Sailing to Marege: the Colin Jack-Hinton Maritime Gallery at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory

摘要

The Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory (MAGNT) is located at Bullocky Point, Darwin, not far from the central business district on a picturesque site overlooking the Arafura Sea. It was opened in 1981, to replace the original Northern Territory Museum of Arts and Sciences that had been housed in Darwin's Old Town Hall until Cyclone Tracy destroyed the building (and most of the city) in 1974. Its construction was one of the first major projects commenced when the Northern Territory was granted self-government in 1978, and it came to fruition in no small part because of the stupendous energy of that cyclone of a man, the late Colin Jack-Hinton, MAGNT's first Director. A few weeks after Tracy, Jack-Hinton was in Canberra lobbying to ensure that a new museum was factored into the rebuilding of Darwin, and as he put it, not one of those 'architectural horrors, occupied by mangy, stuffed animals leaking sawdust and whiskers...inhabited by curators who reflected their exhibits'. Instead, the new museum was to be a 'major complex' signalling 'a new phase in Australian cultural and intellectual thinking'.