South Pacific Museums: Experiments in Culture

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SOUTH PACIFIC MUSEUMS EXPERIMENTS IN CULTURE EDITED BY CHRIS HEALY AND ANDREA WITCOMB

Published by Monash University ePress Matheson Library Building 4, Monash University Clayton, Victoria 3800, Australia www.epress.monash.edu.au First published 2006 Copyright © 2006 All rights reserved. Apart from any uses permitted by Australia’s Copyright Act 1968, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without prior written permission from the copyright owners. Inquiries should be directed to the publisher.

DESIGN A. Katsionis (www.katsionis.com) COVER IMAGES The ‘Uluru’ line. National Museum of Australia. Photograph: Naomi Stead. Jean-Marie Tjibaou statue. Photograph: Kylie Message. Courtesy ADCK-Centre Culturel Tjibaou/Renzo Piano Building Workshop, Architectes. Centre Culturel Tjibaou. Photograph: David Becker. © Centre Culturel Tjibaou – ADCK/ Renzo Piano Building Workshop, Architectes. PRINT ER Sydney University Publishing Service This book is available online at www.epress.monash.edu/spm

ISBN ISBN-13 ISBN ISBN-13

0-9757475-8-4 (pb) 978-0-9757475-8-2 (pb) 0-9757475-9-2 (web) 978-0-9757475-9-9 (web)

Pages: 232

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This collection has its origins in an Australian Research Council Discovery Project lead by Chris Healy, Gaye Sculthorpe and Paul Walker. We acknowledge that support. Kylie Message, Perrie Ballantyne and Hilary Ericksen all played crucial roles in that research project, which included the symposium ‘The Re-Birth of the Museum’ held at the University of Melbourne in July 2004, at which some of the essays here were first presented. We are grateful to all of the symposium participants for making that event so generative and to the Department of English and the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne for their financial support. Tony Birch, Alison Huber and Paul Williams focused and sharpened Chris Healy’s perspective on the museum. Emmanuel Kasarhérou, the cultural director at the Centre Culturel Tjibaou, and Patrick Greene, the CEO of Museum Victoria, were both generous in responding to our questions. Isabelle de Solier was an invaluable research assistant in the later stages of this project. Penny Johnson was, as always, a wonderful editor. At Monash University ePress, Michele Sabto saw the potential in this collection that others could not, Joanne Mullins in production was a dream to work with and Sarah Cannon gave it an energetic launch into the markets to which it is now consigned. We are grateful to all of the copyright holders for permission to reproduce the images here. Publication of this work was assisted by a publication grant from the University of Melbourne.

SOUTH PACIFIC MUSEUMS MONASH UNIVERSITY EPRESS

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ABOUT SYMPOSIUM PAGINATION

A NOTE ABOUT PAGINATION AND CHAPTER IDENTIFICATION Page numbers in this book do not run consecutively across chapters. Instead, page numbering restarts on the first page of each chapter and is prefaced by the chapter number. Thus 01.1 is chapter one, page one; 01.2 is chapter one, page two; 02.1 is chapter two, page one; 02.2 is chapter two, page two; and so on. In the Table of Contents, each chapter is listed with its chapter number (01, 02, 03, etc.) only. This system, in which page numbering is self-contained within each chapter, allows the publisher, Monash University ePress, to publish individual chapters online.

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SOUTH PACIFIC MUSEUMS EXPERIMENTS IN CULTURE

CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 01

Experiments in culture: An introduction — Chris Healy and Andrea Witcomb

NEW MUSEUMS 02

Reforming nationhood: The free market and biculturalism at Te Papa — Paul Williams

03

Museums of New Caledonia: The old, the new and the balance of the two — Marianne Tissandier

04

Contested sites of identity and the cult of the new: The Centre Culturel Tjibaou and the constitution of culture in New Caledonia — Kylie Message

05

National Museum of Australia — Linda Young

06

Pluralism and exhibition practice at the National Museum of Australia — Mathew Trinca and Kirsten Wehner

07

Melbourne Museum — Ian McShane

08

Civic laboratories: Museums, cultural objecthood and the governance of the social — Tony Bennett

NEW KNOWLEDGES 09

Museums as cultural guardians — Deidre Brown

10

The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa — Huhana Smith

11

There’s so much in looking at those barks: Dja Dja Wurrung etchings 2004–05 — Pamie Fung and Sara Wills

12

Gab Titui Cultural Centre — Leilani Bin-Juda

13

The museum as cultural agent: The Vanuatu Cultural Centre extension worker program — Lissant Bolton

14

Tuning the museum: The harmonics of official culture — Ian Wedde

15

Bunjilaka — Moira G. Simpson

16

Very special treatment — Chris Healy

NEW EXPERIENCES 17

Hiroshima mon amour: Representation and violence in new museums of the Pacific — Diane Losche

18

The Auckland War Memorial Museum, Tamaki Paenga Hira — Elizabeth Rankin

19

The National Museum of Australia as danse macabre: Baroque allegories of the popular — John Macarthur and Naomi Stead

20

The Museum of Sydney — Kate Gregory

21

How style came to matter: Do we need to move beyond the politics of representation? — Andrea Witcomb

22

The Australian Centre for the Moving Image — Natalia Radywyl

23

Spirit house — Ross Gibson

INTRODUCTION

EXPERIMENTS IN CULTURE: AN INTRODUCTION Chris Healy, The University of Melbourne Chris Healy teaches cultural studies at the University of Melbourne. His publications include The lifeblood of Footscray (editor, 1986), Beasts of suburbia (co-editor, 1994), From the ruins of colonialism (1997), Cultural Studies Review (co-editor, 2002–06), South Pacific museums (co-editor, 2006) and Forgetting Aborigines (forthcoming 2007). Correspondence to Chris Healy: [email protected] Andrea Witcomb, Deakin University Andrea Witcomb is an associate professor in the Faculty of Arts at Deakin University. She has also worked as a curator at the Australian National Maritime Museum and at the National Museum of Australia, and is the author of Re-imagining the museum: Beyond the mausoleum (2003). Correspondence to Andrea Witcomb: [email protected]

The last two decades have witnessed an explosion in the development of new public and private museums throughout the world. If this is surprising it is only because, for much of the last 50 years, museums have been regarded by many scholars and cultural critics as, if not extinct, then certainly archaic institutions far from the cutting edge of cultural innovation. This judgment is being proved wrong across the globe as innovative and distinctive museums are staking out new territory for themselves as vital, dynamic, public and civic cultural institutions. Nowhere is this most striking than in the South Pacific where large, new or significantly expanded public museums and cultural centres have opened since the 1990s, including the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, the National Museum of Australia, the Melbourne Museum, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, the Museum of Sydney, the Gab Titui Cultural Centre in the Torres Strait, the Centre Culturel Tjibaou and the Vanuatu Cultural Centre. Many more museums in that region have undertaken major renovations. South Pacific museums: Experiments in culture brings together a collection of outstanding analysis of these museums by cultural, museum and architectural critics, and historians. A series of snapshots introduces the reader to key museums in the region while the essays explore these museum developments in the broadest possible terms. The museums under analysis are part of the complex field of heritage, where national economies meet global tourism, where cities brand themselves, where indigeneity articulates with colonialism, where exhibitionary technologies and pedagogies meet entertainment, where histories are fought over, where local identities intersect with academic and popular knowledge, where objects and provenance are displayed and contested, where remembering and forgetting dance their endless dance. Our key metaphor in this collection is to consider museums as experiments in culture. Many of our contributors have taken a lead from Tony Bennett’s essay here on museums as ‘civic laboratories’. Bennett suggests that museums can be thought of as cultural assemblages – institutions that bring together people and expertise, artefacts, texts and architecture, all of which are organised in particular ways. Thus museums place visitors in particular relationships to objects in ways that make real ‘prehistory’ or community or art. This perspective is particularly useful for analysing museums in a state of flux or museums as places in which ‘culture’ can be made and remade in different ways. So, for example, many of the contributions to this collection are interested in exploring how national or indigenous interests are experimenting with museum collections that were first put together for entirely different and often antithetical purposes. As


01.1

Bennett has indicated elsewhere (Bennett 2004), it is an approach that can be taken to museums devoted to natural history, technology or art, but here, in the main, our focus is on historical and cultural museums. The metaphor – museums as experiments in culture – is our way into how these museums can be understood as exemplars of what Chris Healy and Kylie Message (2004) call the ambiguous ‘new museum’ phenomenon. In other words, we want to make sense of these museums as selfconsciously new institutions created in the midst of major political, economic and social transformations. Recent worldwide museum developments are, in part, local cultural responses to globalised markets and industries. Not unlike the ways in which a state will build or upgrade transport infrastructure, museums are being renovated so as to produce a better fit between national or city cultural infrastructure and emerging needs. States expect publicly funded museums to play their role in national or regional economies, whether as centrepieces in the reinvigoration of formerly industrial areas as tourist and leisure precincts, or as attempts to re-fashion entire regional or national economies (Witcomb 2003; Kirschenblatt-Gimblett 1998). From Albert Dock in Liverpool or the Guggenheim in Bilbao to the Powerhouse and Darling Harbour in Sydney, Federation Square in Melbourne, Te Papa in New Zealand or the Centre Culturel Tjibaou in New Caledonia, museums have become important icons of new and emerging consumer cultures. Rather than a repository for dinosaurs or archaically dinosaur-like, museums have actually become signs of ‘the new’. You need one if your nation is having a facelift or strutting the catwalk of the international tourist. At the same time, a very different set of pressures have shaped these museums in the South Pacific. In particular, a half-century of decolonisation, the emergence of postcolonial nations and the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s have all contributed to new museological practices. Erstwhile handmaidens of colony or empire needed to be reborn as new demands were formulated by the politics of self-determination and identity. Museums needed to be attentive to a whole new class of social relationships, to recognise difference and the effects of power, to acknowledge the differing historical experiences of people according to their race, class and gender. Firmly embedded within the principles of the new museology, all of these museums model new approaches to the relations between museums and communities (Karp 1992), including reflexive curatorial strategies aware of the politics of identity, particularly those resulting from the colonial encounter. Informed by developments in the new humanities, museums began to produce a museological practice that was more theoretically and politically aware of itself. Museums began to recognise that there was a politics to their work and to make choices as to what they wanted those politics to be. As both Peter Vergo (1989) and Stephen Weil (1990) have put it, rather than asking how, museologists began to ask why. These demands have placed extraordinary pressures on these museums: to engage with popular media, to represent the entirety of history and culture, to be socially inclusive, and to speak to all peoples at the same time while adequately representing both the diversity and singularity of a nation, region or city. The result was a museological practice that, in historical and cultural museums at least, attempted to contextualise objects differently, to address the legacies of history in the contemporary moment and to recognise the very different needs brought by different people to the museum. The difficulties of doing so have not gone undocumented. Sometimes, the tensions between these competing interests have resulted in cultural experiments that go to the heart of contemporary cultural and political debate. Throughout the late 1980s and 1990s there have

01.2

EXPERIMENTS IN CULTURE INTRODUCTION

been moments of deep contestation as major national institutions around the world have attempted to reinterpret the representation of the national past through their efforts at reinterpreting their collections. What these contestations indicate is something about the tension between the state and its desire for a consensual, celebratory representation of the nation and the notion that museums, as educational institutions, have a social and moral responsibility to help the public understand the contexts for cultural, social and political difference within the nation. Fracas such as those that erupted around the Enola Gay and The West as America exhibitions at the Smithsonian institutions, the Into the Heart of Africa exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum and the new exhibitions at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich are all examples of this tension. What they show are the difficulties involved in maintaining museums as civic institutions removed from political society (Karp 1992). All of these tensions are evident in new museums in the South Pacific, as they are in the rest of the world. But it is our contention that recent museological practices in this part of the world have a particular salience and relevance, which is both comparable with postcolonial nations such as Canada and the United States and unique. Some of these museums carry the weight of their institutional histories and the histories of their collections no less than their European or North American counterparts. Others, such as the Centre Culturel Tjibaou, carry different historical burdens. In other words, they were born as part of the new museology movement and represent the newer forms of investment by governments in museums. It is also here that the pressures of history are most keenly felt as the clashes between coloniser and colonised, indigenous and settler, reverberate continuously in the present. All museums in the South Pacific have had to engage with the past, particularly the colonial past. In Australia and New Zealand, museums have been charged with the task of representing late twentieth and early twenty-first century forms of nationhood and of creating organisational and exhibitionary forms that contribute to the political process known as ‘reconciliation’. In former colonies such as New Caledonia, Vanuatu and East Timor, there are the challenges of much more recent and violent decolonisation. With different museological histories behind them, these new nations are clearly and creatively experimenting with the museum form that might be appropriate to different needs. As a consequence, it is here perhaps that the new museology takes on its clearest contours. Museums in the South Pacific could perhaps be seen as the most advanced flowering of the new museology, taking risks others have not been prepared to take. They present an interesting moment in the history of the museum, representing not the moment of their birth (Bennett 1995) as perhaps their rebirth or their reinvention into something new. The museums analysed in this book reflect all of these tensions and issues. While each contribution stands of its own, in many cases they unravel multiple issues manifest within the one museum. Nevertheless, we have sought to group them to give a sense of some of the key themes across the South Pacific region. The first grouping of essays in ‘New Museums’ introduces three different museums in distinctive national contexts – Te Papa, the Centre Culturel Tjibaou and the National Museum of Australia – and includes Bennett’s ‘Civic laboratories’ essay. All of these essays grapple with the role of the museum in the nation at particular historical moments under specific political pressures. The second grouping of essays, ‘New Knowledges’, document some of the practices and exhibitions at the point of tension between indigenous and non-indigenous interests in the museum. At the risk of sounding too confident, there is evidence that museums, in their attempt to accommodate to indigenous epistemologies and belief systems are themselves


01.3

becoming indigenised – not only in terms of their architecture and the ways in which this reflects attempts to represent and enable indigenous cultural practices but also in their ways of working. In the third and final grouping, ‘New Experiences’, our authors take us to some of the key ways in which these museums are engaged in producing that most ineffable of cultural phenomena – experience. Whether through the particular design strategies discussed by Macarthur and Stead or the evocation or ‘spirits’ in Ross Gibson’s closing essay, these contributions get to the ways in which these museums are engaging audiences anew and become significant sites that place us in the world. Finally, we need to be clear that in exploring what we’ve called ‘new museums’ as experiments in culture, we are not interested in rehearsing old clichés or disabling antinomies: ‘Look’, he would say, ‘at the museum of the future. The Russians are already stocking their museums, not with sculptures or ceramics, nor with copies in fibreglass or plaster, but with these constructions of light. Everything can be everywhere, our culture can be, is, world wide... with modern technology, mere possession of the relics of the past is of little importance’ (Byatt 1990, 386).

A few years ago, The New Yorker recently featured an article on Ellen Futter, the newly appointed president of the American Museum of Natural History (Traub 1995). Futter had been hired as the executive officer to prepare the museum for the millennium but, according to the journalist James Traub, her appointment and the ‘brave new museum’ she was proposing had generated some anxiety. Although the article is ostensibly a profile piece, it is the tension between a new museum and an old museum that gives the discussion a sense of drama. Traub begins the article by recalling Salinger’s elegy to the American Museum of Natural History as a place where Holden Caulfield would retreat from the confusion of the world: The best thing... in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody’d move. You could go there a hundred thousand times, and that Eskimo would still be just finishing catching those two fish, the birds would still be on their way south, the deer would still be drinking out of that waterhole... The only thing that would be different would be you (Salinger 1958).

Traub uses this passage to evoke some of the ‘Proustian sort of feeling’, and the ‘persistence of the archaic that evokes nostalgia’, which he suggests are crucial aspects of why people love the museum. These evocations are important because Traub wants to capture some of the tension that attended Fuller’s efforts to transform the Museum of Natural History from an institution of ‘dowdy respectability’ into one directed to a mass public – ‘the kind of place... where Holden Caulfield would not feel at home’. To this end Traub draws a theatrical contrast between those who want the museum to function as an ‘engaged, vital place’ and those who regard the museum as a ‘cherished sepulchre’. Eventually, this tension is resolved. Futter seems certain to transform the museum – in part through a 90-million-dollar reconstruction of the Hayden Planetarium and the building of a Biodiversity Centre – into a museum without walls that mounts exhibitions on AIDS and designs computer software to explain fossils on cladistic principles. But the American Museum of Natural History will also continue to be a research institution upholding (some of) the virtues of traditions, virtues perhaps best characterised for both Futter and Traub by the

01.4


luminous gorilla group on display in Arkeley Hall – an exhibit that the new chief executive has no intention of changing. While the mock drama of this journalistic piece was precipitated by renovations at the American Museum of Natural History – renovations that seem minor in comparison to many of the new museums and redevelopments discussed here – readers familiar with museums will notice the use of a series of familiar tropes in relation to some of the antagonisms within their institutions over the last 50 years. Call the disputes what you will – between traditionalists and innovators, between those who are research-centred and those who are audience-centred, between modernisers and visionaries, between those who fetishise the object and those enamoured with the optical-fibre-delivered, virtual multimedia total-body experience. These characterisations are clichés, cartoon-like in their simplicity. Nevertheless there are many instances in which these stark alternatives have been mobilised in efforts to reform museum practices or resist their reformation (as indeed they have been used in relation to other institutions) – either you stand fixed and ossified or you join a journey to a brave new future. Read against the grain, this story suggests that in moments of transformation, such as the renovations at the American Museum of Natural History and the recent flowering of new museums in the South Pacific, museums are open-ended experiments in culture.

REFERENCES Bennett, Tony. 1995. The birth of the museum: History, theory, politics. London: Routledge. Bennett, Tony. 2004. Pasts beyond memory: Evolution, museums, colonialism. London: Routledge. Byatt, A. S. 1990. Possession. London: Chatto and Windus. Karp, Ivan. 1992. ‘Introduction: Museums and communities; The politics of public culture’. In Museums and communities: The politics of public culture, edited by Karp, Ivan; Mullen Kreamer, Christine; Lavine, Steven D. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press. Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. 1998. Destination culture: Tourism, museums, and heritage. Berkeley: University of California Press. Message, Kylie; Healy, Chris. 2004. ‘A symptomatic museum: The new, the NMA and the culture wars’. Borderlands 3 (3). Available from: http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no3_2004/messagehealy_symptom.htm. Salinger, J. D. 1958. The catcher in the rye. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Traub, James. 1995. ‘Shake them bones’. The New Yorker (13 March). Vergo, Peter, editor. 1989. The new museology. London: Reaktion Books. Weil, Stephen, E. 1990. ‘The proper business of the museum: Ideas or things?’ In Rethinking the museum and other meditations. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press. Witcomb, Andrea. 2003. Re-imagining the museum: Beyond the mausoleum. London: Routledge.

Cite this chapter as: Healy, Chris; Witcomb, Andrea. 2006. ‘Experiments in culture: An introduction’. South Pacific museums, edited by Healy, Chris; Witcomb, Andrea. Monash University ePress: Melbourne. pp. 1.1–1.5. DOI: 10.2104/spm06001.


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NEW MUSEUMS

REFORMING NATIONHOOD THE FREE MARKET AND BICULTURALISM AT TE PAPA Paul Williams, New York University Paul Williams is an assistant professor and faculty fellow in the Program in Museum Studies at New York University. He has researched museums and memorials in New Zealand, Australia, Cambodia, the USA and Germany, and is most interested in postcolonial museums, the political uses of genocide and war memorials, and the use of photographs in museums. Correspondence to Paul Williams: [email protected]

In 1998 the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa opened to the public. Two key policies have come to define the new museum: biculturalism and market rationalism. Maori–Pakeha biculturalism is founded on the Treaty of Waitangi, which posits a separate-but-equal relationship between two cultural traditions. In practice, this means the museum is structured as two architectural ‘halves’ with separate galleries and systems of management. Market policies are visible both within the museum, where ‘customer focus’ is manifest in a casual institutional style and myriad interactive exhibits, and from without, wherein the museum forms a provocative symbol of corporate involvement in the public sector. This essay suggests that these policies come together in a somewhat problematic fashion. Eight years after opening, Te Papa remains poised as the captivating but troublesome result of the forces of market-driven public accessibility, postmodern curatorial revisionism and Maori cultural reassertion. While public accessibility is a predictable response to the pressures of financial accountability, the latter two interact awkwardly. While biculturalism was conceived as a way in which the museum could respond to an apparent ‘crisis’ of national identity, its execution has, paradoxically, allowed chief problems in that identity to go unexplored. Despite the museum’s novel postcolonial outlook, the topic of ‘race’ remains elemental. The uncertain, even contradictory effect of embracing an indigenous–settler racial difference while marginalising empire – when in fact empire and race are inextricably bound in New Zealand’s history – attests to the ways that former South Pacific colonies struggle to untangle colonialism.

1984: THE STATE EXPERIMENT The institution that would eventually become the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Te Papa) was envisioned in a period of national strife. By the early 1980s the nation was on the brink of economic bankruptcy. After Britain’s entry into the EEC a decade earlier, New Zealand no longer had a singularly reliable market for its agricultural exports and had become crippled by foreign debt. The government could no longer afford to continue the state tradition of ‘socialism without doctrines’; drastic changes were needed to an economy that was perhaps the most highly regulated in the OECD (Bassett 1998). On the political front, the period also saw the culmination of a decade of Maori protests over land rights, marked by demonstrations, strikes and highprofile land occupations. Language, culture and the reaffirming of the authority of the Treatyof-Waitangi history were key markers of unity for Maori groups asserting a new cultural nationalism.1 After earlier rejecting the treaty as ‘a fraud’, Maori rallied around the assertion that it should be afforded a privileged, semi-constitutional role in the nation’s governance. In 1984 a new Labour Party government came to power and immediately set about remedying these urgent concerns. First, it enacted a series of economic transformations that turned New Zealand into one of the most unregulated economies the industrialised world has known. Free

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trade, a deregulated labour market, fiscal restraint and narrow monetarist policies aimed to reposition New Zealand as a prime destination for foreign investment. Second, The Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975 (NZ) gained its ‘teeth’ with a 1985 amendment that extended the Waitangi Tribunal’s powers to investigate Crown actions and omissions in breach of the treaty dating back to 1840.2 At once, much of the nation’s colonial history was the subject of research and possible government redress. Another important 1984 event was the great success of Te Maori. This inaugural international touring exhibition of historic Maori art attracted large crowds in American cities and significant media attention, in part due to the live performances of Maoritanga (culture) at each museum. The 1986–87 ‘return home’ tour of New Zealand was hugely popular, drawing a multitude of Pakeha (the non-Maori majority), many of whom knew little of this Maori heritage. It was hard to miss the range of bright possibilities – economic, social and political – that the Te Maori triumph augured. This cluster of events – the modification of the economy, a fresh politico-judicial framework for addressing Maori grievances and a new national pride in Maori culture – was vital in inculcating a national imaginary deliberately distanced from its colonial origins. All that was missing was a symbol to express all of this: a place, as thenprime minister David Lange called for, that would ‘speak for New Zealand’ (Project Development Team 1985, frontispiece). The Project Development Team (PDT) convened to discuss the shape of a new national museum averred in 1985 that the ‘forbidding monumentality of the traditional museum has no place in the life of a modern Pacific nation, aware and proud of its identity, nurturing and caring of its diverse cultures’ (Project Development Team 1985, 11). The existing national museum was a cool neoclassical edifice on a Wellington hilltop that organised displays in conventional taxonomic divisions. For the PDT, a properly native institution, to be located on the city’s waterfront, would gain wide social relevance by repudiating much of this imperial museum form, not least its staid architecture. The new institution would seek to pull apart the relationship between material heritage and the cultural and class distinctions that New Zealand had inherited in its historical image of being a ‘Britain of the South Pacific’. A revalued Maori culture and emergent postcolonial Pakeha culture were the basis for the vision of a national bicultural institution.3 Planning of the new museum coincided with the government adopting (via the New Zealand Tourism Board) a ‘national brand’ for the first time, whose keywords included the following: unaffected, open and honest; young, active, fresh; not knowing ‘can’t do’; resolute; quiet achievers; and seeking contemporary solutions (New Zealand Tourism Board 1991, 21). The PDT similarly realised that a new museum could augment New Zealand’s draw as a destination for cultural tourism: It is not an outlandish claim to note that a country’s museums can play a considerable role in establishing how a country is viewed from the outside. They can and do act as a significant trigger in tourist destination choices. Despite the high profile tourists already have among New Zealand museum visitors, it is clear from studies that cultural objectives do not figure significantly among tourist expectations of New Zealand (Project Development Team 1985, 10).

Despite having been rapidly urbanised in the postwar period, New Zealand’s tourism draw had been its outdoor environment. To capitalise on the cultural and natural, a museum that

REFORMING NATIONHOOD NEW MUSEUMS

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could draw tourists inside and then away was seen as an ideal outcome. An early policy concept was that of the museum as a waharoa (gateway) to New Zealand’s natural wonderland and cultural uniqueness. If museums were traditionally conceived as an exemplary refuge from overt economic transactions, Te Papa was designed as a provocative symbol of corporate involvement in the public sector. The government program to ‘change the culture’ signals how ‘culture’ referred, in this context, to the complex of social values, customs and beliefs informing workplace relations. In this sense, economics became cultural policy inasmuch as it assumed the status of ideology and generated its own world view and institutional language (such as Te Papa’s twin ‘corporate principles’ of ‘customer focus’ and ‘commercial positivity’). Meaghan Morris has observed how, in such projects, ‘culture’ is redefined ‘as merely the malleable, consumable environment of economic action’ (Morris 1992, 56). The Department of Internal Affairs (that oversaw the museum’s development) stated: [it] is difficult to separate out cultural policy from social and economic policy... it is clear that cultural diversity and an innovative society are necessary ingredients for economic development. There is a strong argument for the Government’s involvement in the arts and cultural area on economic grounds alone (Department of Internal Affairs 1989, iii).

When market liberalism itself constitutes a cultural world view, the conceptual separation of ‘customer focus’ (as cultural policy) and ‘commercial positivity’ (as economic policy) is obfuscated. This conflation strongly suggests that the wider systems of belief and values culturally generated and transmitted – and the public policies through which they find expression – will eventually be harmonised with individualistic concepts informing market liberalism. As it was planned, Te Papa was not just affected by a sharp dive into market-oriented policies, but was positioned as a symbol of the nation’s sleek, new international competitiveness. The museum meant business, and Maori and Pakeha cultural identities were its assets.

THE VIEW, TWO DECADES ON More than two decades after that period of transformation, and almost a decade after its 1998 opening, Te Papa has largely emerged publicly triumphant. Despite an art–religion controversy, a fiscal crisis, content and interpretation predicaments that have necessitated two peer reviews and significant alterations, a Maori censorship dispute, and the surprise resignation of its initial chief executive officer, the museum’s larger story has been its huge public appeal. Its first-year visitation target of 723,000 was achieved in three months; after the first year the figure was 2 million. By June 2001, this had risen to 5 million; the 10 million mark was passed in 2005 (Museum of New Zealand 2005, 4). Currently, Te Papa receives around 1.3 million visitors annually, making it the most visited museum in Australasia. Significantly, the museum has attracted visitors whose age, sex and ethnicity closely mirror that of the larger population (Museum of New Zealand 2005, 12). In all, visitor statistics are Te Papa’s main cause for celebration and the chief weapon in its defence. Te Papa is now closely associated with, and has played a role in the construction of, an image of ‘the little country that could’. An incisive case involves the way in which the museum has tied

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its reputation to that of the Lord of the rings film trilogy. In December 2003 the entirety of Wellington’s inner city was partitioned as several hundred thousand gathered for a street parade, cultural performances and an opening speech by Prime Minister Helen Clark. Postage stamps, billboards, city flags, TV advertisements, specially painted aeroplanes and signs at the airport effectively made the New Zealand countryside ‘Middle-earth’. Indeed, Wellington’s daily newspaper temporarily renamed itself the Middle Earth Evening Post, and a senior cabinet member was named ‘Minister for Lord of the Rings’, whose remit was to exploit the economic opportunities the film represented. Weekly updates on box-office takings underscored the David versus Goliath nature of this triumph. The last time such a commotion had been seen – the large crowds, street performances and prime ministerial speeches, followed by frequent updates on visitor numbers – had been at the opening of Te Papa. The two phenomena were mutually rewarding: Te Papa’s immersive Lord of the Rings exhibition (2002–03, 2006) broke museum attendance records, before travelling to Boston, London, Sydney and Singapore. Not since Te Maori had a New Zealand-produced exhibition fared so well internationally. This time around, the message was the ingenuity of the nation’s creative economy. The hardware and software displayed not only attested to the film, but also endorsed the interactive style and heavy use of Internet technology in Te Papa’s design structure (Kaino 2005, 37). Perhaps the most surprising aspect to emerge in the Lord of the rings frenzy is how the films were financed. In an extraordinary move, the government created a special tax shelter for the film that allowed New Line Cinema, a US-based company, to defray one-third of its NZ$600 million production costs against tax. (The OECD criticised this move as providing an unfair competitive subsidy.) According to Treasury, the net cost to the country was around NZ$217 million (Campbell 2004). State largesse had earlier been extended to Te Papa: while the museum is required to fund 25 per cent of its operating costs, taxpayers paid for its original $320 million cost (Tramposch 1998a, 343). These cases do not involve the same kind of speculation in arts and culture; public funding of museums has a long tradition in Australasia, and can be expected to produce educational and social benefits that blockbuster films do not. Yet the investments in both are justified in similar economic terms, including the creation of local jobs, export earnings and flow-on effects in tourism. Indeed, the museum might consider itself vindicated: while international visitors represented one quarter of Te Papa’s total in its early years, by 2005 they represented a 54 per cent majority (Positively Wellington Tourism 2005). ‘Our Place’, the museum’s brand name, now inevitably proceeds aware of the tension between serving as a place of national self-recognition and as our place for them. Yet these outcomes are not necessarily at odds: where self-recognition is celebratory rather than critical, there may be little tension at all. But what remains of that unquantifiable asset: the educational and social benefits?

BETWEEN THE MUSEUM’S WHORLS: THE STRUCTURE AND STYLE OF BICULTURALISM The museum’s logo, a thumbprint, communicates its infatuation with New Zealanders’ unique cultural imprint. If whorls suggest a labyrinth-like variety of cultural spaces and experiences, those new to Te Papa may be surprised to learn that it is architecturally structured as two distinct ‘halves’ – one Maori, one Pakeha. Overlooking the harbour to the sea are the Maori galleries; on the landward side towards the city are the Pakeha galleries. The interpretive plan states that


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‘the northern (Maori) part of the museum, aligned with the harbour axis, expresses the natural elements associated with papatuanuku tangata whenua [the earth people of the land], while the southern (Pakeha) part is aligned with the urban grid of the city’ (Museum of New Zealand 1992, 87). This spatial dichotomy constructs the Western and indigenous in a familiar scheme that opposes the Maori natural world to Western built forms, the spiritual to the material, and ecological harmony to capitalist exploitation. The Treaty of Waitangi exhibition Signs of a Nation physically cleaves these spaces and aims to express the concept of the encounter of world views. Indeed, it is the treaty that explains and accounts for this separate-but-equal design scheme, also found in Te Papa’s management structure, which is similarly divided into Maori and Pakeha ‘halves’. As a Crown entity created in the years since the mid-1980s, Te Papa was inevitably structured in relation to the Treaty of Waitangi ‘principles’, which, since that era, has forged the idea of (a sometimes contested) partnership between two forms of governance. I now want to describe four permanent exhibitions that are fairly representative of the museum’s approach to cultural history: Golden Days, On the Sheep’s Back, Mana Whenua and Signs of a Nation. I can only briefly refer to its other parts and functions: Te Papa is also the national art museum. Made in New Zealand displays selections from the national collection, centered around works that depict forms of Maori–Pakeha exchange; Te Papa also contains significant natural history exhibitions. Awesome Forces uses interactive displays to depict the nation’s precarious geology and meteorology; Mountains to Sea showcases national flora and fauna; Bush City is an outdoor recreated native environment. Each of these displays applies both Western scientific and indigenous cosmological interpretive frameworks. Another section worth noting for its novelty is The Time Warp and its motion simulator rides. ‘Future Rush’ takes visitors on a tour of Wellington in a ‘state-of-the-art flying car’ in the year 2055. Strapped on their backs in moving seats, the ride takes visitors through a futuristic house before zooming around electrified Wellington city streets and onto a ski field. ‘Blastback’ uses digital animation to fuse geology and Maori creation myth. New Zealand is torn from primordial Gondwanaland and mythical Maori ancestors fashion the landmass in the same seamless story. These simulated rides offer sensation with little specific cultural context; ‘they simply produce effect, and in so doing they erase the social conditions of their production’ (Harvey 1998, 153). Te Papa’s vision of the nation’s future is one where technology and cultural diversity can be effortlessly integrated. GOLDEN DAYS Among the Pakeha galleries, persistent queues form outside a small weatherboard bungalow. An old bicycle leans against the painted yellow facade. ‘Flat 2 – Keep Out’ is roughly painted on a window. About 20 visitors at a time are led in by a Te Papa ‘host’ and seated on a motley collection of chairs. The dimly lit room is stacked with bric-a-brac. A newsreel whirrs into action and the screen shows the window of a junkshop looking out on to Willis Street, a short distance from Te Papa. An old man appears and pulls down the shop’s grille, ending his day’s work. Instantly, like magic, the footage changes to old New Zealand newsreels, movies and advertisements. Simultaneously, announcements and accompanying sounds bombard the audience and the previously immobile curios spring to life in animated synchronicity. War footage shows troops in lemon-squeezer hats on Europe’s battlefields, while toy soldiers march across a coffee table and two Vickers guns reel off rounds. A storm blows up on screen, and a ferry figurine capsizes. Queen Elizabeth is crowned and a spotlight falls on a biscuit tin lid depicting her wedding photo.

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Shots of a suburban front lawn are shown as a Victa lawnmower runs up and down a strip of fake grass. Disasters, wars, sporting triumphs, pop music, cinema and local industry are orchestrated in this clever marionette theatre. If Te Papa is viewed as a microcosmic advertisement for New Zealand’s ‘great outdoors’, then Golden Days is a microcosm of the museum. Its fast, fractured sequence of images aims to jog the memory, rather than provide any linking narrative or chronologic cause and effect. The events depicted – generally isolated, one-off occurrences like a disaster, coronation or musical performance – are suited to this narrative style. ‘Chronology doesn’t matter’, Steve La Hood, the installation’s creator has stated; ‘people just want to know emotionally where we are’ (quoted in Robinson 1998). The film aims for recognition rather than understanding: Te Papa likens the film to ‘a national home movie’. This domestic metaphor is consistent with Te Papa’s institutional theme, yet it more directly points to the role of TV in producing a shared national culture, and also reinforces the elision of the domestic and public that the consumption of TV, in particular, has helped to produce. The multimedia cinema of Golden Days represents a broadly postmodern narrative technique. As an exhibition aesthetic, postmodernism is characterised by ‘the kaleidoscopic approach, the ambition only to provide a “series of impressions”, the abandonment of a master narrative and the frequent collage-like use of pre-existing statements (films/objects/images)’ (Cochrane and Goodman 1988, 38). The arrangement of images around a nationalist narrative in Golden Days lifts events out of their specific histories and de-politicises them as ‘golden moments’. The exhibition appears to have given up on history as a disciplinary system of organisation. Its superficial narrative style draws attention to the distinction between a critical analysis of the national past and the sentimental construction of national history, where ‘good history’ is ‘history that feels good’. If history can be conceptualised as a convention that organises experience across time, then Golden Days effaces historical depth and simulates history. This criticism does not mean, however, that Golden Days lacks a message altogether. Rather than seeing this emptying of meaning as a melancholic reflection of current curatorial practice, it is more useful to note the location and function of Golden Days among the social history displays. The theatrette is physically cloistered from the other permanent Pakeha history exhibitions: Passports, which deals with immigration, and On the Sheep’s Back. It is revealing that Golden Days is the only place in Te Papa that familiar, mainstream events (such as war, sporting victories and coronations) are represented. Rather than viewing this as a base-covering tactic, the superficial treatment of this material is perhaps more pointed: their relegation to nostalgia communicates the museum’s desire to show the nation’s distance from the dusty symbols of nation associated with its colonial past. After all, as repositories of the sentimental, provincial and kitsch, junkshops contain memories piled in disarray; they are connotatively antithetical to the fresh and progressive. The name ‘golden days’ also suggests a somewhat ironic, knowing standpoint towards this welltrod material. The sophisticated digital orchestration of the show also suggests a mastery over this past, implicitly marking it off as lacking the vital new perspectives that might inform a newer national identity formation. ON THE SHEEP’S BACK On the Sheep’s Back focuses on wool as the emblematic base for a broad field of meaning encompassing Pakeha material comfort, rural social life and communion with the physical environment. ‘We’re all farmers at heart’, chief Pakeha ‘concept leader’ Jock Phillips asserted. ‘Farming culture


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has deeply penetrated the New Zealand identity’ (quoted in Poot 1998, 117). Perhaps out of the awareness that wool represents a rather dour subject, the tone of the exhibition is distinctly playful. Visitors see several mini-displays. ‘Shear Hard Work’ shows images of Pakeha shearers at work, wool samples, an old wool press, and a photomontage of record-breaking shearing feats set inside a reconstructed wooden woolshed. ‘Home Is Where the Art Is’ celebrates ‘the homespun creativity of New Zealanders working with wool’. This area includes material items such as tea-cosies, Maori cloaks, socks from the World War I Great National Sock Appeal (which yielded over 30,000 pairs), and woollen flowers made by a schoolgirl in 1885. In ‘Woollen Yarns’, fashion garments from contemporary designers are displayed alongside pristine woollen suits stockpiled on remote Stewart Island in case of shipwreck. This section also features the results of Te Papa’s competition for the best tale about a ‘Swanni’ (woollen bush shirt). One man used his to bury his favourite sheepdog. Another, trapped in a flooded creek, apparently turned his into a raft by tying it up and (somehow) inflating it. On the Sheep’s Back is incongruously placed in a new hi-tech museum representing an emerging postcolonial nationhood. This is particularly palpable in the Time Warp section. One ‘game’ provides the chance to test one’s shearing skills, using a barcode reader in place of a razor handpiece. To play, visitors swipe the plastic sheep’s barcodes in sequence as quickly as possible. If the sheep takes the shearer over 41 seconds, he or she is declared a ‘townie’! The effect of witnessing the general ineptitude of local visitors playing this digital game, in front of a reconstructed shed inside a museum, situated on a waterfront location near downtown Wellington, produces an uncanny relation to Phillips’s idea of a nation of ‘farmers at heart’. The shearing game hints at how the cultural use of ‘country’ (a word used by New Zealanders for both the rural and the nation) has been urbanised – and even made virtual: the game suggests a perceptual shift from the country as the farming backbone of the nation to the country as a play-space for tourists and film producers. On the Sheep’s Back is one of several exhibitions that expose the limitation of Te Papa’s stringent bicultural segmentation. While Maori are not explicitly excluded from the theme of working the land (and indeed Maori have historically comprised a high proportion of farmhands and shearers), the exhibition is located on the Pakeha side. As we shall see shortly, visitors could scarcely be blamed for forming the impression that the ‘real’ Maori relationship with the land is environmental rather than agricultural. This disconnection denies Te Papa the opportunity to engage with a major area of twentieth-century Maori labour history. Moreover, Te Papa does not (and perhaps cannot) reconcile farming culture in On the Sheep’s Back with its attention in Signs of a Nation to the swathe of injustices that flowed from treaty-sanctioned land acquisition. This incommensurability is captured in a revealing exchange between Georgina Te Heuheu, a board member, and Ronald Trotter, former chairman of the board: [Georgina Te Heuheu:] How do we make that [biculturalism] underpin our exhibitions? If we’re talking about peopling ourselves and exhibiting ourselves, then we have to bring Maori into the equation. While the sheep runs were being developed, Ngai Tahu [the principal South Island tribe] over 20 years, lost all their land. [Sir Ronald Trotter:] I came from a tough Scottish farming stock who came out in 1860 to the South Island where there were none of Tipene’s [Sir Tipene

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O’Regan, leader of Ngai Tahu] people – it was too cold for them – and if we don’t give pride to that, well, we wouldn’t be here. I mean we wouldn’t be the country we are today. If we only stole things, and god knows they never thought they were stealing, then that’s also part of our understanding on the other side (Cottrell and Preston 1999).

The total avoidance of the 1845–72 New Zealand Land Wars in On the Sheep’s Back shelters Pakeha from the less desirable aspects of their formative history and, indeed, the exclusion of any Maori perspective masks the political, social and economic dominance that allowed Pakeha to enjoy unhindered ownership of land. The considerable wealth that Pakeha extracted from farming meant that workers’ wages remained comparatively high. If this contributed to a national myth of egalitarianism celebrated at Te Papa, it concealed the real division between Maori alienated from their land and settlers, among whom the wealth from Maori land functioned to reduce class conflict (Steven 1989, 30–31). MANA WHENUA Te Papa’s Maori collection, numbering almost 16,000 items, dates predominantly from the lateeighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Carved pieces include meeting houses, canoes, storehouses, palisade posts, weapons, musical instruments and burial containers. Weaving consists of feather and dog-skin cloaks, flax skirts, baskets, fish nets and war belts. There is also a wide range of stone adzes, fishing and food cultivation tools, and domestic implements. Over the past 20 years, the ownership, lending, handling and display of this material have become a flashpoint between Maori and museums. Museum workers have become particularly concerned about their role in the political climate of Waitangi Tribunal treaty decisions, international indigenous rights protocols, and the governmental shift to an official bicultural policy. These pressures have generally encouraged strident support for Maori aspirations – and a rhetorical endorsement of Maori culture that is evaluative rather than analytic. Consider Te Papa’s description: Mana Whenua [customary authority over lands] captures and conveys the richness, complexity and dynamism of the Maori people... contemporary Maori artworks explore and reinforce the continuum of tipuna [ancestor] culture and whakapapa, linking past generations to present day descendants and the dynamics of cultural continuity... these taonga, or treasures, reconnect through whakapapa, or genealogy, to the living descendants of today in dynamic and meaningful ways... Mana Whenua presents and celebrates the mana (power, authority, dignity) of our culture... (Museum of New Zealand n.d., my emphasis).

This assenting description contains two competing currents often invoked in contemporary accounts of Maori identity. One is essentialist, rooted in tradition and formalised in legal and bureaucratic spheres as a bounded ethnicity. The other discourse, articulated in the academic, cultural and artistic spheres, stresses a dynamic, postmodern and reflexive approach to identity. Tension recurs throughout Te Papa’s work between an official Maoritanga located in indigenous custom and knowledge that is a constituent part of a biculturalism, and the multiple and unstable interpretations of identity that apply to the creative realm.


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In general, Te Papa seems to firmly support the former conception of Maori culture. A striking aspect of Mana Whenua in the context of Te Papa’s overall tone is its traditional ethnographic feel; taonga were not exhibited in greatly dissimilar ways at the old national museum. At both institutions, taonga have been displayed on the basis that race and cultural material are isomorphically related, and that there is a natural fit between art and cultural style. In this scheme, Maori art and ethnography are not opposite categories but complementary modes based on a common epistemological premise. Mana Whenua is dominated by a meeting house, canoe and storage house, which are held to be almost-mandatory elements in Maori displays.4 Around these large objects visitors see smaller displays on topics such as Pacific voyaging, traditional musical instruments, and the ancestors, places and customs significant to particular tribes. As the authoritative statement of Maori culture at Te Papa, Mana Whenua amplifies and aestheticises difference through what appears to be a strong nineteenth-century focus. While there are contemporary works in the gallery, they are often faithful to traditional forms, as if to demonstrate that old techniques have not been abandoned. Taonga are simultaneously presented as fine artworks and as examples of the sacredness of Maori culture. Conventionally, there has been a strategic division between the curatorial principles of natural history and anthropology museums, and those of art museums. In the former, objective and dispassionate information ideally allows visitors to reach their own conclusions. Art museums, by contrast, are concerned not only with supplying information, but with aesthetics and conveying abstract interpretive frameworks (Ames 1992, 51–52). In recent years, several commentators have expressed a concern that this distinction has collapsed – particularly in the display of indigenous cultures. For example, in a review of the Bunjilaka Aboriginal Centre at the Melbourne Museum, Peter Timms reports that the gallery has opted for an ‘unashamedly biased presentation that makes few claims to objectivity’. He argues that the Bunjilaka gallery intermixes art and artefact as the basis for conveying a system of ideological beliefs about the nature of identity, rather than supplying factual information about Aboriginal history and life (Timms 2000, 7). James Clifford has called this new approach to indigenous displays, brought about by the erosion of the opposition between art and anthropology, ‘aestheticized scientism’ (Clifford 1988, 203). A reluctance to define taonga solely as art is no longer justified on the grounds that they lack the aesthetic qualities of European art. Instead, Maori express unease about defining their objects through a ‘Western’ lens, and argue that the spiritual presence that inhabits objects enlarges them beyond the status of ‘art’. Accordingly, Maori stress that the category of taonga embraces a far greater sphere than ‘artworks’ – it includes, for instance, greenstone pendants, geothermal pools, weaving techniques, a proverb or a song (Tapsell 1997, 331). In Mana Whenua, utilitarian objects, previously distinguished from artworks in older taxonomic displays, are accorded the same status as taonga precisely because they also have an ancestral past. The principle that taonga encapsulate a whole world view plays a vital role in rejecting structuralist anthropological categories, which may be charged with artificially disconnecting, say, spirituality from war or kinship from carving. While Mana Whenua is not light-hearted or interactive in the manner of the rest of the museum, it is not lifeless. Objects gain a renewed charge through their display at Te Papa, partly out of the public drama and fresh display tactics of a new museum, which includes Maori language placards, traditional background music and personable Maori ‘hosts’. The gallery also sits next to the self-consciously novel Te Marae. Te Papa claims to be the world’s only museum to have

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a culturally functioning marae (ceremonial meeting space). Carved by young Maori apprentices from throughout New Zealand, the appearance of Te Marae is quite unique: The decorative three-dimensional figures are cobbled together from pieces of composition board, embellished with pieces of galvanised iron cut with tinsnips, and painted with aerosol shading in garish non-Maori colours such as peacock blue, purple, apricot, and pale emerald, surrounding an inverted Japanese archway leading into a shallow interior surmounted by a row of Turkish minarets leading up into an impossibly sapphire sky (Haden 1998, 6).

