This essay is concerned not with celebrating the successes of Indigenous people in Australian museums – important though those achievements certainly are – but with some of the consequences of these successes for non-Indigenous museum visitors and critics. My focus here is on Bunjilaka, the Aboriginal Centre at Melbourne Museum, and, at the National Museum of Australia, First Australians: Gallery of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples as exemplifying broader tendencies. First, I argue that these Indigenous galleries have developed distinctive programs that, in important ways, set them apart from ordinary routines and logics of the museum. Functioning more as cultural centres, these initiatives supplement and perhaps open new directions for ‘the traditional museum’. Second, I explore the significance of the separateness of these Indigenous galleries/centres. I want to suggest that these distinct and, to varying degrees, autonomous Indigenous-controlled galleries/centres both concentrate attention on Indigenous knowledge, culture and history, and separate Aboriginality off from the rest of the museum. There is little doubt that across Australia, the developments in the exhibitions relating to Indigenous people offer exciting and popular opportunities for non-Indigenous museum visitors. But these initiatives have yet to be matched, intellectually or practically, by a comparable non-Indigenous reconsideration of the postcolonial inheritance of the museum. I conclude by arguing that together these two characteristics of Bunjilaka and First Australians – novel exhibitionary programs and their separateness from the host institutions – have produced certain critical reactions, protests against the ‘special treatment’ of Indigenous Australians, which, at a time of cultural conservatism, may be a worrying sign for the future.
Up until very recently, the display of Aboriginal things and images in museums took place in modes that assimilated such exhibitions to the broad, general logics of the museum. It is now well known and widely deplored that, historically, Aboriginal bodies have been displayed as exemplifying the story of human biological evolution; and Aboriginal artefacts and art have been arranged for view so as to demonstrate hierarchies of civilisation. The impact of the non-Aboriginal realisation that Aboriginal people might be interested in the work of museums has been varied. John Mulvaney has given some sense of what a shock this realisation was in recalling that by the 1950s he had never met an Aboriginal person in Victoria, explaining in a telling phrase that ‘they just didn’t “exist”’ (Attwood 1989, 8). As Aboriginal people began to ‘exist’ in the non-Aboriginal apprehension of the world, collections were hidden (Sculthorpe 1989; Sculthorpe 1993) and attempts were made to ‘clean up’ the kinds of displays museums had mounted. As Allan West, formerly curator of Anthropology at the Museum of Victoria has claimed: ‘We took down displays, we renovated and sanitised displays’ (Dodson 1993, 17). It is certainly possible to ‘clean up’ displays, although whether for sanitary or secretive purposes, it may be hard to gauge. But in the museum we are clearly dealing with a world of colonial memories embedded in histories of collections, collectors and displays. The stories and residues of these practices cannot be cleaned up without destroying the traces of violence, pain and sadness that were part of their making.
Over the past three decades, relationships between museums and indigenous peoples have been debated and contested and changed in significant ways. Particularly in postcolonial nations such as the United States and Canada, New Zealand and Australia, there have been major re-negotiations of relationships between indigenous peoples and museums. Indigenous desires for the repatriation of collections have been and remain a powerful motivation (Welsh 1997; McAlear 1999). Some museums have responded to these pressures by reconsidering their policies and procedures in relation to indigenous peoples, sometimes developing innovative and distinctive processes to deal with such difficult issues. Other responses have focused more on creating new ways of representing indigenous people, and indigenous people representing themselves, in specific exhibitions (Fitzhugh 1997; Butler 1999). All of these initiatives have occurred in the midst of the ebb and flow of broader struggles for indigenous rights. They fall within broader debates about the place of indigenous peoples within the nation and are closely associated with notions of reconciliation, Native title, and indigenous intellectual and cultural property rights. These terms mark an important shift away from a narrow anthropological interest in indigenous people in museums to a much broader agenda involving historical and environmental science perspectives and a consideration of indigenous issues across a broader institutional framework.
