Rehabilitating Australia's National Museum.(Australia)

MAJOR CHANGES are being rung at the National Museum of Australia. At the time of writing (September 2008), two of the galleries--Horizons and Eternity--were closed in their entirety for complete redevelopment. A third--Old New Land, formerly known as Tangled Destinies--had most of its exhibition space closed for renovation. These closures constitute a program of renewal that promises to remodel the NMA as a significant national institution and, it is to be hoped, a genuine cultural and educational resource for the Australian community and visitors from other lands.

Even before the current round of reconstruction began, substantial alterations to the galleries' content had already been made. These materially disrupted the ideological grammar that gave the museum its coherence, muting the more strident of its political messages--balancing, for example, the exhibits on the mining industry to include the economic positives as well as the environmental negatives. And sport and industry, largely or entirely ignored in the curators' original vision, have appeared as welcome inclusions.

I want to discuss these changes in some detail. But before doing so, it is appropriate to hark back for a moment to that original vision, which provided the blueprint for the museum's construction and the nature and character of its galleries. It is important to do this, because with the changes currently taking place at the NMA, the physical evidence of the curators' original purpose and intent is being erased. Future visitors, vaguely aware of past controversies and wondering what all the fuss was about, will not realise that the museum was conceived largely as a cruel joke at their expense.

THE ORIGINAL NMA

THE NMA WAS INTENDED to be an ideological showpiece, but of a very special and particular kind. It was designed to play its audience for fools. This purpose was inscribed into the building itself. The surface of the NMA's external walls is made of rectangular aluminium panels. Many of these panels are marked with a series of circular protrusions, like raised dots or small bumps under the museum's dull-brown-and-silver epidermis. They look random, and are unobtrusive enough to escape notice from passers-by. Indeed, these series of dots make attractive patterns across the walls, and would probably strike any who did notice them as no more than an interesting piece of metalwork in relief. But the NMA put them there for a very specific purpose.

As originally inserted into the building's surface, these dots spelled out a coded political message--in braille. No one not in the know can have realised what they meant, and it was not intended that they should be. This was for the insiders only. "Forgive us our genocide", read one; "Sorry", read another. These phrases, obviously, were intended as a hidden challenge to the policies of the then government with regard to the "stolen generations" and Aboriginal reconciliation. They shouted it out, but in silence. No doubt the sight of a conservative prime minister opening the museum below a boldly displayed but secret message that contradicted his own policies would have afforded the museum's designers keen delight as they laughed behind their hands.

Sadly, at least for them, it was not to be. A few days before the museum opened in 2001, Craddock Morton, who later became the NMA's second (and current) Director, rendered the messages illegible by adding new panels or moving the existing ones around to make the braille letters meaningless. This was not generally known at the time, and it was only some years later that the media revealed what kind of trick the NMA had intended to pull on us.