Lauren Pratt
What deserves a glass case?
Sachini Poogoda: I understand what you mean about the museum exhibition focusing a lot on the Indian Ocean being a mode of travel, particularly for ships from colonial England, which is not quite what I expected. I thought it would give more weight to the countries connected through it, kind of like what Weihsin Gui discusses in the piece we published in PR’s first issue, 'How to Know the Indian Ocean.'
Lauren Pratt: Yes, I agree with you – I wasn’t expecting the exhibition to focus so heavily on British and Western Australian connections. I also wish that there was more detail about cross-cultural relations and how cultures from across the Indian Ocean have impacted and influenced each other. Some displays, such as the one you mentioned, were so small and made up a tiny part of the overall exhibition when cultural appropriation is actually a really complex topic.
(Note: many thanks to Portside Review for granting open access to this piece.)