Olivia Jackson: Arts Centre Melbourne

After Documenting Culture, it Should Be Archived

Social history museums have always been an important place for nerds and fans alike to explore their deep passions for various artists. The Australian Music Vault is a special place to explore the history and culture of Australian music over the decades.

Olivia Jackson is the curator of music at the Arts Centre in Melbourne and spent four or so hours of her day showing me around the AMV. It was such a treat. Below is my interview with Liv.

By Billie Estrine

Sun. Aug 18 2024

Australian Music Vault

Where did you grow up?

I grew up in the East. I live in the Northern suburbs now, which is, in my opinion, the cool area, but I grew up in the Eastern suburbs, out in Balwyn. I lived with my grandmother for a long time. In the 1970s, Balwyn was a really big music suburb. The Stones went out there to house parties when they came on tour.

I moved to Northcote and North Fitzroy when I was 20, and I've never lived not North since.

Are you involved in underground music scenes?

I have never been a talented musician, but I have always surrounded myself with musicians. So, a lot of my friends growing up were in underground or punk bands. We have a thriving little band scene here, and so I grew up going to gigs but not participating in them. It's a lovely and inclusive scene, so I always felt like I was sort of around music.

Can you tell me about one of your favorite gigs from then?

I have always loved seeing my friends play. There's something so magical about knowing the people on stage, knowing half the audience, and feeling like you're supporting someone, but you also get something out of it. It would be impossible for me to name any one of those gigs because everyone I knew was in a band for a while there, but always ones where my friends were playing have been my favourites.

My favourite big gig that I've ever been to, it's so hard to pick one. When I was ten, I went to Kylie Minogue's "On A Night Like This" tour, which was a life-changing experience. When I was four, I saw Yothu Yindi playing at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl; it was my first musical memory. I saw Crowded House play at the Bowl a few years ago. They opened with a song called "Mean to Me," which plays in our exhibition every half hour on a cycle. They started playing it, and I don't know why, I think it had been a really stressful few months, but I just started crying, and then I didn't stop. I was so moved by the gig. I saw Nick Cave and Warren Ellis perform their film scores with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra a few years ago. I had tickets in the fourth row with my beautiful colleague, Carolyn Laffan, and watching them respond to an orchestra was really special. Too many to name.

Can you tell me about someone who could be called a muso? It's such a fantastic word that we do not use in the States.

You don't use it! A muso is someone who's just passionate about music. It has implications of being a tragic diehard music fan, someone who dedicates their life to music. It's not just a music fan; it's someone who performs music, who loves music, who contributes to the music industry, maybe. It's such a funny word. I didn't know you didn't have it in America.

It's one of the most perfect words to describe somebody who's so diehard in love with music and the world that it creates. We totally do not have that, and I think it's so special for the people who end up in underground music scenes. There's a very specific person who would be a muso.

Now that you mention it, it's a very Australian word because we are known for our laziness. We will often not bother finishing a word, cutting it off halfway through. I think it refers to the diehard tragic music fans who are just; there's no hope. They're never going to do anything else and just love it. They're the journeymen of the music industry, perhaps.

Why was The Australian Music Vault (AMV) created?

It was created in response to industry calls for a permanent Hall of Fame-style exhibition. More than that, it was the government's acknowledgment of the importance of music culture in Melbourne.

A live music survey done by a musician named Dobe Newton found that on an average Friday and Saturday night, more Melbournians attended live music gigs than a sell-out football match at the MCG. This proved to the government that the music industry was an important economic factor in the city and that the viability of this being a music city was really proven. Until then, we'd been known for our sports because we've [also] got great sporting arenas.

The music industry was calling out for support from the government. The government was getting proof that music was an economic imperative in the city, and they announced the Melbourne Music Works Package. That wasn't just for us; it was $22 million to support the live music scene in all its glory. Some of that money came to us to establish the exhibition, but it also paid for old music venues to upgrade their soundproofing to get better sound in the venues. It paid for certain albums to be produced. You could apply for grants as a musician. You could apply for a grant to support the industry. Not only did the music package start the exhibition, but it also supported music-making at every level. It supported the venues and the performers; it felt like a bit of a love letter from the government to the music industry. 'Cause at the time, the arts minister was also a massive music fan. His favorite band was Radio Birdman, which is a very cool answer when asked what your favorite band is. We were just one of the many things they did to support the industry.

Before that, in addition to the live music survey, there had been Draconian laws put in place [in Melbourne] that equated live music with violence, rather than equating alcohol with violence, in the night scene. So rather than looking at across-the-board solutions, penalties were put on small, medium, and large venues to have a certain number of security guards present when music was performed. But those laws were too blunt of a tool because they affected small restaurants that had a single flamenco guitar, as well as the major stadiums. It meant that live music was not a viable function for a lot of smaller venues, and it took the knees out of one really important area of the industry.

