How Australia still doesn’t have a hall of fame building or music museum in 2015 is crazy when you think about it. We love live music, we love Aussie music and we love celebrating our culture. And yet it’s an area in which we are languishing in comparison to the other great music meccas of the world.
Which is why the pre-election promise by the now Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews was a pleasant if not dubious surprise.
That $10 million in funding still isn’t concrete, however talk has already begun to surface that Port Phillip Council are facing off against Lord Mayor Robert Doyle to add to the already announced $13.4 million redevelopment of the crumbling Palais Theatre and host the half of fame there.
Wherever the site may end up being we spent some time discovering the music museums of Scandinavia and came back with a few ideas on just what the Australian Music Hall Of Fame should look like on the inside.
The first and perhaps most contentious issue is whether a hall of fame – if we’re sticking to the literal meaning of the term – is the best way to memorialise the history of Australian music.
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It’s an idea that music industry legends Molly Meldrum and Michael Gudinski have been pushing for a while now. However if the hall of fame that eventuates from the state government funding is just a celebration of a select few Australian acts deemed worthy of inclusion rather than a testimony to everything that makes our music scene great it will be a missed opportunity.
As Jessica Adams, a representative from the Australian Music Museum Project, a website which advocates for a music museum, told us recently “I think that Michael Gudinski and Ian Meldrum’s idea of a Hall of Fame is brilliant and it was clearly popular with Labor voters in Victoria, but I do think it should be part of something larger.”
Her reasons range from both business to educational. While a hall of fame has the ability to become a tourist draw card, an actual museum will reap the financial benefits of visits from school students from around the country, while at the same time ensuring that Australian music history is passed onto future generations.
“You could not possibly put a price on Australian teenagers learning about Yothu Yindi, Coloured Stone and Warumpi Band while having hands-on didjeridu lessons,” says Adams.
You only need to look to at the success of the Icelandic Rock & Roll Museum, Norway’s Popsenteret and the Swedish Music Hall Of Fame as sources of inspiration for what an Australian music museum should represent.
Chiefly Popsenteret in Oslo is everything you could want from a music museum.
Rather than just reeling off facts Popsenteret is everything from a timeline of Norway’s music history to a venue, an educational facility and an interactive extravaganza.
Interactivity is the key to making a music museum more than just a timeline, but something to encourage kids to actually pick up instruments.
At both Popsenteret and the Icelandic Rock And Roll Museum punters can play instruments and use a mixing board while the former also allows you to make your own album art.
It’s clear that while both museums focus on preserving the past they’ve also created a space that is integral to promoting the future of their respective local music scenes.
There are other features that could be taken from all three museums to easily fit an Australian counterpart
An area for specialist exhibitions at Popsenteret ensures that the museum isn’t resigned to stagnation and provides the opportunity to explore more niche aspects of their music scene and entice repeat visitors.
The museum’s visual database that allows you to scroll through the years and see which venues were open at the time is particularly pertinent given the plethora of music spaces that open and close every year in Australia. Those stages of the past provided a platform for bands and artists and deserve to be remembered alongside the musicians they championed.
With the Icelandic Museum Of Rock And Roll providing iPads for visitors to actually listen to the music they’re reading about a similar thing could be adopted to allow both tourists and locals to explore the underground bands of the past that they may not know about.
Take a walk down the history of Icelandic music and you’ll learn there’s much more to their music scene than just Björk.
Popsenteret also provides tablets and viewing pods for those who want to watch documentaries, music videos and interviews and garner a more in-depth understanding of certain subcultures that lie within Norway’s music scene.
While in Stockholm the Swedish Music Hall Of Fame (situated in the same building as the ABBA Museum) provides a decade-by-decade snapshot into their music scene, which demonstrates just how long Swedish pop music has been infiltrating our ears for.
The opportunities for what we could include in an Australian music museum or hall of fame are endless. What the aforementioned Scandinavian music museums indicate is that museums can no longer just be establishments that display facts or stories that are already replicated on the internet. They have to be interactive and they have to inspire the next generation of musicians and music fans while being a testament to the foundations that past icons have already lain.
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Popsenteret in particular has set itself up as an integral force to the future of Norwegian music. Having an actual venue for up and coming bands to showcase their talents is one thing, but setting aside space for programs that teach musicians the business side of the industry is invaluable.
Towards the end of Norwegian museum there is small display that rotates through the current crop of local acts carving out their own path on public broadcasting service NRK – their Triple J equivalent.
And in this small setting Popsenteret provides a poignant reminder of a museum’s purpose: in order to move forward you have to look back.
If the Victorian Government want to make good use of $10 million in funding they’ll take heed of our Scandinavian counterparts as they look to provide another asset to our local music scene.
To find out more about Popsenteret, the Swedish Music Hall of Fame and the Icelandic Rock and Roll Museum click on the links provided.
