Last week I went to Perth to attend a national conference jointly organised by Museums Australia and Interpretation Australia – At the Frontier.
It was the first time these two organisations had jointly staged a conference, with over 500 delegates attending from around Australia (and a few overseas). Whereas there was a reasonable contingent of people, like me, who are members of both organisations, I would guess that the majority of delegates would have been more clearly from either the “Interpretation” or “Museums” camp, and may not have had much to do with the other organisation previously. This led to some interesting cross-fertilisation, and for me brought into sharp focus where the similarities (and differences!) between the two organisational cultures lie.
Although I wasn’t presenting any papers I had a pretty hectic schedule – in my capacity as Interpretation Australia’s Vice President I chaired a few sessions (including chairing a Plenary – a first for me!). I’m also on the organising committee of next year’s Museums Australia conference in Adelaide and so was busy spreading the word for that too.
Thus, while some others have been far more quick off the mark with their blogging on the conference, I’m still collecting my thoughts (not helped by the fact that I managed to lose my notebook on the last day of the conference!). Fortunately, I have the Twitter archive to fall back on, which given I was tweeting from two accounts in addition to my own (@InterpretAu and @MA_SA2012) is probably more or less a good summary of my notes anyway.
I’ll trawl through them and give my perspective over the next few days.