In addition to that change and underpinning, this was a first-come-first-serve rule. That's not what it's called; I made that up, but we had laws coming in and new developments and new apartment buildings going up all over the city that were then making noise complaints against venues that had been there for decades, saying, "You're too noisy." The laws favored the residences, whereas the government flipped that to whoever was there first had the right to be there, and any new development was responsible for soundproofing. That puts the responsibility onto the developers making these giant apartment buildings. If you're going to build next to a small music venue, you need to soundproof your apartments rather than the venue having to close earlier to make it comfortable for residents. That was something that was absolutely within the wheelhouse of the developers. They have built apartment buildings with proper soundproofing, but it meant that there was a lot of protection for small venues that were having to go up against massive development companies. So there was this really lovely outpouring of music policy that underpinned the establishment of this exhibition.

What is your position at the AMV?

I'm the curator of music here at the Arts Centre, so I'm the curator of that exhibition, but I'm also responsible for developing the music portion of the Australian Performing Arts Collection. Underpinning the exhibition is the collection. About 60 percent of the objects on display at any given time are drawn from our own state collection. The rest are borrowed directly from musicians. We have drawn things like Bon Scott's leather jacket from the collection, and then we've borrowed a guitar from Tash Sultana, for example, and we will return it to them when we take it off display.

The development of the collection is a complex and ongoing concern. We really want the collection to reflect music in Australia. So, I am responsible for identifying gaps or underrepresented areas of music and seeking out acquisitions to add to the state collection. So that they are protected. As it's a state collection, we aim to have objects protected and preserved for a long time into the future. It really is preserving music history for generations to come. Unlike many other galleries, we don't have an acquisition budget. All of that is done through relationship building and donation.

The collection is as strong as it is today through the generation of the performing arts industry here in Australia. We've had some really fantastic major donations come in that help us to tell the story of Australian music. [Still], there are always many gaps, and you can never be finished telling that story because it's evolving and complicated.

As a curator, it's your job to create relationships, such as with Nick Cave. How do you go about that?

There are many ways to do it. Sometimes, I will cold email the general manager of an artist, a record label, or someone and say, "We've got this exhibition or this collection, depending on what we're aiming for, and we'd really like to represent your artist in it." Then, the relationship will grow from there.

There's a dress upstairs in the exhibition that I borrowed from Dami Im, an amazing singer who represented us in Eurovision. I was emailing a different agent about a different musician at the time, and this email popped into my inbox saying, "Hey, I sit next to the person you're emailing. I've got this incredible Eurovision dress here. It's sitting in the office. It'd be amazing in your exhibition." That just came to us organically.

A really powerful way of doing it is word of mouth. We have great relationships already, and often, I'll ask a musician I have a relationship with to introduce me to another one. I asked the drummer of Spiderbait to introduce me to someone from a band called You Am I. He just texted him and said, "Hey, this girl wants to talk to you about her museum. Can you call her?" Then I'll have a really great conversation, because all musicians are delightful.

[To build relationships] particularly with [artists in] genres like hip-hop and punk, word of mouth is really important because these genres have needed to fight for recognition. There tends to be a mistrust of big organizations. Our building is red velvet and gold, and it's a giant spire in the center of the city. When you come to people cold, it can be really difficult. For the hip-hop relationships, we had a couple of people we'd been working with for a long time, and we lent on them heavily to introduce us to people and reassure them that we were here to listen and not impose our own viewpoints onto their genre.

Australian Music Vault

With punk, I wasn't here for the start of a lot of our punk relationships, but I get the impression that a lot of artists were like, "We've been waiting, duh; we know we're amazing, and you've finally caught on." Even though we were quite early at collecting a lot of that material, it was a funny experience. With all those genres, when you have to fight for legitimacy, you have a deep belief that what you're doing is worthwhile. With the punks, that came through in a kind of confidence that they knew they were doing something important, and we were kind of the last to catch them about it.

It's always the museum's way. We have to let something settle often before we permanently acquire it because once it comes into a state collection, there are all kinds of rules about how you care for things, and there is a cost to the taxpayer. So, I have quite a strict collecting policy, and we adhere to all those rules. Certainly, a lot of our relationships are built through referral.

