University of Huddersfield Repository
Wellings, Ben
Nation, History, Museum: The Politics of the Past at the National Museum of Australia
Original Citation
Wellings, Ben (2009) Nation, History, Museum: The Politics of the Past at the National Museum of
Australia. In: Nations and their Histories: Constructions and Representations. Political &
International Studies Collection 2010 . Palgrave. ISBN 9780230218604
This version is available at http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/id/eprint/18603/
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1
Nation, History, Museum:
The politics of the past at the National Museum of Australia.
By Ben Wellings
Introduction
The National Museum of Australia opened its doors to the public on 11 March
2001. Located in Canberra, the federal capital, the Museum was the centre-piece of
celebrations marking the centenary of Australia’s federation in 1901. As such, the
Museum’s director, Dawn Casey, described the $155 million, state-of-the-art institution
as ‘a gift to the nation’. But for some, this was not the sort of present that Australia
wanted. In officially opening the Museum, the Prime Minister of Australia, John Howard,
seemed somewhat under-whelmed, struggling to find anything positive to say about the
new edifice. In his speech, the Prime Minister parsimoniously claimed that ‘Whatever
may be said and whatever has already been said about the Museum… [it] will change in a
very profound way the enjoyment of life for people who live in the national capital’
(Howard, 2001).
Not everyone was as dismayed as John Howard, however. For some
commentators, the idea of a national museum offered the hope of redemption and
renewal, rather than just a monument to a troubled past. Whilst the National Museum of
Australia was criticised for presenting Australian history ‘negatively’, it was argued in
other quarters that such an institution could help re-establish a coherent national narrative
which would in turn help restore a sense of national cohesion. Accordingly, two years
2
after its opening, the Museum underwent a period of government review, in which a
cohesive and positive national narrative was recommended in order to overcome the
fragmentation of national consciousness that had been brought about by the so-called
‘history wars’ of the 1990s.
Unsettling Histories
In a land where it is commonplace to bemoan the ‘lack of history’, the past was
fiercely contested in the years preceding the opening of the National Museum of
Australia (NMA). Such ‘history’ or ‘culture wars’ need explaining by scholars of
nationalism. John Hutchinson has argued that contestation over national history has been
a crucial element in helping to define the forms of a dominant national narrative. He
argues that ‘rival symbolic repertoires, in appealing to multiple class and status groups,
do not so much express sectional struggle as different visions of the nation’ (Hutchinson,
2005, p. 87). On one level, this seemed true of Australia in 2001: radically different
visions of the national past - and consequently the nation itself - crystalised around
arguments about history in general and the National Museum in particular. But
Hutchinson may go too far when making the case for ‘the independent power of
divergent, deep-seated historical memories’ attached to an ethnic sub-stratum
(Hutchinson, 2005, p. 85). The link between ethnicity and nationality in Australia is far
from straight forward. Thus it would be a mistake to understand the ‘history wars’ as a
robust debate carried out within the safe confines of a secure and dominant ethnic group.
What caused the intensity of the debate in Australia’s case was a questioning of the moral
3
legitimacy of the national community due to new understandings of the past, versus a
reaction to this sense of contrition and an attempt to re-impose a cohesive and cohering
national narrative. It will be worth spending some time outlining the history of this debate
itself in order to explain its intensity.
The idea of establishing a national museum for Australia had been raised during the
debates immediately before and after Federation in 1901. However, the National Museum
of Australia only began collecting artefacts once it was established by an Act of
Parliament in 1980. Thus the period of its existence coincided with a significant shift in
understandings about Australia’s past. Since the late 1960s, historians in Australia
increasingly began to concern themselves with the effects of contact and colonisation on
Australia’s indigenous peoples. This newer approach entailed criticism of prevailing
narratives of the past which were increasingly seen as involving conscious or
unconscious acts of forgetting with regard to the more disturbing aspects of Australia’s
history.
Such national narratives were discernible by the middle of the 20
th
century. An
indicative summary of these narratives may be taken from the opening pages of an
illustrated survey of Australia and its principal colony, Papua New Guinea, entitled
Displaying Australia. Produced for American service personnel at the end of the Second
World War, the book was dedicated to:
the Pioneer Men and Women of Australia whose labour and sacrifice have laid the
foundation of a Great White Nation. On their memories the sun shall never set, nor
in the hearts of the Australian people shall they be forgotten. We shall continue to
4
remember that they died from hunger and thirst and exhaustion that future
generations of Australians should enjoy the heritage of our race, while the fruits of
their seeking materialise in the creation of a National soul (Australia Story Trust,
1945, p. 3).
In sum, the dominant national narrative was one which stressed the civilising effects
of hard-working, egalitarian white settlers, given added legitimacy in the 20
th
century by
successful participation in the global struggles against totalitarian imperialism. But
despite this, as Ann Curthoys points out, the dominant national narrative prior to the
1970s defined Australians not as victors, but as victims: convicts as victims of empire;
settlers as victims of the environment; and the Anzacs as victims of British incompetence
(Curthoys, 2003, p. 188). It was this deep-seated sense of victim-hood that made it
difficult for many Australians to identify their forebears as perpetrators of criminal,
inhuman and immoral acts towards Australia’s indigenous peoples. However, in the latter
half of the twentieth century, it was exactly this that they were asked to do. By the early
1980s, many historians were writing a version of history that challenged longer
established national narratives of victim-hood and civilisation in Australia.
Worse was to come. In addition to the official celebrations in Sydney Harbour in
1988 to mark the Bicentenary of the settling of the Australian continent by the British,
there was a counter-demonstration by indigenous peoples and their non-indigenous
supporters. Far from celebrating the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788, the counter-
demonstration mourned the invasion of the Australian continent and the subsequent
dispossession and destruction of indigenous societies and cultures. Australia’s past