In a number of institutions in the South Pacific indigenous people have made a place for themselves in, and have sometimes been invited, and sometimes been accepted, into museums, generally through convoluted journeys. Gaye Sculthorpe has provided us with an outline of some of the results of those processes in Australia by the early years of the twenty-first century:
One can say of the major state museums in Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth and Sydney:
• each has some Aboriginal staff (although some more than others and not all include Indigenous people as curatorial staff);
• each has an Aboriginal advisory committee or has sought external Aboriginal involvement in the development of the galleries;…
• each has staff trained in archaeology and anthropology but only the Western Australian Museum and Museum Victoria employ specialists in Aboriginal history (Sculthorpe 2001, 75).
These three key changes – the employment of Indigenous staff, the establishment of consultative processes and the broadening of specialist professional knowledge in relation to Aboriginality – have taken place as many Australian museums have renovated existing, or created new, galleries and exhibitions in relation to Indigenous people. As Sculthorpe again notes:
The current level of activity in developing exhibitions relating to Indigenous peoples across Australia is probably the highest even in Australian museum history:
• the Australian Museum opened its new Indigenous Australians gallery in April 1997;
• in April 1999, the Western Australian Museum opened its refurbished Aboriginal gallery;
• the South Australian Museum will open its new Aboriginal gallery in March 2000;
• in July 2000, Museum Victoria will open Bunjilaka, its Aboriginal Centre at the new Melbourne Museum; and
• in 2001, the National Museum of Australia will open with the First Australians gallery a key feature (Sculthorpe 2001, 74).
There is no doubt that Aboriginal people will play increasingly significant roles in constructing new relationships between museums and Indigenous communities, in transforming the public programs of museums, in establishing new priorities for collection and so on. Increasingly too, this work has involved the re-working of existing collections in ways that emphasise that Aboriginal property in museums can provide more than a mirror for the colonising gaze. Museum collections are being used as resources in more dynamic processes of remembering. This is basic to the involvement of many Aboriginal people in contemporary museums, heritage centres and keeping places. Aboriginal people have recognised that some of these materials, these remnants of Western historical imagination, can provide opportunities for supplanting the ‘original’ seizure of collection and display, for remaking connections, meaning and memory between objects, culture and history. The intellectual and institutional creativity of these processes is extraordinary.
However, this essay is concerned not with celebrating the successes of Indigenous people in Australian museums – important though those achievements certainly are – but with some of the consequences of these successes for non-Indigenous museum visitors and critics. My focus here is on Bunjilaka, the Aboriginal Centre at Melbourne Museum, and, at the National Museum of Australia (NMA), First Australians: Gallery of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples as exemplifying broader tendencies. First, I argue that these Indigenous galleries have developed distinctive programs that, in important ways, set them apart from ordinary routines and logics of the museum. Functioning more as cultural centres, these initiatives supplement and perhaps open new directions for ‘the traditional museum’. Second, I explore the significance of the separateness of these Indigenous galleries/centres. I want to suggest that these distinct and, to varying degrees, autonomous Indigenous-controlled galleries/centres both concentrate attention on Indigenous knowledge, culture and history, and separate Aboriginality off from the rest of the museum. There is little doubt that across Australia, the developments in the exhibitions relating to Indigenous people offer exciting and popular opportunities for non-Indigenous museum visitors. But these initiatives have yet to be matched, intellectually or practically, by a comparable non-Indigenous reconsideration of the postcolonial inheritance of the museum. With this in mind, I want to conclude by arguing that together these two characteristics of Bunjilaka and First Australians – novel exhibitionary programs and their separateness from the host institutions – have produced certain critical reactions, protests against the ‘special treatment’ of Indigenous Australians, which, at a time of cultural conservatism, may be a worrying sign for the future.