Occasionally, I will blindly DM someone on Instagram, which also works. You really have to meet people where they're at. In the early days of this job, we often didn't work traditional museum hours because that's not how the music industry functions. You'd be out at gigs a lot meeting people, and you'd be out on weekends; people have my personal mobile number because often it's to do with the album cycle. You can't really take people's time on an upswing in publicity. So, you wait for them to be ready, and then they'll call you. Often, I'll be out, and I'll get a call. It'll be someone important who I've been wanting to talk to for months, and you have to meet them where they are. Now that we've been doing so much work over the last few years, it's settled a bit, and people are more aware of who we are and how we work. So it's been a bit easier.

It's also about respect; the music industry has a different timeline and time frame. Everything's different in the way they work in museums. That's really interesting, and it was a real learning curve for me, coming from visual arts. It's also important when you respect people and what they're doing; they feel respected.

What year or decade did you start collecting from the punk scene?

We started in the early eighties, so quite contemporaneously with the post-punk movement. A lot of the Collections, Nick Cave for example, and Fanzines, have come in batches. Oftentimes, [starts with] a foundational object, and then over the years, you'll get additional objects and pieces, and then they go to build a big collection.

We have collected things from the very first days of punk in Australia. So, in terms of the existence of the object, we have things from very early 77. Certainly, the first fanzine is from 77, which is the year that punk started in Australia.

Arts Centre Melbourne

In terms of the museum collecting it, we were quite early. Traditionally speaking, it's 20 years. Hall of Fame works on a 20-year cycle, so you can't be in it if you've had hits for the last 10 years, for example. Traditionally, social history museums work slowly like that, but we acquire things now from last year. Our policy has [been] really broadened with this project as well. We're able to identify things like the Isol-Aid! posters upstairs, which was the Instagram music festival that happened during COVID. We knew that rapid response collecting was really important because we knew this moment was important. We can really be freer with our time periods now because we feel we can identify with confidence things that will be important.

Australian Music Vault

What background led you to join the Art Centre staff?

I technically have no music background whatsoever. I came from a career in visual arts. I had worked at the NGV (National Gallery of Victoria) before this and then at the Heide Museum of Modern Art. I had gained very specific experience there that suited this job. Heide [is] a social history museum, and I have worked with a lot of social history material. I led a cataloging project for the library, which is a historic personal library. I had identified that as an area of passion for me. I really like [people's] stories. Then, at the NGV, I worked as the executive assistant to the assistant director of curatorial and collection management, which is a very big title. [Still], I was responsible for a lot of accessioning work. So, I managed their collecting or aspects of their collecting. I did all of the admin around it and had a good handle on how a state collection acquires material and all the policies and procedures around it.

When this project was established, they anticipated correctly that it would result in a lot more donations so I could meet both of those key areas where they wanted me to work. Additionally, they asked me where my passion for music lay. My answer was, "I don't have an allegiance to any one genre." I think they'd had a lot of people who did, who were diehard fans of particular areas of the music industry. One thing they were really wary of was getting someone who would be really focused on a single area. They wanted someone who would be as passionate about John Farnham as they were about Nick Cave as they were about Kylie Minogue. Luckily, I am very broadly passionate about music.

It was a confluence of things at the time. It was a job that was advertised, but it really doesn't occur very often. I read it and thought, "I think that could be mine. I think that I might dedicate my life to that." I came in for an interview with Carolyn Laffan, the project's senior curator. I loved her basically from the minute I saw her. It's love at first sight, and we worked together closely for a number of years, and it was just this beautiful match made in heaven. She really got me, and I got her, and sometimes I felt we would barely have to speak, and we would know what the other one was thinking. So it was this really fantastic period working on this exhibition.

Can you tell me about the AMV's Agents of Change exhibition.

It's an ever-changing display of objects that tell the story of musical activism in Australia. It has a series of underpinning themes like land rights, disarmament, and women's rights. There's an artist in there who writes a lot about Australia's treatment of refugees. There are artists that we use [their] objects [to] represent these fights that the music industry is undertaking. They're also representative of broader artists. There's a band called Midnight Oil that has worked tirelessly on a number of political fronts. They're in there, with a tour with the Warumpi Band through the Northern Territory with land rights activism. There are flyers from a nuclear disarmament gig held here at the Bowl in the 1980s. There is a Grammy that was won by Helen Reddy, whose song "I Am Woman" was an icon of the women's rights movement in the 1970s.

Australian Music Vault

We try to bring artists in and out according to light exposure. Objects need rest, but we always maintain those themes. One artist who I've never taken off display is Archie Roach. Archie had a very brilliant song called "Took the Children Away," which reflects his experience as a member of The Stolen Generation, and it's come to represent not just his experience but the experience of many. It holds a very special place in the Australian consciousness of this fraught place where we live on stolen land, which is ongoing. It's his personal story of the day he was taken, but it's come to mean so much to so many people, and it's a really powerful song. That's been on display since the day we opened, the award he won for that song in the 90s, and the original album artwork.

