Our Place: 20 Years of Town Hall Gallery

• Jarrod Zlatic

To celebrate its twentieth birthday, the Town Hall Gallery in Hawthorn is holding the exhibition Our Place—the anniversary providing a good excuse for a greatest hits showing of the gallery’s collection. The “our place” in this instance is the remit of the City of Boroondara that includes Kew, Balwyn, Camberwell, and Hawthorn. That these suburbs are amongst the wealthiest in Melbourne may account for the relative strength of the gallery’s permanent collection.

For the collection we can thank former Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett and the machinations of state politics; Kennett’s drastic and controversial amalgamation of councils in 1994 resulted in the combination of formerly separate collections into one. The municipal consolidations also voided the Hawthorn Town Hall of its former purpose, until its reconstitution as a function space and gallery, a further eighteen-million-dollar conversion in 2013 resulting in the Hawthorn Arts Centre. Though Our Place isn’t framed by any explicit historical or chronological explications about the gallery or the local area. Rather, works from the collection are grouped together by three nebulous propositions—people, places, and perspectives.