When there is too much to learn - Molly Young

Going over my experiences with the broad spectrum of Vietnamese museums, one thing I'm struck by is the density of their history compared to Australian history.

As discussed by William Logan in his article about the Hoa Lo museum in Hanoi, so much trauma and change has happened over the last 100 or so years above that doesn't even account for their rich and vibrant history before that. It's a small wonder that the museums here are just completely overwhelmed with objects and essential histories they have to convey. This confusion and just total overload probably explains why locals have little to no connection to the museums. Walking through museums like the National Art Gallery and Vietnam National Museum of History, the objects are organised in a strictly liner and old modernist style, combined with their limited funding and lack of resources, the first most obvious answer to dealing with this incredible density is just organising it chronologically as best as they can.

However, it is more than obvious that this has proven to be an outdated answer. Theories espoused by Jens Andermann and Silke Amdd-de Sinine point out that, for a lot of museums (obviously Western ones with resources and the cash for experimentation) narrative habits are changing to acknowledge community memory as a "complex aesthetic" and museum objects as a facilitator of shared meanings in a museum. Connecting on a personal and empathetic nature to an object narrative or sharing your own memories or opinion validates and prioritises the information. It means something, so it's worth remembering.

From my experiences in Vietnam, I have found that the museums with

1. Secure funding (Vietnam Womens Museum and their private funding from the Women's Union)
2. Visionary and innovative leaders (Temple of Literature)

have begun the process to begin updating their use of objects and exhibition organisation to more reflect these new museology ideals.

Even though the Vietnam Womens Museum had to tackle the entire history of women in Vietnam as their goal, they've managed to do so in a way (mainly, I believe, by identifying common connections between the different generations such as clothing, or providing highly personalised stories of revolutionaries to connect with) that the communities and locals in Vietnam are able to start developing a strong communal memory through the museum, rather them pushing away their target audience, and what would be their most loyal consumers with overly dense and confusing pathways.

It's an incredible challenge that our Vietnamese friends face. The only real equivalent I can think of in Australia is a completely in-depth history of history of all the traditional indigenous communities in Australia. Combined with the smaller amount of funding they received compared to Australian museums, and in a lot of cases having to fight for approval for new innovative projects, creating museum spaces that do justice to their long and moving history will be one of the most difficult challenges for any museologist of our time.