A book we have all been waiting for, a history we have all needed, should be assured success. In the Australian museum world, such a publication should garner acclaim, yet this review will fail to deliver the praise it anticipates. My lack of enthusiasm is not because the editors have failed to do a good job. In fact, they have brought together a wide-ranging series of essays that fascinate and illuminate just as one might wish. Telling the story of the Museum’s complex history, from its foundation in 1880 as the Industrial, Technological and Sanitary Museum, which became the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences in 1950 and, in 1988, the Powerhouse Museum, Yesterday’s Tomorrows captures the changing times and purpose of the institution.

Divided into three sections – Visions, Stories from the Collection, and Tomorrows – the essays show how the Museum began as a typical late-nineteenth-century educational institution with displays aimed at workers bettering themselves – ‘salutary instruction and technical education’ – and has changed into a supreme example of the late twentieth century’s fascination with museums as the source of the best ‘infotainment’. There is just enough history in Yesterday’s Tomorrows to document the other activities of the museum throughout its history, including branch offices sadly no longer in existence at Albury, Bathurst, Goulburn, West Maitland, Newcastle and Broken Hill, and, since 1982, the Sydney Observatory. Curiously, the several years that the Powerhouse occupied the Macquarie Street Mint in Sydney are not mentioned.