallery of NSW (next door) to develop guided walks and school synergies related to their upcoming exhibition called Seasons in Japanese Art.

Conclusion

Those of us who work in cultural institutions have a responsibility to make the collections become society’s collections. Forming partnerships is a most effective way of engaging with individuals and the various groups that make up contemporary society. The fact that these groups take joint ownership of the collections ensures our institution's survival and continuing relevance. If the collections are merely put on display without community involvement, then the risk is run that they will only appeal to a knowledgeable elite.

In this paper I have mentioned a few public awards that acknowledge the success of community programs and partnerships. The greatest significance of these awards is that they clearly demonstrate that society values these interactions with their cultural institutions.

Our collections and institutions should be appreciated as important representations of our cultural past, and valued for their relevance to our contemporary world. Only if this is achieved will their survival be guaranteed and our collections remain available for reinterpretation by future generations.

The other side of botanic gardens: community involvement with collections