Figure 2.1 Detail of Te Marae © Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. Used with permission.

Carvings of mythical Maori creation figures, gods and ancestors are positioned beside settler figures such as a missionary, farmer and schoolmaster. Its interior walls feature carved reliefs similar in appearance to stained-glass windows, while the back section features medieval Gothic doorways. The structure is an explicitly bicultural meeting space. As conceived in museum policy, Te Marae represents a novel arrangement whereby ‘the shared genealogy of the museum’s collection’ allows all peoples to feel ‘at home’ on the marae. Te Papa asserts that the ‘concept of Mana Taonga [the authority of ancestral treasures] will enable the marae to extend its mana, or spiritual power, over the treasures of both cultures, and will allow both cultures to use the marae for events and ceremonies’ (Museum of New Zealand 1992, 17). While its appearance is unorthodox, the issue of the cultural ownership of the marae space is arguably more contentious: traditionally, the marae is the key symbol through which tribes assert their customary possession over land (and recognise another’s). The local tribe exercises rights of invitation and procedure that governs the conduct of outsiders. In this case, however, the concept of the marae has been nationalised.


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In Te Papa’s bicultural model, Maori indifference to chronological ‘national time’ has nothing to do with ideas of relative cultural progress. The almost entire absence of ‘Maori history’ – understood in categories like labour relations, war, urbanisation, demographic changes, gender relations, significant sporting or cultural events, or education and health standards – is revealing. Compared with, for example, the Bunjilaka display at the Melbourne Museum, the First Australians Gallery at the National Museum of Australia, or the Indigenous Australia Gallery at the Australian Museum, Te Papa is much less forthright about twentieth-century racism and inequality. While this may reflect the lesser degree of historical persecution Maori have suffered, it might also say something about the differentiating effect of bicultural museum policy. That is, the desire to absent Maori artefacts from national social history categories may represent a resistance on the part of Maori to define the Maori historical experience in accordance with the assimilative effect associated with a national institution. The projected image in Mana Whenua is of a selfsecure and self-contained Maori culture that possesses pathways to advancement somewhat independent of the larger nation. SIGNS OF A NATION Signs of a Nation is the physical and conceptual meeting point of Pakeha and Maori sections. The space is dominated by a huge glass replica of the (largely illegible) Treaty of Waitangi itself. On each wall are six-metre-high wooden panels inscribed with the full text. On one side is the Maori version; on the other is the English. Seats in front of these versions of the treaty provide a place for visitors to contemplate its articles. A theme of contestation is communicated in several ways. A small display that places an English translation of the Maori text alongside the English text shows how the two versions do not match. It asks the reader to judge which text offered Maori more (the evident conclusion being the Maori version). At the entrance, visitors are surrounded by a thicket of poles (highly reminiscent of the Edge of the trees installation outside the Museum of Sydney) from which a variety of voices of ordinary New Zealanders articulate conflicting views about the treaty: ‘These protestors – you never know what they want’; ‘The Treaty is just a gravy train for the rich Maori elite’; ‘We need to stop this bickering, we are one people – at least that’s what Governor Hobson said’; ‘We can support a symphony orchestra, but a full time Maori culture group wouldn’t even be considered’. Historical conflict is also represented by three display cases that organise objects according to the three treaty articles. The ‘Government/Kawanatanga’ display contrasts Maori icons such as a 1830s United Tribes flag, Huia feathers, a Rakau whakapapa (staff with notches for reciting genealogy) and a toki poutanga (greenstone weapon), alongside Crown items such as the colonial flag, a ballot box and an 1841 Seal of the Colony. A video shows a range of historical dramatisations of Maori and Pakeha talking about the effect of the treaty on their lives: we see Maori women peeling vegetables and discussing the Queen’s impending 1954 visit; contemporary Maori rugby players comparing treaty relations to sport; a young Maori woman likening 1970s prime minister Norman Kirk’s appreciation of the land to that of Maori; a Scottish female colonist indignantly describing their own claim to the new country; and postwar Maori shearers doing the same. In ‘Land and Cultural Heritage/Te Whenua me Nga Tikanga tuku iho’, we see the iron ruler, surveyor’s chain and theodolite, and gold pocket watch that were tools of land appropriation. Maori objects next to these include an eighteenth-century whenua pot (for burying placenta) and a nineteenth-century carved pouwhenua (signpost). In ‘Citizens’ Rights/Mana Tangata’ the shared experience of Maori

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Figure 2.2 Poles at the entrance to Signs of a Nation © Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. Used with permission.

and Pakeha is signified by a copy of the Magna Carta, a barrister’s wig, a bayonet, wire-cutters, and a World War I Maori battalion helmet. Rumination of the treaty in Signs of a Nation works alongside other performances (such as rubbing greenstone in Te Marae or removing one’s shoes to enter Mana Whenua’s main meeting house) that encourage the practice of ‘being bicultural’. The exhibition is promoted as providing a contemplative space removed from everyday life where visitors can discuss and debate the treaty without interference. A text panel reads: The Treaty of Waitangi is a living social document. Debated, overlooked, celebrated. A vision of peaceful co-existence, or the cause of disharmony? An irrelevancy, or the platform on which all New Zealanders can build a future? The meaning of the Treaty changes depending on who’s speaking. Engage with our founding document… The floor is open for discussion.

Signs of a Nation can only struggle to make biculturalism, at heart a state strategy for managing difference, a democratic topic. Due to the ambiguous language of the original treaty document (exacerbated by changes in wording across translations that encompass several different versions, combined with the nuances of tribal oral histories) the Waitangi Tribunal makes its recommendations based on ‘the spirit of the Treaty’ rather than any literal meaning. While drawing viewer attention to the original text may help the public to appreciate the original intentions of the Crown, it does little to elucidate what the treaty spirit, so critical in political decisions, might entail. If Te Papa’s goal (encapsulated in its mission statement) is to act as ‘a forum for the nation’, it appears to have achieved this chiefly in the way it contains a multitude of experiences. It is a place, according to Te Papa’s William Tramposch, ‘where something is always happening’ (Tramposch 1998b, 32). While this activity faintly gestures towards the forum in that it offers


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visitor (or ‘customer’) choices, it does not alone necessarily invite debate over, say, the legacy of colonial history, contemporary social inequality or, indeed, issues that originate far beyond New Zealand. Te Papa’s strategy of immersing visitors in sights, sounds, activities and emotional responses is probably more an issue of display strategies than a rethinking of the museum’s role in the public sphere. After all, although visitors will undoubtedly take different ‘experiences’ away with them, these remain tightly choreographed by the museum. Te Papa’s one-way communication is geared towards allowing the visitor to ‘try out’ and gauge the emotional appeal of a variety of ideas about cultural roots and national identity. This tactic, which Gary Edson calls ‘socioexhibitry’, is premised on the belief that people’s cultural identities rather than objects should be the starting point of the museum’s work (Edson 2001, 40–44). The idea of communicating in a wide variety of modes to a broad array of private selves may be a popular and inexorable museum tactic, but it is not one that is suitably described as a public forum. Instead, my position is closer to that of Arjun Appadurai, who is interested in how the granting of expressions of minority and indigenous self-representation and uniqueness can ultimately act as a state strategy of containment: National and international mediascapes are exploited by nation-states to pacify separatists or even the potential fissiparousness of all ideas of difference. Typically, contemporary nation-states do this by exercising taxonomic control over difference, by creating various kinds of international spectacles to domesticate difference and by seducing small groups with the fantasy of self-display on some sort of global and cosmopolitan stage (Appadurai 1996, 39).

Appadurai’s reference to both ‘taxonomic control’ and ‘the fantasy of self-display’ hints at the double-inscription of museums both as modern institutions of governmental classification and as spaces of glorification, descended from competitive imperial projects. His use of the phrase ‘to domesticate difference’ – particularly apt for a museum branded as ‘Our Place’ – describes the ideological effect when cultural difference is publicly celebrated within an entirely national frame. Consideration is needed to how the ‘forum’ can be utilised, in a postcolonial environment, as a promotional tool for nationalist articulations. That is, in a time when unitary national cultures are viewed suspiciously (particularly by the liberal consensus that often dominates the institutional climate of museums), metaphors that cluster around the ideas of contact, meeting, dialogue and engagement provide a way of dramatising and enlivening the museum itself and its subject – in this case, the nation.

CONCLUSION: MAKING A SPECTACLE OF OURSELVES If, as David Lowenthal (1999) has avowed, ‘the most successful museums are those that are able to play on the divisions and problems of nations’, then how does Te Papa fare? Outwardly, Te Papa directly addresses New Zealand’s chief social and cultural schism through its bicultural focus. Yet bicultural nationhood is realised at the exhibition level in a highly idiosyncratic manner. The difference between what visitors might expect, involving some representation of how Maori and Pakeha have lived together, and what is portrayed, in the form of conceptual and substantive disconnection, is quite disconcerting. Empire, for instance, is almost absent at Te Papa, even as a point of Pakeha origin. G. B. Dahl and Ronald Stade have observed:

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Once a museum was either the self-glorifying institution of national romanticism seeking the roots of a nation in an idealised rural background, or an exoticising museum depicting the colonial other. In territories where indigenous peoples were subjected to European conquest these two categories are today often muddled, signalling new relations between nation-building and indigenous-ness (Dahl and Stade 2000, 157).

While Te Papa stresses a new postcolonial outlook, the central issue of ‘race’ remains fundamental. The uncertain, even contradictory effect of embracing a settler–indigenous racial difference while marginalising empire – when in fact empire and race are inextricably bound in New Zealand’s history – attests to the ways that former colonies struggle to untangle colonialism. In nationalist discourse, cultural identity is asserted as both a fixed object, passed from one generation to the next, and as a territorial claim, where the space of culture becomes imbricated with ethnic and national ideas. This forms a potent combination of blood and soil – precisely the link that tangata whenua articulates. However, the spiritual aspect of Pakeha heritage is not presented in a continuum with the notion of taonga. Yet the blithe tone of exhibitions like Golden Days and On the Sheep’s Back does not necessarily reflect the security of Pakeha identity. Unlike parts of Europe and America, where national museums helped to make national histories in the service of nation building, New Zealand’s museums do not have a long background in narrating national history. However, Te Papa is engaging with this topic at precisely the time when ‘national history’ itself has become unfashionable among many public historians. The result is the demystification of something that was arguably never mystified – at least in the museum setting. An internal inquiry found that: The material culture of the Pakeha is profoundly under-represented in the Museum, such that it is neither fulfilling its fundamental statutory function as the repository of comprehensive collections of truly national significance, nor is it capable of presenting Pakeha history and culture in public displays (Review Team Report 1994, 7).

In this sense, Te Papa has leapt towards a postmodern critique of national history, without having exhausted the modern history of the nation. The historical disparity in collecting practices – where Maori material culture was hoarded according to the needs of a ‘salvage ethnography’ while Pakeha believed that they scarcely had a history worth documenting – again reflects the nation’s colonial origins. Further, a scant object-base also partly explains Te Papa’s reliance on technologically mediated experience. Paradoxically, then, the museum’s bright postcolonial veneer owes a kind of debt to an institutionalised form of colonial cringe. In sum, the received message is that Pakeha identity is a malleable historical experiment, whereas Maori is an immutable cultural world view. Eight years after opening, Te Papa remains poised as the captivating but troublesome result of the forces of market-driven public accessibility, postmodern curatorial revisionism and Maori cultural reassertion. While public accessibility is an emergent and inevitable response to the pressures of financial accountability, the latter two interact awkwardly. Biculturalism was conceptualised as a way in which Te Papa could respond to the crisis of national identity. Its


02.14

implementation has, paradoxically, allowed important problems in that identity to go unexamined. By presenting biculturalism as an achieved postcolonial state, Te Papa overlooks not only a history of colonialism, but also the continuing inequality between Maori and Pakeha that made biculturalism a necessary response in the first place. For now, however, the glamour of international attention (and growing international tourists) seems to produce the sense that constant museological innovation in display tactics supersedes the need to reinterpret overarching cultural concepts.

ENDNOTES 1

The 1840 Treaty of Waitangi was an agreement between the British Crown and Maori chiefs, which remains, in essence, contested. For the purposes of the treaty, the British recognised those Maori who signed it as representing the whole of Maoridom. The treaty consists of a preamble and three articles. The first article signs the rights of sovereignty in New Zealand over to the British Crown. In the Maori version, something quite different (kawanatanga, or governorship) was granted to the Crown. The second article reserved Maori tino rangatiratanga (full sovereign authority) over their lands, forests, fisheries and me o ratou taonga katoa (everything they valued). The third article stated that everyone in New Zealand would have the rights and privileges of British subjects.

2

The Waitangi Tribunal is a permanent commission of inquiry charged with investigating and making recommendations to parliament on claims brought by Maori relating to actions or omissions of the Crown that breach the promises made in the Treaty of Waitangi.

3

The act establishing the museum stated that the board shall: ‘Endeavour to ensure both that the Museum expresses and recognises the mana [authority] and significance of Maori, European, and other major traditions and cultural heritages, and that the Museum provides the means for every such culture to contribute effectively to the Museum as a statement of New Zealand’s identity’. Although this wording suggests the possibility for a multicultural framework, there was very little subsequent development of ‘other major traditions’ in policy. See Department of Internal Affairs (1992), section 8, part b.

4

The objects to which I refer are the whare wananga Te Hau ki Turanga (1842), the waka taua Teremoe (1860), and the pataka Te Takinga (1820).

REFERENCES Ames, Michael M. 1992. Cannibal tours and glass boxes: The anthropology of museums. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bassett, Michael. 1998. The state in New Zealand, 1840–1984: Socialism without doctrines? Auckland: Auckland University Press. Campbell, Gordon. 2004. ‘Ring cycle’. New Zealand Listener 192 (3323): 13. Clifford, James. 1988. The predicament of culture: Twentieth-century ethnography, literature, and art. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Cochrane, Peter; Goodman, David. 1988. ‘The great Australian journey: Cultural logic and nationalism in the postmodern era’. Australian Historical Studies 23 (91): 21–44, edited by Janson, S.; MacIntyre, S. (special issue). Cottrell, Anna; Preston, Gaylene, directors. 1999. Getting to our place. [Film]. 72 mins. Wellington: In association with NZ On Air and TVNZ. Dahl, G. B; Stade, Ronald. 2000. ‘Anthropology, museums, and contemporary cultural processes: An introduction’. Ethnos 65 (2): 157–171.

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Department of Internal Affairs. 1989. ‘A proposed ministry for arts and culture: Discussion paper’. Wellington: Department of Internal Affairs. Department of Internal Affairs. 1992. Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa Act. Wellington: Department of Internal Affairs. Edson, Gary. 2001. ‘“Socioexhibitry” as popular communication’. Museum International 53 (3): 40–44. Haden, Frank. 1998. ‘The Museum of Lady Godiva’. Sunday Star Times (22 March): 6. Harvey, Penelope. 1998. ‘Nations on display: Technology and culture in Expo “92”’. In The politics of display: Museums, science, culture, edited by Macdonald, Sharon. London and New York: Routledge. Kaino, Lorna. 2005. ‘What difference does a museum make? Te Papa’s contribution to the New Zealand economy’. Media International Australia Incorporating Culture and Policy 117: 31–42. Lowenthal, David. 1999. ‘From cosmopolis to culture wars: A national museums saga’. Paper presented at the Australian National University Centre for Cross-Cultural Research conference National Museums: Negotiating Histories. 13 July; Australian National University, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory. Morris, Meaghan. 1992. Ecstasy and economics. Sydney: Empress Publishing. Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. 1992. ‘Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa interpretive plan: A conceptual framework for exhibitions’. Wellington: Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. 2005. ‘Annual report, July 1994 – 30 June 1995’. Wellington: Department of Internal Affairs. Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. n.d. ‘Te Papa – Communications – Mana Whenu’. [Press Release]. New Zealand Tourism Board. 1991. Tourism in New Zealand: A strategy for growth. Wellington: New Zealand Tourism Board. Poot, E. 1998. ‘Finding ourselves at Te Papa’. New Zealand Geographic 38: 110–127. Positively Wellington Tourism. 2005. ‘Wellington Tourism Statistics’. [Internet]. Positively Wellington Tourism. Accessed 7 April 2006. Available from: http://www.wellingtonnz.com/AboutUs/Tourism+Statistics.htm. Project Development Team. 1985. ‘Nga Taonga o te motu: Te Marae Taonga O Aotearoa, Treasures of the nation: National Museum of New Zealand; A plan for Development’. Wellington: Department of Internal Affairs. Review Team Report. 1994. ‘An agenda for scholarship: Scholarship and research in the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa’. Wellington: Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. Robinson, Simon. 1998. ‘Where the Heart Is’. Time 7 (16 February): 9–10. Steven, Rob. 1989. ‘Land and white settler colonialism: The case of Aotearoa’. In Culture and identity in New Zealand, edited by Novitz, D.; Willmott, B. Wellington: GP Books. Tapsell, Paul. 1997. ‘The flight of the Pareraututu: An investigation of Taonga from a tribal perspective’. Journal of the Polynesian Society 106 (4): 323–374. Timms, Peter. 2000. ‘The Manipulative Museum’. The Age (15 November): 7. [Melbourne]. Tramposch, William. 1998a. ‘Te Papa: Re-inventing the museum’. Museum Management and Curatorship 17 (4): 339–350. Tramposch, William. 1998b. ‘Te Papa: An Iinvitation for redefinition’. Museum International 199 (1): 28–32.

Cite this chapter as: Williams, Paul. 2006. ‘Reforming nationhood: The free market and biculturalism at Te Papa’. South Pacific museums, edited by Healy, Chris; Witcomb, Andrea. Monash University ePress: Melbourne. pp. 2.1–2.16. DOI: 10.2104/spm06002.


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NEW SYMPOSIUM MUSEUMS

MUSEUMS OF NEW CALEDONIA THE OLD, THE NEW AND THE BALANCE OF THE TWO Marianne Tissandier, Musée de Nouvelle-Calédonie Marianne Tissandier is the conservator at the Musée de Nouvelle-Calédonie. Correspondence to Marianne Tissandier: [email protected]

A few museums and cultural centres can be visited in New Caledonia, but this snapshot of New Caledonia’s museums is centred on the two main cultural institutions dealing with Kanak culture: the Museum of New Caledonia and the Centre Culturel Tjibaou. Despite their common focus, they offer radically different forms of interpretation. The Musée de Nouvelle-Calédonie (MNC) is New Caledonia’s oldest heritage institution. It has seen successive transformations through the nation’s history associated with changes in function and name. Beginning as the Local Museum it was to become the Colonial Museum. After a lapse of activity, it re-emerged as the New Caledonian Museum later becoming the Territorial Museum before emerging in its present form. ‘Indigenous curiosities’ and mineralogical and botanical specimens were collected for the museum in New Caledonia as early as 1863, only ten years after France took possession of the nation. This nascent collection was mostly considered as a supply of artefacts destined for international and French exhibitions to promote the colony in Europe. From 1895 to 1903, thanks to the director Julien Bernier, the Colonial Museum, housed in the same building as the library, grew through his focused collection and inventory practices. Artefacts were exchanged with other museums and ethnographic objects from Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands, the Marquesas Islands and Australia were acquired. Following Bernier’s death the museum was abandoned in favour of the library, and its collections were neglected until the 1940s. At this time the museum was revived and reconfigured as the New Caledonian Museum and the ethnographic collections were expanded with broader representation of the Pacific region. In 1963 the Kanak collection gathered by the anthropologists Jean Guiart and Maurice Leenhardt at the Institut de la France d’Outre-Mer was given to the museum, which opened in its current building in 1970. Mineralogical and Pacific ethnographic collections collected by the consecutive institutions, despite inevitable attrition due to poor environmental and storage conditions, were mostly put on display. Reorganised again in 1983 as the Museums and Heritage Department (Service des Musées et du Patrimoine), the museum, which had always been part of the Education Ministry, became autonomous within the local administration of the French overseas territory of New Caledonia. The natural history collections were dispersed and the museum’s ambitions were focused on Melanesian and particularly Kanak art and society. The museum is now supported by the Government of New Caledonia and invites visitors to discover local traditions as part of the Pacific region (Kasarhérou 1996, 3–5). Situated in the centre of the city of Noumea, the architecture of the Museum of New Caledonia is typical of the 1970s. It is surrounded by a lawn planted with coconut trees and its white-washed cube-shaped buildings are interconnected with roofed courtyards and delimited by square columns and large wrought-iron gates displaying engraved rock designs. Two gardens extend the display areas of the museum out of doors. The ethno-botanical garden presents trees and plants traditionally used in Kanak and Pacific cultures. The other open-air exhibit recreates part of a customary village with an alley of local pine trees leading up to a traditional Kanak hut.

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Figure 3.1 The traditional Kanak hut in the garden of the Museum of New Caledonia © Musée de Nouvelle-Calédonie

The ground floor of the permanent display rooms presents all aspects of Kanak social life with some of the 1500 objects of the MNC Kanak collection. It is one of the world’s most significant Kanak collections, alongside that of the Basel Ethnography Museum, and well known for its holdings of traditional sculpture produced for ceremonial huts. The first floor is dedicated to cultures from other parts of Melanesia as well as Polynesia and Micronesia, the MNC having a considerable collection of Melanesian artefacts with approximately 1000 objects. The permanent exhibition is displayed according to the design from the 1980s, which features aluminium showcases and black walls. The lively tours of the Kanak guides, which connect the traditional and contemporary aspects of their culture, usually help the visitor to overlook these trappings of museological history. Once a year, a temporary exhibition of three to six months in duration gathers artefacts from the Pacific region around an aspect of social life, with ever-changing contemporary designs and efforts made at giving visitors a more dynamic experience of the museum.1 In relation to the local culture, the MNC is seen by Kanaks not only as a repository of tradition, the guardian of the indigenous ancestral culture, but also as a cemetery where objects are out of context. It is a significant place that holds powerful, special objects belonging to the dead,

MUSEUMS OF NEW CALEDONIA NEW MUSEUMS

03.2

with most no longer used in society. That these objects are exposed to all visitors is disturbing to many Kanaks. Furthermore, the issue of Kanak objects being part of museum collections is still a sensitive one, tied as it is to colonialism and the loss of culture. Going to the museum is something most people consider with caution and some hesitancy. As elsewhere, the relationship between indigenous people from a primarily oral culture and ‘mute’ museum objects does not flow seamlessly (Kasarhérou 2003, 62). The importance of public programs to communicate and interpret culture has been acknowledged by the museum’s staff and efforts are being made to foster meaningful contact between Kanak and other people and objects. For example, activities involving elders are organised, albeit infrequently. With regard to the scale of New Caledonia, the MNC can be seen as a large museum that has decent funding, equipment, collections and unique expertise in conservation, with the only trained conservator and conservation laboratory in the country. Its small staff, however, and the weight of its colonial inheritance impede its evolution as a vital, dynamic public institution at present.2 Hopefully this will change in the near future with the completion of the museum policy and the renewal, upgrading and extension of the building and display designs, partly funded by the French government and due to happen before 2010. The Tjibaou Cultural Centre (Centre Culturel Tjibaou, CCT) has not inherited the same colonial history as the museum, yet it also has to engage with the various ethnic groups brought together by the colonial past and the political leaders’ will to constitute a common heritage for all to share in the future (Neaoutyine 2000). The CCT was funded by the French central government to be the headquarters of the Agency for the Development of Kanak Culture (ADCK), as one of the state’s major undertakings (known as ‘the Great Projects of the Republic’).3 By doing so, Kanak culture has been positioned as an emblem of this French territory, recognising Kanak peoples’ cultural identity while disrupting non-indigenous consciences (Neaoutyine 2000). The cultural centre’s modern, streamlined architecture designed by Renzo Piano, architect of the George Pompidou Centre in Paris, has been renowned and celebrated since its completion. On the wooded peninsula where the Melanesia 2000 festival was held, ten wooden buildings with evocative names rise.4 Their design is drawn from that of traditional ceremonial huts. They are connected by a semi-open central passageway evoking the traditional Kanak village alley. The ‘Kanak pathway’ (chemin kanak) that meanders around the buildings through gardens and traditional huts highlights the culture’s spiritual connection with nature and introduces visitors to the Kanak identity. The CCT opened in 1998, after three years of planning during which Kanak specialists in Kanak culture and European specialists in museology, research, communication and show business tried to place the centre as a hub of artistic creativity, influence and cultural exchange through the presentation of shows and concerts. The objectives of the CCT were and still are similar to those of the ADCK: the promotion and preservation of Kanak heritage, the encouragement of contemporary modes of expression within Kanak culture, the organisation of research programs, and the promotion of cultural exchange, particularly within the South Pacific region (Centre Culturel Tjibaou 2003). Its aim is also to offer Kanak heritage as a cultural inheritance of the whole Caledonian population, in order to provide cultural references on which artistic creation may be founded (Del Rio 1998, 35). Its goal is to present a culture that all Kanaks may recognise as theirs and which is also recognised as such from the outside (Neaoutyine 2000).

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Figure 3.2 Centre Culturel Tjibaou Photograph: David Becker. © Centre Culturel Tjibaou – ADCK/ Renzo Piano Building Workshop, Architectes.

All these objectives are being implemented by the considerable staff numbers dispersed through the various departments of the CCT.5 As a reminder and a starting point for all activities, the CCT first presents a few historical Kanak artefacts on temporary loan from French museums. Throughout the year, the Performance and Events Department promotes and encourages training and presents traditional and contemporary performing arts of New Caledonia, the Pacific and the rest of the world. The Library is a specialised resource centre focused on Kanak and Oceanian cultures. The Department for Cultural Development, Heritage and Research publishes the Mwà Véé Kanak cultural magazine and funds research programs, cultural radio and Kanak language broadcasts. The Public Development Department communicates and organises activities and workshops, especially involving young people. Additionally, the Visual Arts and Exhibitions Department fosters worldwide artists’ workshops focused on the creation of manual arts using contemporary means that are linked to a solid base of heritage and regional consciousness (Centre Culturel Tjibaou 2003). Through the permanent exhibition of its collection of contemporary Kanak and Oceanian art and the organisation of temporary exhibitions of contemporary art, the CCT also tries to associate Caledonian and Kanak contemporary art with art production in the Pacific region to promote the broader international interest in and recognition of Pacific art (Del Rio 2004, 33).6 The CCT probably presents the best organised, professional heritage institution in New Caledonia to the outside world. Contemporary art supported by the centre seems a powerful and meaningful compromise between tradition and modernity. Paradoxically, the creation of an authentic image of Kanak culture to serve as a reference to other cultures endangers Kanak cultural diversity and some denounce the CCT vision as a misrepresentation of ‘The Culture’ (Neaoutyine 2000). This is perhaps where the significance of an ethnographic museum such as


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the MNC lies, standing as it does across from a modern cultural centre such as the CCT. Here the MNC can serve as a reference for tradition and as the foundation for expressions of cultural diversity, balancing tradition and modernity.

ENDNOTES 1

Recent exhibits were Pacific Tapa, Exchange Currencies, Melanesian Bows and Arrows, and Jewellery and Adornment of Melanesia.

2

Fourteen people are employed, with cleaning, security and mount-making staff making up more than half.

3

The funding comes as part of the Oudinot Accords, which complement the Matignon Accords signed by the French government and the two major political parties of New Caledonia on 20 August 1988.

4

The festival was organised by Jean-Marie Tjibaou in 1975 to emphasise Kanak culture and cultural revival (see http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Marie_Tjibaou). The buildings bear names such as Kanaké, Jinu (the spirit), Bwénaado (the customary gathering), Kavitara (the entrance of the hut) or Mvmko (little house).

5

There are almost 70 people employed there, according to Emmanuel Kasarhérou who has been the cultural director of the centre since its opening (personal communication, 2 May 2006).

6

The collection of contemporary Kanak and Oceanian art comprises approximately 700 paintings, sculptures, installations and works of art on paper.

REFERENCES Centre Culturel Tjibaou. 2003. ‘Presentation of the project’. [Internet]. Agency for the Development of Kanak Culture. Accessed 10 May 2006. Available from: http://www.adck.nc/en. Del Rio, G. 1998. ‘A Prefiguration Inscribed in Reality’ (Une préfiguration inscrite dans la réalité). Mwà Véé 19 (January–March): 34–38. Del Rio, G. 2004. ‘Contemporary Art at the Tjibaou Cultural Centre’ (L’art contemporain au Centre Culturel Tjibaou). Mwà Véé 45 (July–September): 32–43. Kasarhérou, E. 1996. ‘Extension project of the Territorial Museum’ (Projet d’aménagement et d’extension du Musée Territorial). Unpublished report. Services des Musées et du Patrimoine. Kasarhérou, E. 2003. ‘Museums and indigenous people in the Pacific’ (Musées et populations autochtones en Océanie). Proceedings of Indigenous Networks, Partnership, Ethical Issues: The International Conference. 20–21 March; Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle de Lyon, France: 59–65. Neaoutyine, M. S. 2000. ‘New Caledonia Searching for a National Identity’ (Nouvelle-Calédonie en quête d’une identité nationale). Akoz 7.

Cite this chapter as: Tissandier, Marianne. 2006. ‘Museums of New Caledonia: The old, the new and the balance of the two’. South Pacific museums, edited by Healy, Chris; Witcomb, Andrea. Monash University ePress: Melbourne. pp. 3.1–3.5. DOI: 10.2104/spm06003.

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NEW MUSEUMS

CONTESTED SITES OF IDENTITY AND THE CULT OF THE NEW THE CENTRE CULTUREL TJIBAOU AND THE CONSTITUTION OF CULTURE IN NEW CALEDONIA Kylie Message, Australian National University Kylie Message holds an Australian Research Council Special Research Centre Research Fellowship in the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research at the Australian National University, where she is also convenor of the Museums and Collections graduate program. She is the author of New museums and the making of culture (Berg, 2006). Correspondence to Kylie Message: [email protected]

The forward-looking ideology of the Centre Culturel Tjibaou has enabled it to engage both with new museums globally and with the political and social objectives associated with New Caledonia’s independence struggles of the 1980s. I explore the features of the cultural centre: its relationship with the French government, its juggling of tradition and modernity, and the multitude of varying responses that the centre has received since its opening in 1998. I argue that the centre has itself become an important and progressive, albeit highly complicated, symbol for a territory undergoing change, and that by looking at how these discussions occur both within and in relation to the centre, we can clearly identify the role that museums play in the constitution of culture. Opened in Noumea in 1998, the Centre Culturel Tjibaou (CCT) provides a spectacular example of the ‘new museum’ concept that has attracted critical and popular interest over the last decade.1 The museum draws materially and conceptually on its geopolitical environment, so that despite being situated on the outskirts of the capital city (on the main island, known as Grand Terre), it draws influence from the diverse Kanak communities residing elsewhere across the New Caledonian islands. The circling pathway that leads from the car park to the centre’s entrance is lined with plants from various regions of New Caledonia. Together, these represent the myth of the creation of the first human: the founding hero, Téâ Kanaké. Signifying the collaborative design process, the path and centre are organically interconnected so it is difficult to discern any discrete edges existing between the building and gardens. Similarly, the soaring huts appear unfinished as they open outward to the sky, projecting architect Renzo Piano’s image of Kanak culture as flexible, diasporic, progressive and resistant to containment by traditional museological spaces. Reflecting on the design process, Piano explains: ‘It dawned on me that one of the fundamental elements of Kanak architecture is the very construction process: “building the House” is every bit as important as “the finished House”. From this, I began to develop the concept of a permanent “building work-site”, or rather of a place which would suggest an unfinished housebuilding project.’2 In this essay I suggest that the centre presents an ‘unfinished’, transformative effect to reflect its ongoing commitment to an image of newness. This effect provides the centre with features associated with contemporary museums across the world, showing its fluency in postmodern architectural discourse as well as its ability to perform as a significant cultural actor on a global stage. While this encourages a steady flow of international visitors interested in the centre’s spectacular architecture and its programs, the constant reiteration of the new is tied to the specific political objective of reconciliation between coloniser and colonised. Fundamentally connected


04.1

to the CCT’s founding mandate, the ideology of the new is more than dogmatic. It is used to produce convincing symbols of national identity for a state undergoing a process of political transition, and aims to evoke a real interest and investment in an evolving public culture. The CCT’s desire to be new can thus be seen to accord with its role in domestic and international affairs, and as indicating, above all else, the need for a clear articulation of cultural politics in New Caledonia, as well as the inseparability of these terms.

Figure 4.1 Exterior of Centre Culturel Tjibaou, from traditional gardens and Kanak path Photograph: Kylie Message. Courtesy ADCK-Centre Culturel Tjibaou/Renzo Piano Building Workshop, Architectes.

THE CENTRE CULTUREL TJIBAOU AND NEW MUSEUMS The CCT embodies many of the key components and features that have become identified with a shift in the way that museums are conceptualised in the Western world. This movement away from a more traditional museological approach has quickly resulted in a series of differences in the ways that museums are designed, made, experienced, and understood to function (Vergo 1988; Lumley 1988; Preziosi and Farago 2004). Often presented as interdisciplinary sites of postmodernity, where subjectivity is presented as contextual and contingent rather than static, new museums may also challenge the continued relevance and role of the nation-state and its boundaries in a contemporary, globalised context (Chakrabarty 2002; Kasarhérou 1995; Losche 2003; Message and Healy 2004, Aldrich 2005, Message 2005). Key features include the incorporation of a self-conscious approach to representation, a heightened political awareness that is informed by postcolonial theories, a unique building that is designed by a high-profile architect, the desire to encourage direct community involvement in relation to the generation of ideas about culture, and the interlinked production of discussions about cultural identity. These elements contribute significantly to producing an image of newness or difference for the museum, a point that is reflected in Margaret Jolly’s description of the CCT: The Tjibaou Cultural Centre is unsurpassed in the Pacific for its architectural splendour and its expensive high-tech virtuosity. It sustains a singular stress on

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CONTESTED SITES OF IDENTITY NEW MUSEUMS

contemporary Pacific arts rather than the curating and display of older objects… There are about thirty older artefacts in the Bwenaado house (mainly masks, houseposts, and roof sculptures on loan from European museums), but most older Kanak artefacts are still housed in the Territorial Museum of New Caledonia in town. The emphasis in the Ngan Jila (house of riches) is rather on contemporary works by named artists in both indigenous and introduced genres. According to Emmanuel Kasarhérou, this is faithful to Tjibaou’s vision of Kanak culture not as frozen in the past, but as open and lived in(Jolly 2001, 434).

New museums also emphasise interactive and multimedia modes of display to enhance this image of newness, and highlight the technological innovation (and ‘expensive high-tech virtuosity’) of their architecture (Montaner 2003). They tend to combine cultural history exhibitions with contemporary arts, often inciting controversy on the basis of their apparently incongruous approaches to exhibition, or because of their perceived privileging of popular culture and entertainment over ‘high’ culture. They frequently function as a site for community festivals and other cultural activities. Aiming to attract a wide and diverse audience, they often deploy alternative modes of history and storytelling, non-linear and multiplicitous narratives and a postcolonial dedication to the politics of authorship, governance and authority (Simpson 1996; Macdonald 2003; Bennett 1995).

LOCALISING A GLOBAL PHENOMENON In many ways, the CCT can be understood as the ideal example of this new museum model because while it conforms so closely with its principles and effects, it does this for reasons that are very clearly connected to its local context, and with the conditions and reasons for its production. This means that although the architecture is breathtaking and eminently suitable for the global marketplace of postcard photography and tourist imagery, its exhibitions and programs engage both with the complexity within Kanak communities and the broader geopolitical context of New Caledonia. For instance, while the CCT’s main exhibition spaces include the growing permanent collection of contemporary Kanak and Oceanian art displayed in the Bérétara Hall and Jinu House, traditional objects of Kanak heritage on loan from the Musée de l’Homme in Paris are exhibited in the Bwénaado House. It also hosts temporary exhibitions, such as Impressions Pacifique: Estampes Contemporaines (2005), which was the result of collaboration between the CCT and the Centre Culturel Goa Ma Bwarhat in Hienghène, and which aimed to produce inter-regional partnerships (Agency for the Development of Kanak Culture 2005, 27). Engagement with rural Kanak communities is promoted through outreach programs that include artists’ workshops and ingenious ‘Travelling Educational Kits’, which are folded-up, suitcase-sized models of the cultural centre, its grounds and its activities. These are taken to schools and community centres to show the cultural centre and its activities, to demonstrate the relationship between Kanak architecture and Renzo Piano’s stylised building, and to encourage children to participate in the visual arts. The CCT has a well-resourced library and digital catalogue that facilitate access to, and the preservation of, Kanak cultural heritage, particularly the remaining 25 languages spoken across the islands (Kasarhérou 2005). It also encourages interaction with other cultural centres and museums in


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Figure 4.2 The steel frame underlying the fading iroko timber Photograph: Kylie Message. Courtesy ADCK-Centre Culturel Tjibaou/Renzo Piano Building Workshop, Architectes.

the Pacific region (through agencies such as the Pacific Islands Museums Association and institutions including the Vanuatu Cultural Centre, with which it discusses issues including the preservation of intangible heritage and language) and promotes dialogue between New Caledonia and museums and other cultural institutions in France and other countries. These programs reflect the centre’s official primary purpose as expressed in its mission statement: to ‘promote and preserve the Kanak archaeological, anthropological and linguistic heritage’.3 This shows the CCT to be concerned with creating a very particular relationship with the postcolonial politics of image-construction: a point that is significant in relation to the centre’s

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official publicity and rhetoric, as well as for the Kanak communities it aims principally to represent and engage with. The CCT may be seen to provide an official site for testing and holding dialogue and debate over what kinds of images and ideas may be appropriate signifiers of a renewed cultural identity for New Caledonians as the country continues to negotiate its future direction.4 Before the centre opened, the Agency for the Development of Kanak Culture (ADCK) stated: ‘The intention is not to make a static presentation of works as in a conventional museum but to make available to be seen, to be admired and, it will be said, “to live again”, objects that have become what the Elders have termed “ambassadors of Kanak culture” throughout the world’.5 These objects are part of the ‘dispersed Kanak heritage’ that exists in museums and collections globally. Emmanuel Kasarhérou, the cultural director of the CCT, explains that an inventory was taken in the 1980s of objects belonging to Kanak heritage acquired during and since the contact period by Western collectors and museums. In the consultations that followed between the Kanak Cultural, Scientific and Technical Board (the organisation that preceded the ADCK) and Kanak communities, it was decided that the centre would not actively seek the return of these objects, many of which have spent up to 150 years away from New Caledonia (and which, according to traditional beliefs, may be dangerous if the conditions of acquisition are unknown). Instead, they would be considered ‘ambassadors’ of Kanak culture, employed to ‘let the rest of the world know that Kanaks exist’.6 The CCT is, however, committed to ongoing discussion about how these objects are conserved and displayed overseas. For example, in a recent case, the CCT sent two Kanak carvers to a regional museum in south-west France to show by demonstration and discussion how the sculptures in their collection had traditionally been made (Kasarhérou 2005). Beyond the issue of repatriation, there are other differences between traditional Western-style museums and the CCT. As Kasarhérou explained during a workshop in Papua New Guinea: In New Caledonia many people think that a museum must keep the past but should not exhibit it. Another explanation of our difficulties in attracting Kanak visitors is their fear of entering a place where artefacts of the past are displayed. They feel as if they were entering a cemetery where devils live. The matter however must not be forced, attitudes will change gradually. The only thing to do, is to explain why it is important for the future of our cultures to have a museum. We must explain why museums did not exist in the past and why they are important nowadays… (Kasarhérou 1992, 166).

In this same forum, the director of the National Museum and Art Gallery of Papua New Guinea, Soroi Eoe, similarly suggested that this may be a dominant perception among Pacific Island cultures, where museum collections are perceived as ‘little more than odd assortments of exotic curios… This view was and still is reinforced by the conviction that museums are only partly the emanations of an indigenous cultural personality: they do not really meet the needs of the great majority of indigenous Pacific islanders’ (Eoe 2005, 1).7 As one measure of the CCT’s success as a social actor within the local community, it seems that both the CCT and the Museum of New Caledonia now attract larger numbers of Kanak visitors and culture workers than was the case in the late 1980s. Expanding its own agenda from ethnography to include social history and current issues, the Museum of New Caledonia now hosts contemporary events such as EXPO:


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La violence, tu sais ce qu’on lui dit? (2005). These examples suggest that the ‘new museum’ paradigm might be more indebted to the practices of ‘museum-like’ spaces, such as the French lineage of cultural centres and eco-museums, than to traditional ethnographic museums (Kasarhérou 2005). It also shows that new museums, cultural centres and other exhibitionary sites in New Caledonia, by expanding their focus to include an interest in contemporary culture, are also playing a part in attempting to bring to fruition Jean-Marie Tjibaou’s dream that the country would one day be ‘irrigated’ with ‘small cultural centres that would be heritage conservation centres and places for contemporary creativity’.8

THE POLITICAL CULTURE AND PERSONALITY CULT OF JEAN-MARIE TJIBAOU The focus on open configurations, representational strategies, and the general commitment to achieving a convincing, ongoing effect of newness is important for new museums at the level of novelty, as a way to keep audiences coming back and to continually attract others. In the case of the CCT, the dedication to forward-looking and non-constant images of identity and culture also emerged as a direct extension of the ideology of Jean-Marie Tjibaou, after whom the centre was named. Leader of the dominant, pro-independence Union Calédonienne party, Tjibaou was revolutionary in his belief that political strength would emerge as a by-product of cultural pride. In a widely quoted statement, he argues that ‘[t]he return to tradition is a myth… No people has ever achieved that. The search for identity, for a model: I believe it lies ahead of us… Our identity lies ahead of us’ (Agency for the Development of Kanak Culture 1998, 4–5; see also Tjibaou 1996; Tjibaou and Missotte 1978; Rollat 1989). Tjibaou rejected the idea that Kanaks must become ‘black Frenchmen’ in order to achieve power or authority, and he envisaged ‘a peaceful resolution of the settler-native confrontation, as long as Kanaks could face France with “a firm personality”, meaning a self-confident identity rooted in culture and history’ (Chappell 1999, 377). He is remembered by many for being, at least in his later years, moderate and reformist, especially in the wake of the ethnic insurgencies that had taken place throughout the 1980s (Agency for the Development of Kanak Culture 1998). He believed that if Kanaks worked toward unified expressions of culture and identity, and a progressive version of tradition that was not at odds with contemporary culture, they would be able to achieve political power more effectively than through any policy of direct action or further violence. Tjibaou’s pointed inter-implication of culture and politics was strategic and relevant, and responded to the fact that, historically, culture has often been the ground on which Kanaks have been persecuted or attacked by the settler community (Maclellan and Chesneaux 1998, 162). Tjibaou argued that ‘to show one’s culture is to show that one exists… There is no cultural phenomenon that doesn’t have an institutional and therefore political impact’.9 Presenting itself as an actor that contributes in concrete ways to social (and possibly political) change, the CCT was designed to embody the intent to formulate a renewed national iconography that is socially progressive as well as culturally sustaining. Despite the sophistication of this objective, it has been writ large in the massive bronze statue of Tjibaou himself that is located atop a nearby hill peak. From here, Tjibaou, dressed partly in Western attire and partly in chiefly garb, oversees his realm, which extends beyond the CCT to encompass the countryside around the city of Noumea. The statue’s privileged location and pose confirm that the centre was envisaged as both ‘the recognition of Kanak culture and the souvenir of Jean-Marie Tjibaou’ (Kasarhérou, quoted

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Figure 4.3 Jean-Marie Tjibaou statue. Photograph: Kylie Message. Courtesy ADCK-Centre Culturel Tjibaou/Renzo Piano Building Workshop, Architectes.

in Jolly 2001, 432). Determinedly social realist in style, the statue reveals the potential dangers associated with the desire to produce urgently reconfigured national symbols by promoting the personality cult of Jean-Marie Tjibaou. Indeed, the specific problem here, according to Peter Brown, is that ‘[i]n the postmodern age of multiple identities, the search to promote a particular cultural or ethnic identity seems to be a utopian if not regressive gesture, when it is not simply rhetorical and tactical’ (Brown 1998, 136). And yet, as Brown also notes, ‘this cult is also a subtle shift in significance, as Tjibaou the politician calling for independence is replaced by the image of the promoter of his culture’ (134). This shift in strategy, whereby the political is overlaid with


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the cultural, rather than positioned in opposition to it, has formed the framework for the CCT and for events contributing to its development, including the important Melanesia 2000 festival, organised by Tjibaou and held on the site of the CCT in 1975. The festival was designed to invest the culture of politics with ‘the art of life’ (Chesneaux 1988, 63), so that ‘Kanak political culture’ could become a more unified and effective force that had a clearer understanding of its relationship with traditional culture and custom. As ‘the first great urban cultural demonstration of Kanak culture’ that was held in ‘Nouméa-la-Blanche’ (white Noumea), the festival ‘aimed at a global representation of the Kanak world and for a unified vision, yet without eliminating the particularities of each of its constituents’.10 It sparked a cultural renaissance. A key figure of support for Tjibaou’s legacy throughout the period leading up to the production of the CCT was Alban Bensa. An anthropologist at the École des Hautes Étrudes en Sciences Sociales and principal advisor to Renzo Piano, Bensa reiterated Tjibaou’s fear that Kanaks would be relegated to the ‘prehistoric’.11 He thus advocated a forward-looking ideology that avoided the depiction – and definition – of Kanaks in relation to past images only, where they can have no current agency, political or otherwise. Bensa’s role as advisor to the project clearly had implications in the way it came to be realised. He argued strongly against the simple reconstitution of a traditional Kanak village, which would have been either picturesque or kitsch (with demonstrable links to the Kanak villages displayed at French colonial expositions in 1889 and 1931).12 He also rallied against building the centre as a theme-park-like and overly saturated media-enriched environment (like the Polynesian Cultural Centre in Hawaii). In recommending against a ‘regionalist replica’ style of design, and in rejecting the straightforward incorporation of history into the project, Bensa argued for development of what would become a paradoxical collection of international and global features, and regional references and tensions (Bensa 2000, 162). While this illustrates a rejection of history that is closely connected to the cult of the new in general terms (and reveals the favouring of newness that is the condition of new museums everywhere), what is unique in regard to the CCT is the relationship that this had with Tjibaou’s guiding philosophy of newness and regeneration (Bensa 1992).

