Research Background: Witcomb (2010) identifies a ‘contemporary museological revolution’ in which multi media centrally realise the ‘affective possibilities’ of museums, challenging their role as fundamentally object repositories. Navigating Norman Creek explores how documentaries might contribute to the repertoire of curators and to engaging citizens with environmental sustainability? Cathcart (2010) and Morgan (2015) represent historical studies turning towards water and its usage as an object of study. Navigating Norman Creek presents an urban history from the perspective of waterway and catchment rather than land and suburb? And asks how audiences can create meaning moving through a space of multiple time-based narratives?

Research Contribution: Navigating Norman Creek contributes to museology and to environmental history and demonstrates Bourriaud’s (2005) relational aesthetics. As historical documentary on Australian public television contracts and history gets taught to dwindling cohorts, this work – its venue’s first film-focused exhibition - finds new audiences and formats for audio-visual histories. 97,238 members of the public saw it in situ (Exhibition report, 2015). It incorporates substantial primary research, and the project provides a cogent expression of this research and an important archive.

Research Significance: The exhibition garnered extremely positive reviews from a museologist (Besley 2016) - ‘the exhibition demonstrates that film can achieve everything that museums aspire to, without objects’; a historian (Connors 2016) and a cultural geographer – ‘[spoke] to my concerns with the urban forest, forcing me to think about the role of art’ (Jones, 2017 forthcoming). In its totality this project demonstrates the significant impact that an art project can have on multiple disciplines and communities.