Museum Transformations. Группа авторов

ordered by the conservative government barely a year after the museum had opened (to be discussed shortly), the museum decided to abandon the display and have a changeover of the story lines in the “frontier conflict” exhibit (National Museum of Australia 2004a).

Review and renewal

      The review of the National Museum was informed by conceptions of nation, democracy, and history that were as conservative as they were conventional. The review panel believed that the nation must have a unitary historical narrative, that it should be largely factual in nature, and that all Australians should embrace this. Demanding that the museum have grand, compelling, and engaging narratives, the panel envisaged a story line that would be primarily Anglo-Celtic in nature, at least in the three principal galleries representing “the history of modern Australia.” This would see a return to problematic colonial tropes such as discovery and exploration. But the most troubling aspect of the review’s recommendations concerned its treatment of post-1788 Aboriginal history. Although it approved of the Gallery of First Australians’ treatment of indigenous culture, it angled to sequester indigenous history so that it appeared only in that part of the museum, presumably because it realized that consideration of it called into question the moral legitimacy of the settler nation. More especially, the review panel called for a very different account of frontier conflict by suggesting that violent clashes were simply caused by both parties having mistaken cultural assumptions. Finally, while the review panel urged the museum to devote space to alternative accounts of the past; it did not countenance alternative ways of representing the past such as those employed in the Wiradjuri War exhibit (Review of the National Museum of Australia 2003). In the wake of the review, the frontier conflict exhibit and two of the principal modern history galleries have been changed, and parts of a third gallery in the latter section have been altered. However, none of this has occurred in the manner conservative forces hoped and supporters of the original exhibits feared.

The museum redesigned what had been “Contested Frontiers” in such a way as to make it clearer that the exhibit was situated in the Gallery of the First Australians and that it was consequently tasked with examining the history of the colonization of the country by focusing on the experience and the stories of Aboriginal people (National Museum of Australia 2004a; the exhibition can be viewed at National Museum of Australia 2011). The purpose of the new exhibit is announced by its name, “Resistance” or “Stories of Resistance,” and by an introductory text panel that emphasizes the variety of strategies that Aboriginal people adopted in an attempt to maintain their community and culture in the face of the changes wrought by colonization. The exhibit foregrounds the agency of particular Aboriginal people, both men and women, and seeks to appeal especially to Aboriginal audiences. In keeping with its purpose, the dominant background color in the exhibit has been changed from black to orange. The museum stresses that the story it seeks to tell belongs to the genre of memory rather than history. The second signpost that visitors encounter is labelled “Remembering Resistance,” and part of the text panel here reads: “the brutal events of the past remain vivid in the minds of many people today. Indigenous and non-Indigenous people continue to remember, commemorate, and come to terms with those events.” Most importantly, the four modules comprising the exhibit, like the two local ones in the abandoned exhibit, seek to reveal connections between the past and the present, and to show what the past means to Aboriginal people now and how it influences or informs what they do. In representing the story of Yagan, who was more or less an equivalent of the Wiradjuri’s Windradyne and the Bunuba’s Jandamurra, the museum tells not only of his cooperation and conflict with settlers in southwest Western Australia in the late 1820s and early 1830s and the decapitation, preservation, and transfer of his body to England after his death, but also of the successful quest of his people in recent decades to locate his remains and to repatriate them. Similarly, in a display telling the story of a Noongar woman, Fanny Balbuk, who passed away a hundred or so years ago, the museum notes that her cultural knowledge has been used recently in a native title claim made by her people.

      In the principal and the most ambitious of the modules in the new exhibit, “Coniston Massacre,” the museum seeks to do more than represent the past in terms of the work of memory, secure in the knowledge that this is one of those properly documented incidents whose veracity even critics like Windschuttle accept. (It was chosen, too, in order to demonstrate that the frontier was longlasting and not simply a phenomenon of a long-ago nineteenth century.) Its text panels include a nuanced account of a series of killings of Aboriginal people by a police-led party in Central Australia in 1928 which is based on contemporary historical sources including an official board of inquiry. Nonetheless, this module also foregrounds a modern-day Aboriginal perspective and links between past and present in the form of a video in which an Aboriginal woman, Theresa Napurrula Ross, tells, in Aboriginal language, of her father bearing witness to the killings (which can be seen at http://www.nma.gov.au/exhibitions/first_australians/resistance/coniston_massacre/film_about_yurrkuru) (Figure 3.3). Finally, while the museum abandoned the Wiradjuri War display, it might be said to have upheld the principle informing it, since it developed an online interactive virtual display about the debate over contrasting accounts of the past that focuses on the Bells Falls Gorge massacre story (see National Museum of Australia 2002).

      The changes the museum has made in its representation of Aboriginal history in its modern history galleries, however, are more striking than the ones in the Gallery of the First Australians, especially in the “Landmarks” installation which replaced a gallery called “Nation.” This change occurred as part and parcel of a decision on the part of the museum’s curators to meet the calls of its national critics to celebrate the nation not by placing an emphasis on “national identity” or “national character” but rather on place or, more to the point, on “specific places and locales” (National Museum of Australia 2004c, 2–3). “A place-based history brings sharply into focus the centrality of the interwoven histories of Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians – the complicated history of colonization – to any understanding of the Australian past,” the exhibition’s senior curator has argued: “Stories throughout Landmarks consider how settlers and Aboriginal peoples encountered each other as Europeans moved into the continent, how they fought and negotiated for access to land and resources, and developed sometimes amicable and sometimes disastrous modes of living together” (Wehner 2011). The emphasis on locale was deepened by the museum’s decision to reorganize its modern history galleries on the principle that objects would function as the primary carriers of information and creators of meaning in displays, and would be their very basis, instead of being merely used, as they had in most of the museum’s opening exhibitions, to illustrate abstract stories or themes principally communicated to audiences via words in various media. (For a discussion of this approach, see Wehner and Sear 2010.)

FIGURE 3.3 Theresa Napurrula Ross, in front of a photo of her father, tells the story of the Coniston Massacre.

      Photo: George Serras. Reproduced with permission of Theresa Napurrula Ross and the National Museum of Australia.

Consequently, most of the modules that make up “Landmarks” pay a great deal of attention to the Aboriginal past. The earliest ones, chronologically speaking, emphasize Aboriginal people’s prior presence and their displacement, dispossession, and death at the hands of the colonizers to a greater degree than the disbanded “Contested Frontiers” exhibit had done. For example, the opening text panel for “Colonial Foundations” states: “These [British] colonists founded towns in the lands of the Aboriginal peoples who had tended and shaped their country for thousands of years, beginning decades of conflict and negotiations over the control of the land.” This theme is pronounced in parts of this display called “Occupying the Country,” “Conquering Van Diemen’s Land,” and a “State of Unrest,” and even more so in a part of “Grazing the Grasslands.” Even in the module devoted to “Urban Life” there are parts that make reference to precolonial Aboriginal use of places and the fact that Aboriginal