THE CONSTITUTION OF CULTURE IN NEW CALEDONIA: TRADITION, MODERNITY AND LES GRANDS TRAVAUX Renzo Piano was commissioned to design the new CCT after winning a competition that was administered by the ADCK and judged by an international panel of architects and other experts (which included the president of ADCK, Marie-Claude Tjibaou; the head of New Zealand’s Maori Affairs Department, Tia Barrett; an Australian anthropologist, Marcia Langton; and the director of the Solomon Islands National Museum, Lawrence Foanoata). The appointment process reflects the desire to project an image of New Caledonia that is progressive and forward-looking. The choice of Piano, which was internationally lauded, provided those involved with a sense of optimism that the CCT might achieve the effect and status of a grand travaux (great work), as well as the creation of a renewed and visible concrete symbol of unification, which was regarded at the time as an urgent task (Graille 2001, 6). Indeed, before construction of the new CCT began, the president of France, François Mitterrand, decreed that it was to be one of the French state’s most important undertakings. It was to be the first of an elite group of significant institutions, known collectively as ‘the Great Projects of the Republic’, to be invested in or built outside

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of France (Main 1998, 9). Other ‘Great Projects’ in Paris include the Pyramid of the Louvre, the arch at La Défense and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. The CCT benefited further from the popular ‘hearts, minds and pockets’ policies of the current French President Jacques Chirac in his two years as prime minister in the 1980s, so that the French Government not only covered the 320 million francs initially required for building the CCT but agreed to support substantially the ongoing administration costs of the site (Connell 2003, 128). Given these rich expectations and resources, the CCT aimed to bridge the gap between the apparently conflicting aspirations of the French Government and the desire by activists to achieve a new and independent state of Kanaky. This struggle over nationhood is represented in a biographical exhibit dedicated to the life and works of Jean-Marie Tjibaou. This demonstrates the ‘entanglement of Kanak and French culture, even as it documented the racism of the French and the violence of New Caledonia’s colonial history’ (Jolly 2001, 434). Located in the Mâlep House (mâlep means ‘to live’ in the yâlayu language), the display includes photographic and textual narrative sections under the headings ‘His land, his loved ones’, ‘Serving others, the priesthood and community works’, ‘A political vision based on Kanak culture’, and ‘The Kanak leader opens the way to a common destiny’. Appropriate to Tjibaou’s dream for Kanak culture to resist becoming caught in the past or rendered as static, very few objects are included. As items that correspond directly to the as-yet-unattained future independent state, a ‘Government de Kanaky – FLNKS’ stamp, the flag of Kanaky, and Jean-Marie Tjibaou’s case and passport are shown in one section. No text explains the significance of this arrangement (that would perhaps be obvious to New Caledonians), yet it refers to an important occasion in 1985 when Tjibaou went to Paris and introduced himself as the head of the provisional government of Kanaky (Ouest France, 25–27 May 1985, quoted in Dornoy-Vurobaravu 1994, 11). Bensa, who saw the CCT as ‘a new opportunity to carry forward the political struggle on the cultural and symbolical front where Jean-Marie Tjibaou had so wished it could also develop’, also promoted these aspirations for unification under a centralised independent state (Bensa 2000, 175). He understood that the building had to be convincing in a symbolic sense, as well as impressive and effective in terms of the contribution it could make to the more pragmatic development of cultural confidence in Kanak communities. It needed to provide Kanaks with an emblem of cultural identity that was optimistic, contemporary and open enough to be interpreted and appropriated widely. More than anything else, it needed to embody a promise for the future. Kasarhérou describes the resultant building in the following terms: For the main part of JMTCC [CCT], Piano has incorporated the Kanak concept of a central avenue aligned with groups of grand case (Kanak chiefs’ houses). However Piano has translated this form, giving it a profound new expression: the circular structures of the grand case soar up to thirty metres in height but they are not thatched nor are the walls fully clad. Reminiscent of (Kanak) houses but opening onto a dream of the future, they have a feeling of incompleteness, bringing to mind that Kanak culture itself is not static but is always open to change (Kasarhérou, quoted in Losche 2003, 81).

In addition to providing a physical manifestation of the ideological principles motivating the development of the centre, Kasarhérou explains that Piano’s building aspires to the principles of


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a pure architectural modernism, so that the structure appears to lift ephemerally up and away from the ground around it. Piano himself says, ‘while the form of the Tjibaou Cultural Centre may have nothing to do with local constructions, it has their spirit, without denying anything of my own modernity’.13 Further registering a break between the traditions of Western architectural practice and the cultural practice of the Kanak communities for whom the centre was designed, it has also been reported that Kanak visitors seem to be most interested in and respond most positively to the ground area surrounding the building, where some communities maintain traditional gardens (Kasarhérou and Mozziconacci 1998, 20; see also Kasarhérou et al. 1998). Instead of seeking a direct relationship with its immediate landscape, however, Piano chose to centralise universalising symbols such as the atmosphere or air, and the passing breeze. His emblems of identity for the future stretch upward and away from the ground that is occupied by the participating Kanak communities. In association with the airy and expansive exhibition spaces inside the buildings, the structure manifests a beauty that challenges rather than replicates the way that the traditional (closed and exclusivist) power structures of Kanak culture have been reproduced in traditional modes of building. It supports a global image of indigenous architecture, or the revisioning of indigenous architecture according to a renewed globalised genre; and yet simultaneously rewrites the traditional pedagogical non-Western style of authority (Memmott and Reser 2000; Dovey 2000; Fantin 2003). Consistently with this, the building appears to privilege a particular version of contemporary Kanak cultural practice that is connected to ideas of progress and development implicit within Piano’s centralised Western position (Austin 1999; Baker 2002). In his critique of the building, Brown quotes from Bensa to suggest that the processes of overinscription (of both the architectural surfaces and the ways of talking about the building) have replaced the traditionally articulated form of closure with the projected illusion of ‘a non-discriminatory and “democratic” openness, in this building [that has been] commissioned and underwritten by a modern Western European state’ (Brown 2002, 283). In appointing Piano and building the project according to an international style of modernism (which links both typologically and genealogically back to the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris), the CCT manipulates architecture ‘to appropriate the spatial power base of an old [privileged Western] regime for use in the identity formation of a new one’ (Vale 1999, 393). Furthermore, the CCT’s status as a ‘great project’ evidences how: the modern era of nation-states calls for multiple allegiances and alliances, often to be upheld across great distances. Especially in cases where single states encompass multiple would-be-ethnic nations, architectural and urbanistic efforts to articulate a single ‘national identity’ are deeply controversial… [this reflects] the need to extend international identity through staking some new claim to noteworthy modernity… (Vale 1999, 396).

This brings us back to the anachronistic bronze statue of Jean-Marie Tjibaou, and to the risks associated with such overtly singular and non-compromising symbols of nationhood. The primary difficulty with Piano’s building is that it appears literally to seek transcendence from its present location, while at the same time it offers to overlay an international kind of architecture into the local context. This integration provides a reinscription of the local custom and culture, not by

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local Kanaks, but by Piano and his advisers (that is due also, in part at least, to the limited consultation that preceded building) (Brown 2002, 282; Veracini and Muckle 2002, fn 46). Brown’s critique is not directed toward Piano’s referencing of customary Kanak huts per se, but at his attempt to tweak the politics internal to them. He is concerned that at a symbolic level, Piano’s design ‘updates’ the huts so they fit more comfortably within a European image of social modernity and progress (and as modelled in exemplary form by the Centre Georges Pompidou). Piano’s imprint of unified progress and optimism for the future might thus be interpreted as problematically illustrating a direct connection to the French Government’s plan to reflect the ideologies and interests of the ‘modern’ nation-state of France as the commissioning agency and overriding authority.14 In this case, the modernist architecture may be understood, possibly too simplistically, as signifying a very specific political statement (keeping in mind that although Piano had won a competition held to find the best designer for the project, he already had a particular history with French institutions and government, having designed the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 1977 with Richard Rogers). Not only is the Pompidou Centre an explicit symbol of social progress and an icon of modernity, but it is also widely accepted as the prototype of the new museum model: a point made evident by the architects’ intention to ‘create a new kind of public forum, a non-monumental building of such infinite flexibility that it would be in constant process. The structure’s interdisciplinary organisation was supposed to democratise the arts’ (Newhouse 1998, 193). Perhaps Piano’s popularity was connected to this prior experience of designing ‘populist’ buildings that constitute ‘anti-monuments’. As the most famous of these, the Pompidou Centre has become connected to, and symbolic of, Paris despite the architect’s intention to provide a space that rejected the pedagogical structure and traditional hierarchies of art museums. If we compare the intention toward and effect presented by the Pompidou Centre and the CCT, we can see that not only does the CCT succeed in reflecting an image of New Caledonia that is democratic-looking and progressive in outlook, but that it appears to offer a symbolic (if not thematic) synchronicity with the ideological grandeur and impressive scale of the Pompidou Centre. By asking why it was that a self-consciously new and internationalist style of museum was selected for the purpose of representing Kanak culture, it may be possible to evaluate whether the CCT as a new museum can possibly live up to the rhetorical claims made on its behalf. In epitomising key characteristics of the new museum so effectively, the CCT may ultimately offer an internationally palatable monument for consumption by audiences from outside New Caledonia. If this is the case, it might confirm Claude Patriat’s argument that ‘out of all democratic countries, the French nation has taken furthest the assertion of an active political presence in the cultural field’ as a way to ensure its authority (Patriat, quoted in McGuigan 2004, 66).

THE DESIRE FOR RÉÉQUILIBRAGE (REBALANCING): HISTORY, POLITICS AND INDEPENDENCE Because of the competing political and economic pressures historically at play within New Caledonia, it is simply not possible to separate the global from the local in the context of the CCT. This means that while an international audience may well have been considered primary for the centre’s success, it was also the result of local political action. Specifically, the decision to construct a forward-looking cultural centre dedicated to the preservation and continued devel-


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opment of Kanak cultural traditions emerged out of the obligation of the Matignon (and Oudinot) Accords (1988) to work toward achieving a degree of political and economic self-autonomy for Kanaks in New Caledonia. In signing this agreement, the French Government undertook ‘to provide for the expression and fulfilment of the Melanesian personality in all its forms’ and ‘to ensure that everyone has access to information and culture’ (Veracini and Muckle 2002). The accords were seen as a way of reducing tension in the area, and of also preserving the principle (and possibly the practice) of the French presence (Maclellan and Chesneaux 1998, 170). They were followed by the Noumea Accord (1998), which replaced a referendum on independence that was to have been held that year but was postponed for another 15–20 years as part of the new agreement. This accord formally acknowledged the trauma of colonisation for Kanaks, and all signatories recognised that ‘Kanak identity’ was central to a new, more autonomous territory with its own citizenship. It legislated the end of New Caledonia’s previous status as a territoire d’outre-mer (overseas territory) of France, and while many felt that this implementation of an ‘irreversible’ process for the transfer of administrative power did not go far enough toward achieving full indépendance kanak et socialiste (Kanak socialist independence), it was generally understood as a reconciliatory gesture and precedent-setting compromise for decolonisation in a multi-ethnic state (Chappell 1999, 373; Maclellan 2004). Central to the accords was the recognition that political progress rested on the capacity to put Kanak culture, custom, identity and experience at the centre of life in New Caledonia. As a key signatory of the Matignon Accords (in his capacity as leader of Union Calédonienne), Tjibaou lobbied for these principles until he was assassinated in 1989 by a dissenting Kanak independentist, Djubelli Wea (Dornoy-Vurobaravu 1994, 10; Henningham 1992). Despite the belief of extremists that the accords would compromise the potential for independent sovereignty,15 the Matignon Accords established the conditions whereby indigenous culture and rights were not to be acknowledged in a rhetorical or symbolic sense only, but were to become the basis for the political reconstruction of the new, multi-ethnic country. The close relationship that emerged between the constitution and development of the CCT and the Matignon Accords and then the Noumea Accord (the CCT opened one day before the latter agreement was signed) was intended as a gesture of goodwill on behalf of the French Government toward Kanaks. The ADCK was established (as part of the Matignon Accords) to be the territory’s principal cultural body, and was charged with promoting Kanak culture and heritage. The interweaving of culture and politics may, as such, have been officially recognised in the constitution of the ADCK, and the CCT may have been intended to open out a space for what James Tully calls a ‘post-imperial dialogue – informed by the spirit of mutual recognition and accommodation of cultural diversity’ (Tully, quoted in Connell 2003, 141).

NEGOTIATING NEW FORMS OF CULTURAL IDENTITY FOR A MULTI-ETHNIC STATE This approach toward representing Kanak culture continues to be legitimated within the CCT on the basis of Tjibaou’s desire to create a space of possibility for the emergence of new and shifting forms of cultural identity and practice: a point that continues to be contextualised by another ongoing dialogue about the relationship between modernity and Kanak culture. And while Tjibaou’s idea of a modern Kanak identity can be understood according to a postcolonial

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framework, whereby identity is historically and socially contingent and shifting (Clifford 2001, 468), Caroline Graille comments that in 1998, a curator at the CCT claimed that it would be ‘unthinkable’ for the CCT to include work by non-Kanak artists in the centre. This has since occurred, however, and may reveal a broader and more recent attempt at constructing (through the agency of the centre as a key actor in this) a ‘multicultural Caledonian identity’ (Graille 2001, 6). She argues further that: the project to construct ‘postcoloniality’ in a multicultural context as neither a Kanak national state nor a French-dominated quasi-colony is still very recent in New Caledonia… Local artists are only just beginning to produce ‘national’ aesthetic icons whose symbolism will necessarily break with a very Eurocentric, essentialist vision of Kanak culture as ‘traditional’/‘pre-contact’ (and thus colonised and dead), but also be very different from the colonialist vision of New Caledonia as a ‘small France in the Pacific’ (8).

This intent is evident in the general style of work included in the contemporary Kanak and Oceanian collection (many of which were commissioned by the CCT) that is exhibited in the Bérétara Hall (Cochrane 1996). The Kanak works, such as Jean-Noël Mero’s sculpture Oubliées de l’historie (Abandoned by history) (2001) and Yolande Moto’s painting Un nouveau regard sur notre passé (A new look on our past) (1997), often combine aspects of traditionalism with imagery that is highly narrative in style and reminiscent of the cultural renaissance of the 1970s. While this reveals the struggle to come to terms with what it means to be Kanak in a contemporary world,16 it also displays the attempt to represent diversity within the Kanak community and to recognise the immigrant groups living in New Caledonia (the population today is over 215,000 people: 42.5 per cent are Kanak, and while Europeans form the majority, other ethnic groups include immigrants from Wallis and Futuna, French Polynesia, Indonesia, Vietnam and elsewhere).17 Expanding the centre’s focus on Kanak cultural heritage and identity has meant that it can focus on the intersections and cross-cultural dialogue that have historically occurred between communities and cultural forms in New Caledonia. This agenda was recently employed in a temporary exhibition (Paris–Noumea: Les Communards en Nouvelle-Calédonie) on Louise Michel, exiled to New Caledonia for her involvement in the 1871 Paris Commune. Shown in Komwi Hall, the exhibition used events in Michel’s life to illustrate colonial relationships and dialogues between French settlers, convicts and Kanaks. Including artefacts such as large shells engraved with images of ‘European man’ or ‘Kanak man’, the exhibition showed how each culture represented itself and each other at this time. As the country grapples with the conceptual issues pertaining to representation in a national context and how to represent diversity, the centre has become the subject of much debate among New Caledonians. While many support the work it does in promoting Kanak cultural identity and representing this to the world, others have criticised it as a biased symbol that is either too focused on Kanak culture or ‘not Kanak enough’ (Bensa and Wittersheim 1998, 243; Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat 2005, 168; see also Guiart 2001). Commenting, for example, on the CCT’s perceived lack of local visitors and support – ‘of Kanaks, for whom the Centre was built, one hardly meets any. Of Caldoches [descendents of early French settlers (Maclellan and


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Chesneaux 1998, 145)], even less’ – local journalist Anne Pitoiset noted that the CCT, ‘established to enable and promote the cultural rebirth of the Kanaks… has become not only an identifiable emblem of New Caledonia; but perhaps, to date, the only really internationally successful symbol’ (Pitoiset 2002; Graille 2001, 7; Maclellan and Chesneaux 1998, 145). Pitoiset argues that the CCT’s lack of support by Kanaks is connected to its repudiation of history, on the basis that it risks denying the facts and experiences of colonisation. Others, she explains, see it as preaching a version of colonially constructed culture back to them (‘we do not need the Centre to know our culture’) (Pitoiset 2002). A customary chief who heads the Kanak Socialist Liberation Party, Nidoish Naisseline, has argued that it is a Kanak centre for white people, saying, ‘I have the impression that ethnologists from Paris have come here to teach us about our culture’ (quoted in Main 1998, 9). Dissatisfaction with the CCT is not just expressed by Kanaks: Pitoiset reports that some non-Kanaks resent the CCT as being designed ‘only for Kanaks’, while others wish it represented a more multi-ethnic population, so that ‘[w]hen one goes into the Centre, one should have an idea of New Caledonia as a whole…’ (Pitoiset 2002). This controversy about the representational responsibilities of the CCT has also continually surrounded festivals and other cultural events staged there, from the 1998 exhibition of Pacific art that accompanied its opening, to the highly political eighth Festival of Pacific Arts in 1999, which ‘generated protests from radical Kanak, who called it a “folk-lorisation” of their culture’. On the other hand, though, supporters of this festival ‘saw it as the Kanak reclaiming their “place in the sun” as Tjibaou put it’ (Chappell 2001, 549).

THE CENTRE CULTUREL TJIBAOU, THE OVERSEAS MEDIA AND THE ‘GLOBAL WAR OF IMAGES’ The depth of difference that characterised local receptions to the CCT has not, however, tended to be replicated by international commentary on the centre and its programs.18 This may be because the ADCK actively solicited international press interest during the years leading up to the centre’s opening and throughout its opening festivals. While most of this focused on the muchpromoted architecture emerging on the site, the reports, if making anything other than the most superficial of comments in relation to the building, frequently correlated the emergent building with a new-found peacefulness (the violent insurgencies that wracked the territory throughout the 1980s appeared suppressed to the visiting writers). Located predominantly in the ‘Arts’ or ‘Travel’ sections of major daily newspapers, the resulting columns generally expressed the belief that the CCT was designed to function as a new emblem of hope for, and belief in, cultural reconciliation. In one case, the writer says: ‘Just as France has designed a model decolonisation for New Caledonia, it has bestowed a jewel of a monument on its historically troubled territory’ (Main 1998, 9). These expressions of relief reflect more than just the writers’ enjoyment of the new spectacle. While every country has to negotiate ongoing issues in relation to the form and content of dominant images of national identity, this process is especially fraught for New Caledonia, which continues negotiations over cultural, political and economic independence (or inter-dependence) while balancing the national, sub-national, international and individual impulses that are associated with an increasingly globalised and transnational context. And while architecture and urban design have always performed important roles in the clarification of spatial and social order,

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newspaper reportage of the early days of the CCT show how the media contributes to producing or promoting particular images, which also demonstrates the ideological processes that are present in the production of the CCT itself. As an important form of ‘publicity’ (as well as a useful, albeit partial, mode of gauging public reception), media sources provide a textual archive and are significant for what they reveal about the public sphere and public culture that emerged in New Caledonia in response to the CCT. In explaining the ongoing political urgency of images, whether they be manifested in print or built form, Murray Edelman says: ‘Especially subtle, powerful, and common are buildings that reinforce a belief that people’s ties to a historic past or a promising future are their important identities’ (Edelman 1995, 76). Accordingly, of the international responses to the centre that I surveyed, the dominant images produced by the CCT presented an idealised picture of Kanak tribal culture that is depicted as forward-focused, ongoing and part of a much greater universal continuum, but that was combined with a much more chimerical, albeit omnipresent, effect of a still-present colonial regime. This focus on the far-reaching past and future means that the inter-ethnic tensions of the interim period (or the complexity of local responses to the centre) are not highlighted (See, for example, Cerebona 1998; Harley 1997; Madoeuf 1998; McGillick 1999; McIntyre 2004; McLean 1998; Power 1998; Riding 2000; Venter 2000; Zinn 1998). These characteristics present an image of the CCT that is consistent with Lawrence Vale’s definition of a ‘mediated monument’ (Vale 1999). While taking into account the point that ‘architecture and design have always performed important roles in the clarification of spatial and social order’ so that the built environment can often be seen as providing a demonstration of or means to interpret national identity, Vale contends that the central point of these structures is that they function as ‘monuments that are inseparable from the media campaigns conducted to construct (and constrict) their interpretation’ (391). In these buildings, political power is often conveyed through the self-conscious construction of ‘forward-reaching symbols’ (391) that have become further animated by the publicity campaigns and international press interest associated with the CCT’s opening. In this case, the media has been particularly influential in shaping public interpretation internationally, and in paying attention to the parade of symbols produced by the opening celebrations and the initial exhibitions of contemporary visual culture and Pacific arts commissioned from across the region. The effect is to risk privileging a forward-looking focus that, when accompanied by a lack of critical analysis, makes only ‘politically useful’ links to the past (Vale 1999, 391). Moreover, contributing to the validity of this argument, Vale contends that ‘[i]n the Pacific Rim of the 1990s and beyond, we are witnessing a global war of images’ (397).

CONCLUSION Driving up from Noumea to the Centre Culturel Tjibaou for the first time, noticing how the grandes cases look persistent and unforgiving about having forced their way through the natural vista, the centre’s pose appeared to me to be confrontational. Despite the CCT’s involvement in contemporary politics (and indeed, considering that it was the product of such politics), the real impact and urgency of these politics – cultural politics – struck me, and something James Clifford had said about Tjibaou vividly came to mind. He said that Tjibaou had insisted that the cultural centre be located in the hostile, settler city of Noumea because, according to Clifford, ‘the


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politics of cultural and political identity, as he saw it, always worked the boundaries’ (Clifford 2001, 471). I had initially taken note of this because I had never really understood why the centre was located in such a hostile environment, when to my mind it would have been a more convincing gesture of reconciliation for the French Government to finance the existent Centre Culturel Goa Ma Bwarhat, designed by Tjibaou, in the (traditionally pro-independence) northern town of Hienghène (Rosada and Huneau 2004). But when I saw the CCT, looming large – and looking like a series of shields (or upcast fists) that have burst through the ground and now refuse to give way – Clifford’s comment about Tjibaou’s statement suddenly made sense. Later I asked Emmanuel Kasarhérou for his view on this, and he reiterated Tjibaou’s point, explaining that it was important that the centre be in town, as a visible symbolic reminder of the continued existence of Kanak culture (for urban Kanaks, visitors from regional tribes and non-Kanaks). Further reading revealed it was Jean-Marie Tjibaou’s idea to ‘implant’ the ADCK and the CCT ‘in the very city in which Kanaks had hitherto been second-class citizens if not entirely excluded’.19 Kasarhérou also said that if the centre had been located in a rural region, it would have further ostracised Kanaks by suggesting that they are linked to tradition and the past rather than the contemporary reality and changing cultural identities of Kanaks living in the city (which more and more are doing). This would have amounted to ‘putting the Tjibaou Centre out of view, in your back yard’ (Kasarhérou 2005), rather than offering a contemporary and progressive symbol of national identity. Yet even more than this, the centre appears to stand over the city, holding it to account for the events of the past while also offering a progressive and spectacular symbol of identity. This image has stayed with me: of the CCT as an extremely complex case study that shows perhaps more than any others the inter-implication of culture and politics, and the high stakes that are attached to the production of new museums.

Figure 4.4 Looking over the Centre Culturel Tjibaou from Tjibaou statue Photograph: Kylie Message. Courtesy ADCK-Centre Culturel Tjibaou/Renzo Piano Building Workshop, Architectes.

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ENDNOTES 1

2 3 4 5

6

7

8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16

17

18

19

This essay was published previously in reCollections: Journal of the National Museum of Australia, no. 1, vol. 1 (2006): 7–28. From Renzo Piano’s notebooks, see http://www.adck.nc. From ADCK mission statement, http://www.adck.nc. http://www.adck.nc. ‘Courants océaniens, Pacific currents’, Mwà Véé (Kanak cultural review), special edition, no. 14, October 1996, p. 44. Kasarhérou (2005); ‘Living heritage, Kanak culture today’, Mwà Véé, special edition, October 2000, p. 34. See also Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat (2005, 168). For further discussion see Stanley (1998); Murphy (2002); Cochrane (1999). Text from Tjibaou exhibition, Mâlep House, Centre Culturel Tjibaou. In ‘Living heritage, Kanak culture today’, Mwà Véé, p. 8. ‘Living heritage, Kanak culture today’, Mwà Véé, p. 8; Graille (2001, 9, fn. 5); Chesneaux (1988, 62). Bensa (2000, 162); ‘Living heritage, Kanak culture today’, Mwà Véé, p. 8. ‘1931 Des Kanak à Paris’, Mwà Véé, no. 13, June 1996. ‘Living heritage, Kanak culture today’, Mwà Véé, p. 11. For the effect of this on other parts of the islands’ economy, see Horowitz (2004). ‘Separatists still divided on Caledonia’s future’, Sydney Morning Herald, 18 July 1998. ‘Courants océaniens, Pacific currents’, Mwà Véé, p. 50; ‘Living heritage, Kanak culture today’, Mwà Véé, p. 34. For demographic statistics for New Caledonia see The world factbook, updated 1 November 2005. Available from: http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/nc.html. Reception by the international mainstream media has been overwhelmingly positive: Cerebona (1998); Harley (1997); Madoeuf (1998); McGillick (1999); McIntyre (2004); McLean (1998); Power (1998); Riding (2000); Venter (2000); Zinn (1998). There has been some critique in academic contexts; see Jolly (2001, 440); see also Brown (2001). ‘Living heritage, Kanak culture today’, Mwà Véé, p. 9.

REFERENCES Agency for the Development of Kanak Culture. 1998. ‘Tjibaou Cultural Centre’, translated by Beynon, Roy. Noumea: ADCK. Agency for the Development of Kanak Culture. 2005. ‘Programme saison 2005 Centre Culturel Tjibaou’. Noumea: ADCK. Aldrich, Robert. 2005. Vestiges of the colonial empire in France: Monuments, museums and colonial memories. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Austin, Mike. 1999. ‘The Tjibaou Cultural Centre’. Pander OS 2.0 (8). Available from: http://www.thepander.co.nz/architecture/maustin8php. Baker, Carolynne. 2002. ‘The Tjibaou Cultural Centre: Centring Kanak identity’. In De-placing difference: Architecture, culture and imaginative geography, edited by Akkach, Samer. Adelaide: Centre for Asian and Middle Eastern Architecture, University of Adelaide.


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Bennett, Tony. 1995. The birth of the museum: History, theory, politics. London and New York: Routledge. Bensa, Alban, editor. 1992. La réalisation du Centre Culturel Jean-Marie Tjibaou: Analyses, enquêtes, documentation. Noumea/Paris: Ministère de la Culture, Mission des Grands Travaux. Bensa, Alban. 2000. Ethnologie et architecture: Le Centre Culturel Tjibaou, une réalisation de Renzo Piano. Paris: Adam Biro. Bensa, Alban; Wittersheim, Eric. 1998. ‘Jean Guiart and New Caledonia: A drama of misrepresentation’. Journal of Pacific History 33 (2): 221–225. Brown, Peter. 1998. ‘New Caledonia: Strangers in paradise, stranger than paradise’. International Journal of Francophone Studies 1 (3): 125–139. Brown, Peter. 2001. ‘New Caledonia: A Pacific island or an island in the Pacific? The eighth Pacific arts festival’. International Journal of Francophone Studies 4 (1): 33–41. Brown, Peter 2002. ‘Book review: Ethnologie et architecture: Le centre culturel Tjibaou, une réalisation de Renzo Piano’. Contemporary Pacific 14 (1): 281–284. Cerebona, Ron. 1998. ‘Nouméa centre focuses on Kanak culture’. Canberra Times (15 June). Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2002. ‘Museums in late democracies’. Humanities Review 9 (1): 5–12. Chappell, David. 1999. ‘The Nouméa Accord: Decolonisation without independence in New Caledonia?’ Pacific Affairs 72 (3): 373–391. Chappell, David. 2001. ‘Book review: En pays Kanak: Ethnologie, linguistique, archéologie, histoire de la Nouvelle-Calédonie’. Contemporary Pacific 13 (2): 592–594. Chesneaux, Jean. 1988. ‘Kanak political culture and French political practice’. In New Caledonia: Essays in nationalism and dependency, edited by Spencer, Michael; Ward, Alan; Connell, John. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Clifford, James. 2001. ‘Dialogue: Indigenous articulations’. Contemporary Pacific 13 (2): 468–490. Cochrane, Susan. 1996. ‘Pacific stories from New Caledonia’. Artlink 16 (4): 52–54. Cochrane, Susan. 1999. ‘Out of the doldrums: Museums and cultural centres in Pacific Islands countries in the 1990s’. In Art and performance in Oceania, edited by Craig, Barrie; Kernot, Bernie; Anderson, Christopher. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Connell, John. 2003. ‘An infinite pause in decolonisation?’ Round Table 368: 125–143. Dornoy-Vurobaravu, Myriam. 1994. Policies and perceptions of France in the South Pacific: New Caledonia and Vanuatu. Vanuatu: Institute of Pacific Studies and USP Complex. Dovey, Kim. 2000. ‘Myth and media: Constructing Aboriginal architecture’. Journal of Architectural Education 54 (1): 2–6. Edelman, Murray. 1995. From art to politics: How artistic creations shape political conceptions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Eoe, Soroi. 2005. ‘The role of museums in the Pacific: Change or die’. In Museums and cultural centres in the Pacific, edited by Eoe, Soroi; Swadling, Pamela. Papua New Guinea: National Capital District, Papua New Guinea National Museum. Fantin, Shaneen. 2003. ‘Aboriginal identities in architecture’. Architecture Australia (September–October). Available from: http://www.archmedia.com.au. Graille, Caroline. 2001. ‘From “primitive” to contemporary: A story of Kanak art in New Caledonia’. [Internet]. A State Society and Governance in Melanesia discussion paper, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, Canberra, no. 01/2. Accessed 4 July 2006. Available from: http://rspas.anu.edu.au/melanesia/dplist.php?searchterm=2001. Guiart, Jean. 2001. ‘Comment: A reply to A Bensa and E Wittersheim, “Jean Guiart and New Caledonia: A drama of misrepresentation”’. Journal of Pacific History 36 (2): 247–249. Harley, Robert. 1997. ‘Renzo Piano building a vision’. Australian Financial Review (28 November). Henningham, Stephen. 1992. France and the South Pacific: A contemporary history. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Horowitz, Leah. 2004. ‘Toward a viable independence? The Koniambo project and the political economy of mining in New Caledonia’. Contemporary Pacific 16 (2): 287–319.

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Jolly, Margaret. 2001. ‘On the edge? Deserts, oceans, islands’. The Contemporary Pacific 13 (2): 417–466. Kasarhérou, Emmanuel. 1992. ‘The New Caledonian museum’. In Museums and Cultural Centres in the Pacific, edited by Eoe, Soroi; Swadling, Pamela. Papua New Guinea: National Capital District, Papua New Guinea National Museum. Kasarhérou, Emmanuel. 1995. ‘“Men of flesh and blood”: The Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Centre in Nouméa’. Art and Asia Pacific 2 (4): 90–95. Kasarhérou, Emmanuel. 2005. Interview by Kylie Message. Centre Culturel Tjibaou. 16 November. Kasarhérou, Emmanuel; Mozziconacci, Cécile. 1998. Centre Culturel Tjibaou. Noumea: ADCK. Kasarhérou, Emmanuel; Wedoye, Béalo; Boulay, Roger; Merleau-Ponty, Claire. 1998. Guide to the plants of the Kanak Path. Noumea: ADCK. Losche, Diane. 2003. ‘Cultural forests and their objects in New Caledonia, the forest on Lifou’. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art 4 (1): 77–91. Lumley, Robert, editor. 1988. The museum time machine: Putting cultures on display. London: Routledge. Macdonald, Sharon. 2003. ‘Museums, national, postnational and transcultural identities’. Museum and Society 1 (1): 1–16. Maclellan, Nic. 2004. ‘From Eloi to Europe: Interactions with the ballot box in New Caledonia’. [Internet]. Available from: http://www.usp.ac.fj/fileadmin/files/Institutes/piasdg/Electoral_Systems_2004/es2004_Maclellan.pdf. Maclellan, Nic; Chesneaux, Jean. 1998. After Mururoa: France in the South Pacific. Melbourne: Ocean Press. Madoeuf, Franck. 1998. ‘New Caledonia cultural center to express Kanak identity’. Agence France Presse (3 May). Main, Victoria. 1998. ‘New Caledonia takes a gamble on beauty’. The Press (2 December). McGillick, Paul. 1999. ‘A sublime Kanak creation’. Australian Financial Review (13 March). McGuigan, Jim. 2004. Rethinking cultural policy. Berkshire, England: Open University Press. McIntyre, Andrew. 2004. ‘Independence in the Pacific: France’s positive approach’. National Observer (Summer): 12–15. McLean, Sandra. 1998. ‘Accent on culture’. Daily Telegraph (5 September). Memmott, Paul; Reser, Joe. 2000. ‘Design concepts and processes for public Aboriginal architecture’. PaPER 55–56: 69–86. Message, Kylie. 2005. ‘Representing cultural diversity in a global context: The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa and the National Museum of Australia’. International Journal of Cultural Studies 8 (4): 465–485. Message, Kylie; Healy, Chris. 2004. ‘A symptomatic museum: The new, the NMA and the culture wars’. Borderlands e-journal 3 (3). Available from: http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no3_2004/messagehealy_symptom.htm. Montaner, Josep Maria. 2003. Museums for the 21st Century, translated by Black, M. Barcelona, Spain: Gustavo Gili. Murphy, Bernice. 2002. ‘Centre Culturel Tjibaou: A museum and arts centre defining New Caledonia’s cultural future’. Humanities Review 9 (1): 77–90. Newhouse, Victoria. 1998. Towards a new museum. New York: The Monacelli Press. Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat. 2005. A pacific plan for strengthening regional cooperation and integration (final draft). Suva, Fiji: Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat. Pitoiset, Anne. 2002. ‘What is the Tjibaou Centre being used for? Disappointed hopes of the CCT’. L’EXPRESS.fr (10 October). Available from: http://www.lexpress.fr/. Power, Liza. 1998. ‘French tropical twist’. The Age (26 September). Preziosi, Donald; Farago, Claire, editors. 2004. Grasping the world: The idea of the museum. Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate Publishers. Riding, Alan. 2000. ‘Showcasing a rise from rebellion to respectability’. The New York Times (5 March). Rollat, Alain. 1989. Tjibaou le Kanak. Lyon: La Manufacture.


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Rosada, Alexandre; Huneau, Philippe. 2004. ‘October 16, 2004: The arts centre of Hienghène celebrates its 20 years’. [Internet]. Available from: http://www.rosada.net/hienghene.htm. Simpson, Moira. 1996. Making representations: Museums in the post-colonial era. London: Routledge. Stanley, Nick. 1998. Being ourselves for you: Global display of cultures. London: Middlesex University Press. Tjibaou, Jean-Marie. 1996. La présence Kanak, edited by Bensa, Alban; Wittersheim, Eric. Paris: Editions Odile Jacob. Tjibaou, Jean-Marie; Missotte, Philippe. 1978. Kanaké: The Melanesian way, translated by Plant, Christopher. Papeete: Les Editions du Pacifique. Vale, Lawrence. 1999. ‘Mediated monuments and national identity’. Journal of Architecture 4 (Winter): 391–408. Venter, Nick. 2000. ‘Pacific architecture puts NZ to shame – Goff’. Dominion (12 July). Veracini, Lorenzo; Muckle, Adrian. 2002. ‘Reflections of indigenous history inside the national museums of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand and outside of New Caledonia’s Centre Culturel Jean-Marie Tjibaou’. Electronic Journal of Australian and New Zealand History. Available from: http://www.jcu.edu.au/aff/history/articles/veracini_muckle.htm. Vergo, Peter, editor. 1988. The new museology. London: Reaktion Books. Zinn, Christopher. 1998. ‘Cultural centre symbolises island’s birth’. Manchester Guardian Weekly (15 November).

Cite this chapter as: Message, Kylie. 2006. ‘Contested sites of identity and the cult of the new: The Centre Culturel Tjibaou and the constitution of culture in New Caledonia’. South Pacific museums, edited by Healy, Chris; Witcomb, Andrea. Monash University ePress: Melbourne. pp. 4.1–4.20. DOI: 10.2104/spm06004.

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NEW MUSEUMS

NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AUSTRALIA Linda Young, Deakin University Linda Young is a senior lecturer in the Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies program at Deakin University, Melbourne. She is a museum critic, a historian of heritage genres and practice, and a student of nineteenth-century Anglo domestic and personal material culture. Correspondence to Linda Young: [email protected]

A national museum for Australia might always have seemed a redundancy, given that seven colonial museums and art galleries were established in the nineteenth century. Federation took place in 1901, but it was via a peaceful process of referendum, and though the idea of a national museum was mooted in the 1920s, and occasionally thereafter, a monumental representation of national unity was never anyone’s priority. Such need as might have been felt was met in 1941 with the opening of the Australian War Memorial; a museum commemorating the Great War, it was primed with the acknowledged national story of Aussie diggers in battle and has presented that theme to public acclaim ever since. Nonetheless, the prosperity of the post-World War II period, the cultural nationalist revival of the 1970s, and the rise of Australian history and heritage consciousness began to suggest that a national story should have institutional expressions. The Australian National Gallery opened in 1973, crossing the Rubicon of collecting artworks in contest with the state galleries. The Australian Heritage Commission was launched in 1975, asserting the value of conserving colonial, Victorian, vernacular and even modern buildings as identifiers of national character. In the 1980s the state museums began to revive, starting with developments in Western Australia to display the finds of Dutch coastal wrecks of the seventeenth century and in New South Wales to mark the 1988 bicentenary of white settlement. Establishing a national museum was among the recommendations of a government inquiry in 1975, with a three-part program to represent the environment, Indigenous culture and people, and the history of European settlement (Committee of Inquiry 1975, 70–71). It achieved legislative reality in 1980, with a handful of staff and a mandate to collect, but no promises to build. In this form, the National Museum of Australia (NMA) puttered along for nearly twenty years, living from hope to hope that government would pick up its cause. When this finally happened, it was Liberal Prime Minister John Howard who decreed in 1998 that a formal home for the museum would be the centrepiece of the 2001 centenary celebrations of Federation. For such a huge development project, the schedule was woefully short. The museum had no charismatic leadership, having long been the creature of efficient but politically ineffective public servants. Ministerial action suddenly switched the site from a paddock, long planned to be capable of further development, to a picturesque but very constrained peninsula. The competition to design the building was so pressed that it was officially blackballed by the Institute of Architects, but it produced an Australian design of sufficient flair for controversy. Melbourne firm Ashton Raggatt McDougall infused their plans with cosmic rhetoric, subversive jokes and contemporary references, which were more prominent than functional exhibition galleries, but they fulfilled the unspoken requirement for a spectacular museum building. A large American design company was contracted to produce the complex internal installations and multimedia requisite for a museum of the third millennium. Content suggested by collections had been in the minds of curatorial staff for some years, and now had to be cast rapidly into exhibits shaped by what was


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taken to be accepted cultural policy in multiculturalism and Indigenous rights, expressed via current directions in academic and popular history. The large story of the National Museum’s galleries remained much as in the original threepart format proposed in 1975, now conceived as land, people and nation. Dawn Casey, the director in the seat at the time of opening, articulated the museum’s approach as a forum for ideas about being Australian: ‘We intend the Museum to speak with many voices, listen and respond to all, and promote debate and discussion about questions of diversity and identity’ (Casey 2001, 6). To academics and museum professionals, this seemed the very model of a modern national history museum. Curatorial staff were aware of the potential for criticism of interpretative cultural histories fed by new techniques of historiography, and anticipated contention in the Gallery of First Australians. But the ‘history wars’ between ‘black armband’ apologists and ‘white blindfold’ progressives had not yet moved from academe into the public sphere. First Australians: Gallery of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples dealt with the most sensitive subject for the NMA. The central plank of the gallery was that Indigenous cultures are distinct, resilient and here-and-now, as shown in the presence of Aboriginal people via a large investment in multimedia. Its presentation of the land rights issue was always going to be the acid test of its commitment to modern historiography and Indigenous cultural rights: the NMA made the case by invoking primal documents to show that the earliest European colonists were expected by the Crown and, indeed, expected themselves to negotiate with the native people for rights to land. At the same time, new trends in Aboriginal oral history and cultural mapping were interpreted in exhibits showing that murder and even massacre also played roles in the settlers’ struggle for the land. When the museum opened, there were rumbles of protest about calumny against pioneers and the say-so words of traditional knowledge, but there was also praise from Indigenous and white groups.

Figure 5.1 Gallery of First Australians, National Museum of Australia, 2001. Photograph: Brendan Bell. © National Museum of Australia 2001.

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NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AUSTRALIA NEW MUSEUMS

Nation: Symbols of Australia was the museum’s primary statement about the nature of Australian identity, and in an attempt to avoid perceived clichés, it was presented via symbols of power and popular culture. Thus exhibits on the symbolism of wool, gold, the World War I digger and transport construed as communication were as close to popular tropes of national history as the museum ventured. The theme of the backyard, ‘where Australians are most truly themselves’, drew on the recently confirmed iconic power of the Hills hoist and the Victa lawnmower, bestowed by the opening ceremony of the Sydney 2000 Olympics. ‘Nation’ also featured one of the most spectacular multimedia items in a hi-tech museum: a vast sequence of statistics, accounts and images projected on a very large map of the country. Visitors were surprised by the mixture, and a few were hostile. Horizons: The Peopling of Australia since 1788 constituted the museum’s offering on the big Australian story of immigration, beginning with Captain Cook’s discovery and moving rapidly onto the twentieth century. Horizons contained more narrative and chronology than the other galleries, and was liberal with personal case histories. The pressure of national inclusiveness was evident in the range of specimen stories: one from every state, representing men and women, Anglos and other ethnicities, early-day convicts to the most recent arrivals from Kosovo. More interesting was the gallery’s perspective on the ambivalence of immigration and of immigrants’ receptions – issues polarised by the Tampa affair in late 2001, just after the museum’s opening. Horizons turned out to bear the brunt of the formal criticism of the NMA made in the subsequent Carroll Review, for minimising the heroic dimension of the British founding fathers (National Museum of Australia Review Committee 2003). Tangled Destinies: Land and People in Australia expressed what used to be called ‘natural history’ – presented at the NMA through the lens of seeing and understanding the land. It produced a history of the natural history of Australia, tracing ideas about the environment and its plant and animal inhabitants over millennia of Indigenous occupation and two centuries of subsequent immigrant history. Many startling objects made the point that the European style of knowledge frequently and drastically misunderstood the Australian environment. By the time it was understood how old and fragile both landforms and human presence were, great damage had been done. Yet for better or worse, argued the exhibition, the invaders – human, animal, vegetable – became Australian too. The direction was grounded in an approach to objects and specimens as ideas made material rather than as artefacts pure and simple; the style pleased some but was called ‘over-intellectual’ by others. Eternity: Stories from the Emotional Heart of Australia was the most original gallery in the museum; it might be called a contemplation of the human condition through individual objects presented in the context of their owners’ emotional lives. It proposed ten emotions or affects, such as hope, joy and loneliness, each expressed five times by a single object belonging to an Australian or Australian-associated person, a few well-known, most unknown. The significance was not always clear to the visitor – how could it be? But all viewers possess objects that are precious for associations with special people or crucial places or defining moments in personal history, and visitors responded frankly with their own on-the-spot video accounts, which were added to the loops of visuals throughout.


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Figure 5.2 Eternity Gallery, National Museum of Australia, 2003 Photograph: George Serras. © National Museum of Australia 2001.

Public response about the content and depth of the museum’s offerings was (and has remained) overwhelmingly positive (National Museum of Australia 2006). But crucial elements of the museum’s governing council objected deeply to what they saw as a mockery of national achievement, and succeeded in launching a full-scale review of the exhibits, reporting in 2003. The resulting report surprised many by focusing its criticism less on the Indigenous culture gallery than on Nation, Horizons, and the natty multimedia theatre Circa, an orientation piece at the entry to the museum galleries. A consistent theme of critique was the absence of strong narrative stories, evidently underlaid by the primary author’s conviction of modern society’s need for inspiring myths (Carroll 2001). Museum staff responded with a revision document outlining a unifying theme of ‘place’, backed up by substantial acquisitions. Accepted by the council, the Federal Government laid out substantial new funding for collection growth and gallery redevelopment, unfurling in 2007–08.

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REFERENCES Carroll, John. 2001. The western dreaming: The western world is dying for want of a story. Pymble, New South Wales: HarperCollins. Casey, Dawn. 2001. ‘The National Museum of Australia: Exploring the past, illuminating the present and imagining the future’. In National museums: Negotiating histories: Conference proceedings, edited by McIntyre, Darryl; Wehner, Kirsten. Canberra: National Museum of Australia. Committee of Inquiry on Museums and National Collections. 1975. Museums in Australia 1975. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service. National Museum of Australia. 2006. ‘Likes (and dislikes) about the National Museum of Australia’. [Internet]. Accessed 9 June 2006. Available from: http://www.nma.gov.au/about_us/corporate_documents/evaluation_and_visitor_research/likes_and_disli kes/#row_4. National Museum of Australia Review Committee. 2003. ‘Review of the National Museum of Australia, its exhibitions and public programs’. [Internet]. Accessed 18 June 2006. Available from: http://www.nma.gov.au/about_us/corporate_documents/exhibitions_and_public_programs_review/review_re port/.

Cite this chapter as: Young, Linda. 2006. ‘National Museum of Australia’. South Pacific museums, edited by Healy, Chris; Witcomb, Andrea. Monash University ePress: Melbourne. pp. 5.1–5.5. DOI: 10.2104/spm06005.