Australian Music Vault

Do you know the song Fitzroy Crossing by the Warumpi band?

I do.

Could you tell me the story of that song if you know it?

I would have to look up the facts. I couldn't do it off the top of my head. Warumpi is such a powerful band. They hold a lot of firsts for us. They were the first band to tour overseas. They were real pioneers in all areas of the music industry.

The first indigenous band to tour overseas, or the first band?

No, they're the first indigenous band. They're really cool. I did get to meet some of them, and we've interviewed some of them for the project, and they're really good.

I think that with First Nations musicians, First Nations culture tends to think about time and space very differently from other cultures, and they're far more expansive in their notions of how we exist in the world and how time works. I always find a lot of common ground when speaking to First Nations musicians because they work on a much slower time frame as do [museums], and it's always a very enriching experience.

Yeah. Western perceptions of time are very specific, weird, and man-made.

Yes, exactly.

Compared to maybe Indigenous time, which was made through a deep relationship with the land.

It's a whole different ballgame, so to speak, and it's humbling, interesting, and moving. It's wonderful to work with these amazing people whose music has changed the way that we relate to our own history.

In that vein, while reading through the material on AMV's website, I came across Victoria's Indigenous music event, Share the Spirit. Can you tell me a little bit about Share the Spirit?

Share the Spirit is the brainchild of Songlines Aboriginal Music and is the largest and longest running Indigenous festivals. Share the Spirit happens every year on the 26th of January, which is known across the country as Australia Day, but for many First Nations people, it's known as Survival Day. The date was officially declared a day of mourning by First Nations people back in 1938, and Survival Day protests have been happening since the 1970s, but the government didn’t get involved in ‘celebrations’ of this date until the 1980s and it wasn’t fomalised until the 1990s.

There's a big debate about changing the date of Australia Day. It's the day that colonization started. It's the day that the First Fleet of boats arrived on Eora country, and for years the date has been this "celebration of Australia," but for First Nations people, it's the beginning of a series of incredibly horrific events. So, the idea that the nation celebrates itself as one on that day has always been a point of great contention. It's a debate that rages in the government and with the general public about whether we should change the date or not. I'm a firm believer that we should change it, because why would we all celebrate on a day that began a genocide. Yet, people seem to feel it is important to have a barbecue on that day.

Share the Spirit is a celebration of First Nations music, established by Songlines in 2003. We have partnered with Songlines to hold it at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl, a natural amphitheatre, for the past three years. It's free to attend, and people can come on that day and be together and celebrate the incredible First Nations musicians rather than celebrating Australia Day. Share the Spirit is always a fantastic way to spend that day. It's time to sit and reflect and come together in celebration of something worth celebrating.

Australian Music Vault

What factors do you think have continued the momentum of the Naarm/Melbourne underground music scene?

The passion of the fans is always the thing that keeps it going. We have always loved music here. Certainly, the small band scene has given people a sense of community. Friendships and the places to go and be together have always driven it. We particularly recently enjoyed government support of that scene, which I talked about earlier, but well before the government clocked on, and realized that we had a great scene here. It was the fans; it was the people who went to the gigs, supported the music, paid the admission fee, and went to the Tote or whatever venue it was.

We've always loved music here. I'm sure there's some historical reason why, in the 50s and 60s, Sydney and Melbourne were the big music scenes, but Melbourne has, if I do say so myself, always persevered through. We had a really strong punk scene. We had a really strong hip-hop scene. We had a really strong electronica scene. We've always had small venues. Most cities have medium to large-sized venues, but we've always had a really broad and diverse scene here that is something for everyone. Any given night you can go see live music in this city. When you maintain a culture like that for long enough, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because you've got people who know they can see it. Still, you've also got people who know they can put gigs on, and people will see it, and you get this beautifully reciprocal, cyclical cycle of people loving bands and bands loving their audiences.

I'm not a proud of my country person, but I always do feel pride when international musicians come here and say these are the best gigs they've ever played. I've had a lot of really great musicians come through and say that was something special, which always makes me feel good cause I think that's down to the quality of our music fans.

I grew up, and even when I wasn't of age enough to go to gigs, I would sneak into pubs to see bands. We had great venues like Cherry Bar, which has moved now, and the Corner Hotel. These long-running, small venues have become foundational core memories for people as they grow up, age, and keep returning. These venues have been around forever. It's really special, and I think we're protective of it as well, and the government's protective of it. It's wonderful, but it happened organically.

AMV’s website: https://www.australianmusicvault.com.au

Billie Estrine

Naarm/Melbourne, Australia

Home Next →