Telling the Bionarrative: a Museum of Environmental Ideas

Abstract

This paper explores the history of a proposal for an ideas-based museum of ecological concepts, a ‘National Biological Centre' for Canberra in 1965, and its successors.2 The background to the proposal came from changing ideas about zoos in the 1960s, and the emerging discipline of human ecology. The mission of the centre was to explore the relations between humans, other life-forms and their physical environment through what its chief protagonist, Stephen Boyden, called a comprehensive ‘bionarrative'.3 The centre was to facilitate the understanding of biophysical and social worlds as interrelated dynamic systems. The Biological Centre was conceived as a ‘major cultural institution' for the nation, reflecting relations between science and society, and informing culture with science.4 Unlike traditional natural history museums and zoos, collections of objects (or animals) were not its primary mission. This paper considers how the 1965 proposal for the Biological Centre anticipated later ‘museums of ideas', and reviews its relevance to new twenty-first-century museums of the Anthropocene, and how museums and related institutions can shed light on the role of science in society.