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In 1984, when Bernice Murphy and Leon Paroissien surprised the art world by accepting co-curatorship of the Power Collection, job-sharing in itself was a novelty. It was a very different time, one in which, as Murphy has said, exhibitions of contemporary art were regarded as 'fringe activities', not part of serious day-to-day art gallery business, and hence meagrely resourced. Sydney was preoccupied with the forthcoming bicentenary of European settlement and colonial art was the object of official attention. To understand the origins of Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) it is important to recognise that in the 1980s the very idea of a museum catering for the professional presentation of contemporary artworks was a challenge to the public imagination.

Murphy and Paroissien were already pioneers in their field: as the first curator of contemporary art at Sydney's Art Gallery of New South Wales, Murphy had overseen the first two editions of Australian Perspecta in 1981 and 1983; Paroissien, founding director of the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council for the Arts (1974-80), was then the artistic director of the 5th Biennale of Sydney. Both had keenly followed the vicissitudes of the J. J. W. Power Bequest, formally accepted by the University of Sydney in 1962, and shared strong ideas about its evolving collection and exhibition policies ...

A central philosophy for the burgeoning museum was the conviction that Australia was part of the world and that international art should naturally include Australian art. While taken for granted today, it was a radical notion at the time. Under Lynn's curatorship Australian art only entered the collection as a gift and therefore a fresh interpretation of the terms of Power's will was required. Murphy and Paroissien adopted a similarly innovative approach with regard to exhibitions. While Pacific art had not hitherto been regarded as international, the MCA's first foreign blockbuster show in 1992 was of New Zealand art: 'Headlands' included Maori culture in a contemporary context for the first time ...

This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art & Australia's Winter 2010 issue.