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PLURALISM AND EXHIBITION PRACTICE AT THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AUSTRALIA Mathew Trinca, National Museum of Australia Mathew Trinca is a senior curator and head of Collections and Gallery Development at the National Museum of Australia. His research interests are in Australian cultural history and museology. Correspondence to Mathew Trinca: [email protected] Kirsten Wehner, National Museum of Australia Kirsten Wehner is a senior curator at the National Museum of Australia and a visual anthropologist, completing her doctorate through New York University on the development of the National Museum 1997–2001. Her research interests encompass the anthropology of history, cultural politics of representation, museological practice, and histories of film and photography. Correspondence to Kirsten Wehner: [email protected]

Growing recognition of the plural character of contemporary societies has underwritten significant changes in museum practice in recent years. Cultural institutions are now by and large sensitive to the differentiated nature of the communities in which they are located. In museums, a more nuanced and complex view of difference has led to improvements in outreach programs and public accessibility, and regard for the need to welcome groups formerly distant or disaffected from the museum. The collaborative, enduring partnerships between museums and Indigenous communities that have developed in recent decades are welcome examples of these changes. In this paper, we explore how the ‘new museology’ has influenced the history of the National Museum of Australia and the consequences of a recent, well-publicised review of the museum’s exhibitions and public programs. We then consider how contemporary museums have used a concept of ‘multiple voices’ or ‘multi-vocality’ to represent pluralist societies and advance social inclusion, and suggest some of the problems in such an approach, especially for a museum charged with exploring national meaning. In thinking about alternative approaches, we consider the museum exhibition as a performative space and draw on the concept of the flâneur as we refocus attention on visitor behaviour in galleries. We then outline how this approach might inform development at the National Museum of Australia of a new permanent gallery representing a general history of the nation.

THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AUSTRALIA The word ‘national’ was invoked rhetorically by colonial museums and galleries in Australia long before Federation in 1901.1 Notwithstanding these semantic flourishes, calls for a national museum began in earnest toward the end of the nineteenth century, and were initially defined by interests in natural history and biological sciences (Robin 2003). In almost every decade after that, until the National Museum of Australia (NMA) was established by legislation in 1980, arguments for a national museum were made and remade. Variously, there were calls for national museums of zoology, ethnology, entomology, botany and history. Some of these – particularly the energy which surrounded Sir Colin MacKenzie’s foundation of the Australian Institute of Anatomy in the 1920s – were founded on the high regard for the nation-building value of scientific knowledges.

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The National Museum of Australia may be the inheritor of MacKenzie’s collections, but its foundation is more concretely traced to the 1975 report of the Committee of Inquiry on Museums and National Collections, often known as the Pigott Report. The report – distinguished professors John Mulvaney and Geoffrey Blainey were key authors – called for the establishment of a Museum of Australia centred on three themes, loosely described as:

• Indigenous histories and cultures; • ‘European’ histories from 1788; and • Environmental histories of Australian places. (Committee of Inquiry on Museums and National Collections 1975, 70–71) As well as a sense of mission and optimism, the Pigott Report was remarkably prescient about the debates within which the ‘national museum’ would one day find itself. It recognised that a national purview was not easily defined, nor would its responsibilities be simply discharged. Infused with a palpable sense of moment, the report argued that: In defining the scope of a national museum we recommend that the phrase ‘national’ should be interpreted in a wide sense. The museum should portray, when appropriate, European and Asian and American influences on Australia’s human and natural history. Australia’s communications with the outside world should be an important theme in the museum (Committee of Inquiry on Museums and National Collections 1975, 73).

The committee was alert to the dangers of any narrow interpretation of the new museum’s role. Five years later enabling legislation – the National Museum of Australia Act 1980 – established the museum as an institutional entity, if not as a physical presence. Within the act, there was direction about the expected national ‘reach’ of the institution, and its responsibilities to reflect Australian history domestically and internationally. Specifically, the museum was also charged with building a collection of material culture to range over the breadth of national experience, which has become known formally as the National Historical Collection.

THE NEW MUSEOLOGY While the NMA began collecting actively in the early 1980s, successive governments dithered over the scale and site of its planned exhibition buildings. Imagined first at a western lakeside site and then at Yarramundi Reach, in Canberra, the museum’s main building was finally opened in 2001 on Acton Peninsula, closer to the city’s main civic centre. In the intervening years, however, the conceptual landscape for museums had shifted, with the academy and museum professionals defining new purpose and practice under the emerging rubric of the ‘new museology’. There are clear difficulties in precisely defining this field, once famously described by Peter Vergo as ‘a state of widespread dissatisfaction with the “old” museology’ (Vergo 1989, 3). Vergo’s line is glib, but does at least represent the critical sense that has underpinned theorising of the contemporary museum in recent decades. Some characteristics of this movement have clearly informed museum developments in this country – in common with those in other parts of the world – not least the NMA. Tony Bennett’s influential book The birth of the museum

PLURALISM AND EXHIBITION PRACTICE AT THE NMA NEW MUSEUMS

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deconstructed the cultural politics of the museum, revealing the authoritative, ideological intent springing from a sense of its social role. Bennett recognised that: the division between the hidden space of the museum in which knowledge is produced and organized and the public spaces in which it is offered for passive consumption produces a monologic discourse dominated by the authoritative cultural voice of the museum. To break this discourse down, it is imperative that the role of the curator be shifted away from that of the source of an expertise whose function is to organize a representation claiming the status of knowledge and towards that of the possessor of a technical competence whose function is to assist groups outside the museum to use its resources to make authored statements within it (Bennett 1995, 103–4).

Bennett’s arguments helped sustain the ‘new’ democratic mood in the contemporary museum, even though he was himself aware of the internal contradictions this posed (103n). If the museum was an ‘exhibitionary complex’ that expressed a powerful will to mould ideal citizens, then the answer in part seemed to be that it should adopt modes of practice that decentred an insistent authoritative voice. Such practices included bringing a greater range of perspectives and interests to the museum’s exhibition making. Following this lead, the NMA described its mission in terms that de-emphasised a singular authority, preferring instead to accent representational breadth, social inclusion and a textual reflexivity. Soon after opening the Acton building in 2001, then director Dawn Casey described the NMA as a ‘forum, a place for dialogue and debate… We intend the museum to speak with many voices, listen and respond to all, and promote debate and discussion about questions of diversity and identity’ (Casey 2001, 6, our emphasis). The exhibitions at the Acton site tended to emphasise a complex narrative that embraced multi-vocality and representational breadth. This many-voiced exhibition practice was designed not only to represent the ways in which people might hold different views of the past, but also to encourage diverse groups to locate themselves in the national story. By representing a selection of opinion or views about an event or condition, the museum was also striving to be sensitive to the contingent nature of historical truth.

THE REVIEW OF THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AUSTRALIA Soon after opening its doors at Acton in 2001, the NMA found itself caught in the crossfire of the history wars (Macintyre and Clark 2003). Largely fought over conflicting views of Australia’s frontier history, the combatants also raged over other themes in the broader historical record. In a sense, there was nothing new in this. From the nineteenth century, opposing interests have wrestled for the iconographic high ground in Australia – there have been intense debates between emancipists and exclusives, between labour and capital, between Irish and Anglo traditions, and between the left and right of Australian politics, among others. For many, it is this continuing contest for national meaning that itself exemplifies the nation’s healthy, robust civil society. It was in this oppositional climate that a panel of review of the NMA was appointed in January 2003. Chaired by Professor John Carroll, of La Trobe University, the panel included museum anthropologist Philip Jones, paleontologist Patricia Vickers-Rich and businessman

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Richard Longes. After a series of meetings with museum staff and external interests, and review of written submissions, the panel released its report in July 2003: Review of the National Museum of Australia: Its exhibitions and public programs (the Carroll Review). While it opened with a broad statement praising the ‘extraordinary achievement’ of the museum, the report went on to make substantial criticisms of its curatorial and exhibition practices. In particular it said much about the need for clearer narratives and storylines in the museum, and for iconic – what it called ‘numinous’ – artefacts to be included in its galleries (Commonwealth of Australia 2003, 42). The Carroll Review’s criticisms went to both the content and form of the NMA’s exhibitions. In terms of the museum’s representation of nation, it argued that the pre-eminent goal of the NMA was to tell the ‘Australian story’ by ‘means of generating consistent themes articulating objects, and thereby to inspire, to satisfy curiosity, to educate and to entertain’ (Commonwealth of Australia 2003, 12). It also made clear its concern that the museum should represent the ‘establishment of a notably stable, efficiently managed, prosperous democracy, with very low levels of institutional corruption, with relatively low social inequality and a largely inclusive ethos, which has integrated immigrant peoples from hundreds of other places with reasonable success’ (8). At the same time, the panel was keen to emphasise its divergence from Graeme Davison’s views that ‘rather than suppressing difference by imposing a single authorial voice… the NMA might better begin with the assumption that the imagined community we call the nation is by its very nature plural and in flux’ (Commonwealth of Australia 2003, 8). Instead of Davison’s support for ‘interpretative pluralism’, the Carroll Review emphasised a view that saw ‘more consensus than plurality at the core of the national collective conscience’ (8). The panel therefore set the future of the NMA within a clearly divided rhetorical contest over the character of the nation. It contrived a division between a consensual and plural view of the national community, and by implication contested the inclusive politics that lay at the heart of the new museology.

REPRESENTING AN INCLUSIVE SOCIETY Acknowledgment of the social role of museums dates back to the Enlightenment (HooperGreenhill 1989; Hooper-Greenhill 1992); what is different in the contemporary museum is the way in which that role has been construed. The new museology has tended to emphasise the capacity of museums to foster social inclusion through a specific representational politics (Karp et al. 1992; Newman and McLean 2002). By describing a representational breadth, commentators have argued, the museum creates opportunities for visitors to find themselves within a text, to feel a part – in the case of the NMA – of a national community. In common with counterparts overseas, contemporary Australian museums have recently delineated a role for themselves in building civic capacity and promoting social inclusion. In the United Kingdom, the National strategy for neighbourhood renewal, PAT 10: Arts and sport (2001) identified social inclusion as a priority for museums and other cultural institutions (Department of Culture, Media and Sport 2001). The American Association of Museums’ 2002 report Mastering civic engagement established a similar argument (Archibald 2002, 3; see also Sandell 2002 and Gaither 2004, 111). In the aftermath of the Carroll Review at the NMA in 2003, the profession’s peak body, Museums Australia, contended that:


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policies of social inclusion have become the mandate for museums as we enter the 21st century… Fundamental to the realisation of social inclusion in museums is the presentation of stories highlighting the diversity of a nation’s population, a nation’s history from the multiple viewpoints of its citizens and the celebration of people from all walks of life, all stations, all creeds (Scott 2003).

This argument of an expanded social role, emphasising an inclusive representational frame achieved through the ‘multiple voices’ featured in exhibitions, underpinned professional practice at the NMA through the 1990s, and through the project development of its exhibition space at Acton. The museum’s permanent galleries included objects that ranged from the everyday to the iconic, and which attempted to represent the practical reality of Australia’s pluralist society. It also chose to avoid simplistic attempts to settle hoary questions of national identity, preferring to depict the nation as the sum of its parts through serried perspectives represented in its exhibitions. Furthermore, the museum adopted a playful tone, juxtaposing contrary views of historical events and consciously using irony and satire in its permanent galleries. This approach, however, is not without its problems. Arguing the value of the NMA in such instrumental terms – as an agent of social cohesion – is based on problematic idealisations of what constitutes an inclusive community. After all, the discourse of social inclusion itself has critics: opponents on the left challenge that a socially inclusive society subsumes difference rather than respects it; while the right is sceptical about prospects for collective transformations of this kind. Both criticisms reveal the difficulty in abstracting community and civic values as social goods. Moreover, the representation of difference in exhibitions cannot of itself discharge the museum’s responsibilities to a plural Australian community (Bennett 1995, 102–103). It tends to obscure the enduring reality of a conscious and insistent curatorial authority in exhibition making. The selection of perspectives represented in any exhibition – even those that include several voices – must ultimately be revealed as limited and partial. While this may be an understandable function of the museum’s spatial and textual constraints, it is still galling to visitors whose expectations are formed by institutional claims to representational breadth. An example of this was seen in the NMA’s gallery devoted to immigration, Horizons, in which the presentation of stories from several ethnic groups provoked complaints from others who felt they had been omitted. In these terms, the museum’s attempts to represent ethnic diversity through ‘multiple voices’ drew attention to its limited range, rather than promoting a sense of an inclusive society. Inevitably, the museum is forced to admit that it simply cannot mimic the differentiated nature of the national community in its exhibitions. At the same time, there are problems with the museum abstracting multi-vocality to represent the deeper and far-reaching complexities of a plural, differentiated community. The presentation of different voices in a museum display may create a sense of textual equivalence that misrepresents the actual relations of power in a given historical moment. For example, displaying nineteenthcentury English, Irish and Chinese experiences of religious practice may say something about the breadth of spiritual devotion in colonial Australia, but little about the differentiated quality of social relations between these groups. While it may be laudable to use these perspectives to represent religious diversity – and support a concomitant argument about a plural social realm – the precise historical conditions that gave rise to these experiences tend to fade from view.

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Untethered from precise historical conditions, such voices lose potency and communicative strength, and begin to appear as banal examples of a contemporary imperative, rather than as personal perspectives on the past. This poses a dilemma for a museum facing community expectations to reflect, perhaps even define, national meaning or self-understanding. In relying on ‘multiple voices’ to represent the varied character of contemporary society, museums have sometimes obscured shared historical meanings or occluded the specificity of past conditions. The discursive tactic of defining the national community through many voices runs the risk of misrepresenting the record of experiences that are broadly felt, or sentiments that are expressed collectively, across the nation. Perhaps museums should heed Stephen Weil’s caution: Museums might also be more modest about the extent to which they have the capability to remedy the ills of the communities in which they are embedded. We live, all of us, in a society of startling inequalities, a society that has badly failed to achieve community, and a society that seems determined to lay waste to the planet that is its sole source of support. Museums neither caused these ills nor – except by calling attention to them – have it within their power alone to do very much to cure them (Weil 1995, xvi).

The attempts of contemporary museums to address plural interests through including multiple voices in exhibitions have therefore brought us to something of an impasse. We can neither detail the representational range needed to truly reflect plural societies, nor escape the tendency for such exhibitions to reduce difference to an abstract signifier of nation. One way to respond to this might be to re-examine the particular environment of the museum exhibition and the subjective experience of visitors within it, and better understand the exhibition as a performative space. In doing this, we can look to continuities in exhibition practice and visitor behaviour between the ‘old’ and ‘new’ museums. The durability of nineteenth-century museum forms and experiences in contemporary museums should be kept in mind as one considers the specific changes wrought by more recent theoretical perspectives (Witcomb 2003, 18–26). The nineteenth-century museum, and the display impulses that emerged from successive public exhibitions of the fruits of industrialism in the course of that century, was strongly informed by a deliberate, educative zeal (Bennett 1995, 59–88). The ‘new museology’ has striven to unpack and reveal this authoritative intent, and replace it with arguments for greater democracy and social inclusion in the museum. Both these perspectives reconfirm a vision of the museum exhibition as a rational mechanism charged with an important social role. Even the recent growth in visitor evaluation, part of the contemporary museum’s new-found interest in audiences, proceeds in similarly instrumental terms.

EXHIBITION ENVIRONMENTS A journey through the galleries of the NMA instructs us in the chaotic sociality of exhibition spaces: school groups move as noisy packs harvesting information, older couples read labels intently, a cleaner pauses to gaze at a display, a father discusses the workings of a car with his son and young families chat with museum hosts over a touch trolley. There is little sense of ordered


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progression in the galleries. Visitors wander and talk, creating their own routes, generating meanings and narratives as they find ways through the exhibition spaces. The fluidity and complexity of visitor behaviour in exhibition galleries reminds us of the continuities between museum exhibitions and other public arenas of display, such as international fairs, department stores and city streets. As Andrea Witcomb argues, the museum emerging in the nineteenth century developed a distinct institutional identity but was also part of a broader field of cultural practice that incorporated these more populist sites of representation and recreation. These institutions were joined in producing a modern urban cosmopolitanism – a sensibility centred on the crowded city street in which wanderers might discover and consume representations of the world in miniature (Witcomb 2003, 18n). This cosmopolitanism was largely grounded in popular culture, in experiences of pleasure and curiosity, rather than in higher culture values of rational and moral improvement. This history of the museum emphasises the agency of ‘visitors’ in creating meanings as they walk through and between displays. From this perspective it may be more appropriate to think of the museum visitor not as a ‘reader’ consuming a text external to themselves, but rather as an embodied ‘performer’ who makes the museum text as he or she moves through an exhibition. We might consider the museum as an inhabited landscape, such as the city or the department store, and the museum visitor as a relative of the flâneur.2 The flâneur is a key figure in theorising modern urbanism. At first, as he is defined in the work of Charles Baudelaire and the later commentary of Walter Benjamin, the flâneur is tied to a specific time and place: nineteenth-century Paris. As Baudelaire described him, the flâneur was a gentleman of leisure, a solitary figure who wanders the city streets, taking up residence in the windows of coffee shops where he can watch the world go by. The flâneur was both a detached observer of the complex world around him and a person looking for contact with and even immersion in the crowd. Baudelaire wrote: The crowd is his domain, just as the air is the bird’s and water that of the fish. His passion and his profession is to merge with the crowd. For the perfect idler, for the passionate observer it becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite. To be away at home and yet to feel at home anywhere (Baudelaire 1972, 399; cited in Solnit 2000, 199).

The flâneur seeks out contact with the city crowds in order to realise his own existential self, his identity defined and developed through his collection and interpretation of encounters with strangers and places in the street. Later writers have considered the flâneur as a more abstract figure, an emblem for the experience of living in the city that may encompass people other than the white, upper-middle-class male of the nineteenth century.3 The flâneur emerges as a figure defined by practices of walking through inhabited public spaces, by activities of observing and deciphering the spatial environment, who produces narratives that explicate the world encountered in wandering (Frisby 1994, 82–83). The flâneur, moreover, is defined by a certain attitude towards the world through which he or she moves. As Tester (1994a) argues, flânerie as described by Baudelaire and Benjamin is an idle activity, a considered strolling that delights in a lack of direction and an absence of destina-

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tions. The flâneur gazes around at a mysterious world, his or her curiosity stimulated by the possibility of discovering the unknown. In a sense, the flâneur is a private detective, but a detective who searches for experience to fuel his own sense of self (Frisby 1994, 83). The figure of the flâneur does not map completely to the museum visitor – for one thing, the flâneur is essentially solitary while many visitors encounter the museum as part of a group – but the flâneur nevertheless powerfully suggests how subjecthood is produced as people move through, observe and engage with socialised spaces. The flâneur insists that we understand exhibitions not as texts to be read through analysis, but rather as environments in which meanings are made as visitors subjectively interpret what and who they encounter. The exhibition as a space for wandering has long preoccupied museum professionals interested in understanding visitor behaviour and learning. As George Hein describes, the earliest known observation of visitors in a museum sought to categorise them according to how they moved through the exhibition. Hein cites an appealing French study of visitors to a natural history museum, which classified visitors as: Ants, who moved methodically from object to object; Butterflies, who moved back and forth among the exhibits, alighting on some displays; Grasshoppers, who chose specific objects and ‘hopped’ from one to another; and Fish, who glided in and out of the exhibition with few stops (Hein 1998, 105).

The highly individual nature of exhibition visitation has often been perceived as a problem, particularly by educators embracing behaviourist models of learning. If everybody is wandering about on their own path, how can the museum ensure visitors ‘receive’ the messages it is trying to communicate? Anxiety about visitors’ propensity for wandering has often been expressed through debates over the kinds of historical narratives realised in museums. Exhibitions that don’t organise visitors to encounter displays in a certain order, that lack a linear narrative, are seen to confuse rather than enlighten and educate. This criticism was directly expressed by the Carroll Review, which described the museum’s displays as ‘fragmentary’ and argued that the distribution of themes across multiple galleries would mean that “all but the most conscientious visitor” would fail to connect them in a coherent narrative (Commonwealth of Australia 2003, 13). For the panel, visitors’ failure to share a single experience of the exhibits meant that the museum was failing in its educative role.4 If we think of museum visitors as related to the flâneur, however, the different paths they take through the museum become less a problem and more a possibility. The flâneur directs attention to how all museum visitors experience exhibitions as embodied encounters with ideas. Seeking greater awareness and understanding of personal subjectivity through encounters with others, the flâneur wanders the city. The flâneur wants to both recognise his or her own differences from and connections with others, seeking out encounters that address his or her own subjectivity. In the same way, we can think of museum visitors moving through exhibitions, comparing and contrasting their own experience to that evoked or represented by what they see. Visitors


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make meaning as their own subjectivity is thrown into relief by their engagement with the exhibition. Hence, enabling visitors to determine the circumstances of their exhibition encounter – rather than simply representing multiple voices – opens up a suite of possible meanings that are literally ‘brought to life’ by them. This encourages us to think of museum exhibitions as performative environments in which meaning or understanding is created through engagements between visitors, objects displayed and spatial environments. What is important in understanding how meaning is created in exhibitions is not so much an analysis of the ‘type’ of visitors, but rather the subjectivity they bring to the museum. Visitors are not external to the exhibition text in this conception of museological practice, but rather an integral part of it. This concept of meaning making in the museum resonates with a number of areas of contemporary scholarship. Constructivist learning theory, as Eilean Hooper-Greenhill describes, emphasises that knowledge is produced in the museum through visitors’ active interpretations of their exhibition experiences. Meaning is constructed through relationships between the active interpreters, the objects they encounter, and their experience of them (Hooper-Greenhill 1999, 4). Hooper-Greenhill argues that the nature of these relationships depends on, first, the prior knowledge visitors bring to the museum that helps them make sense of an object, and, second, the cultural competencies or interpretive strategies they have at their disposal. Researchers within this tradition have begun to describe museum visitors in terms of ‘interpretive communities’ whose members share ‘common frameworks of intelligibility, interpretive repertoires, knowledge and intellectual skills’ (Hooper-Greenhill 2000, 12). As Hooper-Greenhill states, the significance of the concept of interpretive communities comes from the way in which it acknowledges that ‘although each individual actively makes sense of their own experience, the interpretive strategies and repertoires they use emerge through prior social and cultural events’ (122). Constructivist learning frameworks remind us that visitors are not atomistic individuals, but rather people who engage the museum through (partially) shared cultural understandings. The figure of the flâneur importantly reminds us that these shared understandings are not simply practices of reason. Constructivist theories tend to consider the museum visitor as a ‘learner’ – a seeker of rational enlightenment – and to characterise the museum visit as primarily a cognitive and intellectual encounter. In contrast, the flâneur – with his or her walking, wandering and interest in idleness and pleasure – powerfully invites us to understand museum visiting as an embodied, subjective experience. Attending to the embodied quality of museum visiting opens up analyses of meaning making in exhibitions to respond to the roles of ‘feeling’ – in the senses of both emotional engagement and haptic and kinesthetic responses to the environment. Emotions constitute the means through which people evaluate sensory perceptions, identifying their relevance and shaping reactions appropriately (see Csordas 1994; Lyon and Barbalet 1994). They consequently play a crucial part in visitors’ experiences within exhibitions. As Kit Messham-Muir (2006) has recently pointed out, emotional response is closely tied to the spatial dynamics of exhibition spaces. Our perceptions of objects – for example, whether we observe them from above, or feel dwarfed by them, or have to peer inside a tiny, hidden case to see them – powerfully shape our understandings of those objects and consequently the meanings we make within exhibitions.

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In museological scholarship, emotional, sensory and kinesthetic reactions have traditionally been understood as phenomena beyond analysis. They are seen to be highly individual, essentially different from the shared cultural frameworks visitors bring to exhibitions.5 Museum professionals have consequently tended to argue for their importance only in instrumental terms, seeing them as primarily provocations or catalysts for critical inquiry. As Messham-Muir argues, following art theorist Jill Bennett (2005), ‘When museums present their objects in ways that allow them to communicate not only cognitively, but affectively – that allow objects to be ‘felt’ as well as ‘read’ – they draw visitors to the conceptual and analytical via the sensory and experienced’ (Messham-Muir 2006, 5). The figure of the flâneur insists, however, that we should see ‘feeling’ not simply as a means to an end, a mechanism to persuade visitors to rational learning, but as an end in itself. The flâneur suggests that ‘feeling’ – embodied engagement with the world – is itself a form of knowledge integral to the formation of the subject. For the flâneur gains knowledge and produces him or herself through the practice of flânerie – the acts of walking, of encountering others in the crowd, of finding a way through the city streets, of sitting on park benches and sheltering under trees, of, in short, gaining an embodied understanding of the material realities of others’ lives – as well as through the practice of reflecting on his or her walking, observing and collecting. The complexity of flânerie reminds us that analytical inquiry and intellectual understanding are only two of many activities in which visitors may be engaging in exhibitions. Museum visitors, like the flâneur, may equally be searching for titillation, taking pleasure in seeing new people and in being seen by new people, seeking solitude and anonymity, enjoying the company of friends, avoiding work or pursuing the satisfaction of demonstrating known information. Museum visitors arguably engage exhibition displays through multiple contexts, and pleasure may be as important as intellectual profit to understanding how visitors produce meaning in museums. The figure of the flâneur reminds us that any account of the shared understandings visitors bring to the museum must be joined by a nuanced understanding of the processes through which individuals produce and reproduce their own subjectivities in encounters with the world. Conceptualising museum exhibitions as performative environments prioritises the active meaning-making role of the visitor. This suggests that the question we should be asking, in regard to addressing pluralism, is how visitors are enabled to ‘perform’ difference through their encounter with objects and ideas in the museum, rather than relying exclusively on multiple voices in an exhibition. How can we build an exhibition that heightens visitors’ sense of the specificity and commonalities of their own experience and that of others? Put another way, how can we encourage visitors to be aware of their own subjectivity, and build an understanding of pluralism through comparing their experience with that of others?

A NEW GALLERY AT THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AUSTRALIA Recent scholarship that examines histories of place and environment emphasises the ‘located’ character of Australian experience. The work of Tom Griffiths, Peter Read, Tim Bonyhady, Libby Robin and Jay Arthur, among others, encourages the NMA to describe a national reach through located histories, rather than defining or representing a national type or identity. In a 2003 paper in the Griffith Review, Mark McKenna discussed inclusion of a reference to the nation’s territory, or ‘land’, in any new preamble to the Australian Constitution. He wrote


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that ‘By emphasizing the centrality of the land to any new constitutional preamble, perhaps nonAboriginal Australians are also wishing to end the sense of alienation and exile that is embedded within their colonial experience. Home is no longer elsewhere. The mother country is here’ (McKenna 2003, 192). McKenna suggests a way in which cultural landscapes inform our selfunderstanding as a community. A focus on place also helps reveal the layered historical meanings of landscapes and acknowledges the museum’s obligation to include Indigenous and non-Indigenous histories in representing the past. Integrating a focus on place with an ethnographic approach to historical events helps detail the circumstances of change and continuity in the historical record. Moreover, it reinserts place as an active presence, or ‘character’, in the past and acknowledges the temporal and geographical specificity of encounters between peoples, places and ideas. Ethnographic history encourages close examination of particular experiences in their time and place.6 This approach builds a complex relationship between the ‘ethnography of the historical moment’ set against the continuity of cultural landscapes. It can promote care and precision in representing the past, without losing a sense of historical continuities between experiences in different times and places. It also informs the practice of history in the contemporary museum, which depends on material culture to evoke people’s lives in the past. Ethnographic history’s emphasis on event and context resonates with the common curatorial practice of investigating an object’s specific meaning within a broader historical frame. The suggestion then is for the new gallery at the NMA to describe a continental reach to the national story, exploring continuities in the historical record with a precision and care for particular experiences in the past. Such an approach allows for connections to be drawn between common experiences in different places, including those geographically distant from each other. We imagine that visitors will bring their own perspective to the precisely located histories in the gallery. They will be able to reflect on the differences between their own experiences and those represented in the exhibition. Rather than responding to an abstract concept of the national community, they may explore differentiated experience of common themes and draw their conclusions about what constitutes a national biography. This approach offers alternative interpretive opportunities compared with that of describing the national community as the sum of multiple voices. In the latter approach, people’s stories can become dislocated from historical circumstances and abstracted to stand as emblems of nation. Further, such an approach describes an equivalence of difference in the nation’s life, which misrepresents actual social conditions. In contrast, we argue for connecting object and place to provoke visitors’ awareness of their own subjectivity in the physical and conceptual space of the exhibition, allowing pluralism to be ‘performed’ rather than represented.

CONCLUSION The Carroll Review has stimulated thinking about how the museum might represent Australian history in its galleries. In response to both the review and visitor feedback, which suggests difficulties with a complex layering of voices in exhibitions, the museum is now looking at how exhibition practice might move beyond simple oppositions between pluralist and consensual views of nation. We have found that the new museology offers limited help in this regard, and argue here that the discourse has reached something of a cul-de-sac. The new museology emphasises

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breadth in representational practice – the inclusion of diverse peoples, perspectives and experiences – yet this asserts an ideal that is impossible for any museum to realise. Multi-vocal exhibitions also run the risk of reducing difference to an abstract signifier of a plural society or nation, rather than representing the actual relations of power in a given historical moment. We want to look beyond this instrumentalism, with its roots deep in the early history of the museum, and consider instead the performative, subjective aspects of visitors making their own histories in space. In keeping with that, we have turned to an archetype of subjective experience, the flâneur, variously located in the nineteenth-century city and the public exhibition. Imagining the flâneur helps reposition the subject as an active, creative and self-conscious agent in the interpretive space of the museum. The self-consciousness of the flâneur, of the idling gaze that seeks to be seen as much as see, recalls the performance of the museum visit and a sense of the exhibition as a socialised space. While it is not a simple analogy of the museum visitor, the flâneur suggests the highly subjective and volatile nature of visitors in the spaces of the museum, and refocuses our efforts in trying to redetermine a more open, truly democratic – rather than demotic – exhibition practice. It also resists glib restatements of the museum’s mission as the socialising of idealised citizen-subjects. We have also briefly outlined proposals for a new gallery at the NMA that seek to include histories that are more precisely located in place and time, rather than attempting to display the entire field of pluralist views. This is not to deny the virtues of properly articulating the reality that Australian nationhood is characterised by difference, but rather to describe opportunities for visitors to bring their own subjectivities to the performance of pluralism in the exhibition. To that end, this paper suggests a series of questions for further research into understanding what might be called performative pluralism in historical exhibitions. First, we consider more work is needed to develop a phenomenology of visitor experience in exhibitions, drawing on ethnographic analyses of audiences. Second, we think that more detailed understanding of the life histories of objects, and the nature of objecthood, driven by the renaissance in material culture studies in recent years, will help develop a sense of the breadth of readings possible in the exhibition (Appadurai 1986). Third, investigation of the architectures of display, focusing on the relationships between physical elements that comprise the exhibition furniture and related installations will deepen our sense of the interpretive differences between the museum exhibition and other media of historical knowledges (MacLeod 2005). Inasmuch as we have reached an impasse in understanding the relationship between the museum exhibition and cultural function, these studies seek to refocus this question in terms that are sensitive to the volatility of visitors’ agency in exhibitions. Taken altogether, they present the possibility that new exhibition practices may re-inform theorisations of the contemporary museum and its social role, and deepen an understanding of the museum and its relationship to public space.


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ENDNOTES 1

The views expressed by the authors in this paper are their own and not necessarily those of the National Museum of Australia.

2

Similarities between the museum visitor and the flâneur are identified by Witcomb (2003, 20–21) and Storrie (2006, 18n).

3

See Tester (1994b) for a collection of essays exploring different constructions of the flâneur.

4

See Witcomb (2003, 144n) for a discussion of a similar debate over historical narrative in the exhibitions of the Australian National Maritime Museum.

5

This understanding is sharply contested by much recent scholarship in the anthropology, history and sociology of embodiment, emotion and the senses. This work emphasises the social construction of the body, subjectivity, emotional systems and sensoria, and seeks to describe how these vary across different cultures and historical periods. See Csordas (1990), Csordas (1994), Featherstone et al. (1991) and Howes (2003).

6

For examples of this approach see Dening (1992), Isaac (1982) and Clendinnen (2003).

REFERENCES Appadurai, A. 1986. The social life of things. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Archibald, R. 2002. Mastering civic engagement: A challenge to museums. Washington: American Association of Museums. Baudelaire, C. 1972. ‘The painter of modern life’ [1863]. In Selected writings on art and artists. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press. Bennett, J. 2005. Empathic vision: Affect, trauma and contemporary art. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Bennett, T. 1995. The birth of the museum. London: Routledge. Casey, D. 2001. ‘The National Museum of Australia: Exploring the past, illuminating the present and imagining the future’. In National museums: Negotiating histories, edited by McIntyre, D.; Wehner, K. Canberra: National Museum of Australia. Clendinnen, I. 2003. Dancing with strangers. Melbourne: Text Publishing. Committee of Inquiry on Museums and National Collections. 1975. Museums in Australia 1975: Report of the Committee of Inquiry on Museums and National Collections including the report of the Planning Committee on the Gallery of Aboriginal Australia. Canberra: AGPS. Commonwealth of Australia. 2003. Review of the National Museum of Australia: Its exhibitions and public programs. Canberra: Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts. Csordas, T. 1990. ‘Embodiment as a paradigm for anthropology’. Ethos 18: 5–47. Csordas, T. 1994. ‘Introduction: The body as representation and being-in-the-world’. In Embodiment and experience: The existential ground of culture and self, edited by Csordas, T. J. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dening, G. 1992. Mr Bligh’s bad language: Passion, power and theatre on the Bounty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Department of Culture, Media and Sport, Government of the United Kingdom. 2001. National strategy for neighbourhood renewal, PAT 10: Arts and sport. London: UK Government. Accessed 20 June 2006. Available from: http://www.neighbourhood.gov.uk/publications.asp?did=322. Featherstone, M.; Hepworth, M; Turner, B. S., editors. 1991. The body: Social process and cultural theory. London: Sage Publications. Frisby, D. 1994. ‘The flâneur in social theory’. In The flâneur, edited by Tester, F. London and New York: Routledge.

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Gaither, E. B. 2004. ‘“Hey! That’s mine”: Thoughts on pluralism and American museums’. In Reinventing the museum: Historical and contemporary perspectives on the paradigm shift, edited by Anderson, G. Walnut Creek California: AltaMira Press. Hein, G. 1998. Learning in the museum. London and New York: Routledge. Hooper-Greenhill, E. 1989. ‘The museum in the disciplinary society’. In Museum studies in material culture, edited by Pearce, J. Leicester: Leicester University Press. Hooper-Greenhill, E. 1992. Museums and the shaping of knowledge. London: Routledge. Hooper-Greenhill, E. 1999. ‘Museums and interpretive communities’. Paper presented at Musing on Learning seminar. 20 April; Australian Museum, Sydney. Accessed 20 June 2006. Available from: http://www.amonline.net.au/amarc/pdf/research/paper2.pdf. Hooper-Greenhill, E. 2000. Museums and the interpretation of visual culture. London and New York: Routledge. Howes, D. 2003. Sensual relations: Engaging the senses in culture and social theory. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Isaac, R. 1982. The transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Karp, I.; Kreamer, C. M.; Lavine, S. 1992. Museums and communities: The politics of public culture. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Lyon, M. L.; Barbalet, J. M. 1994. ‘Society’s body: Emotion and the “somatization” of social theory’. In Embodiment and experience: The existential ground of culture and self, edited by Csordas, T. J. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Macintyre, S.; Clark, A. 2003. The history wars. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. MacLeod, S., editor. 2005. Reshaping museum space: Architecture, design, exhibitions. Melbourne: Routledge. McKenna, M. 2003. ‘Poetics of place’. Griffith Review 1 (2): 187–194. Messham-Muir, K. 2006. ‘Body hits: The dynamics of kinespherics and interpretation in current museum displays’. Paper presented at Exploring Dynamics: Cities, Cultural Spaces, Communities conference. May; Brisbane. Accessed 19 June 2006. Available from: http://www.museumsaustralia.org.au/dbdoc/Conf%2006%20Messham-Muir%20Concurrent.pdf. Newman, A.; McLean, F. 2002. ‘Architectures of inclusion: Museums, galleries and inclusive communities’. In Museums, society, inequality, edited by R. Sandell. London: Routledge. Robin, L. 2003. ‘Collections and the nation: Science, history and the National Museum of Australia’. Historical Records of Australian Science 14 (3): 251–289. Sandell, R., editor. 2002. Museums, society, inequality. London: Routledge. Scott, C. 2003. Submission to the Review Secretariat, Department of Communication, Information, Technology and Arts. 3 March. Accessed 20 June 2006. Available from: http://www.nma.gov.au/libraries/attachments/review/review_submissions/museums_australia/files/11 8/Museums_Australia.pdf. Solnit, R. 2000. Wanderlust: A history of walking. New York: Penguin Books. Storrie, C. 2006. The delirious museum: A journey from the Louvre to Las Vegas. London: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd. Tester, F. 1994a. Introduction to The flâneur. London and New York: Routledge. Tester, F., editor. 1994b. The flâneur. London and New York: Routledge. Vergo, P. 1989. Introduction to The new museology, edited by Vergo, P. London: Reaktion. Weil, S. 1995. A cabinet of curiosities: Inquiries into museums and their prospects, Washington: Smithsonian Press. Witcomb, A. 2003. Re-imagining the museum: Beyond the mausoleum. London: Routledge.

Cite this chapter as: Trinca, Mathew; Wehner, Kirsten. 2006. ‘Pluralism and exhibition practice at the National Museum of Australia’. South Pacific museums, edited by Healy, Chris; Witcomb, Andrea. Monash University ePress: Melbourne. pp. 6.1–6.14. DOI: 10.2104/spm06006.


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MELBOURNE MUSEUM Ian McShane, Swinburne University of Technology Ian McShane has a background as a curator and heritage consultant and has published in the areas of history, museology and public policy. He is currently completing a doctoral thesis on aspects of the history and policy of civic infrastructure.

The opening of the Melbourne Museum in 2000 marked the end of a period in which the thematics, locations and corporate arrangements of Victoria’s nineteenth-century state museums were thoroughly overhauled. While the provocative siting and expressive architecture of the Melbourne Museum are emblematic of the political style of state premier Jeffrey Kennett, who led a Liberal (conservative) government from 1992 to 1999, the merging of colonial museums of natural sciences and technology to form the Museum of Victoria in 1983 provides a necessary point of reference for the Melbourne Museum project. The Museum of Victoria was a response to intellectual challenges posed by social history, postcolonialism and environmentalism, as well as practical problems associated with poor accommodation and visitor experience at the library–museum complex in Swanston Street in Melbourne’s CBD. A thematic structure of science and technology, natural sciences, indigenous studies and social history undergirded the new entity and the first social history curatorial appointments made. The development of The Story of Victoria, an exhibition that wove together the state’s natural and human history, signalled new, more inclusive museum narratives. Planned building development on a site adjacent to the existing Swanston Street complex was thwarted by heritage considerations and dwindling political support. Heritage management dilemmas, though, offered an alternative solution. Abandoning plans for a single building, director Robert Edwards (1984–1990) proposed a Smithsonian-style campus model. The first component, Scienceworks, opened in 1992 on the site of a disused pumping station on the Yarra River in Melbourne’s industrial western suburbs. In 1998 a second campus, the Immigration and Hellenic Antiquities Museum (the latter, a personal interest of Premier Kennett) opened in a former customs building on the southern fringe of the city. New possibilities for museums to combine education, entertainment and tourism engaged the interest of planning and finance bureaucracies during the 1980s, and the state government included a museum in its plans for a cultural, residential and business precinct on the south bank of the Yarra River (Dovey 2005). However, political fallout from the economic recession in the late 1980s and burgeoning public debt following the crash of a state government bank brought defeat of the state Labor government. While incoming Premier Kennett was eager to politically distance his government from its predecessor, he built on its strategy of major project development through public–private partnerships. He abandoned the skeletal framework of the Southbank museum to a convention centre and, financed by gaming tax revenue from the new Crown Casino, selected a new site in a public reserve in the suburb of Carlton, on the northern fringe of the CBD. The choice of the site was rich with symbolism. It was adjacent to the Royal Exhibition Building (REB), built for the Melbourne International Exhibition of 1880–81, an artefact of the gold-rush prosperity and brittle confidence of the city described by contemporaries as Marvellous Melbourne.

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Melbourne architects Denton Corker Marshall (DCM)’s winning entry in the 1994 museum design competition paired Melbourne’s nineteenth-century exhibition infrastructure with a dramatic twenty-first century variant. DCM’s building runs along the same east-west axis as REB, creating an expansive and somewhat desolate plaza between. The internal configuration of Melbourne Museum gestures towards REB’s central circulatory spine (as well, perhaps, as surveyor Robert Hoddle’s grid plan for Melbourne), but there the similarity ends. The rectilinear form of the DCM design is punctuated by an angular ‘blade’ soaring above the Forest Gallery, an ecological exhibition in the building centre that recalls earlier plans for Southbank. A dedicated children’s museum on the building’s western side imitates a Rubik’s cube, its angular, tumbling appearance a motif for other structural elements expressed out of the building’s core. Relocation of the site from Southbank to Exhibition Gardens contributed to a persistent Melbourne narrative of the alienation of public open space. Residents of the surrounding suburb of Carlton maintained a vigorous campaign against both the site and the DCM design, achieving partial success with a reduction of the length of the blade cantilevering over the Forest Gallery. However, the merits of arguments against juxtaposing the museum building with REB were undercut by a history of unsympathetic additions to the latter and the use of its curtilage for car parking. Ironically, in 2004 REB and its gardens became the first non-Indigenous cultural site in Australia to be inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List. The initial public encounter with Melbourne Museum’s interior is a view through a glass wall of staff offices on upper levels of the building, a common feature of late-twentieth-century museums that fuses democratic and disciplinary instincts. The interior design, with circulation corridors running past the galleries along the building’s length, gives exemplary attention to visitor orientation but reinforces thematic divisions that evoke earlier institutional and intellectual histories: the natural sciences and human history sections are separated by the forest, where the two co-mingle. Carolyn Rasmussen’s outline of the museum’s program development suggests that the strong interpretive and authorial intent of curatorial staff was pulled back by Museum Board of Victoria chairman Professor David Pennington’s injunction to focus on ‘core knowledge’, at least in the natural sciences galleries (Rasmussen 2001, 390). However, neither the Science and Life and Mind and Body galleries sermonise; their emphasis falls towards critical inquiry and constructivist learning theory in object-rich environments. A reflexive thread runs through the natural science galleries (admittedly, an imperfect title given the range of the displays), with early collections placed in their intellectual and institutional contexts. Indeed, museum stories emerge as some of the most engaging: the anti-evolutionary convictions that shaped foundation director Frederick McCoy’s display of gorillas, and curator William Blandowski’s unflattering comparison of new fish species to museum board members are but two. The Mind and Body gallery benefits from the concentration of publicly funded research in Melbourne, particularly in the biomedical field. Equipment from Commonwealth Serum Laboratories highlights its pioneering research into vaccines and antivenoms; a more adventurous interpretation might extend the theme to discussion of the consequences for our intellectual ‘commons’ of widespread commercialisation and privatisation. Side-by-side displays of ‘virtual reality’ visual technology and the 1949 CSIRAC computer – the world’s fourth resident memory computer – suggest the hazards of museums attempting to match the world of commercial entertainment rather than concentrating on their strengths in authenticity. The aesthetic and educational richness provided by the room-sized CSIRAC is unmatched by the passive cinematic

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experience offered by the ‘virtual room’. A soaring space on the northern wall of these galleries accommodates megafauna collections and a richly detailed exhibition on evolution. The eastern side of the building houses the indigenous and social history galleries: Bunjilaka (discussed elsewhere in this volume), Te Vainui o Pasifika and Australia Gallery. Te Pasifika displays water craft from Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia, its narrative of indigenous exploration and trade given added context by criticism of the National Museum of Australia’s lack of attention to early British seafaring and mercantilism (Commonwealth of Australia 2003). Australia Gallery’s title points to a wider problem for the major Australian museums in finding an appropriate narrative structure and range for their social history programs. Australia Gallery is probably the least resolved of the Melbourne Museum galleries, in both content and design terms. Each vignette of the entry display Windows onto Victoria: Eight Moments in Victoria’s History is interesting, but the display is unconvincing as an ensemble approach to the state’s history. Melbourne: Stories from a City is richer in contextual detail, and, together with displays on Melbourne industry, working life and sport (confined to football and cricket), underscores the point that Australia Gallery is largely focused on Melbourne’s urban history. Intangible heritage is given welcome space through the treatment of schoolyard chants; suburban experience is less satisfactorily approached through a set from the Melbourne-based soap opera Neighbours. Both installations are heavily graffitied by visitors fulfilling their brief to contribute to the schoolyard exhibit. Australia Gallery also houses the Melbourne shrine to the famous New Zealand-born racehorse Phar Lap – its relics are spread across three Australasian museums. The interpretation of ‘Big Red’s’ popularity is aided by discussion of the development of broadcast media and the uplift of sporting success during the inter-war depression. Finally, a small community collections area in this gallery continues the trend of Australian museums towards provision of spaces that invert the conventional relationship between museum staff and audience, with wall panels of previous exhibitions closing off questions about the even-handed use of this gallery. Having excised part of Carlton Gardens for the museum building, the Forest Gallery returns a small portion as a simulacra of Victoria’s tall mountain forests. The interpretive intent of Forest Gallery (‘People see the forest in different ways and this influences how they interact with it’) is initially overwhelmed by sensory contrasts with the other galleries. However, this is a subtle space that rewards those who linger. The first component of Melbourne Museum to open (1998) was an Imax large-screen cinema, co-developed with a private cinema company. With its combination of civic and commercial elements (the latter also found in car parking, shop and café concessions, sponsored galleries, and touring exhibition hall), Melbourne Museum conforms to Mark Schuster’s use of the term hybridisation to model the spectrum of ways that cultural institutions have responded to pressures exerted by new public management outlooks and declining state support (Schuster 1998). The Melbourne Museum campus successfully integrates visitor and museum services within an accessible form. As architectural critic Paul Walker (2001) observed, the building has reasserted a distinctive role for public architecture in Melbourne. However, governments are generally more supportive of capital works projects than recurrent costs incurred thereafter. Securing the flow of public funds to support research activities has proved troublesome in Museum Victoria’s past. In the 1980s the museum reinterpreted its agricultural history collections to focus on ecological sustainability. This project serves as a metaphor for the sustainability challenge that lies ahead for Melbourne Museum.