The set of objects the Museum displays is sustained only by the fiction that they somehow constitute a coherent representational universe. The fiction is that a repeated metonymic displacement of fragment for totality, object to label, series of objects to series of labels, can still produce a representation which is somehow adequate to a nonlinguistic universe. Such a fiction is the result of an uncritical belief in the notion that ordering and classifying, that is to say, the spatial juxtaposition of fragments, can produce a representational understanding of the world (Donato 1979, 223).
This provocative characterisation of the museum is used by Susan Stewart (1993) as one way to begin to think about the cultural work that is performed by the museum collection. Her argument is that the representational work of a collection consists of two moves by which the collection comes to stand for the world: ‘first in the metonymic displacement of part for whole, item for context; and second, the invention of a classification scheme which will define space and time in such a way that the world is accounted for by the elements of the collection’ (162). For Stewart, the archetypal collection is Noah’s Ark, a world that, by containing ‘two of every sort’, literally comes to stand in for a world that is to be destroyed, a catastrophe that will erase the context of origin so that the collection is a bounded and knowable ‘whole’ journeying into the future (152). While this model of collection and display is obviously recognisable in both historical and contemporary displays, it seems clear that this model does not, in fact, underpin the development of an Indigenous ‘gallery’ such as Bunjilaka.
In the first place, the program of Bunjilaka is not founded solely or even primarily on the ‘world-making’ of the object, the label and the exhibition. John Morton, who worked on the development of the initial exhibitions at Bunjilaka, comments that the ‘Aboriginal centre’:
is as much an Aboriginal community space as it is an exhibition area. There is a welcome area (Wominjeka); a performance space (Kalaya); a community meeting place used by leading members of the Indigenous community in Victoria (Wilim liwik); a special gallery that mimics the Yarra River (Birrarung); an outdoor courtyard and garden containing Indigenous themes (Milarri); and the main exhibition gallery itself (Jumbunna) which, significantly enough in this context, comes from the Woi-wurrung (Wurundjeri) word for telling stories. As a whole, this mix reflects the Museum’s desire to make the centre as user-friendly as possible to Aboriginal visitors and in relation to Aboriginal aspirations (Morton 2004, 55).
And these are not abstract aspirations. These programmatic aspects of Bunjilaka were built into the centre:
The Aboriginal community provided clear directions for the architectural designs. They identified the need for exhibitions, information services, education programmes, performances, fire-making, story-telling, a resources centre, meeting facilities, and changing rooms (Allen et al. 2000, 9).
In the case of Bunjilaka, the issue is not whether the accumulated Indigenous objects now housed in the Melbourne Museum could have been used, as fragments, to create the fiction of an Aboriginal totality. In fact, the museum’s collection is vast. The issue is the project that became Bunjilaka. Here, the distinctions between the South Australian Museum’s Australian Aboriginal Cultures Gallery (AACG) and Bunjilaka are instructive. Steve Hemming has noted that the artefact-based, ethnographically authorised strategies of the AACG stand in stark contrast to those of Bunjilaka:
Regarded an ‘encyclopedia’ of Australian Aboriginal cultures, the AACG has been characterised as a ‘stubbornly’ brave example of a traditional, ethnographic and artefact-based approach to the display of Indigenous cultures (Hemming 2003, 64).
Interestingly this ‘encyclopedia’ of Indigenous Australia is ‘Sold as a “gateway to the outback”, a gateway to authentic cultural tourism, and is seen as a place where you might still experience “classical” or “traditional” Indigenous culture’ (Hemming 2003, 65). In other words, not only is the world of AACG ‘internal’ to the museum in that through its displays it attempts to represent Aboriginal cultures, but also it is a part of another world that can be consumed by driving or flying north.
The world of Bunjilaka is quite different. We get some sense of this from the exhibitions described by Moira Simpson elsewhere in this collection and from the objectives of the Indigenous Cultures Program:
These objectives include improving the recognition of contemporary Indigenous cultures, enhancing awareness of Indigenous peoples’ right to self-determination; and improving understanding of Indigenous knowledge systems and intellectual property rights (Sculthorpe 2001, 77).
