Hellenic Museum Joins Peers to Highlight Melbourne’s Diversity

The Hellenic Museum has teamed up with four other multicultural venues in Victoria to highlight Melbourne’s claim as one of the world’s most culturally diverse cities.

The Chinese Museum, Co.As.It Italian Historical Society & Museo Italiano, the Hellenic Museum, the Islamic Museum of Australia and the Jewish Museum of Australia have joined together in honor of the city’s diversity to form Multicultural Museums Victoria (MMV).

Under the new collective brand, the five museums will collaborate on major exhibitions which will further enrich the community’s cultural and social environment.

MMV’s first joint project is the exhibition Grandmothers, which invites the public to celebrate the central role of grandmothers in Chinese, Italian, Greek, Muslim and Jewish families.

The project pays tribute to this diverse group of women who, as custodians of culture and tradition, pass on their knowledge, culture and history from generation to generation.

Through striking portraits and artworks, recipes and flavours, tales of war, survival and migration, language, religious texts and traditional objects, each exhibition positions the grandmother at the forefront of family and community history.

They provide new inspiring ways of telling the stories of grandmothers, whose voices have been silenced or absent from historical narratives.

CEO of Hellenic Museum John Tatoulis said: “We all truly believe that one of the great assets of the city is the fact that we are such a multicultural city. And there are five very strong multicultural museums … We came together about two to three years ago with an initial discussion to see how we could form a sector.

“It grew over that time to the point where we felt, well actually, let’s formalise this sector. Let’s create an entity that we decided to call Multicultural Museums Victoria. To launch that entity we thought it would be appropriate if we had an exhibition that we all approach differently but had a single theme.”