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REFERENCES Commonwealth of Australia. 2003. Review of the National Museum of Australia: Its exhibitions and public programs. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia. Dovey, Kim. 2005. Fluid city: Transforming Melbourne’s urban waterfront. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press. Rasmussen, Carolyn. 2001. A museum for the people: A history of Museum Victoria and its predecessors 1854–2000. North Carlton, Melbourne: Scribe Publications. Schuster, J. Mark. 1998. ‘Beyond privatization: The hybridization of museums and the built heritage’. In Privatization and culture: Experiences in the arts, heritage and cultural industries in Europe, edited by Boorsma, Peter B; van Hemel, Annemoon; van der Wielen, Niki. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Walker, Paul. 2001. ‘Melbourne Museum: Denton Corker Marshall skilfully negotiate the complexities of the contemporary museum’. Architecture Australia January/February. Available from: http://www.archmedia.com.au/aa/aaissue.php?issueid=200101&article=9&typeon=2.

Cite this chapter as: McShane, Ian. 2006. ‘Melbourne Museum’. South Pacific museums, edited by Healy, Chris; Witcomb, Andrea. Monash University ePress: Melbourne. pp. 7.1–7.4. DOI: 10.2104/spm06007.


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CIVIC LABORATORIES MUSEUMS, CULTURAL OBJECTHOOD AND THE GOVERNANCE OF THE SOCIAL Tony Bennett, Open University Tony Bennett is Professor of Sociology and a director of the ESRC Centre for Research and Socio-cultural Change at the Open University and a Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne. His books include The birth of the museum (1995), Culture: A reformer’s science (1998) and Pasts beyond memory (2004). Correspondence to Tony Bennett: [email protected]

This essay examines the extent to which the perspectives of science studies and actor-network theory can be combined with those of post-Foucauldian governmentality theory to understand the processes through which cultural institutions fabricate distinctive entities and bring these to bear on the governance of the social. The argument is developed by considering the respects in which the procedures of museums and the distinctive forms of cultural objecthood these give rise to can be illuminated by comparing them to laboratories. This prepares the way for an examination of the ways in which such forms of objecthood have been mobilised in programs of social and civic governance both within museums and outside them, paying due attention to the differences between their functioning in these regards in the context of liberal forms of government and more directive forms of role. These general arguments are then illustrated with reference to contemporary debates focused on the refashioning of museums as instruments of cultural diversity. The paper concludes by reviewing the respects in which the perspectives it develops suggest the need to question the analytical effects of the extended concept of culture that has underlain the development of cultural studies and contemporary sociological understandings of culture. My primary purpose in this essay is to explore the extent to which methods developed in science studies for the study of laboratory practices can usefully be applied to the processes through which, in museums, new and distinctive forms of cultural objecthood are produced and mobilised in the context of programs of civic management, which aim to order and regulate social relations in particular ways.1 I pay particular attention in this regard to current concerns to refashion museums so that they might function as instruments for the promotion of cultural diversity. In addressing these concerns, however, I also explore a more general set of questions concerning the relations between specific forms of cultural expertise and processes of social management, and the historical configuration of the relations between culture and the social in those societies we call modern. There is, of course, nothing new in the suggestion that museums are usefully viewed as machineries that are implicated in the shaping of civic capacities. To the contrary, in the late-nineteenth-century debates leading to the establishment of the Museums Association in 1889, museums were commonly referred to as ‘civic engines’ to be enlisted in the task of managing a newly enfranchised mass male citizenry (Lewis 1989). The value of viewing them specifically as ‘civic laboratories’, then, depends on the light that such an analogy is able to shed on the modus operandi of museums as technologies which, by connecting specific forms of expertise to programs of social management, operate in registers that are simultaneously epistemological and civic. Nor is the suggestion that there is a kinship – a family resemblance, say – between museums and laboratories a new one. It informs two recent assessments of the distinctive qualities of the

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modern art museum. In the first of these, Donald Preziosi characterises the nineteenth-century art museum as ‘a laboratory for the education and refinement of bourgeois sentiment’ (Preziosi 1996, 168) in view of its role in providing both a setting and an occasion for a new set of practices of inwardness, which, in turn, were connected to the fashioning of new forms of civic virtue. In the second, Philip Fisher argues that art museums furnish a context in which what he calls portable objects – easel paintings is the case he mentions – are ‘open to resocialisation and resettlement within this or that cluster of what are now taken to be similar things’ (Fisher 1996, 18). It is, however, the laboratory that serves Fisher as the epistemological model for this form of portability, in view of its ability to replicate experimental arrangements of objects from one laboratory setting to another and so make possible portable, and hence generalisable, results. That these essays should have been written by art historians is not entirely accidental. For there is now a fairly developed literature in which a number of art institutions have been likened to laboratories. Although concluding that it does not fit the laboratory case as well as she had thought it might, Svetlana Alpers none the less finds that laboratory practice provides a useful means of probing the respects in which, like the laboratory, the artist’s studio provides a means of withdrawing from the world for the purpose of better attending to it (Alpers 1998). Bruno Latour’s remarks point in the same direction when he compares attempts – including his own – to free science studies from its epistemological past to the work of those who have struggled to free art history from aesthetics. Science studies, he argues, has learned a good deal from the new material histories of the visual arts that have formed a part of this severing of the aesthetic connection, especially for the light they have thrown on the multiplicity of heterogeneous elements (from the quality of the varnish and the organisation of art markets, through the history of criticism, to the organisation of the studio and the operations of art museums) that have to be brought together to make the work of art. It has also, he suggests, a good deal more to learn from the respects in which these new material histories of art have helped to displace dualistic constructions of the relations between ‘the representing Mind and the represented World’ (Latour 1998, 422) by demonstrating the extent to which each of the poles of such dualities is the effect of the material instruments and practices through which their relations are mediated. While acknowledging the force that the art museum – laboratory connection has thus accumulated, I shall argue for a broader approach. This will involve, first, drawing on the perspectives of science studies and actor-network theory to look at the processes through which different types of museum are able to fabricate new entities as a result of the distinctive procedures (of abstraction, purification, transcription and mediation) through which they work on and with the gatherings of heterogeneous objects that they assemble (Latour and Woolgar 1986). It will also involve considering how the ordering of the relations between objects, and, to bring the visitor into the picture, between objects and persons, that such procedures give rise to mediate the relations between particular forms of expertise and citizens in the context of programs of social and civic management. I shall, in pursuing these issues, be particularly concerned to distinguish the role that museums play in these regards in liberal forms of government from those associated with their role in more directive forms of rule. There are, it will be clear, some tensions in these formulations which – in aiming to incorporate the methods of science studies within a post-Foucauldian concern with the role played by specific forms of cultural expertise in the governance of the social – have none the less to engage with the different, albeit related, ways in which these traditions theorise and engage with both culture

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and the social, and the relations between them. I shall, therefore, return to these questions in concluding. I want first, though, to probe more closely how far and in what respects museums are usefully likened to laboratories.

MUSEUMS AS LABORATORIES The work of Karin Knorr-Cetina is the best route into the issues I want to explore here. This is partly because she has always been alert to the similarities between the ways in which laboratories arrange the relations between objects and persons and similar arrangements in other scientific settings (the psychoanalytic situation) and cultural contexts (cathedrals) (Knorr-Cetina 1992). It is, however, what she says about laboratories as such – with the qualification that it is the experimental laboratory she has in mind – that I want to focus on here. The essence of laboratory practice, she argues, consists in the varied displacements to which it subjects ‘natural objects’.2 Rather than relating to these as things that have to be taken as they are or left to themselves, there are three aspects of ‘natural objects’ that laboratory science does not accommodate. First, Knorr-Cetina argues, laboratory science ‘does not need to put up with the object as it is’ but can work with a variety of substitutes – the traces or inscriptions of objects on recording machinery, for example, or , and Pasteur’s production of microbes is a case in point (see Latour 1988), their purified versions. Second, since they do ‘not need to accommodate the natural object where it is, anchored in a natural environment; laboratory sciences bring objects home and manipulate them on their own terms in the laboratory’. And third, ‘laboratory science does not need to accommodate an event when it happens; it does not need to put up with natural cycles of occurrence but can try to make them happen frequently enough for continuous study’ (Knorr-Cetina 1992, 117). The conclusion she draws from this capacity of laboratories to reconfigure objects and their interrelations is as follows: Laboratories recast objects of investigation by inserting them into new temporal and territorial regimes. They play upon these objects’ natural rhythms and developmental possibilities, bring them together in new numbers, renegotiate their sizes, and redefine their internal makeup… In short, they create new configurations of objects that they match with an appropriately altered social order (Knorr-Cetina 1999, 27).

In referring to ‘an appropriately altered social order’, Knorr-Cetina is thinking about the ways in which reconfigurations of the relations between objects, and between objects and persons, that are enacted within laboratories come to be connected to, and play a role in, the reconfiguration of social relations. The example she gives concerns the effects of laboratories connected to the medical sciences and their relation to the clinic in undermining the earlier system of bedside medicine in which the authority of the physician, resting mainly on the notoriously unreliable interpretation of symptoms, was easily challenged and contested by both patients and their families. The substitution of a new set of relations between doctor and patient, in which the patient was de-individualised as diagnosis came to depend on the laboratory analysis of samples, altered the balance of power between them, as the patient was obliged to submit to the authority of the new social collective of doctors and technicians that the laboratory brought into being.

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Bruno Latour’s contention that it is ‘in his very scientific work, in the depth of his laboratory’ that ‘ Pasteur actively modifies the society of his time’ (Latour 1999a, 267) points in the same direction. For it was his ability to mobilise the microbes produced in his laboratory that gave Pasteur the ability to reshape society as an example of the processes of translation understood as encompassing ‘all the negotiations, intrigues, calculations, acts of persuasion and violence, thanks to which an actor or force takes, or causes to be conferred on itself, authority to speak or act on behalf of another actor or force’ (Callon and Latour 1981, 279). By virtue of the microbes he was able to control and interpret, and which were enrolled as actants in and through the practices of the whole corps of socio-medical personnel who invoked them as allies in their strategies for managing the social, Pasteur’s scientific activities became directly political: If by politics you mean to be the spokesman of the forces you mould society with and of which you are the only credible and legitimate authority, then Pasteur is a fully political man. Indeed, he endows himself with one of the most striking fresh sources of power ever. Who can imagine being the representative of a crowd of invisible, dangerous forces able to strike anywhere and to make a shambles of the present state of society, forces of which he is by definition the only credible interpreter and which only he can control (Latour 1999a, 268).

The scope for thinking of museums analogously as places in which new forces and realities are constructed, and then mobilised in social programs by those who are empowered to act as their credible interpreters, is readily perceptible. Museums have served as important sites for the historical production of a range of new entities (such as art, community, prehistory, national pasts or international heritage), which, through contrived and carefully monitored ‘civic experiments’ directed at target populations (the workingman, children, migrants) within the museum space, have been brought to act on the social in varied ways. The role that museums have played in mapping out both social space and orderings of time in ways that have provided the vectors for programs of social administration conducted outside the museum has been just as important, playing a key role in providing the spatial and temporal coordinates within which populations are moved and managed. ‘Give me a laboratory and I will raise the world’ is the title of one of Latour’s articles (Latour 1999a). This suggests, as a rough equivalent, ‘Give me a museum and I will change society’ in view of the museum’s capacity, through the studied manipulation of the relations between people and things in a custom-built environment, to produce new entities that can be mobilised – both within the museum and outside it – in social and civic programs of varied kinds. However, before pursuing this line of thought further, it needs to be acknowledged that both Knorr-Cetina and Latour have been taken to task for working with a more generous interpretation of the idea of the laboratory than others think is warranted. Ian Hacking, for instance, has cautioned against seeing too much overlap between laboratories and more open network systems (Hacking 1992a). Moreover, whereas Latour includes collections and archives in his definition of laboratories, Hacking explicitly excludes the classificatory and historical sciences from his definition, which stresses instead the ability of the laboratory sciences to interfere directly with the object of study. ‘The laboratory sciences’, he writes, ‘use apparatus


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in isolation to interfere with the course of that aspect of nature that is under study, the end in view being an increase in knowledge, understanding, and control of a general or generalisable sort’ (Hacking 1992b, 33). This means, Hacking concludes, that while museums may undoubtedly contain laboratories in their basements, they cannot be so considered in their archival and classificatory functions since these lack, or do not comprise, an apparatus of intervention on the laboratory model. The point is debatable. John Pickstone has thus shown how the intellectual operations of a range of early-nineteenth-century sciences were essentially museological in the respect that their comparative and classificatory procedures depended on the ability to make observations across the large bodies of material collected in museums and to abstract from these the systems of relations between them that their assemblage in collections made visible (Pickstone 1994; Pickstone 2000). Nélia Dias also reminds us of the relations between the skull collections of late-nineteenthcentury anthropological museums and craniological experiments, and between both of these and the forms of intervention in the social represented by the colonial administration of colonised peoples (Dias 2004, 220–228). However, when these caveats are entered, I suspect that, technically speaking, Hacking is right here. The knowledges that have been most closely associated with the development of museums and that have provided the basis for their curatorial specialism have been a mix of historical and cultural sciences which, while often drawing on laboratory sciences (through carbon-dating techniques, for example), have typically fabricated the entities they construct by different means (the fieldwork situation and the archeological dig, for example). Yet the laboratory analogy is still a productive one in drawing attention to the ways in which the museological deployment of such knowledges – alongside those of education officers, designers, and so on – brings objects together in new configurations, making new realities and relationships both thinkable and perceptible. The crucial point, though, is the occurrence of this within a space that is simultaneously epistemological and civic for it is this that enables such assemblages and the relationships between persons they enter into in the museum space to constitute an apparatus of intervention in the social. It will be useful, in developing this argument, to go back to the three aspects of laboratory science identified by Knorr-Cetina: namely, that laboratories do not have to make do with objects as, where, or when they ‘naturally’ occur. For it is true of the museum just as much as it is of the laboratory that it does not need to ‘put up with the object as it is’. The museum object is, indeed, always non-identical with itself or with the event (natural, social or cultural) of which it is the trace. Its mere placement within a museum frame constitutes a detachment from its ‘in itselfness’, and one that renders it amenable to successive reconfigurations through variable articulations of its relations to other, similarly constituted objects. It is equally true that in ‘bringing objects home’, detaching them from where they ‘naturally’ occur, museums are able to manipulate those objects on their own terms in ways that make new realities perceptible and available for mobilisation in the shaping and reshaping of social relationships. This was, indeed, Hegel’s central contention concerning the productivity of the art museum. By severing the connections linking works of art to the conditions of their initial production and reception, the art museum opened up the space for a properly historical cultural politics that would be alert to the possibilities presented by transformations of the relations between cultural artefacts. It constituted a space in which the meanings and functions of artefacts could be made more pliable to the extent that, once placed in a museum, they were no longer limited by their anchorage within an origin-

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ating social milieu or immanent tradition (see Maleuvre 1999, 21–29). Latour’s conception of anthropological and natural history museums as centres of collection, in which objects from a range of peripheral locations are brought together, is another case in point (Latour 1987, 223–228), one which foregrounds the relationship between collecting expeditions and museums as ‘the sites in which all the objects of the world thus mobilised are assembled and contained’ (Latour 1999b, 101). Their functioning in this regard has played a pivotal role in the organisation of the socio-temporal coordinates of colonialism as a consequence of the differentiation they established between, on the one hand, the far-away and the primitive and, on the other, the closeat-hand and the modern (Bennett 2004, 19–24). There are, however, many other examples that might be cited. The ensemble ecologique developed by Georges-Henri Rivière at the National Museum of Popular Arts and Traditions in Paris has played a key role in producing, as both a surface of government and a locus for new forms of agency, communities identified in terms of the regional cultural ecologies, or territorially defined ways of life, that such arrangements make visible (see Poulot 1994). Another case in point is the close relations between art museums and art history in producing art as an autonomous entity as the necessary precondition for its (contradictory) mobilisation in civilising programs or as a key marker in processes of social differentiation. In all of these cases, museums are a prime example of those processes through which technologies are able to accumulate in themselves powers and capacities derived from the different times, places and agents that are folded into them through what they bring together – powers and capacities that can then be set in motion in new directions (Latour 2002a). They are all cases, too, in which the productive power of institutions is made manifest in their ability to fabricate new entities out of the materials they assemble. ‘Boeing 747s do not fly, airlines fly’: this is how Latour once summarised his contention that only corporate bodies could absorb and regulate the proliferation of mediators through which we and our artefacts have become ‘object institutions’ (Latour 1999b, 193). If it is true, similarly, that it is art museums and not artists who make art, the perception is one that needs to be extended to the wider range of entities (community, heritage, regional cultures, and so on) that are produced by museums as ‘object institutions’ par excellence. If such entities are museum fabrications, then, to come to the third aspect of Knorr-Cetina’s characterisation of laboratory science, it is through the observation of the effects of the different orderings of the relations between visitors and such entities that museums dispense with ‘natural’ cycles of occurrence to organise experimental situations in which contrived and staged encounters between people and objects can be arranged for the purpose of both continuous and comparative study. Museums are, in this regard, one of the most intensively monitored spaces of civic observation that we have with countless studies drawing on a plethora of quantitative and qualitative techniques (for instance, sociological and psychographic visitor profiling, exit interviews, and time and motion studies) to assess and calibrate the museum’s precise civic yield in terms of learning outcomes, improved visitor attentiveness, increased accessibility, social cohesion or greater cross-cultural understanding. And it is through the variety of ways in which they thus monitor and assess the outcomes of such ‘civic experiments’ that museums generate ‘civic results’ that are portable from one museum to another. While acknowledging that there are, of course, limits to how far the museum–laboratory analogy can and should be taken (not least, of course, because visitors practice their own forms of often quite unpredictable agency within the museum space), there is one further aspect of


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Knorr-Cetina’s approach to laboratories I want to draw on. She contends that what she calls the ‘epistemic objects’, which are produced through the research process in settings such as laboratories, have a complex, necessarily unfinished structure that breaks with everyday and habitual relations to objects, to generate an ongoing creative intellectual engagement with them. Here is how she puts it: The everyday viewpoint, it would seem, looks at objects from the outside as one would look at tools or goods that are ready to hand or to be traded further. These objects have the character of closed boxes. In contrast, objects of knowledge appear to have the capacity to unfold indefinitely. They are more like open drawers filled with folders extending indefinitely into the depth of a dark closet. Since epistemic objects are always in the process of being materially defined, they continually acquire new properties and change the ones they have. But this also means that objects of knowledge can never be fully attained, that they are, if you wish, never quite themselves (Knorr-Cetina 2001, 181).

It is, Knorr-Cetina argues, this open and unfolding, never completed, form of objecthood, one that is always at odds with itself, that produces the epistemic desire that motivates and animates the process of scientific inquiry. One question to be considered, then, is whether and, if so, how the forms of objecthood produced by museums are characterised by a similar internal complexity that gives rise to similarly complex and dynamic forms of interiority on the part of the persons who become entangled with them. A second concerns the respects in which, contrarywise, the object regimes of particular types of museum might, as Knorr-Cetina puts it, have the character of ‘closed boxes’. It is to this question that I now turn as one that goes to the heart of debates concerning the relations between museums and liberal government.

CULTURAL OBJECTHOOD AND SELF/OTHER GOVERNANCE There are two general aspects of objecthood I want to consider here. The first concerns the respects in which the arrangement of the relations between the individual objects that are assembled together in museums bring into being the more abstract entities – such as art, prehistory, community, national heritage – that then subpoena those objects as aspects of the realities and relations they organise. The focus here is thus on the operations of cultural institutions in producing distinctive kinds of objecthood understood as a product of the arrangements of objects that they effect rather than on distinctive kinds of object: objects classified as natural are just as much caught up in distinctive kinds of cultural objecthood through their inscription in natural history displays as are objects classified as archeological or as artistic in art museums. Made durable and sustainable by the institutional ordering of the relations between material objects, such regimes of objecthood operate much like the quasi-objects Michel Serres discusses in his account of the role that the stabilisation of objects plays in the constitution of social relations (Serres 1982, 224–234; see also Brown 2002, and Latour 1993, 51–55). Like the tokens in a game which, for Serres, constitute the paradigm case of quasi-objects, such regimes of objecthood are very much ‘in play’ in the processes through which social collectives of various kinds (whether classed, regionalised, gendered, racialised or sexualised) are organised through the positions that such collectives take up in relation to each other via the quasi-objects through which the moves and counter-moves

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of identity formation are mediated. Niklas Luhmann recognises this in the case of works of art which he interprets as quasi-objects in the sense that they maintain their concreteness as objects throughout changing situations while also assuming ‘a sufficient amount of variance… to keep up with changing social constellations’ (Luhmann 2000, 47) in view, precisely, of the fact that their significance as art is not a given but derives from their social regulation. Second, however, Knorr-Cetina’s observations on the open structure of ‘epistemic objects’ and its consequences for the organisation of epistemic desire and the distinctive forms of activity and relations to the self this makes possible suggest the need to also take account of the ways in which the regimes of objecthood produced by museums are differentiated with regard to the distinctive kinds of work and self-work that these make possible. What kinds of complex inner organisations do objects acquire from their insertion in different regimes of objecthood? What kinds of interiority on the part of the subject do these enable and/or require? What kind of work of self on self do different kinds of cultural objecthood make possible? Or what kinds of closure do they operate? And how are their roles in these regards related to processes of identity formation? While her own interests in these issues have been prompted by her concern with the relations between object regimes and the libidinal aspects of scientific inquiry, Knorr-Cetina’s contention that ‘objects understood as continually unfolding structures which combine presence and absence will have to be added to the sociological vocabulary’ (Knorr-Cetina 1997, 15) suggests a broader canvass in which the organisation of object regimes associated with specific forms of expertise becomes crucial to ‘postsocial’ understandings of the organisation of contemporary forms of sociality. It will be useful, in exploring the relations between these two aspects of cultural objecthood, to consider Donald Preziosi’s arguments concerning the ways in which the historicisation of objects in the art museum has put those objects into play in processes of identity formation. The key aspect of the art museum’s operations in this regard, he argues, consists in its capacity to make objects ‘time factored’ such that they ‘are assumed to bear within themselves traces of their origins; traces that may be read as windows into particular times, places, and mentalities’ (Preziosi 2003, 19). The art museum adds to this a classificatory operation according to which the place of each individual work is fixed by assigning it an address within ‘a universally extensible archive within which every possible object of study might find its place and locus relative to all others’ (Preziosi 2003, 24), and an evaluative operation in which, once placed in this archive, works of art are ranked relative to one another in terms of their historical ‘carrying capacity’ – that is, the semantic density of the historical information that is coded into them for retrieval. The greater this is, the greater the work of art in view of the greater degree to which, compared with works accorded a lower ‘carrying capacity’, it can thus be subpoenaed in testimony to the cumulative self-shaping of the universal that was the art museum’s post-Enlightenment project. It is, Prezesio contends, this quality of the artwork, as produced by the art museum, that allows it to be connected to the processes though which social collectives are formed, differentiated and ranked hierarchically in relation to each other. As he puts it: The most skilled works of art shall be the widest windows onto the human soul, affording the deepest insights into the mentality of the maker, and thus the clearest refracted insights into humanness as such. The ‘art’ of art history is thus simultaneously the instrument of a universalist Enlightenment vision


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and a means for fabricating qualitative distinctions between individuals and societies (Preziosi 2003, 36).

Valuable though these insights are in underlining the relations between the art museum’s hierarchical ordering of differences and the formation of ranked social collectives, there are other aspects to the depth structure of the artwork that is produced by the historicising procedures of the art museum that Preziosi’s formulations do not quite fathom. Hans Belting (2001) provides a useful point of entry into these in his assessment of the distinctive kind of objecthood these procedures give rise to as each work of art comes to be haunted by the ideal of ‘absolute art’, which, while motivating artistic practice, also necessarily eludes it. This ideal differs from the ‘classical masterpiece’ of the eighteenth century when canonicity was more typically a matter of producing an artwork that would conform as closely as possible to the prescribed formulae of the academies. The canonicity of the modern artwork, by contrast, is, Belting suggests, tilted forward, constantly pointing, as a step beyond or behind the ends of the developmental series the art museum constructs, to an unachievable ideal of perfection – an ‘invisible masterpiece’ that remains always hidden and out of reach.3 Belting’s interest in the form of objecthood produced by the art museum primarily concerns its dynamising consequences for the forms of artistic production associated with the modern art system with its succession of avant-garde movements. These, while pitching themselves against the prevailing forms of the art museum’s canonicity, succeed only in realising its deep structure by eventually falling into their pre-ordained places as the most recent approximations to, yet still incomplete realisations of, the ideal of absolute art, which is the promise of unblemished perfection held out by the ‘invisible masterpiece’. This form of objecthood has, however, proved equally consequential in fashioning those historically distinctive forms of interiority through which the kinds of work of self-on-self associated with aesthetic relations to the work of art proceed. For the incompleteness of the artwork has also served as a template for the organisation of a division within the person between the empirical self and an unreachable ideal that motivates an endless process of self-formation, as the beholder strives to achieve the ideal, more harmonised, full and balanced self that is represented by the standard of perfection embodied in idea of the absolute work of art that hovers just behind or beyond the art on display. This, the central ‘civic experiment’ of the nineteenth-century art museum, was made possible by the liberation of the lower faculty of the aesthetic from its tutelage to the higher one of reason that had characterised the relations between aesthetic thought – especially that of Christian Wolff – and state reason in the arts policies of the Prussian state. Wolff’s formulations, as Howard Caygill summarises their political effects, ‘restricted the scope of culture to the cultivation of the lower, sensible faculty by the higher, rational one’ and, thereby, made ‘the realisation of perfection and freedom’ the responsibility not of ‘individual citizens making judgements in civil society, but that of philosopher bureaucrats who judged what was best for the common good’ (Caygill 1989, 141). Kant’s autonomisation of the aesthetic as an independent form of cognition allowed a reconceptualisation of the space of the art museum as one of self-formation through the acts of judgment – and, via the artwork, of self-judgment and formation – on the part of a free citizenry. Yet, if this annexes art to the practices of liberal government in the stress these place on the free and autonomous self-activity of the governed in governing themselves, it would be wrong to conclude that Kant’s position has ever entirely eclipsed the earlier Wolffian orientation. Indeed,

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it is possible to illuminate significant aspects of the subsequent history of art museums in terms of the different ways in which these contradictory orientations have inscribed artworks in, on the one hand, processes of social differentiation and, on the other, those of governance. Art museums have – in the case of twentieth-century practices of connoisseurship, for example – formed a part of the processes through which classed collectives have been formed by differentiating those able to enter into the transformative relation to the self that the artwork’s conception as an ‘invisible masterpiece’ makes possible from those who are judged to lack this capacity (McClellan 2003). Equally, though, works of art have also been caught up in ‘extension movements’ where what is at issue is organising an extended circuit for the distribution and circulation of art objects that will coopt new constituencies into the transformative relation to the self that engagement with the complex interiority of the artwork makes possible (Barlow and Trodd 2000). Except that, very often, the artwork, when it is brought into contact with ‘the people’, loses that complexity in being refashioned as a more straightforwardly didactic instrument – a closed box in Knorr-Cetina’s terms – through which popular tastes and practices of seeing are to be managed and regulated in a more directive fashion.4 The relations between art museums and forms of cultural objecthood is, in other words, a variable depending on the nature of the civic experiments in which they are engaged and the populations concerned. If the insights that can be generated by looking at museums as laboratories are to be generalised, however, attention needs also to be paid to the distinctive forms of cultural objecthood that have been fabricated by other types of museum. This is something I undertake in Pasts beyond memory (Bennett 2004) where, by examining how the uses of the historical sciences (archeology, anthropology, paleontology, and geology) in evolutionary museums contributed to the fabrication of the new entity of prehistory, I also consider how this produced a new and distinctive kind of objecthood in the form of ‘archeological objects’. These were objects that, whether in natural history displays or in exhibitions of the development of technologies, weapons or ornaments, acquired a new depth structure by being interpreted as summaries of the stages of evolution preceding them. Viewed as the accumulation of earlier phases of development that had been carried forward from the past to be deposited in the object as so many sedimented layers, the archeological architecture of the objects in evolutionary museums produced a new form of complex interiority in the object domain. Objects in typological displays, for example, constituted both a summary of the earlier stages of development stored up in the objects preceding them as representatives of earlier stages of evolutionary development and a departure from that accumulated past in registering a new stage of development. Yet, as well as storing the past, each object in such displays also points to the future: not what it once was, it is not yet what it will become – thus introducing a new kind of dynamic historicity into the field of objects. This found its echo in a parallel construction of the person as similarly an archeologically stratified entity made up of so many layers of past development folded into the organisation of the self. Operating in the relations between these forms of objecthood and personhood, evolutionary museums functioned as mechanisms for differentiating collectives, primarily racialised ones, in the form of a division between those with thickly and those with only thinly stratified selves: white Europeans in the first case, black ‘primitives’ in the second. In relation to those with thickly historicised selves, evolutionary museums served as a template for a process of developmental self-fashioning in which the legacy of earlier layers of development was to be sloughed


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off in order to update and renovate the self so that it would be able to respond appropriately to the imperatives of social evolution. Where this architecture of the self was judged to be absent – as was the case with the construction of the Aborigine as ‘primitive’, an evolutionary ground zero – the template provided by the archeological structure of the museum object was deployed differently. We can see this in the early-twentieth-century programs of Aboriginal administration that were developed by Baldwin Spencer. Cutting his museological teeth by assisting in the arrangement of Pitt Rivers’s typological displays when they were moved to the University of Oxford, Spencer subsequently introduced typological principles into the arrangement of Aboriginal artefacts at the National Museum of Victoria in Melbourne during his tenure as its second director. When he later became involved in the administration of Aboriginal affairs, Baldwin introduced the principles of sequence on which typological displays rested into the civilising program he proposed for Aborigines. This involved forcibly removing ‘half-castes’ from their communities and moving them through a series of staging houses until, once they had been ‘fully developed’, they would be able, at the end of the process, to be absorbed into white society. The logic underlying this program depended on interpreting the racial impurity of ‘half-castes’ as a sign of developmental possibility in comparison with the utterly flat, undeveloped make up of the ‘full blood’ and consisted in the movement of bodies through social space as if they were so many museum pieces being moved along a continuum of evolutionary development. As such, it aimed at the compulsory introduction of sequence into the Aboriginal population – previously (and, of course, erroneously) judged to lack it – as a necessary prelude to their being accorded, but only as individuals severed from their communities, a capacity for self-government.5 Once the epidermal-cum-cultural transformation of the Aborigine that this program envisaged had been managed to the point of giving rise to an archeological splitting of the Aboriginal self into a division between its primitive and archaic layers on the one hand and its civilised and modern ones on the other, then so the Aboriginal – as, now, an individualised persona – would be able to assume direct and personal responsibility for his or own evolutionary and civic self-fashioning. This is a telling example of the respects in which, to recall Knorr-Cetina’s formulations, museums, like laboratories, ‘create new configurations of objects that they match with an appropriately altered social order’. For it illustrates how distinctive configurations of the relations between things produced by the deployment of particular knowledges within museums actively shapes the contours of the social within which, once they are mobilised by agents outside the museum, those new realities and relations become active agents in specific programs of social management. Dominique Poulot’s sharp observations regarding the redistribution of national heritage associated with the development of ecomuseums point to a similar set of processes. By breaking the national heritage down into discrete environmental cultures, Poulot argues, the ecomuseum has formed a part of the ‘regionalisation of the social’, allowing its organisation to be conceptualised as a set of relations between regionally defined communities (Poulot 1994). In being pitted against earlier French statist conceptions of the museum as a civic technology acting on citizens who are placed in direct, unmediated and identical relations to the state, the eco-museum produces the territorially defined community as a key point of identity formation. It does so, moreover, by reversing the operation of the universal survey museum, reattaching objects to the specific regional cultural systems that the latter had detached them from, and,

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thereby producing, in the notion of a regional cultural ecology, a new surface of civic management – a space in which identities can be caught and nurtured in spatially defined programs of cultural or community development. This, in its turn, is connected to the specific forms of objecthood that the eco-museum fashions by resocialising ordinary and familiar objects. By placing these in the context of what might be an environmentalist, geographical, folkloric or sociological knowledge of the operative principles connecting them together in a distinctive cultural ensemble, the eco-museum enlists such objects for new processes of identity formation that depend on the active acquisition of new forms of self-knowledge rather than, as Hegel had feared, simply confirming existing identities as organic quasi-vegetal entities rooted in the local soil. A final and related example is given by Bill Brown in his discussion of the regionalisation of the artefactual field that was carried out in late-nineteenth-century American anthropology. The key figure here was Franz Boas whose displays, focused on life-group exhibits in specific geographically defined tribal and environmental settings, served, as Brown puts it, ‘to “regionalise” anthropology, and to displace artefacts from their traditional place within a taxonomic and evolutionary scheme’ (Brown 2003, 88). Brown’s concern is with the relations between this regionalised object-based epistemology and parallel tendencies in American letters, especially the writing of Sarah Orne Jewett, seeing these convergences as parts of new ways of operationalisating regionalism as a framework for thought and action. It’s relevant in this regard to note the respects in which Boas’s work contributed to a distinctive kind of ‘regionalisation of the social’, which, in the post-Indian Wars context, replaced the temporal coordinates that had been proposed by evolutionists such as Spencer for the management of indigeneous peoples with a new spatialised conception of indigenous peoples as regionally distributed, holistic cultures (Hinsley 1981).

RESOCIALISING OBJECTS, DIVERSIFYING THE SOCIAL I turn now to the directions in which these remarks point when they are brought to bear on current attempts to redeploy museum collections for new civic purposes by resocialising the objects that are contained within them so that they might function as the operators of new kinds of action on the social. The most important of these tendencies consists in the now more-or-less ubiquitous concern to refashion museums as ‘differencing machines’, which, in varied ways, are intended to ameliorate conflicted racialised differences. What different kinds of cultural objecthood are produced by the reconfiguration of the relations between objects, and between objects and persons, within museums where such concerns predominate? What role do these play in putatively reshaping the social by being mobilised as parts of civic programs that aim to act on relations between ethnically differentiated communities as opposed to those between hierarchically ranked social classes? Answering questions of this kind helps to identify how the approach developed in the foregoing discussion differs from those forms of discourse analysis which – quite contrary to those advocated by Foucault, which, as John Frow reminds us, treat of discourses as complex assemblages of texts, rules, bodies, objects, architectures, etc (Frow 2004, 356) – convert the museum into a text that is to be analysed to reveal its ideological effects in occluding the real nature of the social relations it represents.6 These typically exhibit three main shortcomings. The first concerns the lack of any clear attention to the distinctive forms of objecthood associated with different kinds of museum. Dissolving objects too readily into texts in order to make museum arrangements


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readable as ideologies, such approaches fail to grapple adequately with the different and specific kinds of qualities objects acquire as a result of the ways in which the relations between them are configured in different museum practices. Second, and as a consequence, they fail to deal adequately with the distinctive operations, procedures and manipulations through which different knowledges – art history, anthropology, natural history – fabricate new entities through the new alignments of the relations between objects that they establish. They deal with such questions largely abstractly by positing homologies between the intellectual structure of particular knowledges and museum arrangements, paying little attention to the whole set of technical procedures (from accessioning, classification, conservation, and so on) through which objects are actually manipulated and managed. And third, they pay little attention to the distinctive relations to the self and ways of working on it that are made possible by different forms of objecthood. The kind of displacements of these approaches that my comments point toward echo those advocated by Alfred Gell in his concern to develop an action-centred approach to art, in which art is viewed as ‘a system of action, intended to change the world rather than to encode symbolic propositions about it’ with the consequence that it is ‘preoccupied with the practical mediatory role of art objects in the social process, rather than with the interpretation of objects “as if” they were texts’ (Gell 1998, 6). The difference, however, and it is one that Gell points out himself, is that when such perspectives are applied to the distributed relations between objects and persons associated with Western art institutions, it is the action of art objects in the supra-biographical relations between classes or castes or states groups or communities that has to be attended to rather than, as Gell’s own concern, their role mediating more personalised forms of social interaction. And this means, as he puts it, attending to the institutional processes through which some objects come to be ‘enfranchised’ as art (Gell 1998, 12). In seeking both to apply this perspective to art museums and to generalise it to the processes through which other distinctive kinds of objecthood are produced within Western collecting institutions, I have found the methods of science studies helpful precisely because of the centrality they accord to those processes that approaches to museums as texts neglect. They bring with them the kind of attention to technical procedures through which the realities that science works with take on a phenomenal form by virtue of their construction through material techniques that is necessary if the operation of museums as epistemological-cum-civic technologies, working on and with objects in distinctive ways, is to be understood in adequately specific terms. At the same time, they also warn against the temptation to approach these in terms of epochal divisions of the kind implied by Foucault’s historical sequence of epistemes. This is so for three related reasons. First, the ways in which the relations between objects are configured and, accordingly, the agency that is attributed to them, is viewed as always provisional. The fixity into which they are ordered is always a loose and pliable one. Grahame Thompson puts this well in his account of the operation of ‘immutable mobiles’ in actor-network theory. While always the same, such objects – and the museum object is a classic example – take on different values and functions when moved from one set of configurations to another. ‘Whilst “fixed” in one sense,’ Thompson says, ‘these are also made “mobile”, by being arranged and reconfigured through the network of places and agencies to which they are attached and through which they operate; they have the combined properties of mobility, stability, and combinability’ (Thompson 2003, 73).7 Second, a point I take from Latour’s account of the ways in which technologies fold into and accumulate

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within themselves powers and capacities derived from different times and places (Latour 2002b), objects carry with them a part of the operative logic characterising earlier aspects of their history as they are relocated into reconfigured networks. Their organisation in this respect is, Latour argues, always archeological, as aspects of their earlier use and inscriptions are sedimented within them. Third, this process of enrolling objects in networks always has multiple, and often contending, dimensions at any one time just as it lacks a single point of origin or definite finality. These considerations caution against ruptural accounts, such as those based on Foucault’s notion of epistemes, in which museum objects are said to be disconnected from one configuration to be inscribed in another governed by entirely different epistemological principles.8 This is not to dispute the usefulness of such accounts in identifying significant shifts in the permissible forms of combinability of objects that have proved relatively durable and widespread. It is, though, to caution against the view that such shifts entirely cancel the earlier operative logic of the objects they enrol, or that they are only enrolled in single and stable configurations at any one point in time. This, of course, is precisely what we find in the current flux and fluidity of museum practices: not a simple transition from one episteme to another, but a profusion of different ways of rearranging the relations between objects and persons in the museum environment and of enrolling these in social and civic programs of varied kinds. Yet it is here, perhaps, that the laboratory analogy begins to break down. For – and this is where the objections of Hacking (1992b) ring true – the laboratory situation usually involves a more singular and authoritative manipulation of the relationships between objects than has been true of museums over the last quarter of a century or so. The challenges to the classificatory procedures of the cultural and historical sciences that are the mainstay of Western curatorial practices that have come from a range of quarters – from postcolonial theory, indigenous critiques and counter-knowledges – and the divisions that these have occasioned within Western systems of thought closely associated with museums, especially archeology and anthropology, mean that there is a much greater tug-of-war between competing knowledges regarding the arrangement of the relations between objects and persons within the museum space. There is little disagreement – at least, little public disagreement – with the view that such relations should be reordered with a view to reconfiguring the social in more culturally plural ways. All the same, this shared commitment belies a real variety of practice and effect as museums are variously conceptualised as contact zones, as spaces for dialogic encounters between cultures, as instruments for the promotion of cultural tolerance, or as means for promoting and managing the identities of differentiated communities.9 Rather than developing this point abstractly, a brief comparison of the Living and Dying exhibition at the British Museum with contemporary rearrangements of Aboriginal materials in Australian museums will help to identify some of the issues posed by these debates and practices. Opened in 2003 as a part of the British Museum’s 250th anniversary celebrations, Living and Dying involved the resocialisation of objects from both the British Museum’s own collections and those of the Wellcome Trust. Lisant Bolton, the curator of the Museum’s Pacific and Australian collections, has contrasted her experience as the lead curator of Living and Dying with her earlier work at the Australian Museum and the Vanuatu Cultural Centre in terms which usefully foreground some of the tensions concerning the relations between different curatorial practices, the ways in which they are institutionally authorised, and the implications of these considerations for the ways in which museums construct and fashion the social they seek to act


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on (Bolton 2003). In the Australian Museum, Bolton argues, the authority exercised by Indigenous Australians over how Indigenous cultural materials are presented results in forms of cultural advocacy that expose and critique the historical particularity of the earlier colonial frameworks in which such materials had been exhibited. A more recent example is that provided by Bunjilaka, the Aboriginal Centre at the Melbourne Museum, where Aboriginal curation and extensive community consultation has resulted in a resocialisation of the Aboriginal weaponry that had been a part of the evolutionary exhibitions introduced into the National Museum of Victoria by Baldwin Spencer in the early twentieth century. Displayed in a vitrine alongside a reconstruction of Spencer – so that the collector of Aboriginal culture is collected alongside his collections in an Aboriginal framing of both – these artefacts are wrenched from the evolutionary time, in which they had originally been installed, to open up a new, indigenously marked time, in which the forms of hunting and collecting that characterised anthropological practice along the colonial frontier are depicted as archaic. Equally important, Bunjilaka provides a space that is both in the Melbourne Museum and not in it, of it and not of it, to the degree that it is marked out as a semi-separate space in terms of its location (to one side of the museum), the community-auspiced history of its curation, the Aboriginal guides who mediate the visitor’s relations to the centre, and its inclusion of a meeting space for the conduct of Aboriginal affairs. The consequence is a form of cultural objecthood that establishes a tutelary relation in which an Aboriginal framing of objects in the present seeks to detach them – and the visitor – from their past inscriptions, thus mobilising the museum’s capacity as a civic and reformatory apparatus in distinctive ways. The contrast Bolton draws between such strongly marked resocialisations of objects and the British Museum is not, however, one in which the ethnographic authority of the curator prevails over that of indigenous knowledge, so much as one in which the institutional ‘voice’ of the Museum prevails over both. Conceived as a cross-cultural exhibition on the theme of health and wellbeing, Living and Dying examines, in the words of the exhibition’s summary description, ‘how people everywhere deal with the tough realities of life, the challenges we all share but for which there are many different responses’ – sickness, trouble, sorrow, loss, bereavement and death. The main organising principle for the exhibition echoes the concerns of contemporary anthropological theory (Bolton studied for her PhD with Marilyn Strathern) by exhibiting objects as mediators in complex and varied sets of relations: for example, those between Native Americans and animals, represented as non-human persons, in the vitrine ‘Respecting animals’; and the relations between human persons in the Pacific Islands in the vitrine ‘Sustaining each other’. Eschewing any normative framework, the exhibition is presented as a testimony to the insights into the variable responses to shared human problems that can be gained from bringing together under one roof so many objects from many different cultures and periods. This results in a distinctive, although not uncommon, form of objecthood in which the specific, culturally variable meanings of any particular set of object-mediated relations are eclipsed in being subpoenaed as stand-ins for anthropologically constant, universally shared human concerns. The result is an exhibition of a set of what are largely ‘disconnected diversities’ – disconnected from each other as well as from any particular histories connecting them to each other in either allied or hostile relations – as a testimony to the creative ordering capacity of human beings as evident in the varied ways they respond to, and make sense of, death, pain, and suffering. In Mythologies, Roland Barthes discussed a photographic exhibition held in Paris under the title The Great Family of Man, which,

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much like Living and Dying, aimed ‘to show the universality of human actions in the daily life of all the countries of the world: birth, death, work, knowledge, play’ (Barthes 1972, 100). The effect of this, Barthes argued, was to magically produce unity out of pluralism: the diversity of different ways of life does not belie, and cannot eclipse, ‘the existence of a common mould’ (100). The effect of Living and Dying is not quite the same: rather than invoking a universal humanness, it reconfigures earlier hierarchical forms of difference into an abstract form of ‘side-by-sideism’ through which the social is mapped as a set of equivalent differences. The significance of this, however, is fully evident only when Living and Dying is viewed in the context of its juxtaposition with the Enlightenment exhibition. Opened at roughly the same time, these two exhibitions – both of them permanent – are also adjacent to one another, occupying connected sides of the Great Court, and both have featured strongly in the British Museum’s institutional discourse in seeking to fashion a new role for itself as a universal survey museum. At one level, the aim of the Enlightenment exhibition is a self-consciously relativising one: in seeking to rediscover how the world was intellectually ordered at the time of the British Museum’s foundation, the Enlightenment’s claims to universality are discrowned by being revealed in all their historical particularity and peculiarity. Yet this message of historical difference, like that of cultural difference suggested by the Living and Dying exhibition, depends on an affirmation of the continuing value of the universal survey museum for its ability to bring together people and things from all places and times for the purpose of exploring relations of similarity and difference. The relations between the two exhibitions thus comprise the means by which the universal survey museum is detached from the particular normatively weighted concept of universality associated with the Enlightenment to be, in the words of its director, ‘reinvented’ as a machinery for exploring relations of sameness and difference (MacGregor 2003, 7) where this means laying out the social as a set of equivalent differences to be tolerated as equally valuable.10 The Living and Dying exhibition’s place in this scheme of things is thus signalled by its location in what the British Museum describes as its World Cultures galleries, which explore the many ways in which different cultures are shaped by their attempts to make sense of ‘a common experience of what it means to be human’. The resonances of this are echoed in the wall plaque acknowledging the sponsorship of the Wellcome Trust. Designed as a tribute to Sir Henry Wellcome, it suggests a connection between the exhibition and Wellcome’s role as a collector, particularly his unrealised aspiration to establish a Museum of Man – passing in tactful silence over the colonial and evolutionary ordering of the Hall of Primitive Medicine in the Historical Medical Museum that Wellcome did establish (Skinner 1986).

