Science as Cultural Ideology: Museums and Mechanics' Institutes in Early New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land

Abstract

In Australia the history of museums and of mechanics' institutes has traditionally been seen in Whiggish terms as liberal effort to advance 'useful knowledge', public enlightenment and human progress. Thus museums, which originated as private and rather eccentric collections of 'rare and curious' scientific specimens and objets d'art, are seen as of some intellectual stature and considerable educative importance as they become public institutions in the second half of the nineteenth century.1 Similarly, mechanics' institutes feature as a charitable form of adult education, taught by volunteer gentlemen of artistic or scientific persuasion, to stimulate the intellect and enlarge the skills of the working man. Though most writers have usefully noted the institutes' middle-class membership and concern with constructing a culture of 'moral enlightenment', they have not been concerned to analyse the relationship between this culture and science, the role of the institutes in developing and applying science's potential as cultural and political ideology.2 Nor have studies of the nu merous other scientific societies founded prior to the 1850s been concerned with this issue. Many are commemorative and some are self-congratulatory.3 Some recent studies, both in Australia and overseas, have been more ambitious and analytical. Already in the 1950s, J.D. Bernai had suggested that science was not a pure, culturally neutral activity. Nor were scientific societies somehow independent of the people who founded them or who were shaping the questions which science was being asked to solve.4 Then from the 1970s, the Enlightenment ideal of knowledge as progress, carrying all humankind towards freedom and perfection, came under increasing attack.5 For some of these newer writers, scientific societies and institutions were an essential part of the process by which nineteenth-century imperialist nations controlled and exploited colonial resources.6 For others, public museums and mechanics' institutes were, like the agricultural shows, zoological and botanical gardens, devices