A national museum for Australia might always have seemed a redundancy, given that seven colonial museums and art galleries were established in the nineteenth century. Federation took place in 1901, but it was via a peaceful process of referendum, and though the idea of a national museum was mooted in the 1920s, and occasionally thereafter, a monumental representation of national unity was never anyone’s priority. Such need as might have been felt was met in 1941 with the opening of the Australian War Memorial; a museum commemorating the Great War, it was primed with the acknowledged national story of Aussie diggers in battle and has presented that theme to public acclaim ever since.
Nonetheless, the prosperity of the post-World War II period, the cultural nationalist revival of the 1970s, and the rise of Australian history and heritage consciousness began to suggest that a national story should have institutional expressions. The Australian National Gallery opened in 1973, crossing the Rubicon of collecting artworks in contest with the state galleries. The Australian Heritage Commission was launched in 1975, asserting the value of conserving colonial, Victorian, vernacular and even modern buildings as identifiers of national character. In the 1980s the state museums began to revive, starting with developments in Western Australia to display the finds of Dutch coastal wrecks of the seventeenth century and in New South Wales to mark the 1988 bicentenary of white settlement.
Establishing a national museum was among the recommendations of a government inquiry in 1975, with a three-part program to represent the environment, Indigenous culture and people, and the history of European settlement (Committee of Inquiry 1975, 70–71). It achieved legislative reality in 1980, with a handful of staff and a mandate to collect, but no promises to build. In this form, the National Museum of Australia (NMA) puttered along for nearly twenty years, living from hope to hope that government would pick up its cause. When this finally happened, it was Liberal Prime Minister John Howard who decreed in 1998 that a formal home for the museum would be the centrepiece of the 2001 centenary celebrations of Federation.
For such a huge development project, the schedule was woefully short. The museum had no charismatic leadership, having long been the creature of efficient but politically ineffective public servants. Ministerial action suddenly switched the site from a paddock, long planned to be capable of further development, to a picturesque but very constrained peninsula. The competition to design the building was so pressed that it was officially blackballed by the Institute of Architects, but it produced an Australian design of sufficient flair for controversy. Melbourne firm Ashton Raggatt McDougall infused their plans with cosmic rhetoric, subversive jokes and contemporary references, which were more prominent than functional exhibition galleries, but they fulfilled the unspoken requirement for a spectacular museum building. A large American design company was contracted to produce the complex internal installations and multimedia requisite for a museum of the third millennium. Content suggested by collections had been in the minds of curatorial staff for some years, and now had to be cast rapidly into exhibits shaped by what was taken to be accepted cultural policy in multiculturalism and Indigenous rights, expressed via current directions in academic and popular history.
The large story of the National Museum’s galleries remained much as in the original three-part format proposed in 1975, now conceived as land, people and nation. Dawn Casey, the director in the seat at the time of opening, articulated the museum’s approach as a forum for ideas about being Australian: ‘We intend the Museum to speak with many voices, listen and respond to all, and promote debate and discussion about questions of diversity and identity’ (Casey 2001, 6). To academics and museum professionals, this seemed the very model of a modern national history museum. Curatorial staff were aware of the potential for criticism of interpretative cultural histories fed by new techniques of historiography, and anticipated contention in the Gallery of First Australians. But the ‘history wars’ between ‘black armband’ apologists and ‘white blindfold’ progressives had not yet moved from academe into the public sphere.
First Australians: Gallery of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples dealt with the most sensitive subject for the NMA. The central plank of the gallery was that Indigenous cultures are distinct, resilient and here-and-now, as shown in the presence of Aboriginal people via a large investment in multimedia. Its presentation of the land rights issue was always going to be the acid test of its commitment to modern historiography and Indigenous cultural rights: the NMA made the case by invoking primal documents to show that the earliest European colonists were expected by the Crown and, indeed, expected themselves to negotiate with the native people for rights to land. At the same time, new trends in Aboriginal oral history and cultural mapping were interpreted in exhibits showing that murder and even massacre also played roles in the settlers’ struggle for the land. When the museum opened, there were rumbles of protest about calumny against pioneers and the say-so words of traditional knowledge, but there was also praise from Indigenous and white groups.
Figure 5.1 Gallery of First Australians, National Museum of Australia, 2001.
Photograph: Brendan Bell. © National Museum of Australia 2001.
Nation: Symbols of Australia was the museum’s primary statement about the nature of Australian identity, and in an attempt to avoid perceived clichés, it was presented via symbols of power and popular culture. Thus exhibits on the symbolism of wool, gold, the World War I digger and transport construed as communication were as close to popular tropes of national history as the museum ventured. The theme of the backyard, ‘where Australians are most truly themselves’, drew on the recently confirmed iconic power of the Hills hoist and the Victa lawn-mower, bestowed by the opening ceremony of the Sydney 2000 Olympics. ‘Nation’ also featured one of the most spectacular multimedia items in a hi-tech museum: a vast sequence of statistics, accounts and images projected on a very large map of the country. Visitors were surprised by the mixture, and a few were hostile.
