Like many Australian primary school students, my Year 5 experience was coloured by the highly anticipated Canberra Trip. Settled at the “base camp” of a cheap motel on the city’s outskirts, we spent four days sampling some of Canberra’s delicacies: the National Archives, the Australian Institute of Sport, the CSIRO and an assortment of devon sandwiches stored in our coach bus. Needless to say, the trip back to Sydney paled in comparison to the wonders we had witnessed.
I have chosen to open with this particular tableau for two reasons. Firstly, it represents a stalwart in the Australian youth’s collective memory; there are very few amongst us who would not call this our first time visiting Questacon. But above all, it was an attempt to teach us something about the ‘nation’ and its meaning through public spaces. It was political, not only in its tours of Embassy Road and the High Court, but also in its aim to reinvent the mythology of so-called ‘Australia’ — and to cement us as its proud, fresh-faced and diligent narrators.
The trip itself was, rather obviously, nationalist. But it was only made so through the contents of the many museums and galleries we visited. At first, they were convincing; my UAC preferences were dominated by aspirations to return to Canberra and study politics. Yet as we grow older, and the fresh coats of paint on these public institutions begin to peel, we can no longer hide from the glaring inconsistencies and mistruths embedded in the narratives we tell about ourselves.
In a post-Voice and climate-changing ‘Australia’ built upon the injustices of settler colonialism, white supremacy and capitalism, our generation must now reckon with everything our ‘National Museums’ stand for.
What’s In An Australian Museum?
If you were to enter into any of Australia’s 587 state-sponsored museums, you would likely find much of the same content repackaged, reinterpreted and repeated. An exhibition about the landscape of our “Great Southern Land”, similar to that at the National Museum of Australia. An insight into First Nations history and culture, like Yankunytjatjara Wangka! at the South Australian Museum. Or perhaps a focus on Anglo-Australian democracy and values, as is highlighted in the Tasmanian Museum & Art Gallery’s Australian Design and Identity Since Federation.
These themes, expressed through different artefacts — but undeniably present in every curatorial decision — are neither accidental nor unsurprising. They have been chosen as part of what Noel Pearson called the “three pillars of Australian life”, an attempt at forging a ‘national story’ that appeals to everyone in Australia’s ‘diverse’ population and ‘celebrates’ its history.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in the National Museum of Australia’s submission to the Federal Parliament’s Inquiry Into Nationhood, National Identity and Democracy in 2019. In addition to providing visitors with “a sense of belonging, value and agency”, the National Museum recognises the public’s high level of trust for its “impartial and considered information.” Rather than providing the critical voice so many of our institutions need, it has instead resolved to supporting public discussion without “taking sides or settling arguments.” Its priority remains in building “social cohesion and cultural identity in the nation-state.”
One does not have to read this Inquiry in full to feel disappointed and dissatisfied with our museums’ current approach. When I spoke to the University of Sydney’s Professor James Curran about how we ended up in this position, he reminded me that defining ‘nationalism’ has long been a problem in the Australian context. To be sure, only white Australians did have “a powerful sense of nationalism from the 19th century to the 1960s”; they believed themselves to be “one people with a common destiny — and one blood.”
But John Curtin’s vision of Australia as a “bastion of the British-speaking race” in 1941 collapsed alongside the British Empire, leaving the state to lean on a ‘multicultural’ nationalism amidst demographic changes and increased immigration. During our conversation, Curran pointed out that Australia has not fought any great wars or struggles for independence — so, he asked, what is the national story that we should represent in a museum? Captain Cook? Bush rangers and the Centenary Federation? The ANZACs? Diversity?
Many Prime Ministers, historians and archivists have tried, but all have failed to make any of these narratives stick. Yet they remain, as Curran noted, “loathe to let go of the idea of Australia.” We are therefore stuck with the question of the purpose of a ‘national museum’, particularly in a context marred by ongoing physical and epistemological violence, where there is nothing to be proud of or celebrate.
Taking ‘Nationalism’ Out Of Our ‘National Museums’
The Australian political landscape is not lacking in examples of an increasingly aggressive nationalism: we are all familiar with the failure of the Voice to Parliament, the state’s obsession with AUKUS and a decade-long commitment to ‘stop the boats.’ It is no surprise, then, that these feelings — of protecting colonial interests, of rallying around militarism and of desperately attempting to turn it into a ‘national myth’ — also colour our museums.
