Museum Transformations. Группа авторов

so helps to shed further light on the reasons for the rise of difficult histories in Australia in the course of the 1990s and much of the following decade.

History wars

      In the final decade of the twentieth century, the past came to have an even more significant place in Australian political and cultural life as historical narratives about the nation were exploited in an unprecedented manner. Australia was not alone in this regard. As a result of the decline of the left, major political parties in many liberal democracies increasingly espoused similar economic and social policies, and in order to distinguish themselves from each other they turned to the realm of culture and more especially that of history. Arguably, the deepening impact of globalization played a role in this trend. As their power in determining economic matters has dwindled in the face of the growing influence of corporate bodies which have no local allegiances, nation-states have had to find other means of projecting their sovereignty.

In the Australian case, Paul Keating, who had become prime minister in 1991, sought to position the Australian Labor Party as the standard bearer of Australian nationalism. He advocated a deeper embrace of Australia’s place in the Asia–Pacific region, called for an Australian republic to replace Australia’s constitutional ties with the British monarchy, and embraced the cause of reconciliation between Aboriginal and settler Australians. He connected these goals to critical events in the nation’s past, interpreting them in the light of the currents that had come to dominate scholarly work in the field of Australian history since the mid- to late 1960s, a corpus which has been called the “new Australian history.” In giving voice to an aggressive Australian nationalism, he attacked earlier conservative leaders, deriding their slavish devotion to Britain and blaming them for suffocating the growth of a distinctive Australian identity (Attwood 2005). At the same time, Keating, more than any Australian prime minister since Whitlam, connected the plight of Aboriginal people to the future of the nation. Deploying the language of shame, he called on settler Australians to tackle the burden of the nation’s colonial past. He argued that acknowledging this legacy was a matter of historical truth, and addressing it a test of whether Australia was truly a democracy. Combining a call for Australia to become a republic with a demand to uphold Aboriginal people’s native title, he suggested that these would provide the basis for a new foundational history since they could help resolve the very historical problems that undermined Australia’s legitimacy as a nation, namely its Britishness and its treatment of Aboriginal people. In 1993 Keating’s government was unexpectedly returned to office. History seemed to represent political capital. In opposition, the conservatives under John Howard’s leadership were prompted to take up the nation’s history as a political weapon. Australia’s history wars had begun. They would be fought largely over the nation’s Aboriginal past as Howard launched an attack on the new Australian history, damning it as an account that suggested the nation’s past was little more than a shameful history of imperialism, racism, and the like, and held that the appropriate stance settler Australians should adopt toward it was one of regret rather than one of apology (Attwood 2005).

      This was the context in which the creation of a national museum in the nation’s capital returned to the political agenda. In the election campaign of 1996, the Australian Labor Party merely proposed the building of the Gallery of Aboriginal Australia and, in response, the Liberal Party claimed that the government was favoring the special interests of minority groups, such as Aboriginal people, and made its own commitment to provide funding for what it called a fully fledged national museum (Gardiner-Garden 1997). After winning office, the Howard Liberal/National Party government announced that it would proceed with the construction of a museum where “all the stories of the nation [were] told” (Alston 1996). Yet, at the same time as it pursued this racially inflected program, the government agreed to construct a new building for the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies on the same site as the museum, a plan that revealed the degree to which Aboriginal matters and national matters had come to be joined to one another.

As the National Museum of Australia moved toward completion in 2000, the government’s appointees to the museum’s governing council made it known that they had no truck with the Pigott Report’s pluralistic vision of the museum as an institution that should stimulate dialogue, doubt, and debate, even though or perhaps because the museum’s director, Dawn Casey, an Aboriginal woman, had recently affirmed its commitment to this ideal (Casey 2001, 3, 6). Instead, these critics demanded that the museum stage exhibitions that celebrated the nation, bolstered national pride, reinforced national identity, and strengthened national unity. Upon its opening in March 2001, the museum came under further attack, and former journalist and academic Keith Windschuttle soon took up the cudgels. Most dramatically, he repeated claims that the museum had borrowed the design of Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin in order to signify that Aboriginal people had suffered the equivalent of the Nazi genocide. More substantively, he alleged that the museum’s treatment of Aboriginal–settler relations was badly flawed, and devoted considerable attention to a display that sought to tell the story of a massacre that had allegedly taken place in the 1820s at Bells Falls Gorge (Windschuttle 2001, 11, 18–19).

The democratization of history

      Consideration of this display and the criticisms of it can illuminate much about the nature of the difficult histories boom, and why institutions such as museums have so much trouble in handling it. This phenomenon is largely the consequence of the democratization of history. This process has meant not only that more historical narratives are being presented in the public realm but that there is now a greater struggle over which stories, or whose stories, will rule the roost. Furthermore, traditional bases of historical authority have been brought into question as different kinds of stories are now being told in diverse forms and forums. Accounts of the past that were not previously regarded as a source of history but merely as sources for history, and problematic ones at that, are frequently characterized as histories. For example, in academic historical practice, narratives in the form of memory and myth or, in the genre of testimony, autobiography, life stories, plays, novels, and films are now commonly regarded as history. Furthermore, those presenting these are often called historians.

The impact of this democratization is evident in the ways in which the subject matter of the display in question had been represented in Australia in the decade or so prior to the opening of the National Museum. In the 1970s and 1980s, academic historians sought to construct a picture of frontier conflict on a large canvas, such as the nation or a colony. They relied on documentary sources and seldom drew on memory or myth. Their accounts tended to be works of exposition and analysis rather than of narrative. They tried to demonstrate the presence of frontier conflict across Australia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and explain why it occurred. Most argued that it amounted to war but conceded it was sporadic and scattered. Except for well-known atrocities that had long been described as massacres, such as the Myall Creek massacre of 1838 and the Coniston massacre of 1928, they devoted relatively little attention to the small number of recorded mass killings of Aboriginal people.

      Their treatment can be contrasted with the ways in which this past came to be represented in the closing decade or so of the twentieth century. Most importantly, perhaps, were the accounts of the past told by Aboriginal people themselves. These histories are mostly very local, focusing on places such as Bells Falls Gorge. They are usually based on Aboriginal people’s own sagas, myths, traditions, and legends, which are ways of relating the past that can be characterized as memorial rather than historical in nature inasmuch as they do not rest on traces of the past contemporaneous to the past being recounted. Moreover, these accounts do not seek to replicate empirical scholarly accounts of the frontier and so do not depend on a correspondence between the historical truth they claim and historical facts. Instead, they tend to render the past in terms of an event that their tellers believe is symbolic of the nature of Aboriginal–settler relations. Furthermore, there is often an acknowledged personal, familial, or kin connection between the narrator and the subject matter. Indeed, this subjective relationship between present and past provides the very raison d’être of most Aboriginal history. An account that typifies this