From left: M.Krawczynski, M.Kwiatkowski, & J.Wolska

More than 12 months ago I had the honour of meeting Prof. Kwiatkowski, director of the Lazienki Royal Summer Palace complex where the new Polish Exodus Museum has been created. He was then planning an exhibiton about early Polish migration to Canada and showed me another smaller exhibit about Poles who travelled to America two hundred years ago and wrote heart-wrenching letters about the difficulties of leaving their homeland.

I suggested that an exhibition about Polish migration to Australia would be very dramatic and didactic and might help Poles to develop their own pride and self-confidence by reading about the achievements of their predecessors when they travelled to the most distant point on this earth, which was Australia.

My desire to prepare such a project was stimulated by the fact that my father worked as an architect on the restoration of the Lazienki Palace after the war (as well as our famous Warsaw Starowka for which he drew the largest perspective of the pre-war Old Town, now exhibited in the Historical Museum). So my spiritual links with Lazienki were very strong.

The idea developed further during concurrent discussions with the new Australian Ambassador, H.E. Ian Forsyth when he presented the Sydney Opera Shade as a culturally inspired gift to the Lazienki Gardens for the famous Chopin outdoor piano concerts. He gave his ideas and valuable support to this new exhibition as a means of building cultural bridges between our 2 countries.

I then started to work on the architectural concepts and thematic treatment for the exhibition. The intent was to make it more colourful and dynamic than most other exhibitions, which are usually based on voluminous texts. We wanted to attract more of the younger generation, because they are the future of both our countries and have the most to gain from such exhibitions.

To this end I decided to focus also on the drama of the horrendous sea voyage in the early days and the true colours and ambience of the ancient land of Australia. After much contemplation to find a theme which was timeless, I decided to present a huge mural of Uluru as a timeless, non-technical icon of Australia’s spirit.

I worked out the conceptual design and began searching for sources of materials and artefatcs.

With some limitations in my writing skills in Polish, I was not displeased when Ms. Jola Wolska introduced herself to Prof. Kwiatkowski and asked to be involved in the exhibition. She has a nice turn of phrase and was very keen to find a cause for her writing skills. I welcomed her to the team which I was creating.

After I had a radio interview and exchanged phone calls with Mr Lech Paszkowski as well as many people in Melbourne and South Australia, I received heartening promises of support from Australian Polonia groups and even Mr. Paszkowski’s agreement to feature his book and use information contained in it for this very worthwhile exhibition. Through Ernestyna Skurjat in Sydney I received offers of support from Adelaide and Polish Hill River (as well as groups in Queensland, Gosford and Canberra).

I travelled to Australia in February 2006 and planned a sharing of the “collection” functions with Ms. Wolska. We eventually managed to pick up most of the items which had been offered.

From April I started to plan the exhibition in earnest and as a Chartered Architect it was a pleasurable and appropriate task for me. I also searched and managed to source a number of unique artifacts from collections within Poland, amongst which were included original boomerangs gifted to a Polish medic (Dr. M. Lukowicz) who voluntarily helped Aborigines in central Australia in the late 19th century. This collection has been selectively lent out for this exhibition.

Many other graphic and thematic elements had to be found and "designed" into the exhibition.

I worked many weeks on this, using very meagre resources (after all there were not that many Poles in Australia before 1918 – our cut-off date) to make the exhibition lively and informative. The concept was to give an entry and central zone which would grab attention thru the soul and then allow the visitor to read at pace the quieter panels in the surrounding rooms. Ms. Wolska was to prepare many of the texts, having much material available from Mr. Paszkowski. I was very grateful.

Ms. Wolska came up with a rough idea for the title of the exhibition and after some refinements, we finally settled on the title of "Orly w Krainie Kangurow" (Eagles in the land of Kangaroos). She is a skilled wordsmith. The catalogue front page and the invitations caused us some problems, but I relented to some of her fixations and after making many changes I finally accepted what we now see as quite a unique and appropriate visual concept. (Before I insisted on adding the Polish flag for example, there was no balance between the iconic symbolism of our 2 countries.)

All the while I was collecting the main visual materials and refining the exhibition design. Many texts prepared by Ms. Wolska started to finally appear and I then was able to assemble the rest of my texts (over 40 bilingual titles and descriptions) and the large visual elements were urgently created by me from the various materials we had found earlier. I refined the thematic treatments and added extra focal points for public interest (e.g. Sydney Opera House as a closing-up symbolic statement which would read well in the media).

All done. And it is time to start thinking about collecting artefacts for the second exhibition: from 1918 on...

Mark Krawczynski
Chartered Architect

All photos Ryszard Opechowski

All photos Ryszard Opechowski