Recent events have crystallised these issues in new ways. The Australian Museum’s controversy over its Ramses and the Gold of the Pharaohs Exhibition has, in many ways, reaffirmed the dominant definition of the state according to colonial interests and standards in Australia and beyond. Curators came under fire in December last year from the Australian Jewish Association for using the word “Palestine” to describe the location of a battle where “Ramses was second in command, alongside Seti”, claiming that the name “wasn’t invented until thousands of years later.”
Initially, the Museum responded by removing “any non-historical geographic references besides the use of the common term ‘Egypt’” to “avoid confusion and to focus on the story of Ramses himself.” After AFOPA, APAN and Palestine supporters around Australia sent an email to the Museum on December 28th condemning this decision, the Museum updated the text panel to read “Ramses was second in command, fighting alongside Seti I in what is today known as Libya and Palestine” to “provide current geographical context.”
This example does not, as some might say, represent the latest tiff in an ongoing war over history or ‘political correctness.’ Instead, it demonstrates our institutions’ commitment to upholding the power and privilege of the nation-state; and, in turn, erasing the lives, languages and histories of colonised people.
As an anonymous University of Sydney student who works at the Museum put it: “at the end of the day, museums are a medium of public history and thereby are curated with the intention of serving ‘the public’. It raises the question of which ‘public’ the Australian Museum caters for, and how this reflects the core values of the institution.”
While this example does not seem to indicate anything about the parochial ‘Australian’ identity, it does signal a reliance on identity politics in history, to omitting and misrepresenting the uncomfortable sections in favour of something more palatable to the Anglo-Australian ear. The Australian War Memorial, wrapped up in its visions of sacrifice, service and loyalty to what many have experienced as an oppressive ‘nation’, lies at this intersection between whiteness, settler-colonialism and militarism.
When I first visited the War Memorial in 2013, I was struck by its grandeur: the wall of red poppies, the echoing quiet in the Hall of Memory, and the glistening light flickering from the Eternal Flame to the Pool of Reflection fascinated me as an eleven-year-old. But this is all pomp, pageantry, performance intended to make me feel this way.
The Memorial’s rebranding to “we are young and free” in 2017 not only takes British settlement as the beginning of history, but also tempers what historian Nicholas Brown calls “the facts of conflict and its casualties within [an] apparent innocence.” Digital exhibitions are intended to dramatise war. The whole thing is, as James Curran and I also discussed, “nurturing a spiritual chain of memory for white Australians back to their ancestral forebears.”
Past, Present, Future
That definitive moment has never existed. I suspected so much in Year 5, and I know it now. Of course, this is not an exclusively ‘Australian’ issue. Upon a recent trip to Singapore and Malaysia, I was continuously struck by the large groups of school-aged children descending upon their own national museums. Clad in paper-white tunics and the wry grins of missing school for a day, they diligently copied ‘official histories’ onto their activity worksheets.
Herein lies the fallacy of what many Australian museums have embraced as the allegedly ‘challenging’, ‘countercultural’ or ‘controversial’ exhibition. Some of the nation’s most notable exhibitions are avowedly ‘activist’ in their purpose and content: the Australian Museum’s Burra, Melbourne Museum’s Unfinished Business and our very own Chau Chak Wing Museum’s Tidal Kin are all doing important cultural and intellectual work to contest Australia’s official narratives.
Yet the extent to which this is genuinely decolonial work must be problematised. As political scientist Sarah Maddison points out, Australia’s “record of historical injustice” implicates a “guilt about the past” in its construction of national identity. Australian nationalism is perpetuated as a kind of ‘settler-nationalism’, one which is inseparable from the relationship between colonists and First Nations people, and which defines land ownership as the nation-state’s main identifying feature. In many ways, these exhibitions represent a co-opted narrative of Australia as a ‘post-colonial’ state.
So, the museums remain white and sanitised, and the schoolchildren will continue travelling to Canberra to visit them. We may not remove the ‘nation’ from these public institutions, but we can certainly change its meaning. Perhaps we will finally have a history written not by the state, but by ourselves — and one which we’re not afraid to tell the truth about.