CONCLUSION In his account of why critique has run out of steam, Latour groups sociology and cultural studies together, castigating both for the terrible fate they have inflicted on objects (Latour 2004, 165). His objections to sociology have been developed at some length and have now been widely rehearsed in the literature: the rationality of the nature–society distinction is challenged as the simultaneously enabling–disabling fiction of the ‘modern settlement’; the division of society into different levels – micro and macro – inhibits understanding of the mechanisms through which particular societies are made up of actor-networks of human and non-human agents which form chains of connected relations and actions rather than separate levels; and his dismissal of invoc-


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ations of society as an invisible totality or underlying structure capable of explaining observable actions and relations as nothing but a power play on the part of sociologists, from Comte to Bourdieu, in their attempt to lord it over other disciplines (Latour 1993; Latour 2002b). While he has paid less attention to the concept of culture, he argued, in answer to a question at a public lecture he gave at the University of Oxford in 2003, that it could have no general value for analysis. The implication, although with some hesitation in his more recent work (see Knox et al. 2005), is that there are only actor-networks of humans and non-humans subject to variable and impermanent inscriptions, translations, articulations, and enrolments; that there are no independently existing grounds (whether of nature, culture or society) outside of these and their effects that can be invoked to explain their operations. ‘All that one can do’, as Andrew Pickering summarises the position, ‘is register the visible and specific intertwinings of the human and the nonhuman. But this is enough; what more could one want or need?’ (Pickering 2001, 167). Foucauldian conceptions of the social are, of course, different from sociological ones; indeed, they frame these as a part of a broader account of the emergence of modern forms of governmentality and their production of both the economy and society as autonomous realms, differentiated surfaces of government constructed through the application of new forms of description, classification and enumeration in the context of regulatory practices. In his explorations of this analytical territory, Timothy Mitchell (2002) draws freely on the vocabulary of actor-network theory to account for the processes through which national economies are assembled out of a variety of human and non-human forces and agencies, constantly stressing their role in the making of new realities and processes of production and exchange. It is in this light, and for the same reasons, that I want to suggest, contra Latour, that the concept of culture retains a similar validity provided that we interpret it as a historically fabricated – in the sense of ‘materially made’ not ‘invented’ – set of entities, and provided that we place limits on it. This involves, in the first place, paying attention to the processes – proceeding roughly in parallel with the production of the economy and the social – through which culture was produced as an autonomous realm that was made to stand apart from the social in order that it might then act back on it as a moralising, improving force. Patrick Joyce (2003) usefully illuminates the architectural aspects of these processes in his account of the transition from the ‘display city’ of the eighteenth century to the ‘moral city’ of the nineteenth century, in which the new institutions of culture – art galleries, libraries, museums and concert halls – were separated from both commercial zones and city slums in order to civilise and moralise the circulation of bodies within the city.11 The perspective of museums as ‘civic laboratories’ similarly focuses on the processes through which, via the organisation of distinctive forms of objecthood, distinctive cultural entities are separated out from other relations and practices and made durable, but only so as to be then connected to the social in varied programs of social management and reform. To suggest the need to place limits on such an understanding of culture is not merely a matter of stressing its historical specificity: culture, in this sense, did not pre-exist the processes of its making in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and, although still an effective (albeit weaker) force in the twenty-first century, there is no reason to expect it will prove a permanent one. It is also a matter of disentangling culture in this sense from those other practices with which it has become hopelessly enmeshed as a consequence of two of the key defining moves of cultural studies which have now also become widespread within sociology. The first of these, as Francis

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Mulhern describes it, consisted in ‘a radical expansion of the corpus’ so as to include the role of the symbolic in everyday life in an expanded definition of culture, while the second consisted in ‘the unification and procedural equalisation of the field of inquiry’ (Mulhern 2000, 78) that this expanded understanding of culture produces. The difficulty here lies in the second proposition which does two things: first, it asserts that all kinds of culture, whether ‘high’ or ‘low’, are equally important and worthy of study; and second, it asserts that similar methods of analysis can be applied in studying all forms of culture and their role in the organisation of social relationships. While not quarrelling with the first of these contentions, the second is patently not true. First, it occludes the respects in which the forms of cultural objecthood I have been concerned with are the products of distinctive processes of fabrication, involving specific forms of expertise in specific settings. Second, it forecloses on the possibility of analysing the ways in which these operate on the customs, beliefs, habits, traditions, ways of life, character systems, and so on, which comprise the surface of the social to which they are applied in programs of social regulation and management. Just as many anthropologists have had cause to question the value of the anthropological extension of the concept of culture and to insist on the value of distinguishing customs, habits and beliefs, from culture rather than bundling them all up into one omnibus concept (see Kuper 1999), so too the purposes of social and historical cultural analysis will be better served by a more careful differentiation of the different sets of relations and processes that the extended concept of culture yokes together.

ENDNOTES 1

2

3

4

5

This paper arises out of the research theme ‘Culture, governance and citizenship: The formation and transformations of liberal government’ of the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-cultural Change (CRESC) at the University of Manchester and the Open University. I am grateful to the members of this theme for their comments on the initial version of the paper at a theme meeting, and more especially to Grahame Thompson and Kath Woodward for their more detailed comments on the later version that was published as CRESC Working Paper 2. The paper published here is a revised version of that working paper and was originally published in 2005 in Cultural Studies, 19 (5), pp. 521–547. An earlier version of the paper was presented at the Rebirth of the Museum conference at the University of Melbourne in 2004. I am grateful to the organisers of that conference for providing me with the initial prompt for my work on the issues the paper addresses. I place ‘natural objects’ in quotes since, as Frow (2004, 358–361) shows, there can be no clear-cut distinction between culturally defined and naturally occurring objects. The ‘naturalness’ that is at issue here then concerns those objects which laboratory practice takes as natural. Belting develops his conception of the invisible masterpiece via a commentary on Balzac’s 1845 short story ‘The unknown masterpiece’: see Balzac (2001). The nineteenth-century literature contains many examples of arts administrators and museum directors who were prepared to sacrifice aesthetic complexity for the accessibility of more familiar kinds of art as the price of enlisting art in the cause of improving public manners. This was especially true of Henry Cole whose reasoning on this matter I have discussed elsewhere (Bennett 1992). The individualising aspect of this strategy is important and in sharp contrast to both the earlier forms of Aboriginal administration based on a logic of protection of Aborigines as communities on separated reserves and to Aboriginal (mis)interpretations of these strategies as ones which would, through the application of Lockean principles, eventually earn them the right to community-based forms of freedom


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and self-governance in recognition of the rights derived from the application of their labour to the lands granted them. See Attwood (2004). 6

See, for example, the contributions – including my own – in Lumley (1988), an early and influential collection of the ‘new museology’ in English.

7

Thompson, though, does go on to take actor-network theory to task for subscribing to too unbounded and open-ended a conception of the capacity for networks to be endlessly rearticulated.

8

This is true, in some degree, of Museums and the shaping of knowledge by Eilean Hooper-Greenhill (1992), and of my own The birth of the museum (Bennett 1995a).

9

I have discussed the range of positions on the relations between museums and cultural diversity more fully elsewhere: see Bennett (2006).

10

11

This was a especially evident in Neil MacGregor’s address in a public seminar held to mark the opening of the Enlightenment exhibition. Organised around the contemporary role of universal survey museums, the seminar was addressed by the directors of five such museums: the Louvre, the Hermitage Museum, the National Museum in Berlin, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the British Museum. MacGregor invoked the Living and Dying exhibition as an example of the British Museum’s commitment to diversity, and a way of exhibiting diversity that would not be possible but for the ways of accumulating and storing the world developed by Enlightenment forms of collecting. The debates leading to the establishment of the South Kensington Museum at South Kensington rather than Trafalgar Square are an extraordinarily vivid example of this: a clear case of withdrawing culture from the city, organising it is a separate and separated zone, so that it would be better able to act as an improving force upon it (see Bennett 1995b).

REFERENCES Alpers, Svetlana. 1998. ‘The studio, the laboratory, and the vexations of art’. In Picturing science, producing art, edited by Jones, Caroline A.; Galison, Peter. London and New York: Routledge. Attwood, Bain. 2004. Rights for Aborigines. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Balzac, Honoré de. 2001. The unknown masterpiece. New York: New York Review Books. Barlow, Paul; Trodd, Colin. 2000. ‘Constituting the public: Art and its institutions in nineteenth-century London’. In Governing cultures: Art institutions in Victorian London, edited by Barlow, Paul; Trodd, Colin. Aldershot: Ashgate. Barthes, Roland. 1972. Mythologies. London: Jonathan Cape. Belting, Hans. 2001. The invisible masterpiece. London: Reaktion Books. Bennett, Tony. 1992. ‘Useful culture’. Cultural Studies 6 (3): 395–408. Bennett, Tony. 1995a. The birth of the museum: History, theory, politics. London and New York: Routledge. Bennett, Tony. 1995b. ‘The multiplication of culture’s utility’. Critical Inquiry 21 (4): 861–889. Bennett, Tony. 2004. Pasts beyond memory: Evolution, museums, colonialism. London and New York: Routledge. Bennett, Tony. 2006. ‘Exhibition, difference and the logic of culture’. In Museum frictions: Public cultures/global transformations, edited by Karp I.; Kratz, C. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Bolton, Lissant. 2003. ‘Living and dying: Ethnography, class and aesthetics at the British Museum’. Paper presented at the Museums and Difference conference, Centre for 21st Century Studies. November 2003; University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin. Brown, Bill. 2003. A sense of things: The object matter of American literature. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Brown, Steven. 2002. ‘Michel Serres: Science, translation and the logic of the parasite’. Theory, Culture & Society 19 (3): 1–27.

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Callon, Michel and Latour, Bruno. 1981. ‘Unscrewing the big Leviathan: How actors macro-structure reality and how sociologists help them to do so’. In Advances in social theory and methodology: Towards an integration of micro- and macro-sociologies, edited by Knorr-Cetina, K.; Ciroucel, A. V. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Caygill, Howard. 1989. Art of judgement. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Dias, Nélia. 2004. La mesure des sens: Les anthropologies et le corps humain aux XIXe siècle. Paris: Aubier. Fisher, Philip. 1996. ‘Local meanings and portable objects: National collections, literatures, music, and architecture’. In The formation of national collections of art and archaeology, edited by Wright, Gwendolyn. Washington: National Gallery of Art. Frow, John. 2004. ‘A pebble, a camera, a man who turns into a telegraph pole’. In Things, edited by Brown, Bill. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Gell, Alfred. 1998. Art and agency: An anthropological theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hacking, Ian. 1992a. Representing and intervening. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hacking, Ian. 1992b. ‘The self-vindication of the laboratory sciences’. In Science as practice and culture, edited by Pickering, Andrew. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Hinsley, Curtis M. Jr. 1981. Savages and scientists: The Smithsonian Institution and the development of American anthropology 1846–1910. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean. 1992. Museums and the shaping of knowledge. London and New York: Routledge. Joyce, Patrick. 2003. The rule of freedom: Liberalism and the modern city. London: Verso. Knorr-Cetina, Karin. 1992. ‘The couch, the cathedral, and the laboratory: On the relationship between experiment and laboratory in science’. In Science as practice and culture, edited by Pickering, Andrew. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Knorr-Cetina, Karin. 1997. ‘Sociality with objects: Social relations in postsocial knowledge societies’. Theory, Culture & Society 14 (4): 1–30. DOI: 10.1177/026327697014004001. Knorr-Cetina, Karin. 1999. Epistemic cultures: How the sciences make knowledge. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Knorr-Cetina, Karin. 2001. ‘Objectual practice’. In The practice turn in contemporary theory, edited by Schatzki, Theodore R.; Knorr-Cetina, Karin; von Savigny, Eike. London and New York: Routledge. Knox, Hannah; Savage, Mike; Harvey, Penny. 2005. ‘Social networks and spatial relations: Networks as method, metaphor and form’. In CRESC working papers on socio-cultural change no. 1. ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-cultural Change, University of Manchester and The Open University. Kuper, Adam. 1999. Culture: The anthropologist’s account. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno. 1987. Science in action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno. 1988. The pasteurisation of France. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We have never been modern. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno. 1998. ‘How to be iconophilic in art, science and religion?’ In Picturing science, producing art, edited by Jones, Caroline A.; Galison, Peter. London and New York: Routledge. Latour, Bruno. 1999a. ‘Give me a laboratory and I will raise the world’. In The science studies reader, edited by Biagioli, Mario. New York and London: Routledge. Latour, Bruno. 1999b. Pandora’s hope: Essays on the reality of science studies. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno. 2002a. ‘Morality and technology: The end of the means’. Theory, Culture & Society 19 (5/6): 247–260. DOI: 10.1177/026327602761899246. Latour, Bruno. 2002b. ‘Gabriel Tarde and the end of the social’. In The social in question: New bearings in history and the social sciences, edited by Joyce, Patrick. London and New York: Routledge. Latour, Bruno. 2004. ‘Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern’. In Things, edited by Brown, Bill. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Latour, Bruno; Woolgar, Steve. 1986. Laboratory life: The construction of scientific facts. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.


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Lewis, Geoffrey. 1989. For instruction and recreation: A century history of the Museums Association. London: Quiller Press. Luhmann, Niklas. 2000. Art as a social system. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Lumley, R., editor. 1988. The museum time-machine: Putting cultures on display. London and New York: Comedia/Methuen. MacGregor, Neil. 2003. Preface to Enlightenment: Discovering the world in the eighteenth century, edited by Sloan, Kim. London: The British Museum Press. Maleuvre, Didier. 1999. Museum memories: History, technology, art. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. McClellan, A. 2003. ‘A brief history of the art museum public’. In Art and its publics: Museum studies at the millenium, edited by McClellan, A. Oxford: Blackwell. Mitchell, Timothy. 2002. Rule of experts: Egypt, techno-politics, modernity. Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press. Mulhern, Francis. 2000. Culture/metaculture. London and New York: Routledge. Pickering, Andrew. 2001. ‘Practice and posthumanism: Social theory and a history of agency’. In The practice turn in contemporary theory, edited by Schatzki, Theodore R.; Knorr-Cetina, Karin; von Savigny, Eike. London and New York: Routledge. Pickstone, John. 1994. ‘Museological science’. History of Science 32 (2): 111–138. Pickstone, John. 2000. Ways of knowing: A new history of science, technology and medicine. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Poulot, Dominique. 1994. ‘Identity as self-discovery: The eco-museum in France’. In Museum culture: Histories, discourses, spectacle, edited by Sherman, Daniel J.; Rogoff, Irit. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Preziosi, Donald. 1996. ‘In the temple of entelechy: The museum as evidentiary artifact’. In The formation of national collections of art and archaeology, edited by Wright, Gwendolyn. Washington: National Gallery of Art. Preziosi, Donald. 2003. Brain of the Earth’s body: Art, museums, and the phantasms of modernity. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press. Serres, Michel. 1982. The parasite. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Skinner, Ghislaine. 1986. ‘Sir Henry Wellcome’s Museum for the Science of History’. Medical History 30 (4): 383–418. Thompson, Grahame F. 2003. Between hierarchies and markets: The logic and limits of network forms of organisation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Cite this chapter as: Bennett, Tony. 2006. ‘Civic laboratories: Museums, cultural objecthood and the governance of the social’. South Pacific museums, edited by Healy, Chris; Witcomb, Andrea. Monash University ePress: Melbourne. pp. 8.1–8.21. DOI: 10.2104/spm06008.

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NEW KNOWLEDGES

MUSEUMS AS CULTURAL GUARDIANS Deidre Brown, University of Auckland Deidre Brown is Senior Lecturer in Architecture and NICAI Faculty Associate Dean (Equal Opportunities) at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She is of Ngapuhi and Ngati Kahu descent. She is author of three books on Maori art, a museums peer reviewer for National Services, a Maori trade marks and cultural expressions advisor to the Intellectual Property Office of New Zealand, and a freelance curator. Correspondence to Deidre Brown: [email protected]

An important concern for contemporary South Pacific museums is the responsibility associated with guardianship, particularly as it is applied to indigenous culture. This chapter explores guardianship in the Aotearoa New Zealand context, which was defined in the 1990s as a bicultural notion guided by curatorial policy and as the Maori customary concept of kaitiakitanga (guardianship). In more recent years it has been redefined in response to community discussion on repatriation, the legalisation of cultural guardianship as a concept, and the impact of digital technologies. Shaped by these influences, South Pacific museums of the future may have to accept the loss of key artefacts and change their curatorial and display policies to accommodate digitally replicated objects. They may also have to form close allegiances with tribal museums and adapt their bicultural mandates to acknowledge the increasing importance of cultural and intellectual property law. In recent times museums have accommodated many new ideas in their emerging role as the keepers of culture and, as the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa states in its corporate principles, the ‘speakers’ of authority on cultural knowledge (Museum of New Zealand 2006; Museum of New Zealand 1996). One of the key concerns in the new museum movement is the responsibility associated with guardianship, particularly as it is applied to indigenous culture. This essay explores guardianship in the Aotearoa New Zealand context: defined in the 1990s as a bicultural notion guided by curatorial policy and as the Maori customary concept of kaitiakitanga (guardianship); and redefined in more recent years in response to calls for repatriation, the legalisation of cultural guardianship as a concept, and the impact of digital technologies. The change in role experienced over the past few decades by the ethnological museum, from storehouse of empire to preserver of culture, and by the art museum, from treasure house of artist and period works to interpreter of visual culture, has been well documented, and is related to changes in curatorial practice and public perceptions. These changes run parallel to those in the institutionalised natural world, where zoological parks and botanical gardens have distanced themselves from their appropriationist origins to be aligned with the conservation movement – the fates of indigenous and natural objects often intertwined in Western imagination (Baratay and Hardouin-Fugier 2002, 272–279).

BICULTURALISM AND KAITIAKITANGA While the facilities and collections might have largely remained the same, museum philosophies, staff and audiences have changed. In Aotearoa New Zealand the most significant philosophical shift has been the adoption, as a principle, of biculturalism, that bilateral relationship of justice and equality between Maori and non-Maori founded on the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi and codified around the time of the treaty’s sesquicentennial in 1990. Biculturalism can determine power


09.1

relationships within an institution; the methods by which institutions appoint, train and use their staff; the way in which collections are managed, displayed and researched; and the types of relationships that are maintained with the Maori and non-Maori communities (Jones 1995, 33). At first viewed by the museum community as an ideal or moral commitment between treaty partners (Mane-Wheoki 1995, 6), biculturalism was codified into policy by civic institutions following the model of government departments, who were themselves influenced by changes in quasilegislative systems. These policies quickly developed from notions of partnership to creating remedies for the almost invisible presence of Maori in the guardianship of the nation’s cultural treasures (O’Regan 1997). The practice of guardianship has therefore dramatically changed in Aotearoa New Zealand civic museums and galleries over the past twenty years. Through policy, Maori are actively recruited to be involved the care of their own taonga (treasures), collections are handled and displayed in a way that observes ritual and customs, and sincere efforts are being made to repatriate highly tapu (restricted, prohibited, sacred) items, such as human remains, from offshore. A critical notion in bicultural curatorial practice is the Maori custom of kaitiakitanga, or the acknowledgment that cultural objects have guardians rather than owners, and that the primary role of these guardians is to serve the needs of the objects. A culturally relevant guardianship or kaitiakitanga in an institutional setting involves collection divestment as much as investment. Smaller institutions, particularly private museums, are increasingly looking like dioramas of the custodial past as they become filled with imperialist items and display devices that civic institutions are only too keen to de-accession. Boy’s Own, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and royal birth, deaths, marriages and tour supplements sit upon shelves while plastic tiki, Maori doll and gollywog collections lie in cabinets. These museums have a different guardianship role, often parodied as the ‘last stop before the garbage dump’, that is significant for remembering the civic institutional practice of forgetting, a concept recently fabricated in Carole Shepheard’s Museum of Cultural Anxiety in Auckland and the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles.

REPATRIATION Apart from caring for collections in a culturally responsible way, repatriating valued treasures and willingly divesting objects, contemporary museum guardianship also involves relinquishing definitive items in the collection in response to community demand. There seems to be one or more of at least three general reasons, given by New Zealanders, particularly Maori, when they discuss the repatriation of taonga from institutions: first, that the taonga have a value in themselves, and to Maori people, that cannot be realised unless they are returned to their turangawaewae (place of tribal belonging); second, that their removal from their turangawaewae was sometimes the result of confiscation, deception and theft; and third, that they are misunderstood by ‘general’ audiences. The implication is that the museum’s redefined role as preserver of culture and provider of authoritative narratives is not one that is necessarily recognised by all sectors of the community. In the past, a metropolitan museum display of taonga was not considered complete unless it included a whare whakairo, or decorated meeting house, and a pataka, or decorated storehouse. Following acquisition, these architectural signifiers of identity were, as some scholars have argued,

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MUSEUMS AS CULTURAL GUARDIANS NEW KNOWLEDGES

digested and decontextualised in the museum context (Austin 2003). In his discussion of the Ruatepupuke meeting house, the writer, professor, former New Zealand cultural ambassador in New York and Ngati Porou tribal elder Witi Ihimaera writes: ‘My personal belief is that all of these meeting houses [in museums] should be brought back. Because, if our marae [tribal forum featuring a meeting house] is our turangawaewae, then while they are away the people who belong to them are in limbo’ (Ihimaera 2002, 97). The house was completed in 1881 at Pakirikiri, passing from Ngati Porou into the hands of the German antiquities dealer J. F. G. Umlauff, who later sold the house to Chicago’s Field Museum in 1905. Since then, the Field Museum has maintained a relationship with the New Zealand museum community and the people of Ngati Porou, and certainly today the house is cloaked with a large amount of interpretive material (Ihimaera 2002, 89, 93–96). Yet Ihimaera is as forceful now in his opinion that Ruatepupuke should be returned as he was twenty years ago, when he saw the house during the opening of the touring Te Maori exhibition. For him, guardianship as kaitiakitanga cannot be properly realised in a public museum context, and he is not alone in his view. Tribal authorities have had some success in realising their guardianship role as a property right, and repatriating museum-held taonga. The most well known instances of repatriation have involved meeting houses. The return of the Mataatua meeting house, from Otago Museum to the Ngati Awa tribe in 1996, marks this change in the definition of guardianship as a possessive right. Hirini Moko Mead, the celebrated Ngati Awa elder and scholar, was instrumental in securing the return of the house through 15 years of negotiation (Mead 1997, 213–218). His daughter Aroha Te Pareake Mead is an internationally renowned expert on indigenous intellectual property law. Together with their tribe they hosted the First International Conference on the Cultural and Intellectual Property Rights of Indigenous Peoples in June 1993, the most notable outcome of which was the drafting of the ‘Mataatua Declaration’, a non-government-organisation document presented to the United Nations (‘Mataatua Declaration’ 1993). The Declaration called for the repatriation of all indigenous human remains, an inventory of all museum-held indigenous objects, and the offer of repatriation by museums holding such items. It also placed the patenting of indigenous plants and human genetic codes alongside these concerns, in effect promoting the idea that the same guardianship role exists over both the natural and object/built worlds, the two described together as cultural resources or traditional knowledge. The New Zealand Crown, in another high-profile repatriation case, recently admitted that, in its acquisition of the Te Hau-ki-Turanga meeting house, it had breached a guarantee in the second article of the Treaty of Waitangi not to disturb any taonga in Maori possession (Waitangi Tribunal 2004). This building, constructed by the Rongowhakaata tribe in the early 1840s, was confiscated by the Crown in 1867 during the New Zealand Wars and sent to the national capital, Wellington, where it remains today as the central exhibit of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Brown 1996, 7). The Crown admission was made during a hearing of the Waitangi Tribunal, a body that makes recommendations to the government for compensation to Maori groups who have suffered treaty breaches. It opens up the possibility that New Zealand museums may have to repatriate or negotiate loan agreements for any provenanced Maori object. The Maori community is, of course, not calling for the return of all taonga, since there are instances where guardianship as kaitiakitanga has either been transferred for a mutually agreed purpose or cannot yet be assigned to an appropriate group. There is a history of Maori occasionally gifting, loaning or selling items to museums, their reasons for transferring kaitiakitanga


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usually having a spiritual or ritual basis. For example, in 1929 Wiremu Ngawati gave David Graham, an Auckland War Memorial Museum research officer who was on a collecting trip in the northern part of the North Island, a pou rahui (boundary post, AM 22061), probably used to protect an eel fishery (see Neich 1991). Ngawati had an association with the spiritual leader Tahupotiki Wiremu Ratana, who advocated that Maori should abandon taonga, including carvings, for their spiritual wellbeing (Brown 2003, 75). Indeed, Ratana had his own ‘museum’, the Whare Maori at his eponymous settlement near Whanganui where ‘objects supposed to contain spirits’, in this case taonga with customary associations or disability devices left over from healing sessions, could be placed under his mana, or greater kaitiakitanga, so they could do no harm (Henderson 1972, 79). In 1922 the selling of a whakawae (door jamb, AM 6394; see Figure 9.1) to Auckland Museum by Kapowairua Moki, a female member of the Ngati Whatua tribe, may have represented a ritual transferral of kaitiakitanga. The carving was one of a number that the tribe had intended to put in the museum some years before. After being struck down by the 1918 influenza epidemic, they had decided against the deposit, as the disease was interpreted as a punishment for violating the tapu of the carvings (Brown 2003, 113). Moki’s actions could be interpreted as a form of whakanoa, or an attempt to free the carving and its people from restriction by violating its tapu through a financial transaction, money and women-being-noa (free from tapu) elements. In these instances from the early twentieth century, the museum was regarded by Maori as a benign guardian, a place where the power and presence of an object could not escape to harm them. It is estimated that 95 per cent of taonga are held by museums, the majority in the care of the four Aotearoa New Zealand metropolitan museums (O’Regan 1997, 78), with small but significant collections in the British Museum and the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem Massachusetts. A large proportion of these taonga do not have any attributions to a tribe or region aside from being described as ‘Maori’ or ‘from New Zealand’, and therefore it would be difficult to repatriate such items to a specific group. Foreign collections of taonga also present different guardianship issues: would the educative value of a taonga, or group of taonga, in a foreign public collection outweigh its significance and value once it returns home? For example, would the collections associated with Captain James Cook and his voyages lose their ‘collectioness’ if they were returned to New Zealand? Or is the notion of an explorer collection an artificial curiosity in itself, in a repatriation context? There are also a surprising number of faked taonga in overseas museums and a large number of works produced by inexperienced Maori artists. These novice-produced items are evidence of the artistic experimentation that took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and are still part of a Maori heritage. If these items were to be repatriated to an Aotearoa New Zealand institution, who would assume their kaitiakitanga? Furthermore, overseas collections of indigenous arts are enjoying a new period of kaitiakitanga from diasporic communities. In the United Kingdom, the Maori expatriate organisation, Ngati Ranana (or the London tribe), has formed an alliance with the British Museum and the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology to keep their taonga warm. The relationship is a reciprocal one, the museums having a community to provide kaitiakitanga, as a form of cultural guardianship, to their collections while Ngati Ranana has a cultural touchstone that localises their diasporic situation. As the Maori community migrates, such alliances may become more commonplace in other parts of the world.

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Figure 9.1 Whakawae (door jamb) from a rua tahuhu (storehouse). Reg. No. 6394. Auckland Museum Tamaki Paenga Hira.

LEGALISATION OF CULTURAL GUARDIANSHIP The possible protections offered to indigenous cultures by intellectual property law – in particular copyright, trade marks and patents – have been a topic of debate for almost a decade, and were prompted by the realisation that other groups, through international law, were appropriating indigenous culture, including art objects, foods, medicine, design, music and genes. Over this time, indigenous people, many governments and the legal profession have also grappled with how cultural guardianship could be legally developed to prevent the commoditisation of indigenous culture. Aroha Te Pareake Mead describes the threat posed by the commoditisation of traditional


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knowledge as ‘the second wave of colonisation – grabbing what few resources Maori retained after the first wave of colonisation left us landless and marginalised’ (Mead 2002). It is interesting that the distinction characterises recent changes in museological thinking in Aotearoa New Zealand, the first an attempt to forget or overcome the colonial past through a process of bicultural curatorial practice, and now an uncertain path of repatriation as indigenous people assert their cultural property rights. There have been some inventive initiatives using trade marks to protect physical cultural property and legally enforce indigenous guardianship. Since 1990, the United States Indian Arts and Crafts Board has awarded registered trade marks for indigenous artists, and tribal and pantribal collectives, and reserved the name ‘Indian’ for products manufactured by Native American people or organisations (Battiste and Youngblood Henderson 1990, 158). Similarly, Te Waka Toi, the Maori arm of the government department Creative New Zealand, registered the TOI IHO trade mark for a similar purpose in 2002 (see Toi Iho 2006). The intellectual property divisions of central government in Aotearoa New Zealand have also been involved in this evolving process of legalising guardianship as kaitiakitanga, and have consulted widely within the Maori community in the formulation of their policies and initiatives. In 2003, the Maori Trade Marks Advisory Committee was established to advise the New Zealand Intellectual Property Office (IPONZ) of the offensiveness of trade mark applications containing Maori words or devices (Intellectual Property Office of New Zealand 2006).1 This committee is the first indigenous consultative body on international property law recognised through sui generis provisions. Between 2000 and 2006, the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) has held ten intergovernmental meetings on ‘Intellectual Property and Traditional Knowledge, Cultural Expressions and Genetic Resources’ and have considered the misappropriation of indigenous visual arts to be as significant an issue as biopiracy (World Intellectual Property Organisation 2006). Its contribution to the guardianship debate may be the extension, through international or sui generis law, of trade marks, copyright and patents to indigenous cultural expressions for the benefit of indigenous communities. The continued conflation of the indigenous and natural worlds, as seen in the movement towards conservation in museums, zoological parks and botanic gardens and also in the ‘Mataatua Declaration’, is apparent in legal responses to cultural guardianship. Indeed, WIPO’s intergovernmental meetings on traditional knowledge also examine genetic resources. That a single set of guidelines might be developed to cover both may be an issue of concern for museums and indigenous arts professionals alike. Museum curators, academic researchers, independent scholars and artists do not, in practice, operate in the same ethical and professional environment as the patent attorneys of multinational pharmaceutical companies. Possibly the old oppositional notion that indigenous people, unlike Westerners, are somehow so inextricably linked to their natural environment that their technology cannot be separated from the flora and fauna of the material world has dominated thinking in this area. One current application to the Waitangi Tribunal touches on issues that could dramatically affect local museum practices with respect to guardianship. The Wai 262 Flora and Fauna claim includes demands present in the Mataatua Declaration, and claims that the Crown has breached the second article of the treaty, by not guaranteeing Maori the ‘unqualified exercise of their chieftainship [rangatiratanga] over their lands, villages and all their treasures’ (Waitangi Tribunal

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2006). As David Williams writes in his Wai 262 report to the tribunal, ‘it is up to the Crown to show how, if at all, it is proper to claim that whare whakairo, waka tupapaku (bone caskets), koiwi (human remains), mokaikai (preserved heads), etc., are now rightfully in the ‘full ownership’ of a museum in New Zealand or overseas’ (Williams 2001, 14). Intellectual property law, as it now stands, will not achieve the types of protections that the Mataatua Declaration and Wai 262 suggest should follow on from the transferral of guardianship for cultural objects from museums to indigenous people. The notion of a cultural ‘property’ implies an individualised commodity; however this concept is alien to tribal, sub-tribal or community understandings of kaitiakitanga. For the law to be more inclusive, the definition of intellectual property would need to be expanded to account for not only material expressions but also collective ideas, held in perpetuity rather than just for an individual’s lifetime. As discussions at forums such as WIPO, museum conferences and hui (formal meetings) on marae continue, a general consensus is emerging in Aotearoa New Zealand that the law can enforce some aspects of kaitiakitanga, while biculturalist policies and social morals have a role to play in reinforcing the importance of other aspects.

DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES Digitisation further complicates debates over the meaning and assertion of cultural guardianship in museum contexts, specifically the role of digitisation in the imaging of taonga Maori and the spiritual significance of digital replicants. In her book Decolonising methodologies, Linda Tuhiwai Smith warns that any fruitful discussion between ancient taonga and contemporary observers that is enabled by new technologies may be undermined by interactive processes that reduce discussion to predetermined, or even uncontrolled, access through buttons (Smith 1999, 102). Aside from standard computer screen and keyboard interactive interfaces, the continuing development of three dimensional software, scanners, studio-based recording facilities, printers and head mounted displays (HMD) offers museums a wide range of possibilities as well as significant issues to consider. With this technology it is now possible to insert three-dimensional digitised cultural objects or people into our real world field of vision using augmented reality (also known as mixed reality) HMDs, or insert ourselves into immersive environments with virtual reality HMDs. Original objects can be scanned as three dimensional images, and if the object is museumheld, then the potential exists for the institution to retain a digital replicant and repatriate the original, or visa versa. The same scanned data used to visualise the object can manifest it in the real world through a three-dimensional printer. These technologies can also transport us into a virtual environment, belonging to any culture, place or period of time, either recorded from life or animated or a combination of both. Extending Smith’s argument further, we might ask whether the essential qualities of a taonga, those that provide its meaning and significance, are transferred to a digital copy. If this is the case, are the kaitiakitanga rights over the original also transferred to the replicant? In attempting to quantify and qualify the essence of taonga, Paul Tapsell, Tukuaki Maori (Director Maori) of Auckland War Memorial Museum, identified a number of interrelated qualities: mana (authority power and prestige); tapu (the protected or sacred or prohibited); korero (oratory and narratives); karakia (recitation or incantation); whakapapa (genealogy and systematic framework); wairua (everlasting spirit); mauri (life force); ihi (spiritual power); wehi (the incitement of fear and awe);


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and wana (authority and integrity) (Tapsell 1997, 326–331). Although none of these qualities are visual – the sense that augmented and virtual singularly relies upon – it is my proposition that some, if not all, of these cultural values are transferred by digital replication, to a lesser or greater degree, depending on circumstance. This observation is based on the way that metropolitan and central government public archives, including museums, currently manage Maori photographic material as if it is, not just a representation, but an actual manifestation of the taonga illustrated. In keeping with their bicultural policies, Auckland War Memorial Museum and the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa have assumed kaitiakitanga of these photographic images and established Maori consultative bodies that determine the accessibility, display and reproducibility of this material on an application-by-application basis. While it is likely that similar bicultural principles of kaitiakitanga could be applied to virtual taonga, as new imaging technologies are adopted by museums for archiving and display purposes, the law may also be invoked to enforce indigenous perspectives of cultural guardianship. If Wai 262 achieves some degree of success at the Waitangi Tribunal, then the recognition of indigenous rights over genetic material, and its replication through cloning, could be extended to digital imaging of taonga, beyond the limitations of copyright. This would be an unexpected but advantageous development from the conflation of the natural and object/built worlds. Wai 26, another claim that opposed the sale of radio and television spectrum rights because bandwidths for Maori had not been reserved, successfully argued that the Crown’s kawanatanga (governorship) did not empower it to create property rights over any part of the known or unknown universe, including the digital domain, without first consulting Maori (Waitangi Tribunal 1990). According to the findings of the Waitangi Tribunal for Wai 26, it would seem that indigenous virtual objects, people and environments placed in the digital frontier should have their cultural significance legally recognised and protected as if they were real objects, and be cared for according to the principles of kaitiakitanga.

CONCLUSION The redefinition of guardianship in terms of kaitiakitanga, associated with changes in intellectual property law and the development of digital imaging processes, will not necessarily lead to the emptying out of indigenous art from Western museums. If we accept that, over time, indigenous people will be successful in realising absolute guardianship of provenanced taonga through repatriation, then museums will have to accommodate the loss of key artefacts. They may have to return curatorial practice to the Cabinet of Curiosity model, or negotiate with indigenous guardians for the rights to display electronic images of objects, people and environments next to those treasures that have been retained. In the latter scenario, museum architecture will become part gallery, part virtual diorama. Municipal museums will have real and digital collections, possibly networked to tribal museums that have kaitiakitanga over key cultural treasures, and curatorial policies that are as much driven by intellectual property law, as bicultural and multicultural practices.

ENDNOTES 1

The author of this chapter is a member of the Maori Trade Marks Advisory Committee. The views expressed in this chapter do not necessarily reflect those of the Committee or IPONZ.

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REFERENCES Austin, Michael. 2003. An unpublished paper presented at the Pacific Arts Association (PAA) Repositioning Pacific Art: Artists, Objects, Histories conference. 23–26 June 2003; Christchurch. Baratay, Eric; Hardouin-Fugier, Elisabeth. 2002. Zoo: A history of zoological gardens in the West. London: Reaktion Books. Battiste, Marie; Youngblood Henderson, James (Sa’ke’j). 1990. Protecting indigenous knowledge and heritage: A global challenge. Saskatoon: Purich. Brown, Deidre. 1996. ‘Te Hau ki Turanga’. Journal of the Polynesian Society 105 (1): 7–26. Brown, Deidre. 2003. Tai Tokerau Whakairo Rakau: Northland Maori wood carving. Auckland: Reed. Henderson, J. M. 1972. Ratana: The man, the church, the political movement. Wellington: A. H. & A. W. Reed. Ihimaera, Witi. 2002. ‘The meeting house on the other side of the world’. In Te Ata: Maori art from the east coast, New Zealand, edited by Ihimaera, Witi; Ellis, Ngarino. Auckland: Reed Publishing. Intellectual Property Office of New Zealand. 2006. ‘5. Maori Trade Marks Advisory Committee’. [Internet]. Intellectual Property Office of New Zealand. Accessed 10 May 2006. Available from: http://www.iponz.govt.nz/pls/web/dbssiten.main (select Online Journal / Information Library / 02 Trade Marks / 5. Maori Trade Marks Advisory Committee). Jones, Shane, 1995. ‘Summary Report May 1995’. In ‘Framework for funding and performance measurement of museums in New Zealand’. Wellington: Taonga o Aotearoa National Services. Mane-Wheoki, Jonathan. 1995. ‘Imag(in)ing our heritage: Museums and people in Aotearoa’. New Zealand Museums Journal 25 (1): 2–8. ‘Mataatua Declaration’. 1993. First International Conference on the Cultural and Intellectual Property Rights of Indigenous Peoples. [Internet]. Accessed 10 May 2006. Available from: http://aotearoa.wellington.net.nz/imp/mata.htm. Mead, Aroha. 2002. ‘Understanding Maori intellectual property rights’. [Internet]. A paper presented to the Inaugural Maori Legal Forum. 9–10 October; Wellington. Available from: http://www.conferenz.co.nz/2004/library/m/mead_aroha.html. Mead, Sidney Moko. 1997. Maori art on the world scene. Wellington: Ahua Design & Matau Associates. Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. 1996. ‘Speaking with authority: Scholarship and matauranga at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa – a strategy’. Report. Wellington: Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. 2006. ‘Corporate Principles’. [Internet]. Accessed 10 May 2006. Available from: http://www.tepapa.govt.nz/TePapa/English/AboutTePapa/AboutUs/WhatWeDo/Corporate+Principles.htm. Neich, R. 1991. ‘Á Pou Rahui from a North Auckland eel-fishery’. New Zealand Journal of Archaeology 13: 59–64. O’Regan, Gerard. 1997. ‘Bicultural developments in museums of Aotearoa: What is the current status?’ Report. Wellington: Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa National Services and Museums Association of Aotearoa New Zealand. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 1999. Decolonising methodologies: Research and indigenous people. Dunedin: Otago University Press. Tapsell, Paul. 1997. ‘The Flight of Pareraututu’. Journal of the Polynesian Society 106 (4): 326–331. Toi Iho. 2006. ‘Toi Iho Maori Made Mark’. [Internet]. Te Waka Toi, Creative New Zealand. Accessed 10 May 2006. Available from: http://www.toiiho.com. Waitangi Tribunal. 1990. Report of the Waitangi Tribunal on claims concerning the allocation of radio frequencies. Wellington: Brooker and Friend.


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Waitangi Tribunal. 2004. Turanga tangata, turanga whenua: The report of the Turanganui a Kiwa claim. Wellington: Legislation Direct. Waitangi Tribunal. 2006. ‘The Crown and Flora and Fauna’. [Internet]. Waitangi Tribunal. Accessed 10 May 2006. Available from: http://www.waitangi-tribunal.govt.nz/resources/researchreports/wai262/. Williams, David. 2001. Matauranga Maori and taonga. Wellington: Waitangi Tribunal. World Intellectual Property Organisation. 2006. ‘Intergovernmental Committee’. [Internet]. World Intellectual Property Organisation, United Nations. Accessed 10 May 2006. Available from: http://www.wipo.int/tk/en/igc.

Cite this chapter as: Brown, Deidre. 2006. ‘Museums as cultural guardians’. South Pacific museums, edited by Healy, Chris; Witcomb, Andrea. Monash University ePress: Melbourne. pp. 9.1–9.10. DOI: 10.2104/spm06009.

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NEW KNOWLEDGES

THE MUSEUM OF NEW ZEALAND TE PAPA TONGAREWA Huhana Smith, The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa Huhana Smith is Senior Curator Maori at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, and has studied Maori language, Maori visual culture and museum studies. As an artist, her paintings have been widely exhibited, with many held in both public and private collections.

The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa is a bicultural institution that acts as kaitiaki or guardian for an extensive taonga Maori and Moriori collection. With approximately 29,500 taonga from across the islands of Aotearoa New Zealand, the collection represents diverse knowledge systems applied to communal or personal taonga of special value, and the ongoing significance these taonga have to contemporary iwi, hapu and whanau (social groups).

LOOKING AFTER ICONS NGA TAONGA: A QUICK GLIMPSE INTO TE PAPA The entire collection at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Te Papa) highlights the skills and innovations employed by tohunga or tribal experts, from around 800–900 years ago to the present day. When Pacific technologies were applied to different resources, materials and needs in a temperate climate another existence and a unique visual culture flourished that is well respected and celebrated today. When caring for, or presenting taonga, particular principles and practices are favoured at Te Papa. Te Papa recognises the cultural notion of mauri or the life principle or essence that derives from a Maori world view, where humankind is genealogically related to all matter. All things, both animate and inanimate, possess mauri. Therefore, natural and human-fashioned forms invested with mauri have a spiritual dimension that demands ritualised attention. A principle known as mana taonga is observed at Te Papa. It recognises the strong spiritual and cultural connections taonga have with their people through the whakapapa or genealogy of the creator, the ancestors after whom the taonga is named and the ongoing connections expressed by those to whom the taonga is cherished as cultural signifier or heirloom. Iwi and other communities therefore have rights to define how taonga or cultural material within Te Papa should be cared for and managed according to different tikanga or customs. Te Papa ensures that the rights conferred by mana taonga are protected by practice so that any relationships created with Maori or other communities and their esteemed cultural material are well looked after. Mana taonga reminds Te Papa of its obligation to extend museum practice. Te Papa is aware of the sensitivities and intricacies of what are often difficult historical contexts surrounding taonga, particularly those that entered the collection at times of conflict and social disruption. From the 1860s until the early 1980s museums in New Zealand often collected and then interpreted taonga without any referral to, or contribution of, iwi or hapu. While some taonga in the collection may have been gifted, they were inevitably sold off to collectors. Over time many taonga were bought, stolen, bartered, confiscated, fossicked or unceremoniously removed from areas of cultural importance to iwi and hapu. This severance continues to impact on descendants today. With this in mind, museums no longer have the unfettered right to unilaterally make decisions about how taonga are cared for and managed. While some museum directors and staff, particularly


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museum anthropologists began to initiate changes to museum practice in the 1960s, it was not until the success of Te Maori, the exhibition that toured the United States and New Zealand in 1984–87, that national and international practice for museums shifted when dealing with indigenous peoples’ cultural and spiritual material. In developing these shifts in ideology, the Treaty of Waitangi is the base on which the bicultural foundation of Te Papa celebrates both Maori and Moriori as tangata whenua, the first peoples of the land with rights of first settlement. The treaty affords right to the diversity of peoples within contemporary society at large. The Rongomaraeroa marae complex and Te Hono ki Haiwaiki as the contemporary meeting place at Te Papa embody a living marae concept as the focal point for all peoples to meet at Te Papa. The marae recognises the unique cultural origins of Maori and Moriori through the application of protocols unique to the culture. Rongomaraeroa is therefore the conceptual heart from which the bicultural nature of the museum manifests itself. Te Hono ki Haiwaiki as the contemporary meeting house refers to ancestral origins while extending an embrace to all peoples and all cultures. This fundamental acknowledgement of shared kinship and the concept of manaaki tangata, or welcome to all visitors is observed at Te Papa. While Te Hono ki Haiwaiki is innovative in design it remains customary in concept. Te Papa understands the Maori cultural notion of ongoing relationships between the past, present and future, and the challenges this raises for both museum and iwi. The efforts of curators and researchers around taonga Maori concentrate on bringing people and ancestral taonga with strong iwi associations back together again.

Figure 10.1 Maori Resource Room © Huhana Smith

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THE MUSEUM OF NEW ZEALAND TE PAPA TONGAREWA NEW KNOWLEDGES

Figure 10.2 Space to research and to talk © Huhana Smith

Curatorial research efforts reveal many aspects about the most unique or even unusual taonga. Such research can also chart shifts in carving practice, especially with changes in symbolism wrought by the nineteenth century. Te Papa also acknowledges an endurance of customary concepts that underpin the work of contemporary artists through an active collection development plan. The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa is committed to celebrating a dynamic Maori visual culture nationally and internationally that acknowledges innovation, recognises and supports Maori knowledge systems, and reveres the connection and continuity between nga tupuna, nga uri me nga whakatipuranga e whai ana – the ancestors, descendants and future generations to come.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS A version of this essay by Huhana Smith appears in Icons nga taonga from the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Te Papa Press: Wellington, 2004). Cite this chapter as: Smith, Huhana. 2006. ‘The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa’. South Pacific museums, edited by Healy, Chris; Witcomb, Andrea. Monash University ePress: Melbourne. pp. 10.1–10.3. DOI: 10.2104/spm06010.

