Linden was originally the stately home of the Michaelis family. It was built in 1870 for Moritz Michaelis, a German Jew who settled here in the middle of the 19^th century; he was the founding father of a family of prominent Victorians as well as foundation president of the St Kilda Hebrew Congregation. So, this winter, when the Jewish Museum of Australia held a historical survey exhibition on the Jews of St Kilda and Caulfield (Bagel Belt: The Jews of St Kilda and Caulfield , June 20^th – Sept 30^th 2001), documenting the educational, religious, cultural, social and charitable institutions and activities of Jews in the locality, Naomi Cass was invited to curate an adjunct exhibition at Linden.  She in turn invited six artists working in different media to produce works inspired by the early history of Linden.

The State Film Centre of Victoria has been renamed the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, elevating its status from a state to a national institution and extending its domain to incorporate the post-celluloid media of reproduction. It has also moved into an imposing new edifice on Federation Square, alongside the NGV’s new Gallery of Australian Art, in a tourist site generously endowed with chic restaurants and shops. The ACMI edifice houses two cinemas, offices, shops, restaurants and coffee shops, as well as a large gallery. For the opening exhibition in the new building, Ross Gibson, the inaugural Creative Director of ACMI and now Professor of New Media and Digital Culture at UTS, curated an exhibition of ACMI acquisitions, entitled “Remembrance and the Moving Image”, and edited a sumptuous catalogue. Comprised of 32 artworks, the exhibition was divided into two parts: Persistence of Vision, which ran from March 21^st to May 25^th; followed by Reverberation, from the end of June until the end of August.

We should be grateful for what we have, not ask for the moon. For, as Bette Davis said to Paul Henreid at the end of “Now Voyager”, we still have the stars. A visit to the Gippsland Art Gallery earlier this year gave us both moon  and stars. As a result of inspired curatorship, visitors had to pass through an exhibition of photographs by the internationally acclaimed stars of American landscape and nature photography, Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter, to arrive at Janina Green’s meditation on the local landscape. In moving from the front to the back of the gallery, we not only moved from the stellar to the lunar, and from the global to the local. We also passed by the great male masters’ heroic encounters with the sublime attributes of Nature and Mechanismo on our way to the space which housed the female photographer’s search for a place for herself in the scheme of things - a search guided by the illusive light of mirror reflections and the fatal attraction of lunar modules. 

It was Proust, with his use of the madeleine motif, who initially drew attention to the role of the senses as triggers of memory. More recently, cultural theorist Dipesh Chakrabarty has questioned the adequacy of a purely ideological approach to modern identity construction. He finds many of the proponents of the theory of “the invention of tradition” guilty of concentrating exclusively on the ideas propagated by modern nation states, thereby ignoring the importance of sensory training in the imparting of tradition:

`No “invention of tradition” is effective without a simultaneous invocation of affect, of sentiments, emotions, and other embodied practices… Practices of subjectivity are embodied, our senses are culturally trained – smelling, tasting, touching, seeing and hearing. Ideas alone cannot provide a genealogy of tradition. Ideas acquire materiality through the history of bodily practices. They work not simply because they persuade through their logic; they are also capable, through a long and heterogeneous training of the senses, of making connections with our glands and muscles and neuronal networks. This is the work of memory… The past is embodied through a long process of training the senses…’ ^[1]

It is because our feelings are constructed from sensual memories, not only ideas, that we can continue to respond emotionally to nationalistic songs and flags, to religious hymns and icons and to the aromas of festival fare, even though we may have rejected nationalism and religion intellectually.