What is most interesting about these objectives is that they do not derive from the logic of the museum. There is not a word about displays, representations, objects, labels, collections and so on. I should add immediately that as far as I can judge, Bunjilaka is deeply concerned with all of the professional protocols and practices of museum practice. But my point is that the museum work of Bunjilaka is not guided by museum-like objectives. John Morton has made the point that ‘the Bunjilaka exhibitions in general were designed as a contribution to… the political process known as Reconciliation [which] occurs through a general moral questioning of colonial history in a highly politicised climate’ (Morton 2004, 57). Another way of saying this is that Bunjilaka is not a place for displays of Aboriginal cultures but a space in which ideas about Aboriginal cultures are produced as interventions in the world of the museum and beyond.
In architectural terms, Bunjilaka is both integrated into the overall design of the Melbourne Museum and clearly separate. The Denton Corker Marshall design works with a series of what we can think of as shipping containers stacked and sequenced to produce strong and definite patterns of connection and circulation. The roof that holds the containers together is broken by a huge north-projecting mantle enclosing an exhibition of a temperate rainforest in the Forest Gallery. Separated from this unifying roof are the cube-form Children’s Museum to the west and the ‘shelter’ that is Bunjilaka to the east. First Australians is similarly part of and discrete from the design and circulatory logic of the NMA building but for very different reasons. The design of the Melbourne Museum is fundamentally modular (hence my shipping container metaphor) and structured so as to enable visitors to choose to visit particular parts of the museum. By contrast, the NMA is fundamentally holistic and despite the metaphors of ‘tangled destinies’ and the invocation of George Boole, the visitor’s route through the museum is like a walk through a terrace house: down a corridor and into the backyard. In a typical first-shall-be-last reversal, First Australians is the last gallery in the NMA. Although there is access from the Garden of Australian Dreams and via the back gate, there is really only one way into First Australians. So, if it is not a centre like Bunjlaka, it is certainly discrete, and although it is definitely a key part of the normative journey through the NMA, in important respects the design separates First Australians from the rest of the NMA.
Other commentators do not share this perspective. I am agreeing with Gaye Sculthorpe (2001) when she writes: ‘Indigenous content in Australian museums remains largely self-contained within an Indigenous gallery and is not integrated across the whole institution as part of an overall conceptual framework’ (80). On the other hand, in discussing the development of Melbourne Museum, Richard Gillespie (2001) insists: ‘We have tried to blur the boundaries between the galleries: there are several elements of Aboriginal history within the exhibition on Melbourne and Victoria’ (119). That may be the case but such blurring only needs to take place where boundaries are firmly in place. I think we can unpack some of these disagreements if we turn to the comments of Charles Jenks (2002) on both these museums:
One will not readily find [in the USA] as sophisticated a weaving of the complex past as is present in the new Melbourne Museum. Not only do Denton Corker Marshall provide the pluralist background needed, but the curators have managed to present conflicts with an honesty and drama that is rare in an institutional setting. The same trend is more completely realised in Canberra. There is the same vivid mixture of sociological comment and telling artefact, but a clearer indication that the Aboriginals themselves were fragmented into many cultures, and they too committed atrocities. Clubs and pistols and hanging instruments, as well as artworks based on them, give presence to the simulations of Australian history (Jenks 2002, 69).
It’s hard to know what Jenks means when he suggests that Denton Corker Marshall provide a ‘pluralist background’ – apart from Bunjilaka, the Children’s Museum and the Forest Gallery there is little in the design of Melbourne Museum that is other than functional architecture – let alone what an Australian reader is to make of the fragmentation of Aboriginal culture, Aboriginal atrocities and simulations of Australian history. Perhaps it’s best to pass this by as an example of (architectural) criticism that lacks sufficient local knowledge to make a persuasive and grounded case to an Australian reader.
