A visit to the National Museum Australia reveals the nature of things and those things are systems.
It was my pleasure to make a visit, with fellow students, to the National Museum Australia on Friday 19th February 2026 in the company of Professor Katherine Daniell, Interim Director of the ANU College of Systems & Society, School of Cybernetics and Associate Professor Ash Lenton, Convenor of this year’s Master of Applied Cybernetics course.
Exhibit A – For Fish
The fish traps of Brewarrina “Baiames Ngunnhu” are famous for a number of reasons fully articulated elsewhere (Baiame’s Ngunnhu, Nonah). Far from trivialising these constructions, from another perspective as described by Professor Daniell, they can be abstracted as a system, in which challenges and resultant functional features can be analysed by cybernetics.
For example, the migration of fish down the Darling River, can be represented as a flow of information subject to change. How are the active processes and mechanisms (intended to perform the delivery of food by capture) at Brewarrina to be adapted to or altered by often capricious, precipitous and violent change within the meandering evolution of the watercourse. Question? Could the design and implementation of processes and mechanisms be changed to improve the performance of the system? If so how and at what cost? How has the new fishway at the site contributed to productivity?
Exhibit B – Socrates, Gorgets and Nova’s Olympic Gold Medal
The introduction to the group of “Socratean dialogue” by Associate Professor Ash Lenton provided an engaging and reflective means for the consideration of the systems required for the manifestation of the displayed artefacts.
Complex supply chains, cybernetic systems stretched in trading webs across the globe, were a recurrent theme illuminated by the display of breastplates (more specifically “gorgets” in this article from the NMA) and the Gold medal earned by Nova Peris at the 1996 Olympics with the Hockeyroos, still an extraordinary achievement.
Exhibit C – Jack Brabham
Thirty years prior to Nova’s triumph, another Australian achieved a remarkable feat, never replicated before or since, that of a Formula 1 championship as driver, engineer and owner. Arguably underappreciated in his own land, the legend that is Sir Jack can be revisited in the NMA’s collection.
Again, the extraordinary power of cybernetic information exchange was evidenced as Repco took the Oldsmobile block from the U.S.A. to Australia and created an engine to compete in, at that time, the most European of contests (the Repco engine).
Further Viewing
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