THE MUSEUM OF NEW ZEALAND TE PAPA TONGAREWA NEW KNOWLEDGES

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NEWSYMPOSIUM KNOWLEDGES

THERE’S SO MUCH IN LOOKING AT THOSE BARKS DJA DJA WURRUNG ETCHINGS 2004–05

Pamie Fung, The University of Melbourne Pamie Fung is a PhD candidate at the Australian Centre, University of Melbourne, and has worked as a customer service officer at Bunjilaka Aboriginal Centre in the Melbourne Museum and at Museum Victoria’s Immigration Museum. Sara Wills, The University of Melbourne Sara Wills is a lecturer at the Australian Centre, University of Melbourne, where she teaches in the areas of immigration and cross-cultural studies, and currently holds an ARC research grant to explore issues of migrant hospitality in Australia. Correspondence to Sara Wills: [email protected]

This essay focuses on the claims of the Dja Dja Wurrung Aboriginal people of north-western Victoria in their attempt to repatriate a set of rare bark artefacts that were loaned to Museum Victoria from two British museums. We argue that understanding the significance of the barks to the Dja Dja Wurrung requires an appreciation not only of a history of cultural loss but also of dynamic forms of cultural continuation. The essay highlights the ongoing tension between museums and Indigenous communities over issues of authority and ownership, and illustrates the expectations, obligations and new hegemonic relationships that can arise even within ‘new’ museum practices. Consideration of what the Dja Dja Wurrung see and know through ‘looking at those barks’ indicates the need for collecting institutions to negotiate, understand and participate in both old and new imaginings of history within contemporary Australia.

INTRODUCTION: A STORY OF OWNERSHIP In 2002 two bark etchings from the 1850s were discovered within the collections of the British Museum and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (Servaes and Prendergast 2002). Staff at the Royal Botanic Gardens contacted Museum Victoria (MV) in Melbourne, where curators connected the barks with one produced in the 1870s from the museum’s own collection. Curator Elizabeth Willis’s interest in the barks led her to write two articles about them. The first article detailed their discovery and also their importance as the earliest extant bark etchings produced by Victorian Aboriginals (Willis 2002). In her second article, Willis investigated the relationship between Scottish settler John Hunter Kerr and the Dja Dja Wurrung people who produced the barks and lived near Kerr’s station on the Loddon River in north-western Victoria. According to Willis’s study, Kerr maintained ‘good relationships’ with the Dja Dja Wurrung and had commissioned them to make the barks for him (Willis 2003). Given the rarity of these pieces, and the fact that the barks were first put on display in the Melbourne Exhibition of 1854 (the year of MV’s foundation), the barks were borrowed from the British museums to be used as part of MV’s 150th celebration in 2004 (Willis 2002). The barks were brought to Melbourne to be displayed in a small-scale exhibition called Etched on Bark 1854: Kulin Barks from Northern Victoria. Etched on Bark was exhibited in Bunjilaka, the Aboriginal centre at MV’s Melbourne Museum campus, from 18 March to 27 June 2004. The exhibition contained the three bark etchings, an emu ceremonial figure hewn from bark (also on loan from Britain), and photographs Kerr had taken of the Dja Dja Wurrung

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in the 1850s (Willis 2004). Something of the nature of the exhibition was captured in a review, which noted that while ‘at first glance, Etched on Bark 1854 is not very striking’, ‘the humbleness of this exhibition is its strength’ (Nelson 2004).

Figure 11.1 Dja Dja Wurrung Elder Gary Murray and one of the barks at the Melbourne Museum Photograph: Craig Abraham. The Age Photo Sales.

Nevertheless, it soon became apparent that these etchings were ‘striking’ to some. Early intimations of what was to occur can be found in a news article ‘Petition calls for return of Koori etchings’ published on 27 May 2004 (Usher 2004). Three weeks later, on 18 June, Rodney Carter, an Aboriginal cultural heritage inspector appointed under the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Heritage Protection Act 1984 (Cwlth) (the Heritage Protection Act) placed an emergency declar-

THERE’S SO MUCH IN LOOKING AT THOSE BARKS NEW KNOWLEDGES

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ation upon the barks.1 He did so on behalf of the Dja Dja Wurrung and Jupagalk Aboriginal groups to prevent the items from going back to the museums in England. Carter is a descendant of the Dja Dja Wurrung and a former manager of Bunjilaka; both Carter and members of his family are also part of MV’s Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Advisory Committee (ACHAC; see Museum Victoria 2000; Sculthorpe 2001). The emergency declarations were based on the information that the two barks from England were produced in the 1850s by Dja Dja Wurrung people, and on the Dja Dja Wurrung assertion that they had a right to their ancestor’s cultural objects (R. Carter 2004a). Throughout the period of the dispute, research on the area was being conducted by Gary Murray, the elected Dja Dja Wurrung representative and spokesperson in the dispute (G. Murray 2005). MV was due to return the barks to England after Etched on Bark finished, but the emergency declarations made this impossible. Thus MV was put in a difficult position: the museum could not return the artefacts and break Australian heritage law; but if they did not return the items to England they would dishonour their loan contracts with the British museums and would be liable to pay £900,000, the insured value of the barks.2 Subsequently the two British museums released a media statement indicating that they wanted the artefacts returned and that the emergency declarations jeopardised the legal framework of borrowing and lending for all museums (British Museum 2004). For the British museums, repatriation raised legal problems as well: under The British Museum Act 1963, it is illegal to de-accession artefacts unless they are a duplicate of the original, deteriorated and damaged, or ‘unfit to be retained in the collections of the Museum and can be disposed of without detriment to the interest of students’ (Wilson 1989, 24). Under these circumstances the dispute escalated. Carter renewed the emergency declarations after their expiry every 30 days, issuing eight in all.3 In one of the ensuing declarations he added the emu ceremonial figure. The emu figure was subsequently cause for speculation about the original exchange between Kerr and his Aboriginal ‘friends’. According to some Dja Dja Wurrung accounts, it was and still is not customary practice to give away or display sacred material such as the emu figure (N. Murray 2004a).4 Other controversies erupted at MV during this period, including concern regarding the lack of engagement with members of the Aboriginal community at the time of the arrival of the barks.5 After the initial declarations, senior officials at MV attempted to defuse the dispute by trying to engage British Museum officials to negotiate with the Dja Dja Wurrung. In meetings between MV and the Dja Dja Wurrung, the elders expressed a desire to discuss the matter directly with the British Museum, but attempts to engage the British Museum failed on a number of occasions.6 Within this period, the Curator of Pacific and Australian Collections at the British Museum Lissant Bolton came to Victoria to meet with the Dja Dja Wurrung. She listened to their concerns and provided them with an inventory of all Victorian Aboriginal artefacts within the British Museum’s collection; but the British Museum insisted that Bolton was not there to negotiate with Aboriginal people.7 Carter states that Bolton’s visit was to apologise for not inquiring into the necessary Aboriginal protocols and ceremonies for the barks when they arrived and that she had no real power to effect any communication between the Dja Dja Wurrung and senior officials of her museum.8

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In the period after the first declarations, local and international media reported the dispute. Frequently articles described the dispute as a fight between the British and Aboriginal peoples; headlines included ‘Brits seek legal advice: Kooris grab museum art’9 and ‘Aborigines “hijack” artefacts loaned by Britain’ (Alberge 2004). During this time, while the British Museum remained relatively silent on the matter, Gary Murray, Deputy Chairperson of the North-West Nations Clans (which includes groups such as the Dja Dja Wurrung and the Jupagalk) was much quoted in the media. Also a member of MV’s ACHAC advisory committee, Murray has been an important Koori community leader in Bunjilaka’s activities, and was the official spokesperson for the Dja Dja Wurrung in the dispute. The British Museum’s position of non-negotiation with Aboriginal representatives resulted in the expression of considerable frustration by Murray and other members of the Dja Dja Wurrung; on the North-West Nations Clan website, a photo of Murray appears with the caption ‘Nemesis of the British Museum’ (North-West Nations Clan 2004). In late September 2004, MV publicised their decision to take the Dja Dja Wurrung to court. Their decision to challenge Carter’s application of heritage law for the return of the barks damaged their relationship with many Aboriginal staff and advisors to the museum. Prominent Aboriginal spokesperson and senior curator for south-eastern Australia Gary Foley expressed anger regarding the museum’s decision in an email that was distributed to all staff.10 On the following day, MV’s chief executive officer Patrick Greene sent a response that explained MV’s position; shortly afterwards Greene sent another email requiring that all staff refrain from commenting to the media. Greene argued that MV staff would be in contempt of the law if they spoke about the dispute publicly.11 The second email, in particular, was felt by many of the Aboriginal staff to be a strategy to ‘gag’ them, which increased the existing tension within the museum. With loyalties both to their elders and community, as well as to their workplace, many Aboriginal staff found themselves in a difficult position; Foley and Bunjilaka Gallery staff staged a protest by ‘walking off work’ on 22 September 2004.12 Another source of tension for the Koori community associated with the museum was the fact that MV enlisted the legal aid of Peter Seidel, a lawyer with the firm Arnold Block Leibler who had handled the Yorta Yorta Native title claims. Seidel’s employment by MV served to escalate the dispute.13 On 9 November 2004, a directions hearing held in the Federal Court concluded that the Dja Dja Wurrung and MV should enter into mediation, but the dispute remained unresolved and litigation continued. Justice Ryan eventually heard the case on 15 and 16 December 2004. In the legal proceedings, MV aimed to test the validity of Carter’s successive declarations according to the Heritage Protection Act, and their legal representative argued that Carter had misused the law. Representatives for Carter from Holding Redlich attempted to introduce the cultural importance of the etchings for the Dja Dja Wurrung in order to defend Carter’s actions (Federal Court of Australia Victoria District Registry 2004). The British Museum was not represented, and the Victorian Minister for Aboriginal Affairs was not present. Throughout the dispute Minister Gavin Jennings had the power under the Heritage Protection Act to make a permanent declaration on the artefacts and thus end the dispute between MV and the Dja Dja Wurrung; the Dja Dja Wurrung applied for his assistance many times to no avail (Federal Court of Australia Victoria District Registry 2004).14 On 20 May 2005, Justice Ryan supported the contention that Inspector Carter lacked the power to make the successive emergency declarations (Museums Board of Victoria v Carter 2005). After the decision, the Dja Dja Wurrung still hoped the minister would


11.4

place a permanent declaration on the barks, but he decided against this. Subsequently, on 27 May 2005, MV sent the bark etchings and emu ceremonial figure back to the British museums in recognition of their ‘ownership’. In the last 30 years disputes about ownership have been the cause of frequent contestation between indigenous peoples and museums (McBryde 1985; Greenfield 1989; Mauch-Messanger 1989; Kaplan 1994; Peers and Brown 2003; Simpson 1996). In Australia, Aboriginal peoples have lobbied for their rights to participate in the research, management and care of their cultural heritage, with particular focus since the 1970s on the return of human remains (Langford 1983; Ucko 1983; Davidson 1991; Burke et al. 1994; Museums Australia 1996; Pearce 1998; Ward 1998; Batty 2002; Museums Australia 2005). Nevertheless, while moves to repatriate human remains are increasingly recognised and accepted by institutions such as museums and universities, the repatriation of objects has been relatively neglected. Against this background, this study arose from a desire to work towards an understanding of the arguments made by the Dja Dja Wurrung and other Indigenous speakers in this dispute. Originally undertaken as a broader study of the roles played by the British Museum, MV and the Dja Dja Wurrung (Fung 2005), the essay published here brings to the fore the often complex nature of the relationships between Aboriginal people and museums, and challenges assumptions in ‘new’ museum practices. It aims to contribute to an understanding of the aspirations invested in repatriation by Koori people in south-eastern Australia.

LIVING CULTURE, LOOKING AT THOSE BARKS The bottom line for the Dja Dja Wurrung as it is for the Greeks, the Ethiopians and every other Group robbed and pillaged by the British, is that the Two Etched Barks and Ceremonial Emu Head Figure are culturally significant to us as they connect us to country and our ancestors (G. Murray 2004c).

Dja Dja Wurrung people have maintained that the bark etchings and emu figure currently owned by the British museums should be returned to Dja Dja Wurrung elders and community. They also insist that the barks should remain in Dja Dja Wurrung traditional country. At a wider level, their argument encompasses other Aboriginal cultural objects and human remains that are held in museums nationally and overseas without Aboriginal consent; they contend that this material should be owned and controlled by Aboriginal people (R. Carter 2004a). For the Dja Dja Wurrung, as for other Aboriginal groups, culture is living and dynamic, and their position in the dispute was formed within a wider context of Koori self-determination, relating in particular to the right to participate in the narration, definition and assignation of value to material culture and cultural identity. For the Dja Dja Wurrung, the bark etchings have the potential to play a critical role in the (re)signification and (re)inscription of identity. Rosalind Langford’s seminal paper on Aboriginal cultural heritage articulates what is at the heart of such disputes over the ownership of cultural material: The issue is control. You seek to say that as scientists you have a right to obtain and study our culture. You seek to say that because you are Australians you have a right to study and explore our heritage because it is a heritage to be shared by all Australians… We say that it is our past, our culture and heritage,

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and forms part of our present life. As such it is ours to control and it is ours to share on our terms (Langford 1983, 2).

Similarly Henrietta Fourmile contends that Aboriginal people need to be safe in their own ownership and knowledge of their culture before they can partake in the sharing of their culture (Fourmile 1989). In other words, while Aboriginal people want to share their culture, they argue their needs should come first. Dja Dja Wurrung Elder Aunty Fay Carter has stressed continually, for example, the significance of the barks to her community: ‘How many pieces do we have that we can look at done by our ancestors? It’s our connection and our children’s connection… there’s so much in looking at those barks’ (F. Carter 2004). Thus the Dja Dja Wurrung argue that if returned the barks would be something that they have not yet possessed: a set of tangible objects that are specifically listed as Dja Dja Wurrung culture that can be looked at, touched, studied, objects that elders would be able to show to younger generations (Lenaghan 2004). In particular, Dja Dja Wurrung claims suggest the potential of the barks, upon return, to function in their rightful cultural context. Murray states, ‘we have a belief that those artefacts, if they’re going to retain their cultural integrity, that integrity is here in Australia. Particularly it’s in the Dja Dja Wurrung people’s area’ (G. Murray 2004a). These barks are invested then with Koori aspirations and an assertion of the continuance of Koori culture: the return of the barks would enable the Dja Dja Wurrung to reinsert them into an Aboriginal framework that, as has been noted elsewhere at MV, stresses the interrelatedness of land, spirituality, law, culture and people (Museum Victoria 2000). Such arguments about cultural integrity are informed by, and attempt to address, knowledge of a widespread history of misrepresentation of Aboriginal people and culture, particularly in southeastern Australia (Langton 1993; Birch 2003). Thus arguments about cultural integrity provide, at one level, a critique of the practices of collection and exhibition, which result in the removal of objects from their cultural contexts. By stressing cultural integrity, the Dja Dja Wurrung are responding to the de-contextualisation of their cultural material (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1991), which they see as one way in which their culture has been misrepresented. Their claims for repatriation address the appropriation of their culture by ethnographers into non-Aboriginal narratives of Aboriginal culture, including exhibitions. As Ivan Karp argues, ‘what is at stake in struggles for control over objects and the modes of exhibiting them… is the articulation of identity. Exhibitions represent identity’ (Karp 1991, 15). Given that objects and exhibitions can represent cultures and groups of people, for the people who are the subject of exhibitions, control is important. Hence at one level, we can understand Dja Dja Wurrung claims for the barks as an assertion of their right to speak for themselves. Dja Dja Wurrung arguments are also then about foregrounding how the practice of colonial collecting has disrupted their culture and life in a wider context. Murray states, ‘It must be remembered that museums like invading governments acquired these artefacts, just like others acquired our Country, lands and waters, our language, our art and artefacts, our dead and burial grounds’ (G. Murray 2004c). Such efforts to repatriate the barks are invested with the need to remember the conditions in which the barks were removed; and others have noted that ‘when the process of collection becomes a metaphor for the removal of freedoms, liberties, dignities, culture and even life, the objects collected take on a huge moral and semiotic load as symbols of persecution’ (Glass 2004, 123). Indeed a central point of contention in this dispute is the circum-


11.6

stances in which the British museums came to acquire the barks. In 2002 Caroline Servaes at the Royal Botanic Gardens traced diary entries and references in Melbourne (1854) and Paris (1855) exhibition catalogues to ‘rude’ and ‘curious’ bark drawings, but noted that ‘there is no explanation for how both the British Museum and Kew ended up with one each’, and that while at Kew ‘Kerr is recorded as the donor… no such information exists for the British Museum’ (Servaes and Prendergast 2002). More importantly for the Dja Dja Wurrung, throughout the dispute both museums insisted that they rightfully owned the barks because Kerr gave them the barks, and also because, on his own testimony, he had a ‘friendly relationship’ with the Dja Dja Wurrung and, again on his own testimony, had commissioned the making of the barks in the 1850s (Alberge 2004; Willis 2004). We may never know the full history of the exchange that occurred between Kerr and the Dja Dja Wurrung he ‘befriended’, but the museums’ arguments presume a problematic equality by flattening out the different conditions of power and privilege (or lack of) that would have existed between Kerr and the Dja Dja Wurrung of the time. Both Henrietta Fourmile and Moira Simpson have questioned the equity of power relationships in such exchanges, arguing that ‘virtually all were on a basis which could not be seen as constituting transactions under fair and equal conditions for both parties’ (Fourmile 1990, 58; see also Simpson 1996 and Nicks 2003). Bain Attwood’s study of the Dja Dja Wurrung in the period 1837–64, describes the rapid and violent settlement of Dja Dja Wurrung country by squatters (Attwood 1999). Attwood’s study reminds us the barks were ‘given away’ at a time when the positions of Aboriginal people and settlers were greatly unequal. Dja Dja Wurrung efforts to repatriate the barks are about reminding everyone of the colonial violence that displaced Aboriginal people and disrupted their ways of life. Hence, the process of making a case for the return of the barks becomes also a way for Dja Dja Wurrung people to ‘find a legitimate framework for injurious experiences… against which a claim can be established’ (Myers 2004, 209). Repatriation represents a focal point for Dja Dja Wurrung agency: it is a process that enables the Dja Dja Wurrung to call into account wider injuries wrought by colonisation. Thus repatriation is also invested with the possibility that it can be potentially restorative for Aboriginal culture and people. Murray argues that the Dja Dja Wurrung’s repatriation claims are aimed at ‘picking up the loose ends [of] dispossessions, dispersal and de-culturalisation’ (G. Murray 2004a), and it has been argued that the practice and process of returning can become a strategy ‘to redress historical grievances and to address present and future cultural needs specifically through reuniting people and objects “at home”’ (Glass 2004, 123). Dja Dja Wurrung efforts to reclaim their culture are hence about the possibilities of re-possession, revitalisation of culture and the re-gathering of dispersed Aboriginal people. Indeed, Denis Byrne has described repatriation as ‘archaeology in reverse’, and further suggested that repatriation enables the ‘reinstatement of Aboriginal visibility’ in the land, where colonisation and the practices of collecting have erased the physical traces of Aboriginal ownership (Byrne 2003, 73, 77). Although Byrne’s analysis is focused on human remains repatriation, his work is illuminating for Dja Dja Wurrung claims, which can be understood as a form of restoration work focused on reversing settler perceptions of the erasure of Aboriginal presence. In particular, Murray’s reference to loss in his claims of ‘dispossession, dispersal and deculturalisation’ can also be understood in relation to claims that Aboriginal culture was ‘wiped out’ in south-eastern Australia. Murray and the Carter family have been (and still are) involved in Native title land claims, but

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other cases dismissed in court (such as the Yorta Yorta’s) clearly demonstrate the continuing power of beliefs that Aboriginal culture has not survived in the south-east (Birch 2001; Aboriginal Community Elders Service and Harvey 2003). Through their arguments the Dja Dja Wurrung draw attention to the injustice of what Byrne and Thomas call ‘the illogicality of colonialism’ (Thomas 1994, 60; Byrne 2004, 251), and thus Dja Dja Wurrung arguments for repatriation also actively criticise as unjust the hegemonic legal and governmental definitions of Koori culture, which seek to punish Koori people for surviving and living within conditions of subjugation and control. Rather the Dja Dja Wurrung have emphasised the possibilities of re-possession, revitalisation of culture and the re-gathering of dispersed Aboriginal people. In the court hearing on the barks dispute, Rodney Carter drew attention to Dja Dja Wurrung and wider Koori interpretations of ‘preservation’ in the Heritage Protection Act, where preservation of culture occurs through the continued use of the barks by their traditional owners. Carter used the language of the legislation to argue that the barks would be ‘injured and desecrated’ if they were to be separated from the traditional owners (Federal Court of Australia Victoria District Registry 2004). Moved to respond poetically while considering the dispute, Carter wrote: ‘This is a bark’ Oh no! They are much more They have an opportunity to tell their story Then they shall turn to dust from whence they came If the traditional owners do not hear the story it will be lost forever Yet forever in our soul, minds and hearts, etched. (R. Carter 2004b) To illustrate the potential for the story of the barks to be heard, younger members of the Dja Dja Wurrung set to produce new bark etchings. On 6 August 2004 these new barks were presented to Senator Rob Hulls at a land claim meeting for the North-West Nations at Lake Boga. The new barks were also offered as a possible replacement for the barks that the British museums own (G. Murray 2004b). By doing this, the Dja Dja Wurrung similarly demonstrate that the tradition of producing these bark etchings can be recalled and reinstated into present Dja Dja Wurrung culture. Ngarra Murray, a project officer for Bunjilaka, made a set of 10 bark etchings in collaboration with other Koori artists for an exhibition in the Aboriginal centre, drawing materials from traditional Dja Dja Wurrung country (G. Murray 2005). Due to the conflicts that have ensued from the barks dispute, the 10 new bark etchings produced were not exhibited in Bunjilaka,15 and have since been purchased by members of the Boort Council who plan to build a cultural centre in collaboration with members of the Dja Dja Wurrung.16 The reinstatement of Dja Dja Wurrung cultural practices is part of a wider Koori assertion of culture and identity, which entails a radically different definition of preservation. Their repatriation claims amount to what might best be described as a ‘counter-collection’ strategy. Byrne argues that ‘[f]or Indigenous minorities to retain identity within the invented community of the settler nation they have had to mount various localising, decentering, counter-collection strategies’ (Byrne 2004, 248). Ngarra Murray argued that the term ‘re-appropriation’ is a more accurate


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expression of the Dja Dja Wurrung’s present moves in reclaiming the barks (N. Murray 2004). It is a term that asserts the agency of Aboriginal people today to take back what has been removed from them, that signifies ‘the changing relationship between Indigenous people and museums’, and that ‘carries with it the memories of previous transactions and prior relationships’. Sandra Pannell further stresses that for Aboriginal people today ‘in the post-Mabo landscape museums represent important collecting sites… a somewhat different identity to the former status of museums as sites of indigenous collections’ (Pannell 1994, 18). Re-appropriation – the making of an object into one’s own again – is an important way of describing Dja Dja Wurrung claims to the barks. Chris Healy has argued that by working with collections of Aboriginal material in museums and other archives, Aboriginal people have been actively ‘reclaiming memories which were stolen’ (Healy 1994, 44). Dja Dja Wurrung repatriation claims identify myriad strategies of reviving culture and reinstating Koori identity, and as Healy argues further, there can be dynamic and creative ways of working with objects, which ‘might be shifted towards remembering and renewal, towards… a possibility of history for life’ (Healy 1997, 105). The Dja Dja Wurrung people’s claims for the barks are dynamic and creative responses to dominant constructions of Koori culture and identity. In their efforts to reclaim the barks the Dja Dja Wurrung have mobilised many strategies to assert their agency in the way their culture and identity is understood.

OBLIGATION AND PRIVILEGED RELATIONSHIPS Museum Victoria is proud to work closely with Aboriginal communities to ensure the preservation and display of Aboriginal heritage and culture. However, Museum Victoria also acknowledges its obligations to abide by its loan agreements with the British Museum and the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew (Museum Victoria 2004).

The position of MV in the bark etchings dispute is complex: museum representatives have stressed throughout that they have obligations to both the British museums and the Dja Dja Wurrung. In late September 2004, however, board members and the CEO of MV Patrick Greene challenged Carter’s emergency declarations on the barks in court to facilitate their return to the British museums. Moreover, earlier interviews and correspondence indicate that MV’s intention was always to facilitate the return of the barks to the British institutions because they privileged their contractual obligations to these museums (Greene 2004b).17 Thus while MV officials maintained also that they had a proud and close relationship with the Dja Dja Wurrung, they were also pushing for the return of the barks to the British museums against the Dja Dja Wurrung’s wishes. Such moves provoke reconsideration of the relationship between MV and the Dja Dja Wurrung, and finally the nature of obligations and ‘goodwill’ in ‘postcolonial’ museology. Since the 1980s, MV’s relationships with Aboriginal communities can be characterised broadly as progressive, and representative of much new museum practice (see Vergo 1989; HooperGreenhill 2000). The formation of ACHAC, policies on repatriation, Indigenous involvement in public programs, the creation of Bunjilaka in collaboration with the wider Koori community, as well as the repatriation of the Jaara baby burial bundle to the Dja Dja Wurrung in 2003 (G. Murray 2003; Minchin 2004) are all illustrative of the close relationship that had been formed

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between MV, the wider Koori community and Dja Dja Wurrung representatives. MV’s support for the return of the Jaara baby bundle, in particular, set a positive mood for collaboration with Indigenous communities, but one that was subsequently disrupted for some by the barks dispute. Senior curator Foley stated: The history of Museum Victoria is severely tainted in most of its 150-year history… but the last twenty years it has been changing. Up until a year ago, Museum Victoria was promoting itself as most progressive… the barks episode has clearly demonstrated how superficial that commitment is (Foley 2004).18

This sense of reneging on the goodwill generated through a recent history of consultation and cooperation has been engendered in particular by MV’s insistence that it ‘knows best’ on issues of negotiation and repatriation, and that it acts as a ‘neutral’ player in a landscape occupied by a number of competing groups or claims. One key to the barks dispute was MV’s continued attempts to wrest authority from the Dja Dja Wurrung to decide the ‘most appropriate’ way to repatriate the barks. Throughout the dispute, CEO Greene stated that ‘MV has a role of responsibility to basically talk to communities about what is better for them’, and also insisted that MV’s ‘powers of persuasion, discussion and negotiation are better’.19 In the media Greene also downplayed the importance of repatriating cultural objects by insisting that ‘human remains are our number one priority’ (Greene 2004a), and that the Dja Dja Wurrung position threatened the return of human remains and cultural material belonging to other groups (Greene 2004b). Arguments that favour the return of human remains over cultural objects clearly have wide appeal and the issue of the return of human remains has become less controversial than the repatriation of artefacts (see Peers and Brown 2003). Still this effectively ignored the Dja Dja Wurrung stance that ‘objects have been neglected but are just as important’ (G. Murray 2004d). Thus although the Dja Dja Wurrung did not agree, MV presented itself as ‘knowing best’ and ‘doing the best’ for Aboriginal people. In the bark etchings dispute then, the museum’s position reveals the parameters of their engagement with Indigenous people, and perhaps their unwillingness and unreadiness for ‘indigines [to really be] in charge’ (Branche 1996, 120). While MV was placed in a difficult situation, financially and legally, the barks dispute and the arguments and alignments involved foregrounded the limitations of MV’s work for Indigenous communities, and what Julie Marcus has described as the ‘soft but critical edge’ to such statements that seek to ‘control and express once again settler and Aboriginal perceptions of Aboriginal society and culture’ (Marcus 1997, 33). Such appeals to a liberal sense of ‘good politics’ have been characterised by Andrew Lattas as ‘attempts by whites to determine what is good, moral politics [which] keeps alive the pastoral powers of European culture’ (Lattas 1993, 260). While new postcolonial museum practices are founded on the twin aims of democratising and decolonising museums, clearly new hegemonic forms emerge within the realm of ‘progressive’ politics and also, in this context, of ‘progressive’ museology. As Gillian Cowlishaw and Barry Morris have argued, attention needs to be paid to specific contexts in which such formations exist and are made legitimate (Cowlishaw and Morris 1997). While the museum and the Koori community have done much to democratise and decolonise MV’s exhibitions and collections, it seems useful to be reminded that disputes between MV and Koori community members were at times the catalyst for such changes. As Sculthorpe writes,


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MV’s lending of Aboriginal human remains to American institutions in the 1980s angered Indigenous members of staff at MV and also set about a chain of events which led to court cases and the eventual forming of the Koori Heritage Trust (Sculthorpe 2001). Such recollections of MV’s history are perhaps suggestive of the way in which new paradigms and protocols for Indigenous rights in the realm of museums have not necessarily been forged only out of ‘the powers of negotiation and persuasion’, but also out of conflict and dispute. Yet it is conflict and dispute that have been sidelined in some respects by those (provisionally ‘victorious’ in this dispute) seeking to locate their analysis in relation to notions such as ‘historical accuracy’.20 Since the barks dispute ‘ended’, some shifts in Bunjilaka’s exhibitions reflect also what some have described as an increasing tendency towards ‘safety and conservatism’ in approaches to repatriation and Aboriginal history at MV.21 One of the gallery’s exhibits about repatriation, for example, has been replaced. The original exhibit displayed Aboriginal objects wrapped (as though in storage) and atop of a series of text panels discussing regional Koori Keeping Places; a set of grey cabinets sat underneath, and inside one of the drawers could be read an article about Greek claims to the Parthenon Marbles; there were also drawers which opened to reveal labels indicating that objects had been returned to their communities of origin. This exhibit is gone, and has been replaced with a painting by a local Koori artist about the return of Aboriginal human remains. Other changes in staffing and management at Bunjilaka indicate the need not only for MV to work to re-establish trust, commitment and a sense of the importance of Aboriginal rights within museum culture, but also for Aboriginal people to have a say in their own cultural heritage ‘as things that inspire action as well as “contain meaning”’ (Muecke 2004, 11). When museums acknowledge the authority of Indigenous stakeholders this also has wider implications. As Moira Simpson has pointed out, increasingly staff working with museum collections are being called upon to address wider social and political issues such as Indigenous land claims (Simpson 1996). The role and function of museums for Indigenous people is thus changing, and museums have the potential to bring about greater change as a site for the recovery of important cultural heritage, family histories or even evidence for land claims. Michael Ames states: ‘control over museum collections and exhibitions are only the more immediate stages in the broader struggle for economic, political and cultural sovereignty’ (Ames 1996, 212). Hence the importance of the physical presence of the barks to the Dja Dja Wurrung is one thing, but the symbolic importance of repatriating the barks is another. It is the symbolic importance of repatriation that museums need to focus on, as it can provide the necessary conditions for a relationship of respect to occur. The Dja Dja Wurrung continue their efforts to repatriate the barks and to lobby more broadly for their return. They also continue their re-creation and development of the tradition of making bark etchings, partly as a result of the physical alienation of the barks from them, and also based on their sense of ongoing connection. As a group of Aboriginal members in ACHAC have emphasised previously, ‘it is the Aboriginal community who lives its culture’ (Rabberts 1994, 37). Asserting their own ‘deep narrative’ about the barks, Dja Dja Wurrung actions in this dispute also indicate the nature of the complex negotiations, understandings and imagination required in contemporary Australia, where, as Stephen Muecke has more recently argued, ‘[s]imple truth is not enough to answer to power; something more like creative events are needed to answer

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back to the blunt force… that tends to insist that “we” are ahead of the Others’ (Muecke 2004, 12). It would be grossly unfair to characterise MV as a ‘blunt force’, and it should be noted that Murray issued a media release during the dispute emphasising that the Dja Dja Wurrung ‘are proud of Museum Victoria’s more recent policies on repatriation which we regard as best practice and of a world standard’.22 Yet in a subsequent lecture on the barks dispute at the University of Melbourne, the original curator of Bunjilaka’s Koori Voices exhibit, Tony Birch, raised an important question. Given the museum’s reliance on the goodwill and intellectual input of Kooris, such as the Dja Dja Wurrung in the creation of Bunjilaka, Birch asked, how will MV gain such significant information from the Koori community in the near future?23 It remains to be seen how the relationship between local Koori groups and the museum will fare, how the museum will continue to represent Koori communities, and how the museum will meet its obligations to those it relies on to help create and validate exhibitions with stories and approval. How will the museum address Dja Dja Wurrung Elder Aunty Fay Carter’s powerful desire to continue looking at the barks?

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The authors would like to thank the following people for interviews, as well as access to unpublished material and personal archives: Philip Batty, Tony Birch, Aunty Fay Carter, Rodney Carter, Gary Foley, Patrick Greene, John Morton, Gary Murray, Ngarra Murray, Gaye Sculthorpe, Elizabeth Willis and the Bunjilaka customer service officers at Museum Victoria.

ENDNOTES 1

2

3 4 5

6

7

8 9 10 11

For details of the Heritage Protection Act, see the Australian Legal Information Institute database: http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/aatsihpa1984549/. Part IIA refers specifically to Victorian Aboriginal cultural heritage (which, subsequent to this dispute, was subject to amendment in 2005); section 21C covers emergency declarations of preservation on Victorian Aboriginal cultural property. Patrick Greene to Director of Aboriginal Affairs Victoria Angela Jurjevio, letter, 10 August 2004, archive of Gary Murray, Melbourne. Rodney Carter to Pamie Fung, email, 8 March 2005. Rodney Carter to Pamie Fung, email, 8 March 2005. As an employee at the Melbourne Museum, Pamie Fung heard many concerns expressed about the lack of a ‘proper welcome’ for the barks during the period of the dispute. Patrick Greene, ‘Affidavit of John Patrick Greene, Federal Court of Australia, Victorian District Registry, 13 September 2004’, archive of Gary Foley, Melbourne. Neil Macgregor to MV Director of Collections Research and Exhibitions Robin Hirst, email, 9 July 2004, archive of Gary Foley, Melbourne. Rodney Carter to Pamie Fung, email, 8 March 2005. Herald Sun, 27 July 2004. Gary Foley to all staff at Melbourne Museum, email, 21 September 2004. Patrick Greene to all staff at Melbourne Museum, emails, 22 and 30 September 2004.


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12 13

14 15

16 17

18

19 20

21

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Bunjilaka gallery staff, personal communication with Pamie Fung, 30 September 2004. Seidel’s profile at the Arnold Bloch Leibler website details his involvement in the Yorta Yorta case: http://www.abl.com.au/default.asp?p=4,118,120&i=2080118. In an interview with Aboriginal Elder Aunty Fay Carter, Fung was provided with an email communication to Arnold Bloch Leibler by Yorta Yorta Elder Wayne Atkinson written on behalf of the Dja Dja Wurrung (dated 8 October 2004). It expressed various concerns about Seidel’s relationship with MV (F. Carter 2004). Rodney Carter to Pamie Fung, email, 8 March 2005; (G. Murray 2005). An exhibition featuring the barks, Ngatuk (Possum Skin Cloaks) and Mityuk (Barks), was subsequently held at the Meatmarket Arts House, North Melbourne, 4–16 April 2006, featuring works by principal artist Ngarra Murray and other Koori artists, including Lyn Thorpe, Alistair Thorpe, Jason Tamiru and Doris Atkinson. Ngarra Murray, personal communication with Pamie Fung, 9 June 2006. Patrick Greene to Director of British Museum Neil Macgregor, email, 24 June 2004, archive of Gary Foley. Foley has since resigned from his position as Senior Curator of South-Eastern Indigenous collections at MV. Patrick Greene, ‘Affidavit of John Patrick Greene’ (Greene 2005). Throughout the dispute, both British museums have configured their arguments concerning ownership in this way. MV curator Willis sought also to distinguish ‘historical research’ from ‘politicisation’ (Willis 2006). Tony Birch, comments and questions raised at ‘The bark etchings dispute’ lecture by Gary Murray, Gary Foley and Wayne Atkinson, 17 May 2005, Department of Political Science, University of Melbourne. Gary Murray, unpublished media release, 23 July 2004. Tony Birch, comments and questions raised at ‘The bark etchings dispute’ lecture, 17 May 2005.

REFERENCES Aboriginal Community Elders Service; Harvey, Kate. 2003. Aboriginal elders voices: Stories of the ‘tide of history’; Victorian Indigenous elders’ life stories and oral histories. Melbourne: Language Australia. Alberge, Dalya. 2004. ‘Aborigines “hijack” artefacts loaned by Britain’. Times (26 July). Ames, Michael. 1996. ‘Retrospective: Reflections on some common themes arising out of diversity’. In Curatorship: Indigenous perspectives in post-colonial societies. Ottawa: Canadian Museum of Civilization with the Commonwealth Association of Museums and the University of Victoria. Attwood, Bain. 1999. ‘My country’: A history of the Dja Dja Wurrung 1837–1864. Melbourne: Monash Publications in History, Monash University. Batty, Philip. 2002. ‘A recent repatriation’. Museum Victoria Magazine 3: 10–12. Birch, Tony. 2001. ‘Returning to country’. In A museum for the people: A history of Museum Victoria and its predecessors, 1854–2000, edited by Rasmussen, Carolyn. Melbourne: Scribe. Birch, Tony. 2003. ‘“Nothing has changed”: The making and unmaking of Koori culture’. In Blacklines: Contemporary critical writing by Indigenous Australians, edited by Grossman, Michele. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Branche, Winnel. 1996. ‘Indigenes in charge: Are museums ready?’ In Curatorship: Indigenous perspectives in post-colonial societies. Ottawa: Canadian Museum of Civilization with the Commonwealth Association of Museums and the University of Victoria.

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British Museum. 2004. ‘Joint statement issued by the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew and the British Museum’, 13 July. In National Museum Directors’ Conference Newsletter 37 (August) 2004: 4. Available from: http://www.nationalmuseums.org.uk/images/newsletters/nmdc_newsletter_aug04.doc. Burke, Heather; Lovell-Jones, Christine; Smith, Claire. 1994. ‘Beyond the looking glass: Some thoughts on sociopolitics and reflexivity in Australian Archaeology’. Australian Archaeology 38 (June): 13–22. Byrne, Denis. 2003. ‘The ethos of return: Erasure and reinstatement of Aboriginal visibility in the Australian historical landscape’. Historical Archaeology 37 (1): 73–86. Byrne, Denis. 2004. ‘Archaeology in reverse’. In Public archaeology, edited by Merriman, Nick. New York: Routledge. Carter, Fay. 2004. Interview with Pamie Fung, 26 October. Carter, Fay. 2005. Interview with Pamie Fung. 10 February. Carter, Rodney. 2004a. ‘Emergency Declaration Under Subsection 21C (1) of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Heritage Protection Act 1984’, 18 June. In Museums Board of Victoria v. Carter (2005) FCA 645. Available from: http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/federal_ct/2005/645.html. Carter, Rodney. 2004b. ‘Barks etched’. Unpublished poem, lines 6–10, composed 25 October 2004; provided by Aunty Fay Carter, with the permission of Rodney Carter. Cowlishaw, Gillian; Morris, Barry. 1997. ‘Cultural racism’. In Race matters: Indigenous Australians and ‘our’ society, edited by Cowlishaw, Gillian; Morris, Barry. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. Davidson, Ian. 1991. ‘Archaeologists and Aborigines’. Australian Journal of Anthropology 2 (2): 247–258. Federal Court of Australia Victoria District Registry (FCA). 2004. ‘Museum Board of Victoria and Rodney Carter’, 15–16 December 2004; transcript of proceedings provided to Pamie Fung by Spark and Cannon. Fourmile, Henrietta. 1989. ‘Aboriginal heritage legislation and self-determination’. Australian-Canadian Studies 7 (1–2): 45–61. Fourmile, Henrietta. 1990. ‘Possession is nine-tenths of the law and don’t Aboriginal people know it!’ Bulletin of the Conference of Museum Anthropologists 23 (April): 57–67. Fung, Pamie. 2005. ‘The bark etchings dispute’. Honours thesis, Melbourne: University of Melbourne. Glass, Aaron. 2004. ‘Return to sender: On the politics of cultural property and the proper address of art’. Journal of Material Culture 9 (2): 115–139. Greene, Patrick. 2004a. Interview with Peter Thompson. ‘AM’. ABC Radio National, 28 July. Greene, Patrick. 2004b. Interview with Virginia Trioli. ‘Drive’. ABC Radio 774, 15 July. Green, Patrick. 2005. Interview with Pammie Fung. 17 February. Greenfield, Jeanette. 1989. The return of cultural treasures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Healy, Chris. 1994. ‘Histories and collecting: Museums, objects and memories’. In Memory and history in twentieth-century Australia, edited by Darian-Smith, Kate; Hamilton, Paula. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Healy, Chris. 1997. From the ruins of colonialism: History as social memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hooper-Greenhill, Eileen. 2000. Museums and the interpretation of visual culture. London: Routledge. Karp, Ivan. 1991. ‘Culture and representation’. In Exhibiting cultures: The poetics and politics of museum display, edited by Karp, Ivan; Lavine, Steven D. Washington: Smithsonian. Kaplan, Flora, editor. 1994. Museums and the ‘making of ourselves’: The role of objects in national identity. London: Leicester University Press. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. 1991. ‘Objects of ethnography’. In Exhibiting cultures: The poetics and politics of museum display, edited by Karp, Ivan; Lavine, Steven D. Washington: Smithsonian. Langford, Rosalind. 1983. ‘Our heritage – your playground’. Australian Archaeology 16 (June): 1–6. Langton, Marcia. 1993. ‘Well, I heard it on the radio and I saw it on the television’. Sydney: Australian Film Commission. Lattas, Andrew. 1993. ‘Essentialism, memory and resistance: Aboriginality and the politics of authenticity’. Oceania 63 (3): 240–268.


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Lenaghan, Nick. 2004. ‘Curator warns Vic Government over dispute etchings’. The Age (19 October). Marcus, Julie. 1997. ‘The journey out to the centre: The cultural appropriation of ayers rock’. In Race matters: Indigenous Australians and ‘our’ society, edited by Cowlishaw, Gillian; Morris, Barry. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. Mauch-Messanger, Phyllis, editor. 1989. The ethics of collecting: Whose culture? Albuquerque: University of Mexico Press. McBryde, Isabel, editor. 1985. Who owns the past? Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Minchin, Liz. 2004. ‘A century on, one Aboriginal child returns to the land’. The Age, 11 September. Muecke, Stephen. 2004. Ancient and modern: Time, culture and indigenous philosophy. Sydney: UNSW Press. Murray, Gary. 2003. ‘The Jaara Baby’. Unpublished manuscript. Archive of Gary Murray, Melbourne. Murray, Gary. 2004a. Interview with Virginia Trioli. ‘Drive’. ABC Radio 744, 15 July. Murray, Gary. 2004b. Interview with Tiga Bayles. ‘Let’s Talk’. Radio 4AAA, 5 August. Murray, Gary. 2004c. ‘Barks fall on dead ears, culturally significant boort barks: Paper prepared for Federal Court hearing Tuesday 9th November (2004)’. Unpublished paper provided by Ngarra Murray with permission from Gary Murray. Murray, Gary. 2004d. ‘Remains returned’. Koori Mail (25 August). Murray, Gary. 2005. Interview with Pamie Fung. 17 February. Murray, Ngarra. 2004. Interview with Pamie Fung. 25 October. Museums Australia. 1996. ‘Previous possessions, new obligations: A plain English summary for museums in Australia and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’. Policy paper. Available from: http://www.museumsaustralia.org.au. Museums Australia. 2005. ‘Continuing cultures, ongoing responsibilities: Principles and guidelines for Australian museums working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Cultural Heritage’. Policy paper. Available from: http://www.museumsaustralia.org.au. Museums Board of Victoria v Carter. 2005. FCA 645 (20 May 2005). Available from: http://www.austlii.edu.au/cases/cth/federal_ct/2005/645.html. Museum Victoria. 2000. Bunjilaka: The Aboriginal Centre at Melbourne Museum. Melbourne: Museum Victoria. Museum Victoria. 2004. ‘Media statement from Museum Victoria’, 26 June. Myers, Fred. 2004. ‘Social agency and the cultural value(s) of the art object’. Journal of Material Culture 9 (2): 203–211. Nelson, Robert. 2004. ‘Etched on Bark 1854’. The Age (26 May). Nicks, Trudy. 2003. ‘Museums and contact work’. In Museums and source communities, edited by Peers, Laura; Brown, Alison K. London: Routledge. North-West Nations Clan. 2004. [Internet]. Accessed 2005. Available at: http://www.kooriweb.org/nwnc/index.html. Pannell, Sandra. 1994. ‘Mabo and museums: “The Indigenous (re)appropriation of indigenous things”’. Oceania 65 (1): 18–39. Pearce, Trevor, editor. 1998. Museum National 7 (1). Peers, Laura; Brown, Alison K., editors. 2003. Museums and source communities. London: Routledge. Peers, Laura. 2004. ‘Repatriation: A gain for science?’ Anthropology Today 20 (6): 3–4. Rabberts, Melanie. 1994. ‘Trade at a distance’. MA thesis, Melbourne: Deakin University. Sculthorpe, Gaye. 2001. ‘Negotiating new relationships’. In A museum for the people: A history of Museum Victoria and its predecessors, 1854–2000, edited by Rasmussen, Carolyn. Melbourne: Scribe. Servaes, Caroline; Prendergast, Hew. 2002. ‘Out of the museum darkness: A mid-19th century bark drawing from Victoria, Australia’. Economic Botany 56 (1): 7–9 Simpson, Moira. 1996. Making representations: Museums in the postcolonial era. London: Routledge.

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Thomas, Nicholas. 1994. Colonialism’s culture: Anthropology, travel and government. Melbourne: Melbourne University. Ucko, Peter. 1983. ‘Australian academic archaeology: Aboriginal transformation of its aims and practices’. Australian Archaeology 16 (June): 11–26. Usher, Robin. 2004. ‘Petition calls for the return of koori etchings’. The Age (27 May). Vergo, Peter, editor. 1989. The new museology. London: Reaktion. Ward, Graeme. 1998. ‘Ethical Australian archaeology’. Newsletter of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia 17 (3): 23–30. Willis, Elizabeth. 2002. ‘Searching out a Victorian treasure overseas’. Museum Victoria Magazine 4: 20–21. Willis, Elizabeth. 2003. ‘Exhibiting Aboriginal industry’. Aboriginal History 27: 39–58. Willis, Elizabeth. 2004. Etched on Bark 1854: Kulin barks from northern Victoria. Melbourne: Museum Victoria. Willis, Elizabeth. 2006. ‘Etched on Bark 1854: Contested Historical Ground’. Paper presented at Museums Australia Conference, Brisbane, 14–17 May. Available from: http://www.museumsaustralia.org.au/whatwedo.php?pageID=463&fileName=whatwedo&dispModule=t wocoln av&contentID=435. Wilson, David. 1989. The British Museum: Purpose and politics. London: British Museum.