But the argument becomes clearer in the very next passage. Jenks’s point of comparison here is with those US and British museums that ghettoise minority histories and cultures:
Where [US and British museums]… disperse the pluralism into safely separate components, the Australian museums pull together history into one messy and conflicting whole… The curators and the Director of the NMA, Dawn Casey, have even taken clues from the architects; one of their permanent installations makes use of the metaphor “tangled destiny” and, it appears, the architects conceived of much of the content of the museum before there was even a program’ (Jenks 2002, 69).
Here Jenks is confusing architectural and museological programs, and the rhetoric of designers with the actual buildings they have helped make. Melbourne Museum and the NMA are certainly singular museums. In this sense they are unlike say the suite of museums on the Washington Mall in relation to which it is possible to assert that, say the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) is an example of safely dispersed pluralism. Although it is equally possible to assert that such a major new institution as the NMAI actually centralises the place and role of indigenous Americans in a significant fashion. Nevertheless, Jenks has not recognised the ways in which Bunjilaka and First Australians produce the separate and distinct spatial ordering of the Indigenous presence in these museums. He privileges the architectural rhetoric, ‘tangled destinies’, as if that architectural instruction has shaped not only the actual design – which is predominantly linear and processual rather than entangled – but also the program and the content of the NMA itself; mystical powers indeed. My argument in relation to Bunjilaka and First Australians as special places that are both constrained and enabled by their separateness is similar to the analysis of Te Papa provided by Paul Williams in this collection. It is a predicament that, while offering real opportunities for indigenous curators, is not without costs.
The museum of the nineteenth century functioned as a general archive in which time never stopped building, in which things of all epochs, all styles, all forms could be accumulated and preserved against the ravages of time, in perpetuity. The Museum acted and in many ways still acts (and not least, conceptually) as a microcosm of the world, as a universal sacred space where Man can rediscover and reconstitute his fragmented self (Hooper-Greenhill 1990, 58).
The establishment of Bunjilaka and the Gallery of the First Australians as organisationally and architecturally distinct elements within two significant museums marks a major development in the history of these museums, and resonates with similar international developments in New Zealand and the Pacific that have been discussed in this collection and with more recent examples in North America such as the National Museum of the American Indian. I have suggested that their significance lies in the production of spaces and institutional structures that provide some measure of indigenous autonomy. As new cultural assemblages these initiatives are literally re-making (parts of) the museum as a host of indigenous spaces. As W. Richard West, the founding Director of the NMAI, said of his institution, ‘We also hope that Native people will look upon the museum as a truly Native place, where they are welcomed and honoured guests’ (Volkert 2004, 7). I’m certainly not claiming that these are utopian places of pure indigenous autonomy and indigenous ‘self-realisation’. These museums are public cultural institutions shaped in important ways by intellectual, bureaucratic, political and economic imperatives, both internal and external. The discussion of the dispute over the Dja Dja Wurrung etchings in this collection, the recent history of the NMA and a number of examples in other essays here make that more than clear. Nevertheless, my claim is that, for indigenous people working in the museums and some indigenous communities, they have and may in the future continue to provide a base for productive indigenous cultural work.
However, the non-Indigenous reaction to these developments has been mixed. I do not want to forget the overwhelmingly positive endorsements provided by museum visitors through surveys.1 Nor do I want to discount the many thoughtful and critical yet generally positive appraisals of both Bunjilaka and First Australians produced by critics including, to the surprise of some, the Carroll Review (Commonwealth of Australia 2003, 20; see Message and Healy 2004). But in addition to these responses, there has been a raft of more negative critiques.2 As John Morton (2004) has argued, most of the more scholarly criticisms have mis-recognised exhibitions in Bunjilaka as being versions of or representations of history or culture as opposed to being exhibitions about cultural and historical relationships. That is, these exhibitions are often attempts at giving form to what Tony Birch (1996) identifies as the central question: ‘the relationship between communities and museums’ (39). In a different vein, for Andrew Bolt, Bunjilaka is ‘“a propaganda unit, presenting a skewed and inaccurate account of our history and culture”… a “silly wet dream” allegedly intended to promote “the Noble Savage myth” and containing the dishonourable hidden agenda of “[making] the white man look silly”’ (Morton 2004, 59). An unlikely alliance of radical Aborigines, postmodern intellectuals and lily-livered liberals has captured this space at the very heart of one of civilisation’s great institutions, and they are corroding culture from within.
