The vision splendid. (Argus).(Municipal Museum of Ghasthurst, Australia)(Brief Article)

THE NATIONAL MUSEUM of Australia (September 2001), may well be, as its director insists, "world class", but just how up to date is "world" in the rapidly changing field of museology? Where the NMA and the museums it compares itself with seek to reinterpret the past to the present, the really avant-garde public collection of the 21st century conceives its function as interpreting the future. In this category one--and only one--museum is blazing a trail for the rest of the world to follow--the new Municipal Museum of Ghasthurst.

The future it interprets is, of course, a purely Australian one ("xenophilia has had our museums in its grip for far too long," says Ghasthurst's director, Dr Marxia Sneer), but not one in which white Australia has much importance. "We may not show a future reactionary historians or demographers consider likely," admits Dr Sneer, "but it is a future all enlightened Australians would surely aspire to and, as such, a logical corollary of the reconciliation process." In visual terms this means that almost all the Australians depicted in the museum's displays are Aboriginal. In the "Ordinary Australians & Their Life" gallery, for example, Aboriginal holidaymakers laze on beaches or enjoy barbecues of witchetty grub and wattleseed relish outside their caravans, Aboriginal crowds watch Aboriginal footballers, Aboriginal chancellors preside over graduation ceremonies of Aboriginal students, Aboriginal juries give verdicts and Aboriginal judges hand down sentences. Aboriginal yuppies flash credit cards of shining turtle shell as they stock up on mobile phones and leisure-wear in "a typical shopping mall" and an Aboriginal synod debates the finer doctrinal points of the eschatology of the dreamtime. (All these displays hang upside down from the ceiling, in order, says the director, "to subvert conventional Anglocentric notions of space and order.")

Few white faces are in evidence, in or out of showcases. The nation's Anglo-Saxon past is represented by a straggly band of actors in settlers' and diggers' costumes who traipse the museum's galleries wailing and beating their breasts, while the word "sorry" reverberates continuously from loudspeakers in a variety of voices and accents--male, female, old, young, "Aussie", Vietnamese, Italian and Greek (when asked exactly what the last three groups had to say sorry for, Dr Sneer said it would be "discriminatory" to have any reference to non-Aboriginal Australians in the museum in which "the full range of our multicultural heritage" was not represented).

The faces receiving sentence in the courtroom tableaux are white, as (with a reddish tinge) are those of the evil-eyed One Nationers and Coalition reactionaries who form the tiny minority of ...