How not to run a museum: people's history at the postmodern museum. (History).

ONE OF THE EXHIBITS at the new National Museum of Australia is called "Snapshots of Australian History". It is a long display containing objects and documents about twenty-five significant historical events from the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788 to the defeat of the republican referendum in 1999. The event it commemorates in 1967 is the referendum that permitted the Commonwealth government to legislate on behalf of Aborigines. The caption calls it "A Vote for Aboriginal Rights" and the display above is entirely taken up by a photograph of Gough Whitlam in a full-page newspaper advertisement for the Australian Labor Party urging people to vote "yes". I don't know if Gough has seen this yet or whether he approves or not, but I hope he would be embarrassed by a display that portrays him as the liberator of the Aborigines at that time. None of the schoolchildren filing past this exhibit when I was there, nor many of their teachers for that matter, would have realised that Gough was only Opposition Leader in 1967 and that the Aboriginal referendum was actually an initiative of Harold Holt's Liberal-Country Party government.

There has already been much discussion in the press about the National Museum, especially its architecture. Designed by Howard Raggatt, and built at a cost of $155 million, it borrows its central structure--shaped as a lightning bolt striking the land--from the Jewish Museum in Berlin, signifying that the Aborigines suffered the equivalent of the Holocaust. The director of the museum, Dawn Casey, has claimed in the press that she and her council were not aware of this symbolism when they approved the plan:

 
   We endorsed the plans as a whole for their imaginative and creative 
   solution to the task at hand. Hindsight is a fine thing and, had we known, 
   we may well have asked for that particular reference not to be included. 

However, one of the council's own publications explaining the signs and symbols of its construction, Building History: The National Museum Of Australia, praises this very connection:

 
   The most dramatic of the architectural references is in the form of the 
   First Australians gallery, with a zigzag footprint, or outline, which 
   closely resembles the recently completed Jewish Museum in Berlin designed 
   by Daniel Libeskind. 

As the Melbourne architectural critic Conrad Hamann has written (approvingly), the building is "clearly one in the eye for the Howard government, who have been bashing away at Aboriginal council groups for some time".

The content of the museum's displays has attracted less public discussion but has been the source of considerable acrimony within its governing council. Late last year, one of the Howard government's appointees to the council, author David Barnett, wrote a memo protesting about the political bias of the exhibits. He objected to the museum's "reworking of Australian history into political correctness". He said it glamourised people such as the Lenin Peace Prize winner William Morrow, the bushranger Captain Moonlite and the anti-nuclear activist Benny Zable. He complained that while the museum glorified the trade unionists who vandalised Parliament House during a riot in 1996, it trivialised the death of Harold Holt by repeating the urban myth that he was a Chinese spy who had not drowned off Portsea but had deserted Australia aboard a Chinese submarine.