Read something about this in The Age a while back, written by the exhibition's curator, Robyn Annear, and mentally filed it away as a 'to attend'; yesterday, midway through a mid-paced Sunday, I had a window of an hour or so and dropped by. The exhibition is to mark the 150th anniversary of responsible government in Victoria, and works its way forward from the institution of the Westminister system in the newly independent colony through various key events in Victoria's political history - the gradual entrenchment of first full male and then female suffrage (the newspaper coverage, pamphlets and so on associated with that latter being probably the most interesting part for me), shifts in the nature of political party organisations and parliamentary composition, the police strike of 1923, the campaign for early shop closing, and others.
For mine, the exhibition as a whole doesn't have the same kind of unity as some of the ones I've seen in the State Library in the past - it's a bit 'lumpy', and there's not really a strong unifying theme beyond the broad goal of "look[ing] at ways in which the governing of Victoria has made a difference to how people live, and vice versa" (the bit at the end given over to various types of maps of Victoria, while interesting (ain't maps the greatest?), seemed particularly random). Where it's stronger is on the quirky, interesting details - noting in passing, say, that the initial elections in 1856 were conducted by the world's first secret ballot, or adverting to the loophole in the Electoral Act of 1864 which inadvertently conferred the franchise on women (an inadvertence which was hastily rectified in time for the next election). Also enjoyed reading through newspapers down the years - got a kick out of the old-fashioned prose and all the olde-worldisms (not least the Myer advertisements from the 1920s).
