Museum Transformations. Группа авторов

at the racial assumptions that had underpinned European imperialism, and the Australian government realized that its racial policies and practices, known by the term “White Australia,” was attracting growing criticism from postcolonial nation-states. Finally, Australia’s demographic makeup underwent considerable change as a result of the arrival of a large number of non-British migrants. In these circumstances, a term that had hitherto never been used, “national identity,” was increasingly mobilized as settler Australians sought to create a new sense of nationhood or nationalism shorn of its traditional British, imperial, and racial baggage (Curran and Ward 2010, 21–22). In particular, a transformation of the historical narratives that had once told settler Australians who they thought they were was required.

In this context, the newly elected Whitlam Labor government (1972–1975) made two moves. First, it tried to cast Australia as a culturally diverse nation and represented its history as the outcome of the common voyaging of its many peoples, thereby abandoning any hierarchy of descent or origins. But, second, it sought to appropriate Aboriginality, that is, the culture of the indigenous people, and especially their antiquity. Whereas Australia had previously laid claim to an ancient British past, it now claimed that the nation had a deep indigenous past by embracing the tens of thousands of years that had been added to human time in Australia as a result of recent archaeological research about the precolonial past. The significance of this change became all the greater as the Whitlam government began to champion the ideal of a national heritage or a national estate.

      At the same time as the Australian state began to develop a national consciousness featuring a deep indigenous history, it felt the need to address the implications of its colonial past as Aboriginal people made claims on the nation as its oppressed first peoples. Indeed, the newly defined Australian nationalism and the country’s newly discovered Aboriginal history emerged simultaneously and became increasingly intertwined with one another. Consequently, many settler Australians came to believe that Australia faced a critical moral problem, namely that its historical foundations were mired in crimes that had been committed against Aboriginal people and that the nation must atone for these. By 1988, the year of Australia’s bicentenary, a richly ambiguous slogan formulated by Aboriginal political leaders, “White Australia has a black history,” neatly symbolized this emerging consciousness. This sense of the past, with all its manifold difficulties, had become central to the national discourse.

A national museum for Australia

      In April 1974 the Whitlam government established a committee of inquiry with terms of reference that included a brief to recommend the establishment of “a national museum of history” in the nation’s capital. By this time the concept of a national museum had departed from the way in which such institutions had been conceived more than a hundred years earlier, when they were charged with the task of educating, enlightening, and civilizing its people rather than defining the nation’s character (Davison 2006, 94–95). Thus it was that the Special Minister of State in the Whitlam government could tell his cabinet colleagues: “There is no national institution which tells the story of Australia to Australians – the history of Aboriginal man, early white settlement and discovery, and so on through to modern times” (Bowen 1973). The kind of museum Lionel Bowen had in mind would be required not only to advance knowledge but also to provide a focus for growing national sentiment. Indeed, its very founding, he argued, should be regarded as a symbol of the new nationalism (Bowen 1973).

The committee of inquiry established by the government was headed by a businessman, Peter Pigott, who held positions in organizations such as the National Parks and Wildlife Foundation, but the prehistorian John Mulvaney and the historian Geoffrey Blainey are commonly regarded as the principal architects of its report or at least the section that was later to become the basis of the National Museum of Australia’s charter (Davison 2003, 201–202; Macintyre and Clark 2003, 199). Mulvaney also headed a separate committee directed to prepare a report on the establishment of a “Gallery of Aboriginal Australia” (Planning Committee of Aboriginal Australia 1975). His research had been responsible in large part for adding a new temporal depth to the country’s past, while his book The Prehistory of Australia (1969) had turned the history of Australia upside down by suggesting that the continent’s history began in neither 1770 (with the voyaging of Captain James Cook) nor 1788 (with British colonization) but tens of thousands of years earlier with Aboriginal people, and that they were the country’s first discoverers, explorers, and colonists (Mulvaney 1969, 12). For his part, Blainey was completing a history of “ancient Australia,” Triumph of the Nomads (1975) which, by synthesizing the work of Mulvaney and his fellow archaeologists, told the story of the Aboriginal people’s mastery of the Australian environment for a popular audience.

In recommending that a new national museum be established, the authors of the Pigott Report advanced several arguments. First, they presented it as an opportunity to mend “several intellectual rifts,” which included the separation in Australian museums of “Aboriginal man from European man” (Committee of Inquiry on Museums and National Collections 1975, 70). “The foundation of the main Australian museums in the mid-nineteenth century coincided in time with the climax of the Western faith in material progress and doctrinal certainty in human and social evolution,” Mulvaney’s report noted. “Because scientific interest emphasised tracing chains of evolutionary progress, and arranging artefacts and races in sequences, the Aborigines were ranged in the lower steps of the ladder of human success” (20–21). The consequences of this racism were still apparent. “The achievements of Aboriginal society over 40,000 years were minimised,” the authors of the Pigott Report pointed out. “Accordingly, many of the factors which moulded the human history of both black and white settlers were neglected” (70). Second, they presented a new national museum as an opportunity to illuminate “new fields of knowledge” and to link “traditional fields in revealing ways.” In saying this, they had in mind some of the recent findings of Australian archaeology. “The chronology of the human occupation on Australia is dominated by Aboriginals,” they argued, echoing Mulvaney’s recent writings: “If the human history of Australia were marked on a 12 hour clockface, the era of the white man would run for only the last three or four minutes” (Mulvaney 1971, 55; Committee of Inquiry 1975, 71). Finally, the Pigott Report’s authors claimed that a museum with “a national responsibility” was “long overdue” (Committee of Inquiry 1975, 70). In deploying this argument, it seems that Aboriginal matters were among those they most had in mind. Mulvaney claimed that the founding of a major Gallery of Aboriginal Australia could be “seen as an index of [Australia’s] cultural maturity,” a sign that the nation was finally recognizing the value of Aboriginal culture, acknowledging the contemporary problems of Aboriginal people, and seeking to provide some restitution for the nation’s treatment of them (Planning Committee 1975, 5, 7, 12).

      The Pigott Report recommended that the overarching theme of the museum should have three overlapping and interconnecting themes, namely the environment, Aboriginal history, and the history of Europeans in Australia (Committee of Inquiry 1975, 70–71). If it was ambiguous as to what the second theme would consist of, Mulvaney’s accompanying report made it clear that it should include the history of both the pre- and the postcolonial era; at least one of its recommended sections was to consist of “an objective history of race relations from first contacts” and its topics were to include frontier conflict and cooperation, disease and decimation, and Aborigines in the labor force (Planning Committee 1975, 11). In seeking to represent its three themes, the Pigott Committee insisted that the museum should tackle controversial matters: “In our view, museums concentrate on certainty and dogma, thereby forsaking the function of stimulating legitimate doubt and thoughtful discussion” (Committee of Inquiry 1975, 73).

      Several days after the Pigott Report was tabled in parliament, the Whitlam government was toppled, and five years were to pass before the conservative Liberal/ Country Party government enacted legislation to establish a national museum. In doing so it affirmed the themes the Pigott Committee had set down, as well as the principles informing these (Commonwealth of Australia 1980). However, a decade and more passed before a national museum returned to the political agenda of the major parties, and by this time there was no longer any bipartisan consensus about the