Monthly Archive for December, 2009

Using video, lighting and sound, the Music Cube, featured in The 80s are back, immerses the visitor in a 1980s dance party.

Dance parties emerged from an underground subculture as a new form of popular entertainment. Pioneered by the Recreational Arts Team, dance parties satisfied the primal need to celebrate en masse. DJs became an advertised attraction, pumping out high volume dance music. Experimental recording artists like Severed Heads delivered electronic and techno sounds. Video artists created visual effects to go with the music. By 1989 Sydney was buzzing with the excitement and energy of huge events such as the stylish and theatrical Sweatbox parties.

You can see other images of the music cube here and we will be adding more images and video clips to this page over the period of the exhibition.

Photography by Emma Bjorndahl
© All rights reserved
Post by Peter Cox, Curator

This is the title wall made out of cubes that can be seen at the entrance to our upcoming exhibition The 80s are back. The cubes were put together by members of the public who attended a morning session at the Museum last week that helped us to make this feature. We got to meet some amazing people including an 8 year old boy that could solve the Rubik’s cube puzzle in less than two minutes and Ankur Chaudhary who you can see solve the puzzle in 60 seconds which we have posted to YouTube.

Photography by Paula Bray
License: Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0

This image, showing a very sparse Surry Hills circa 1900, comes from the Phillips photographic collection. In our collection database the house has been identified as the ‘Phillips’ old homestead in Surry Hills’. This small and rather unusual collection of glass plate negatives were found in a deal box in the garage of a house in Latimer Road, Bellevue Hill and was late identified by Neville Phillips in 1989.

The donor Raymond Phillips was a rotograver and for many years was responsible for the Australian Women’s Weekly cover. His father, Arthur Phillips, was a gold and silver merchant and was possibly the photographer of the glass plate negatives.

According to The City of Sydney, Surry Hills at the turn of the century was a maze of narrow lanes with rows of houses in close proximity that numbered 776 in total. You can do this street comparison that shows the width of the streets from 1900 compared to 2003.

No known copyright restrictions

This photograph shows the New Zealand displays nestled next to the stairwell attached to the central dome. The central focus of the display is complete skeletons of the extinct Moa bird and their eggs. This is flanked by a diorama of the volcanic system of the central North Island mountains of Ruapehu and Tongariro and a display of sacking by the Jute Mill Company

Photography by Messrs Richards and Company
No known copyright restrictions
Post by Geoff Barker, Assistant Curator