Horizons: The Peopling of Australia since 1788 constituted the museum’s offering on the big Australian story of immigration, beginning with Captain Cook’s discovery and moving rapidly onto the twentieth century. Horizons contained more narrative and chronology than the other galleries, and was liberal with personal case histories. The pressure of national inclusiveness was evident in the range of specimen stories: one from every state, representing men and women, Anglos and other ethnicities, early-day convicts to the most recent arrivals from Kosovo. More interesting was the gallery’s perspective on the ambivalence of immigration and of immigrants’ receptions – issues polarised by the Tampa affair in late 2001, just after the museum’s opening. Horizons turned out to bear the brunt of the formal criticism of the NMA made in the subsequent Carroll Review, for minimising the heroic dimension of the British founding fathers (National Museum of Australia Review Committee 2003).
Tangled Destinies: Land and People in Australia expressed what used to be called ‘natural history’ – presented at the NMA through the lens of seeing and understanding the land. It produced a history of the natural history of Australia, tracing ideas about the environment and its plant and animal inhabitants over millennia of Indigenous occupation and two centuries of subsequent immigrant history. Many startling objects made the point that the European style of knowledge frequently and drastically misunderstood the Australian environment. By the time it was understood how old and fragile both landforms and human presence were, great damage had been done. Yet for better or worse, argued the exhibition, the invaders – human, animal, vegetable – became Australian too. The direction was grounded in an approach to objects and specimens as ideas made material rather than as artefacts pure and simple; the style pleased some but was called ‘over-intellectual’ by others.
Eternity: Stories from the Emotional Heart of Australia was the most original gallery in the museum; it might be called a contemplation of the human condition through individual objects presented in the context of their owners’ emotional lives. It proposed ten emotions or affects, such as hope, joy and loneliness, each expressed five times by a single object belonging to an Australian or Australian-associated person, a few well-known, most unknown. The significance was not always clear to the visitor – how could it be? But all viewers possess objects that are precious for associations with special people or crucial places or defining moments in personal history, and visitors responded frankly with their own on-the-spot video accounts, which were added to the loops of visuals throughout.
Figure 5.2 Eternity Gallery, National Museum of Australia, 2003
Photograph: George Serras. © National Museum of Australia 2001.
Public response about the content and depth of the museum’s offerings was (and has remained) overwhelmingly positive (National Museum of Australia 2006). But crucial elements of the museum’s governing council objected deeply to what they saw as a mockery of national achievement, and succeeded in launching a full-scale review of the exhibits, reporting in 2003. The resulting report surprised many by focusing its criticism less on the Indigenous culture gallery than on Nation, Horizons, and the natty multimedia theatre Circa, an orientation piece at the entry to the museum galleries. A consistent theme of critique was the absence of strong narrative stories, evidently underlaid by the primary author’s conviction of modern society’s need for inspiring myths (Carroll 2001). Museum staff responded with a revision document outlining a unifying theme of ‘place’, backed up by substantial acquisitions. Accepted by the council, the Federal Government laid out substantial new funding for collection growth and gallery redevelopment, unfurling in 2007–08.
Carroll, John. 2001. The western dreaming: The western world is dying for want of a story. Pymble, New South Wales: HarperCollins.
Casey, Dawn. 2001. ‘The National Museum of Australia: Exploring the past, illuminating the present and imagining the future’. In National museums: Negotiating histories: Conference proceedings, edited by McIntyre, Darryl; Wehner, Kirsten. Canberra: National Museum of Australia.
Committee of Inquiry on Museums and National Collections. 1975. Museums in Australia 1975. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service.
National Museum of Australia. 2006. ‘Likes (and dislikes) about the National Museum of Australia’. [Internet]. Accessed 9 June 2006. Formerly available from: http://www.nma.gov.au/about_us/corporate_documents/eval uation_and_visitor_research/likes_and_dislikes/#row_4.
National Museum of Australia Review Committee. 2003. ‘Review of the National Museum of Australia, its exhibitions and public programs’. [Internet]. Accessed 18 June 2006. formerly vailable from: http://www.nma.gov.au/about_us/corporate_documents/exhi bitions_and_public_programs_review/review_report/.
Cite this chapter as: Young, Linda. 2006. ‘National Museum of Australia’. South Pacific Museums, edited by Healy, Chris; Witcomb, Andrea. Monash University ePress: Melbourne. pp. 5.1–5.5.
© Copyright 2006 Linda Young
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