Australian house museums offering Paisley Park a run for its money

Dr Linda Young, Senior Lecturer in Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies at Deakin University and author of the upcoming book Historic houses in the United Kingdom and the United States: A History, said that houses made for a distinctive species of museum.

“Houses become museums for a number of reasons. They could be monuments to collectors, specimens of design, or a historic event or, as in the case of Paisley Park or Elvis’ Graceland, a monument to a hero,” Dr Young said.

“Many house museums are set up thanks to collectors who are keen to keep their collection together and these collectors houses are well thought of as ‘egoseums’.

“For visitors, house museums offer the voyeuristic pleasure of entering the private life of the famous, from staid Victorian writers to contemporary pop culture stars.

“House museums are particularly popular in the UK and the US, with one of the first examples being Abbotsford, the home of 19th century romantic poet and novelist Sir Walter Scott, on the banks of the River Tweed in Scotland.

“Sir Walter began building this ‘Gothick’ castle in 1825 and his fans used to come and visit him there. They kept on coming after he died in 1832 and his family allowed them into his library, then his collection of armour, then the drawing room, until in 1850, they built a new little castle next door and moved into that, leaving the original Abbotsford for the tourists.

“Here in Australia, there are over 200 house museums, many of which are managed and run by the National Trust and other voluntary organisations. They range from rambling houses with magnificent gardens – like Rippon Lea and Werribee Mansion – to humble huts in the bush.”

If a trip to Paisley Park is a stretch for your next holiday but you’d still like to experience the lives and memories captured in house museums, Dr Young suggests pencilling in a trip to her Top 5 Australian house museums:

1.Susannah Place, The Rocks, Sydney
This terrace of four houses was built in 1844 for working class tenants and had domestic occupants until 1990. Today, the terraces are furnished to represent a corner shop and dwelling about 1900, a worker’s home in the 1840s, a house stripped bare to expose 150 years of inhabitation, and another, stabilised and closed up as a capsule specimen for the future to examine. The whole stands as a documentation of the urban working class community in The Rocks throughout time and is a real ‘house of the humble’.

2. Calthorpes’ House, Canberra
Built in 1927, just as Canberra was taking off as the national capital, this middle-class house was furnished by Mrs Dell Calthorpe in one great shopping trip to the Beard Watson emporium in Sydney. She was a careful, thrifty housekeeper. Not only do the original accounts survive, but so does the fashionable ‘Tudorbethan’ furniture, the stylish drapery, and a sequence of stoves and other kitchen technology.

3. McCrae Homestead, at the foot of Arthur’s Seat, Mornington Peninsula
The McCrae family represents the genteel but not very successful end of the Australian settler spectrum. Their experience was recorded in Mrs Georgiana McCrae’s diary, and leaves behind the slab timber house now known as the McCrae Homestead, today bizarrely surrounded by suburban development. Built in 1844, with internal walls rendered and whitewashed, Georgiana made the house a home with furnishings she brought with her. Many of these survived in the family after they left Arthur’s Seat, and returned to the house when it was presented to the National Trust in 1970.

4. Marble Hill, Adelaide Hills, SA
One of the most romantic ruins in Australia is this stark, burned-out, neo-Gothic shell. The summer house of the Governors of South Australia from 1880 to 1955, it was destroyed in one of the Hills’ endemic bushfires and has been maintained as a ruin ever since. Surrounded again by well-grown trees which tickle the sweeping views, Marble Hill is rather beautiful and a witness of dominant nature over culture. Controversially, the ruin was sold some years ago and is being privately restored to habitable condition.

5. Ben Chifley’s House, Bathurst, NSW
Australians don’t memorialise many heroes among their political leaders. Ben and Lizzie Chifley, both Bathurst-born, married in 1914 and moved into this semi-detached Victorian cottage near the railway workshops. Ben was already active in union politics and he went on to serve as Treasurer under John Curtin in World War II. As the post-War Prime Minister, he introduced social services and nation-building projects. Lizzie never came to Canberra, where ‘Chif’ died in 1951. Their modest home, furnished in pre- and post-War periods, was museumised in 1973 and is now a Labor shrine.

Historic houses in the United Kingdom and the United States: A History by Dr Linda Young will be published by Rowman & Littlefield in December 2016.