Critiques like those of Bolt seem to me to resonate with a new set of reactions against Indigenous autonomy, reactions that are gaining ground in 2006. While I was revising this essay for publication, a media storm blew up in Australia ‘about’ the levels of sexual assault on women and children in remote Aboriginal communities, particularly in the Northern Territory. As a media event, such moments call forth a broad and often incoherent range of ways of talking about Aboriginality largely disconnected from the expertise of those who know about actual life circumstances and challenges of Indigenous people in such communities. One strand of this ‘crazy talk’ and of the current government’s rhetoric of ‘practical reconciliation’ is fixated with ‘special treatment’ available to Indigenous people. Whether it’s the Prime Minister, John Howard, leaping to the aid of Health Minister Tony Abbott in South Australia telling ‘indigenous leaders it was not possible to develop a culture of work when some people took three months leave to grieve dead relatives’,3 or complaints about special sentencing for Aboriginal offenders or demands for the end of ‘special’ education in Indigenous communities, there is a familiar sameness in this rhetoric. It’s a very particular configuration. It relies on the well-established tradition of identifying Indigenous people as bearing the responsibility for ‘the Aboriginal problem’; things would be better if Indigenous people took personal responsibility for observing commonsense norms rather than choosing to be unemployed, drink alcohol, eat poorly, commit crimes and neglect their children. But there is a more recent twist: Aboriginal people have been enabled in the exercise of irresponsibility and criminality by the special treatment afforded to them by their non-Indigenous supporters. So, pretty much the entire post-1972 policy framework in support of Indigenous self-determination becomes culpable.
The exhibition and marketing of Indigenous culture has been a major contributor to the national economy over the last two decades, and for the most part this work, whether in the form of art, tourism, culture or branding, has been carefully managed through a range of strategies that promote and contain Aboriginality, and disseminate and disavow difference. Despite this, such work offers real challenges and genuine opportunities for those interested in postcolonial futures. Whether or not political agitation against ‘special treatment’ will produce effects in relation to places like Bunjilaka and First Australians, there are at least two risks associated with their relative autonomy. They may be singled out for reform and brought into line by managers or curators keen to reinstate disinterested scholarship and re-sanitise ‘Aboriginal propaganda’ (Bolt 2000) by eliminating the ‘slur of hindsight’ (Mulvaney and Calaby 1985, 128) and ‘voguish… didacticism’ (Jones 2002). The other alternative is that such galleries and centres might be simply neglected or starved of resources to simply become relics of a past moment when Aboriginality in the museum promised so much.
1 See, for example, Casey (2003).
2 In addition to the references that follow, here I’m drawing particularly on Morton (2004) and a debate between Gaye Sculthorpe and Andrew Bolt, ABC Local Radio 3LO, 29 November 2000.
3 ‘Indigenous mourning may be too long: PM’, AAP, 6 July 2006.
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Birch, Tony. 1996. ‘“All things are linked or inter-related in one way or another”: The recognition of Indigenous rights with the Museum of Victoria’. Unpublished essay produced for the Museum of Victoria.
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Welsh, P. 1997. ‘The power of possessions: The case against property’. Museum Anthropology 21(3): 12–18.
Cite this chapter as: Healy, Chris. 2006. ‘Very special treatment’. South Pacific Museums, edited by Healy, Chris; Witcomb, Andrea. Monash University ePress: Melbourne. pp. 16.1–16.10.
© Copyright 2006 Chris Healy
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