Cite this chapter as: Fung, Pamie; Wills, Sara. 2006. ‘There’s so much in looking at those barks: Dja Dja Wurrung etchings 2004–05’. South Pacific museums, edited by Healy, Chris; Witcomb, Andrea. Monash University ePress: Melbourne. pp. 11.1–11.16. DOI: 10.2104/spm06011.


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GAB TITUI CULTURAL CENTRE Leilani Bin-Juda, Torres Strait Regional Authority Leilani Bin-Juda has been employed by the Torres Strait Regional Authority (TSRA) since 2002. She was involved in establishing the Torres Strait Cultural Centre and has managed the TSRA Arts Development Program. In 2005 she participated in the Venice Biennale through the Australia Council’s Emerging Indigenous Young Curators Program. She is currently the Health Policy Coordinator for the TSRA.

THE LONG AND WINDING PATH: FROM PLACES TO PEOPLE – THE SIGNIFICANCE OF GROWING LOCALLY Traditionally museums have been a foreign concept to indigenous cultures. Recently, however, there have been many initiatives and exhibitions that have proactively engaged indigenous peoples to become involved in content development, research documentation and performance. Although this level of engagement is important for museums and their collections, equally important is the training and recruitment of indigenous peoples within those institutions. This essay will outline the significance of employing and nurturing locally skilled personnel to care for their own cultural objects. The maintenance of indigenous culture can be achieved through art, craft, song, dance and ceremony, which form an integral part of what is termed ‘intangible cultural heritage’. UNESCO’s Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage defines such heritage as: ‘The practices, representations, and expressions… associated knowledge and… necessary skills, that communities, groups and, in some cases, individuals recognize as part of their cultural heritage’ (UNESCO 2003). UNESCO recognises that this can also be defined as ‘living cultural heritage’, in the forms of oral traditions, expressions and language; the performing arts; social practices, rituals, and festive events; knowledge and practices about nature and the universe; and traditional craftsmanship. It is imperative that while ‘living culture’ is recognised as an essential part of the maintenance of ‘intangible cultural heritage’, the investment to skill local indigenous people is equally significant for the survival of cultural heritage. In this essay, I examine some initiatives and exhibitions that have empowered and skilled local Indigenous people of the Torres Strait Islands. The Torres Strait Islands are a group of islands situated between the tip of Cape York Peninsula in Northern Queensland and south-west Papua New Guinea in the Torres Strait, which was named after the Spanish explorer Luis de Torres in 1606. The Torres Strait became part of Australia with annexation at the turn of the twentieth century, and today there are approximately 8000 people living in the Torres Strait, 75 per cent of whom are Torres Strait Islander and Aboriginal people (Torres Strait Regional Authority 2003, 22). The origins of Torres Strait Islanders stretch to the north of Papua New Guinea, west to the Pacific Islands, and south to Cape York Peninsula. There are now 18 inhabited island communities throughout the Torres Strait region (Torres Strait Regional Authority 2003, 22). The islands are divided into five regional groups: Top Western (Saibai, Boigu, Dauan); Western (Mabuiag, Badu, St Paul’s Community, Kubin Community); Central (Yam, Coconut, Yorke and Sue); Eastern (Murray, Darnley and Stephen); and

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Inner Islands (Hammond, Thursday, Horn and Prince of Wales). Although Torres Strait Islanders are distinctly different from Australian Aboriginal people, the diversity among Islanders is also unique because of their different languages and cultural beliefs. The long and winding path to fostering locally skilled people of the Torres Strait occurred in various phases. The first phase included establishing the much-anticipated Past Time exhibition, which showcased a selection of objects from the Alfred Haddon Collection at the National Museum of Australia (NMA). The second phase was to develop a replacement exhibition for Past Time, and this was Paipa. And the third phase involved establishing the first cultural centre in the Torres Strait, Gab Titui, with our own Indigenous trained personnel. This is my story of how this long and winding path evolved and culminated into finally achieving the vision to empower, develop and nurture our own people, who will one day become the next generation of custodians of our very survival in cultural heritage and preservation.

PHASE ONE: PAST TIME In 1999 I was employed by the NMA as the curator of the Torres Strait Islander Program, and was tasked with the delivery of a Torres Strait Islander exhibition from the nineteenth-century Alfred Haddon material housed at the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (CUMAA). The first stage in the exhibition delivery involved community consultations with Torres Strait Islanders. At that time, the NMA had in place a Torres Strait Islander reference group with representatives from throughout Australia. The reference group nominated a small delegation to travel to Cambridge and select appropriate objects to display at the new NMA’s opening in Canberra as part of the Australian Government’s centenary celebrations for 2001 (National Museum of Australia 2002, ii). My role was to escort the delegation – which included Ephraim Bani, Flo Kennedy, Fr Dave Passi, Goby Noah and Francis Tapim – to Cambridge to select the objects and develop the content for the exhibition. The Australia Council’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts Board provided the museum with financial assistance to enable the visit.

Figure 12.1 Studying the Alfred Haddon photographic collection at the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology © Leilani Bin-Juda

Much preparation work had been carried out by the previous curator of the Torres Strait Islander Program, Mary Bani, who was successful in obtaining an Australian Winston Churchill Fellowship in 1998. This fellowship enabled Ms Bani to conduct an audit of Torres Strait Islander artefacts throughout Europe. Ongoing liaison and support was provided through the NMA’s reference group; the Cambridge curator Anita Herle, who has a long affiliation with the Torres

GAB TITUI CULTURAL CENTRE NEW KNOWLEDGES

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Strait; and Jude Philp, an Australian student undertaking studies at CUMAA, who upon return to Australia wrote the Past Time exhibition catalogue (Philp 2001) and was then employed at the Australian Museum. These networks were the building blocks for the much anticipated exhibition content for the NMA. The timing of the visit to Cambridge was planned to coincide with CUMAA’s exhibition commemorating the 100-year anniversary of the Haddon material. Entitled Torres Strait Islands: An Exhibition to Mark the Centenary of the 1898 Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait, the exhibition opened on 1 July 1998 (Herle and Philp 1998, 5). The significance of selecting Haddon material for display was monumental for the NMA and the Torres Strait, because it would be the first time in over 100 years that some of this cultural material would be brought back to Australia. During the delegation’s discussions I was privileged to listen to the elders talk about the most researched Torres Strait Islander cultural material collection and its importance. My background had previously been working in project management and human resources; therefore, the opportunity to gain knowledge from the group on the significance of cultural heritage for us as Islanders was an intense learning curve. The mere fact that we were right among the material steeped in history had an immense impact on each of us. During this moment of consultation and discussion, a question occurred to me: why were there not many young Torres Strait Islanders involved in the preservation and maintenance of our history, either employed in, or having an interest to work in, cultural institutions? In 2000 there was only a handful of Torres Strait Islanders working within museums and galleries throughout Australia. This was identified as a critical element in our survival, as well as continued efforts to ensure our cultural material would one day return to the Torres Strait and be appropriately cared for by our own skilled people. This was a pivotal turning point for me in recognising the skill shortage, and I made a personal pledge to train more young Torres Strait Islander people in the heritage field, thus beginning the long and winding path to achieve this task. Even so, there was much work to be done before this could be implemented. The 70 objects selected from the Haddon material were displayed as the Past Time exhibition in 2001 in the Torres Strait Islander Gallery of the NMA for 12 months. The exhibition then toured to the Cairns Regional Gallery for a further six months before returning back to Cambridge. Part of the plan to resolve the skills shortage involved using my Peter Mitchell Churchill Fellowship, from the Australian Winston Churchill Fellowship, to identify strategies that encouraged indigenous youth to actively participate in cultural heritage and learning, particularly within museums in New Zealand, Canada, the United States of America and Hawaii. This was then paralleled with similar circumstances to the Torres Strait. I conducted the research in 2000 and 2001, produced and submitted a report to the NMA, and subsequently provided a presentation at the Museums Australia Conference 2002 in Adelaide. Although the exhibitions took precedence at the NMA, due to the enormity of the 2001 opening, the written report provided a foundation that would later be executed. In particular, the Canadian Museum of Civilization’s Indigenous Curator Program later inspired my thinking in developing a similar program for the Torres Strait.

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PHASE TWO: PAIPA The second phase was to establish a replacement exhibition for Past Time at the NMA. I immediately started developing Paipa (Torres Strait Islander Western language, Kala Lagaw Ya, meaning ‘windward’), which opened in 2002. The population of Islanders on the mainland is 42,400, compared with 8000 in the Torres Strait (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2001). With this in mind, Paipa explored the different waves of migration from the Torres Strait to mainland Australia. Paipa built on the contemporary living culture of Islanders from mainland Australia with a clear connection to the Torres Straits. It explored the flow of migration from the nineteenth century to the present through five major themes: the introduction of Christianity; the pearling and fishing industry; the cane cutting industry; World War II; and young people’s responses to the changing environment. Islander communities from Broome, Townsville, Mackay, Cairns and Thursday Island were involved in the exhibition’s development, and their stories were interwoven throughout. The Paipa exhibition gave me the widest opportunity to connect with Torres Strait Islander communities throughout Australia. This reinforced my vision to ensure that the skills shortage of our own young people working in the heritage sector needed to be filled. While Paipa was being developed, the Torres Strait Regional Authority (TSRA) had been undertaking discussions to build a central keeping place for cultural material in the Torres Strait. Once Paipa had opened, I relocated to the Torres Strait to begin work as an arts development officer for TSRA in August 2002. Part of the work involved establishing the first Torres Strait Islander cultural centre, Gab Titui, on Thursday Island, as well as fostering and nurturing the arts development of the Torres Strait.

PHASE THREE: GAB TITUI The most significant task in establishing the cultural centre was the recruitment and selection of local Torres Strait Islanders.1 This involved extensive groundwork in fostering good working relationships with a multitude of stakeholders within the employment and heritage sectors. It was within this context that the long and winding path slowly began to evolve and become formalised. In providing personnel for the cultural centre, I needed to recruit, select and appoint three Indigenous trainees in partnership with TRAWQ Community Council (a local Indigenous council), Thursday Island TAFE, Queensland Apprentice Scheme and ITEC Employment Services. I set up the traineeships and the course development with the TAFE to ensure that the Indigenous trainees would complete a formal qualification (Certificate III in Tourism, Visitor Services) to complement the work at the cultural centre. As part of the trainees’ on-the-job training, I utilised my networks with the Australian Museum and facilitated a joint internship whereby all three trainees spent time at the museum investigating their collections and their conservation and public programs.2 In addition, as the key driver and overall manager in creating the cultural centre, I established the first Indigenous mentoree position at the centre through the successful financial assistance of the Australia Council for the Arts. I facilitated the funding submission, and identified the need for the position in creating employment opportunities for Indigenous people of the region, as well as an opportunity to mentor a local Torres Strait Islander person. The rationale behind


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setting up the mentorship was to ensure that local skills and knowledge would be developed and people would be trained to participate within the cultural heritage industry. At the conclusion of 2004, the three trainees graduated with the Certificate III. It was an exciting day to see, finally, one’s vision being achieved. One of the trainees has since gained employment with the National Gallery of Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander section.3 This was a great achievement to see how the skill-development and empowerment of a young Torres Strait Islander person who was nurtured locally had enabled their engagement by a national cultural institution. The cultural centre won the Queensland Tourism Award in 2005 under the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander category, and was recently highly commended in the National Tourism Awards under the same category.4

CONTINUED EFFORTS In my position at TSRA, I continued to foster a good working relationship with Cambridge University. I was awarded a travel study grant from a philanthropic organisation based in the USA in August 2004, and had the opportunity to visit CUMAA (and other museums in Hawaii, Canada, USA and Japan). The visit enabled me to select historical photographs from Haddon’s photographic collection, which were displayed at the Gab Titui Cultural Centre’s first birthday celebrations in April 2005. Ongoing liaison continues with the long-term view that once a facility is built in the Torres Strait to appropriately house the objects, then cultural material could be returned. This type of negotiation for the return of cultural material requires sensitivity, particularly the ability to negotiate with CUMAA both as a cultural and academic institution.

CONCLUSION In conclusion, the main point throughout the history of the long and winding path to empowering locally skilled Indigenous people is that young people matter, and giving them the opportunity to develop, nurture and mentor at a local level is crucial for our survival in the heritage sector. It is not just about the infrastructure, artefacts, exhibitions and programs, but more importantly, about ensuring that we have our own skilled people and can create a culture of continuous learning for our own sustainability. For me, the long path began from a seed in Cambridge where I, as a young person, had identified the need to overcome the skills shortage, and thus grew the idea to implement the vision that finally became a reality in 2005.

ENDNOTES 1

‘Introducing the Gab Titui Team’. TSRA News, no. 56, Apr–Jun 2004: 5.

2

‘Trainees gain unique insight into national museums’. TSRA News, no. 61, Feb–Mar 2005: 2.

3

‘Simona off to Canberra’. Torres News, 18–24 January 2006: 2.

4

‘Torres Strait’s Gab Titui Cultural Centre Wins Queensland Tourism Award’. TSRA News, no. 70, Dec 2005–Jan 2006: 1; and ‘National tourism body acknowledges Torres Strait’s Gab Titui Cultural Centre’. TSRA News, no. 72, March 2006: 2.

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REFERENCES Australian Bureau of Statistics. 2001. ‘Population characteristics of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians: 2001 Census’. [Internet]. Australian Bureau of Statistics. Accessed 12 July 2006. Available from: http://www.abs.gov.au/Ausstats/[email protected]/0/4B01828AAE8653CDCA256DCE007F78E2?Open. Herle, Anita; Philp, Jude. 1998. Torres Strait Islanders – An exhibition marking the centenary of the 1898 Cambridge Anthropological Expedition. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Herle, Anita; Rouse, Sandra, eds. 1998. Cambridge and the Torres Strait: Centenary essays on the 1898 anthropological expedition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. National Museum of Australia. 2002. Annual report, 2001–2002. Canberra: National Museum of Australia. Philp, Jude. 2001. Past time: Torres Strait Islander material from the Haddon Collection, 1888–1905: A National Museum of Australia exhibition from the University of Cambridge. Canberra: National Museum of Australia. Torres Strait Regional Authority. 2003. Annual report, 2003–2004. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia. United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization. 2003. ‘Convention for the safeguarding of the intangible cultural heritage’. [Internet]. Accessed 11 September 2005. Available from: http://portal.unesco.org/culture/en/ev.php-URL_ID=16429&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTI ON=201.html.

Cite this chapter as: Bin-Juda, Leilani. 2006. ‘Gab Titui Cultural Centre’. South Pacific museums, edited by Healy, Chris; Witcomb, Andrea. Monash University ePress: Melbourne. pp. 12.1–12.6. DOI: 10.2104/spm06012.


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THE MUSEUM AS CULTURAL AGENT THE VANUATU CULTURAL CENTRE EXTENSION WORKER PROGRAM Lissant Bolton, British Museum Lissant Bolton is curator of the Pacific and Australian collections at the British Museum, and has worked collaboratively with the Vanuatu Cultural Centre from 1991. Her research focuses on women’s knowledge and practice, especially as expressed through both indigenous and introduced textiles. Her book, Unfolding the moon: Enacting Women’s Kastom in Vanuatu (University of Hawaii Press), was published in 2003. Correspondence to Lissant Bolton: [email protected]

The majority of Western museums hide the authorship and agency of their staff behind the institutional umbrella. This chapter explores an alternative model of knowledge production, which recognises the agency of individual practitioners within institutional practices. The Vanuatu Kaljoral Senta (Vanuatu Cultural Centre) began a fieldworker program that gave individual agency to local volunteer community workers in defining and carrying out a research program to document and preserve local customs (kastom). In describing the women’s fieldworker program by focusing on a number of individual women I highlight the ways in which their work opens up the continued relevance of kastom to local communities and enables both personal and institutional fulfilment. In this model of knowledge production, agency is given both ways – from the institution to the fieldworkers and to the institution itself via the fieldworkers. It is a model that enables the Vanuatu Kaljoral Senta to engage directly with its postcolonial context and address the needs of the communities it serves. As institutions, museums are often depersonalised. Exhibition curators are usually not named, and other decisions – about public programs, acquisitions, community liaison – are rarely attributed publicly to one individual. The convention is of institutional authorship, sometimes identified in the person of the current director. As anyone who has ever worked in a museum knows, museums are actually a ferment of personalities, convictions, disputes and politics. An exhibition, for example, is almost always a compromise: a negotiated settlement of deeply felt and often opposing convictions held by curators, educators, designers, conservators, managers and financiers. Unlike feature films, where the closing credits scroll through a litany of participants – studio executives, directors, authors, actors, technicians, funders, even caterers – museums frequently elide the individualities they encompass in favour of a single and impersonal institutional authorship. As has been persuasively argued in a variety of contexts, many museums were founded to achieve political and social objectives. As strategies for influencing the moral and intellectual conduct of the citizenry, as declarations of national identity, as assertions of certain views of history or culture, the agency of museums has been widely discussed (for example, Bennett 1995; Kaplan 1994; Sherman and Rogoff 1994). This agency is not, at least in my experience, always made explicit in internal museum debates. Indeed, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, many museums are less concerned about their moral or political agency than they are about the impact of their visitor numbers on their funding streams. Even so, museums continue to have significant agency both in reproducing contemporary cultural preoccupations and in modifying them with new or different ideas.

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The Vanuatu Kaljoral Senta (Vanuatu Cultural Centre, VKS) is well known as an energetic and effective cultural institution in the Pacific. Significantly, the VKS director, Ralph Regenvanu, is explicit about recognising the agency available to his institution and making use of it for the benefit of Vanuatu as a whole (Regenvanu 2003). His interest is not primarily in exhibitions, but rather in a series of research programs directed towards a social and economic development based on indigenous practice. Recent VKS programs have contributed to the formulation of national environmental legislation, promoted the use of the vernacular in kindergartens and early primary education, developed a national history curriculum for secondary school use, and explored the use of indigenous economic systems in contemporary contexts (see Regenvanu 2003; Bolton n.d.; Lightner and Naupa 2005; Huffman 1996. Although the VKS contains many of the internationally conventional structures of major cultural institutions – incorporating Vanuatu’s national museum, library, archaeological site survey, film and sound unit, and audio-visual archives – the energy that drives these different sections comes from an unconventional source. The bedrock of the VKS is a group of about 100 volunteer extension workers, known as the fieldworkers. Vanuatu is extremely complex culturally: a population of about 220,000 people live on some 80 islands and between them speak 113 languages. The fieldworkers, representing this diversity, act for the VKS in their own places and bring perspectives and issues from those places to bear on the cultural centre’s activities. Their charter is to document, preserve and promote indigenous knowledge and practice in their places. The fieldworker program personalises and individualises VKS institutional agency. Each fieldworker, working voluntarily in his or her own area, is free to act in whatever way he or she chooses. The role and title – filwoka in Bislama, the national lingua franca – is widely respected throughout Vanuatu, and being a fieldworker can give a person significant agency in his or her own community. To an extent dependant on character, community and circumstances, individual fieldworkers can and do make a significant impact at the local level. They are motivated to act for the VKS out of personal commitment and interest. Indeed for many, what is important is not that they represent the VKS so much as that their connection to it enables them to do things they consider important. VKS staff also listen to what the fieldworkers say: their concerns have an influence on the institution’s projects and policies. This paper explores the fieldworkers’ personal agency, discussing the fieldworker program by focusing on a number of individual fieldworkers. While there are both men and women fieldworkers, this paper addresses the women fieldworkers’ network.

THE FIELDWORKER NETWORK From first settlement about 3200 years ago, indigenous society in what is now the Vanuatu archipelago consisted of small, politically independent communities of subsistence agriculturalists. Although people traded widely, both for goods and for cultural resources such as songs and ceremonial cycles, they were in other ways tied to their own land. Unlike many societies in Papua New Guinea, ni-Vanuatu cultural practice often concentrated more on knowledge and performance – ceremony, dance, song, story, intellectual resource – than on the production of objects. They did not worship gods as such, but rather recognised the landscape to be co-inhabited by a range of other beings including spirits, some of which were ancestral spirits. Expatriate contacts with the islands – named the New Hebrides by Captain Cook in 1774 – only became significant from

THE MUSEUM AS CULTURAL AGENT NEW KNOWLEDGES

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the 1840s, when planters and missionaries began to settle there. No colonial arrangements were put in place until 1906, when an initial joint naval agreement between Britain and France was transformed into the Anglo-French Condominium Government of the New Hebrides. Britain and France, both rather reluctant participants in this arrangement, invested little in the islands and, equally, made little significant impact on the islanders. Missionaries, labour traders and planters were more influential, and more influential in some islands than others. One consequence of this set of arrangements was that many ni-Vanuatu retained a strong sense of local autonomy through the colonial era. Although the British were keen to grant independence, the French were not, and the resulting struggle for independence through the 1970s helped to create a sense of shared national identity that had never existed before. The fieldworker program was initiated in the late 1970s and developed in the heady years after independence in 1980. It remains infected with the idealism of that whole period. The VKS fieldworker network has been discussed in a number of publications (Huffman 1996; Tryon 1999; Bolton 2003), and is addressed to some extent in many others (Bolton 1999; Curtis 2002). The network began with a small group of men brought together under the direction of the then VKS curator Kirk Huffman and the Australian linguist Darrell Tryon. In 1994 a women fieldworkers’ network was instituted, under the care of Jean Tarisesei and me. Jean Tarisesei works for the VKS full-time, heading a section called the Women’s Culture Project. Both fieldworker groups have grown steadily through the ensuing years, and there are now about 40 women fieldworkers. The core characteristic of the whole fieldworker program is the project of affirmation: the affirmation of the importance of kastom – the Bislama term for indigenous knowledge and practice – and the affirmation of local initiatives to sustain and support rural niVanuatu society. The two fieldworker groups each meet for an annual two-week workshop at which each member reports on his or her work through the preceding year, presents a research report on the workshop topic and receives training in research techniques. At the end of each workshop a research topic is set for the following year, and the fieldworkers take away a list of potential research questions. At the women’s workshop we always discuss the next research topic at some length, to get the measure of its potential parameters: questions are written on the basis of that discussion. During the year the fieldworkers live in their own places, supporting themselves by subsistence agriculture and small-scale cash cropping, and working as much, or as little, as they choose. The annual workshops are a crucial part of the fieldworker program. They give the fieldworkers a regular focus for their work, an audience for their achievements, an environment in which to discuss problems and a source of new ideas. The composition of each group changes a little every year: there are always a few new fieldworkers, and inevitably someone or other is absent. Nevertheless each group has developed a strong identity and camaraderie. Each has its own elected executive, with a chairperson, secretary and treasurer. Individual members make distinctive contributions both to the workshops themselves and to VKS programs, and over time a kind of balance has developed between such various contributions. In the workshops some women participate vigorously in discussion while others hardly say a word. Several have real gifts in research, while others are more interested in action in their own communities. There are also, of course, some women fieldworkers who effectively do no work at all, and hardly contribute to the

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workshops, but usually VKS staff weed them out from the group, so that most long-term members are active and engaged.

WOMEN AND COLONIALISM During the colonial era the public discourse that grew up around kastom identified men as its primary actors. Men were seen to know and practice kastom; women were hardly visible. The Women’s Culture Project and the women fieldworkers’ network were founded, with the support of the men fieldworkers, to redress the notion that women possessed no significant cultural knowledge (see Bolton 2003). Through Women’s Culture Project initiatives – through radio, video, arts festivals and the work of individual fieldworkers – this fiction has now been overturned. More broadly, however, women continue to be disadvantaged by innovations made by expatriates – missionaries, planters, government officials – in the colonial era. Under the colonial government the islands were for the first time comprehended as a collectivity, and an administrative and political hierarchy that overarched indigenous political systems was created. Women were commonly excluded from the new roles and opportunities thus created – from working for the administration; from the formalised system of ‘traditional’ leadership, the chiefs; and from official roles in the church. Lucy Moses, from North Ambrym, joined the fieldworker group in 1997. Lucy was born in 1942, during World War II. Her father was forcibly recruited to work for the Allies before she was born, and her mother died when she was very small. To her bitter regret, there wasn’t enough money in the family to pay school fees for all the children, and so, as a girl, she was only educated to the fifth class at the village school. She felt this keenly, recalling that when the others went to school she felt so bad she used to go out of the village each day, to the bush or down to the sea. Eventually, she left altogether, taking the opportunity to follow her aunt to the nearby island of Malakula. Her aunt had been educated at the French school in the capital, Port Vila, had found work as a domestic servant, and had then become the mistress of a Frenchman who subsequently took up a plantation on Malakula. Lucy worked for them as a domestic servant, a ‘housegirl’, the most common employment young women could find, staying with them for some years. Eventually she returned to Ambrym, married and settled down to village life. The decade leading to independence, the 1970s, was a decade of considerable ferment throughout Vanuatu, but particularly on Ambrym, Lucy’s home island. Willie Bongmatur Maldo, who became the first chairman of the Vanuatu Council of Chiefs, also came from North Ambrym, although his right to his role as chief was strongly disputed on Ambrym itself (Bolton 1998). Lucy joined the New Hebrides National Party, which ultimately formed the first government after independence and with which Chief Willie was also connected. The participation of women in the independence movement, with a few notable exceptions, hardly rates a mention in accounts of this era, and women did not have any opportunity to take formal roles, or to contribute significantly to discussions about the formation of the new nation. After independence, the Vanuatu National Council of Women was founded. The council both acted as an umbrella organisation for existing women’s groups through Vanuatu, including church groups, and founded new rural women’s groups. Lucy became a member of the Ambrym branch of the organisation. Not long after the women fieldworkers’ network was founded, Lucy joined. A person of considerable energy and intelligence, her history is the history of someone looking for an outlet, a place to contribute.


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Figure 13.1 Lucy Moses, Kaljoral Senta fieldworker from North Ambrym, 2002 © L. Bolton

Lucy is one of the older women in the women’s network. She has been most comfortable contributing to two workshops that have been held on historical themes – domestic service in the colonial era and mission dresses.1 In both cases she provided vivid and amusing reports about her own experiences and encounters (Moses n.d.). Although she makes reports on other workshop topics – on indigenous calendrical systems and gardening, for example – her keenest interest has always been directed to non-traditional or historical topics. Her particular contribution to the group has been to make the precolonial era vivid for other, younger women, and in her lively, wry sense of humour.

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ACTING ON INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE Ethnographic museums constantly struggle with the intersection of the ‘Western’ knowledge systems; the systems of record, organisation and classification that generated museums in the first place; and the indigenous knowledge systems that produced the objects displayed within them. Internationally, issues in the presentation and management of ethnographic material have become more complex as source communities (or ‘traditional owners’) have started, in the last two decades, to engage with ethnographic museums as holders of their cultural property. A whole new series of accommodations and modifications to the practice of ethnographic museums has developed from this. These developments have been widely discussed, especially in anthropology (see Clifford 1997; Peers and Brown 2003). This situation is further complicated for museums established in postcolonial contexts. Using a Western model for the organisation of knowledge and objects these museums attempt to engage with and document local systems of knowledge and practice for a local audience, and sometimes find that engagement uphill work (Eoe 1991). On the whole, the Western academic project of museum anthropology has privileged male knowledge and practice, so that this situation is further complicated when local museums address women’s knowledge and practice. When Jean Tarisesei and I organised the first women fieldworkers workshop in 1994, we adopted the model established by the men’s group, a model of research followed by seminar-style reporting and discussion. The first few workshops were challenging as the new fieldworkers got used to this approach. Every now and then a ni-Vanuatu-invited speaker at the workshop would comment to the women on the difficulty of merely sitting in a chair every day for 10 days: the fieldworkers always nodded in recognition. The workshops are set up to operate without recourse to writing – all the presentations are oral – but writing is becoming more important. As time has passed, more and more women have began to prepare their reports on paper, in notebooks issued to them by the VKS. Their knowledge of the kastom of their places is increasingly being presented in a written format – inherently alien to the material itself. The fieldworker program is itself alien in this sense – objectifying knowledge and practice as something on which to act in new ways. Both men and women fieldworkers are unwilling to subject certain branches of knowledge and practice to this alien strategy of documentation. Subjects like traditional medicine, childbirth and origin narratives have all been withheld by the fieldworkers from the workshop process. Other topics are uncontroversial. The women’s network has discussed a range of topics from kinship terms and marriage rituals to baskets and cooking techniques, each fieldworker presenting the specific practices from her own area. Individual interest in these topics always varies. A woman whose reports on kin terms and marriage rituals were rather perfunctory may suddenly blossom in a workshop on traditional gardening techniques, and produce a detailed report. The experience of the colonial era in Vanuatu varied considerably from island to island. Maewo, a long thin pencil of an island in north Vanuatu, was not much affected by expatriate settlement and did not even have an expatriate missionary stationed there. Indigenous knowledge and practice has continued there more vigorously than in some other places. Irene Lini, from Maewo, attended the first women fieldworkers workshop in 1994 and has from the first been an active and engaged fieldworker, quick to grasp the essential idea of both documenting and reviving kastom. With the moral support of another more elderly Maewo fieldworker, Rachel


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Boe, now retired, and the male fieldworker, Jeffrey Uliboe, Irene has revived the making of two important Maewo textiles, has reinvigorated the women’s status-alteration ritual, lengwasa, and has taken up and extended the use of indigenous medical knowledge. Using this knowledge, she now regularly delivers babies on Maewo, an island without significant medical facilities. She also encouraged the young men in her area to start a string band – a band with guitars and a miscellany of other sometimes homemade string instruments – to use in conjunction with kastom songs and dances. Instead of accompanying these with rattles, drums and the beating of feet upon the earth, the dances are now accompanied by the band. Irene’s comment is that young people are much more interested in this way of performing kastom.

Figure 13.2 Lengwasa ceremony, Maewo, organised by Irene Lini, 1997 © L. Bolton

Irene cannot read or write. She is an energetic and intelligent woman with children and grandchildren. With or without the fieldworker program, she would have been involved in the life of her community. But with the program, she has had the opportunity both to grasp the importance of kastom as the basis of community identity, and the opportunity to find ways in which to act on it. Her confidence in speaking publicly has grown and I suspect that she has also gained confidence in her own convictions. Her leadership abilities have been recognised by the community in which she lives and since she became a fieldworker she has become an advisor to the chief in her area, often asked by him to assist with dispute settlement. Her role as fieldworker enables her to access VKS resources, and to draw on them. In 1997, for example, she recruited National Film and Sound Unit staff to film a lengwasa ceremony; in 1999 she drew Women’s Culture Project staff to Maewo to hold a small workshop to assist in reviving traditional textiles. Irene’s contribution to the fieldworker workshops is also significant because, as the possessor of significant knowledge about cultural practice on Maewo, she enriched other fieldworkers’ understanding of each research topic.

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FEMINISMS If the colonial system favoured men, and produced a male-dominated national structure for the newly independent nation, then, another intellectual import, Western feminism, offered a model for overturning that structure. Grace Molisa was key figure in post-independence Vanuatu. Born and brought up on the island of Ambae, Grace subsequently studied at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji, becoming the first ni-Vanuatu woman graduate. She returned to Vanuatu in the late 1970s to join the independence movement, working after 1980 as a political advisor and secretary to the first prime minister, Walter Lini. Although she was clearly influenced by feminism at university she later wrote that she had ‘no idea about discrimination’ until she began working in the prime minister’s office. Before then, she said, ‘as far as I was concerned, people were people and in every community and every family men and women worked together’ (Molisa 2002, 39). A tireless campaigner for women’s issues in Vanuatu until her death in 2002, her project was to bring women into the national public arena, and specifically into the urban maledominated political elite. It was Grace who pressured the VKS to start a women fieldworkers’ group, and to acknowledge that women were equally possessors of kastom knowledge and practice with men. The Vanuatu National Council of Women, which Grace helped to found in 1980, started as an umbrella organisation to assist and support rural women, but in the ensuing decades it has been increasingly politicised and detached from rural preoccupations. Influenced both by expatriate advisors and by participation in international women’s conferences such as the 4th World Conference on Women, held in Beijing, China, in 1996, the council increasingly formulates issues in terms alien to rural women. For example, the adoption of the international ‘rights’ discourse (women’s rights, children’s rights) makes little sense to people who hold to the indigenous notion of a right as something one purchases or acquires by ritual achievement. Other women’s organisations in rural areas are church groups, such as the Presbyterian Women’s Missionary Union, and groups associated with the government’s women’s affairs unit. The fieldworker program does not have the kind of reach that these organisations have. Nevertheless, it provides some women with another way to think about and explore contemporary gender relationships. The problem is not so much the indigenous gender relations, which are still sustained to some extent in local contexts. Although arrangements vary significantly from place to place in indigenous Vanuatu, the point is that in small communities each relationship is determined by specific kinship proscriptions. Each relationship is determined by kinship norms that, for example, might make how a man behaves to his sister quite different from how he behaves to his father’s sister. ‘Western’ feminism, which identifies an opposition between all women and all men, only makes sense in larger groups, as at the national level in Vanuatu. The emphasis on male authority at national level, however, has influenced gender relations at local levels: it legitimates the exclusion of women from some contexts and the creative revision of some kinship proscriptions at others. The Women’s Culture Project provides a counter discourse at national level, consistently demonstrating in national contexts the extent of women’s participation in kastom at local levels. It has also drawn national level attention to the essential contributions women make in rural contexts. Tanni Frazer, from Uripiv, Malakula, joined the women fieldworkers’ group in 1995, at the second women fieldworkers workshop. She continued as an active member of the network until


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her death from bowel cancer in 2005, when she was probably in her late 30s. Tanni was an extremely unusual ni-Vanuatu woman in that she had decided she would never marry. Her mother had died when she was small, and she had been brought up by her father, to whom she was very devoted. She described this childhood as enabling her to act and think independently. At the workshop devoted to the history of women’s domestic service, she commented that she herself had never been willing to work as a housegirl, indeed that she was not willing to be a ‘slave’ to any man (Frazer n.d.). She was not antisocial in any broad sense; rather she was an active member of her community on Uripiv island.

Figure 13.3 Tanni Frazer, Kaljoral Senta Fieldworker from Uripiv, Malakula, 2000 © L. Bolton

It took Tanni no time at all to grasp the nature of the fieldworker project, and her interest in the work grew quickly. She recognised the importance both of documenting and promoting kastom and of preserving knowledge about Vanuatu’s colonial history. On Uripiv, she organised a workshop about traditional cooking techniques, taught kastom knowledge to classes at the local primary school, and researched many aspects of the kastom and history of her own area. Her research reports were consistently detailed and thorough. At the fieldworker workshops, she understood both the research questions and the reports, and she always asked insightful and pointed questions that extended the discussion and our understanding of the issues involved. She

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served the women fieldworkers group as executive secretary for most of her time in the group, and contributed both organisational ability and leadership to the network. Although no researcher was based with her full-time, she provided assistance and hospitality to a number of VKS research projects, for example, the project looking at women’s use of marine resources. Several times Jean Tarisesei asked Tanni if she would host expatriate visitors working with the VKS (helping with the museum, for example), to give them some insight into rural life, and she was always willing to do so. Alongside her involvement with the VKS, Tanni was very involved in the Presbyterian Church, seeing it as important to be active in both arenas. She was never discouraged by the potential difficulty of any task. Kate Holmes, who ran the marine resource project, commented that if the VKS had suggested that it would be good to try and build a rocket ship, Tanni would have gone back to Uripiv and started to draw up the plans: she was willing to take on anything. The fieldworker program gave her an outlet for her energies, and a legitimising position.2 It gave her a way of being a non-traditional woman who nevertheless valued kastom highly.

OPPOSITION Especially when they start work, a number of women fieldworkers experience considerable opposition from their communities. Their agency is not recognised by those around them, or it is opposed for personal and political reasons. This opposition can be very intense, and it is not unknown for a woman to cry as she reports to the workshop on the difficulties she has encountered in the previous year. In some cases this opposition comes from a conviction that kastom is history and that communities must move forward. Sometimes it results from longstanding acrimony between families or villages or from jealousy that in becoming a fieldworker a woman has gained access to resources or opportunities denied to others. The workshops always allow time for discussion of how to handle these problems. Jean Tarisesei supports fieldworkers during the year, and takes opportunities where she has them to visit fieldworkers. She believes in facing such problems head on, and during these visits always convenes a community meeting at which such issues can be aired. The fact that the fieldworkers are not paid, but work for free, is crucial to the survival of the project, as is the fieldworkers’ personal conduct. Like Tanni, Roselyn Garae, the fieldworker from east Ambae and first chairperson of the women fieldworkers’ group, places considerable emphasis on the importance of community participation. Women who are supportive of their communities in several arenas are often more accepted as fieldworkers. Roselyn is always urging the importance of appearing at every community event and occasion – participating in church activities, supporting the local primary school, helping in community work projects and so forth. Fieldworkers are also helped by what they can bring to the community. Bringing a film crew to document a ceremony or festival, putting people’s voices on the VKS radio program and organising a small local workshop are all strategies that establish a woman’s identity as a fieldworker. Roselyn is also a strong advocate for regional responsibilities. She and quite a few other fieldworkers take time to visit adjacent villages around their district each year. In each place they report on the last workshop they attended and talk about the research topic for the next year. Rural transport is very expensive and, far from being paid, they often invest their own resources into such tours.


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Numaline Mahana, one of the fieldworkers on Tanna in south Vanuatu and currently chairperson of the women’s group, is one of the best educated women fieldworkers. After attending the British Secondary School, she worked for the British sector of the Condominium Government before independence and for various sectors of the Vanuatu Government afterwards, mostly as a secretarial assistant. She worked for the VKS briefly in the late 1990s, but she and her husband are now mainly based on Tanna. Numaline is a major contributor to the fieldworker workshops, always ready to ask a question or raise an issue in discussion, and her questions are often acute. A good speech writer, she has often assisted those women fieldworkers making speeches, for example, to workshop funders such as the Australian High Commissioner or Vanuatu government officials. Some community leaders are more willing to grant women agency than others: women fieldworkers have devised a number of strategies for working with, or around, this kind of opposition. As is the case for a number of fieldworkers, Numaline’s husband is very supportive of her work and assists her with it. If Numaline, in researching a particular topic, comes up against leaders who are not willing to assist, her husband is willing to step in and do the research for her. Numaline is not disrespectful of male authority, but she has no time for those who obstruct legitimate research. She is explicit about the importance of research. At the workshop about domestic service in 2001 she commented, ‘what interests me so much about fieldworker research is that the more you do, the more you find that the work is without end, it goes on and on’ (Mahana n.d.). Numaline is also explicit about the importance of applying research results. Currently, a lot of her energies are devoted to programs to promote indigenous food and cooking. Trade stores through the islands sell rice, tinned meat, pot noodles, biscuits and jam, and, ironically, in some places these are becoming preferred foodstuffs. In the past indigenous food preparation across Vanuatu utilised a diverse range of recipes, many of which are now being forgotten. In 2005 Numaline initiated a project to teach such recipes to people in her district. At the following workshop she reported with real pleasure on the young men who commented to her that eating the food she was teaching them to prepare gave them far more energy than their normal diet – power they put to good use on the football field. Even so, she has had a hard time getting this food program going in Tanna, and uses a number of inducements to get people to come to her workshops, including giving gifts, such as gardening tools, to participants. The VKS has arranged to assist her with a small grant to support this program.

TRANSFORMATIONS Numaline Mahana’s food project highlights another aspect of the fieldworker program, an aspect crucial to the work of the VKS as defined by Ralph Regenvanu – that is, that kastom should be the basis of contemporary development. Rather than drawing on models from overseas, Regenvanu believes in taking the systems that have operated in the archipelago for centuries and adapting them to contemporary conditions. The fieldworkers’ research provides some of the materials on which this can be based. Regenvanu recognises the extent to which the education system undermines individual self-respect, both in teaching only introduced subjects, and in presenting the prospect of future employment, which is very often not fulfilled (Regenvanu 2003). He is also concerned to build identity and self-respect among ni-Vanuatu. Both major programs such as

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the development of the national history curriculum for secondary schools and small projects such as Numaline’s food project achieve these objectives. VKS agency, especially the personal agency of VKS fieldworkers, is always transformative. By documenting kastom, fieldworkers transform it, objectifying it as knowledge and often modifying practices so that they can be continued in contemporary settings. VKS programs are intended to be effective. Both the fieldworkers in their own districts and the VKS at the national level are transforming that which is their own: their own knowledge, their own practice, their own social arrangements. In acknowledging and making use of the agency that a cultural institution can have, and giving that agency a personal impetus, the VKS is more and more powerfully influential in Vanuatu.

ENDNOTES 1

2

These workshops were additional to the main workshop program, and were attended only by fieldworkers who expressed interest in the topic. The workshop on domestic service was organised in collaboration with Margaret Rodman, and held in 2001. Two workshops on mission dresses arose out of fieldworker interest in my research on mission dresses (known as island dresses) and were held in 2001 and 2002 respectively. This comment by Kate Holmes in 2004 was the starting point for this paper. I acknowledge her insight with thanks.

REFERENCES Bennett, Tony. 1995. The birth of the museum: History, theory, politics. London: Routledge. Bolton, Lissant. 1998. ‘Chief Willie Bongmatur Maldo and the role of chiefs in Vanuatu’. The Journal of Pacific History 33 (2): 179–195. Bolton, Lissant., editor. 1999. ‘Fieldwork, fieldworkers: Developments in Vanuatu research’. A special issue of Oceania 70 (1). Bolton, Lissant. 2003. Unfolding the moon: Enacting women’s kastom in Vanuatu. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Bolton, Lissant. n.d. ‘Resourcing change: Fieldworkers, the Women’s Culture Project and the Vanuatu Cultural Centre’. In The future of indigenous museums, edited by N. Stanley. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Forthcoming. Clifford, James. 1997. Routes: Travel and translation in the late twentieth century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Curtis, T. 2002. ‘Talking about Place: Identities, histories and powers among the Na’hai speakers of Malakula (Vanuatu)’. Unpublished PhD thesis, Australian National University. Eoe, S. M. 1991. ‘The role of museums in the Pacific: Change or die’. In Museums and cultural centres in the Pacific, edited by Eoe, S. M.; Swadling, P. Port Moresby: Papua New Guinea National Museum. Frazer, T. n.d. ‘Malakula’. In House-girls remember: Domestic workers in Vanuatu, edited by Rodman, M.; Kraemer, D.; Bolton, L.; Tarisesei, J. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Forthcoming. Huffman, K. W. 1996. ‘The fieldworkers of the Vanuatu Cultural Centre and their contributions to the audiovisual collections’. In Arts of Vanuatu, edited by Bonnemaison, J., Huffman, K.; Kaufmann, C.; Tryon, D. Bathurst: Crawford House Publishing. Kaplan, F., editor. 1994. Museums and the making of “ourselves”: The role of objects in national identity. London and New York: Leicester University Press. Lightner, S.; Naupa, A. 2005. Histri blong Yumi long Vanuatu: An educational resource. Four volumes. Port Vila, Vanuatu: Vanuatu National Cultural Council.


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Mahana, N. n.d. ‘Tanna’. In House-girls remember: Domestic workers in Vanuatu, edited by Rodman, M.; Kraemer, D.; Bolton, L.; Tarisesei, J. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Forthcoming. Molisa, G. 2002. ‘Grace Mera Molisa: Author, poet, publisher, educator’, in Ni-Vanuatu role models: Successful women in their own right, edited by Randell, S. Port Vila: Blackstone Publishing. Moses, L. n.d. ‘Ambrym’. In House-girls remember: Domestic workers in Vanuatu, edited by Rodman, M.; Kraemer, D.; Bolton, L.; Tarisesei, J. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Forthcoming. Peers, Laura; Brown, Alison, editors. 2003. Museums and source communities: A Routledge reader. London and New York: Routledge. Regenvanu, R. 2003. ‘The changing face of “custom” in Vanuatu’. Presented to the international symposium The Pacific in the Twenty-First Century: The formation of New Tradition, Culture and Identity. 21 March: Japanese Society for Oceanic Studies. Sherman, D. J.; Rogoff, I., editors. 1994. Museum culture: Histories, discourses, spectacles. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Tryon, D. 1999. ‘Ni-Vanuatu Research and Researchers’. Oceania 70 (1): 9–15.

Cite this chapter as: Bolton, Lissant. 2006. ‘The museum as cultural agent: The Vanuatu Cultural Centre extension worker program’. South Pacific museums, edited by Healy, Chris; Witcomb, Andrea. Monash University ePress: Melbourne. pp. 13.1–13.13. DOI: 10.2104/spm06013.

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NEW KNOWLEDGES

TUNING THE MUSEUM THE HARMONICS OF OFFICIAL CULTURE Ian Wedde Ian Wedde is a freelance writer and curator based in Wellington, New Zealand. Between 1994 and 2004 he was head of humanities and of art and visual culture at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. His recent collection of essays, Making ends meet: Essays and talks 1992–2004, was published in 2005 by Victoria University Press. Correspondence to Ian Wedde: [email protected]

National museums – especially national museums developed in the cultural environments created by neoliberal economics, proliferating virtuality and global social formations – are asked to mediate significantly tensioned and even conflicted remits. The state may expect them to put the best possible face on a marketable national identity within which commerce, culture and tourism converge; at the same time, they may be expected to report on and represent complex, contradictory, polysemic and polyvocal identities that resist the smoothing effects of statist emulsifiers. Museums may be asked to defer to the expectations of socially and politically influential lobbies, while remaining the custodians of minority, alternative or critical alterities. They may be expected to balance commerciality and good public programming. They will need to evolve while retaining critical success instruments. They need to be capable of taking risks without jeopardising high-level support, especially government support. The metaphors of tuning and of ‘loosely coupled’ systems are used in this essay to explore and critique the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa’s management of its organisational harmonics: the combination of social listening and directorial conducting that keeps the place in tune.

TUNE-UP The metaphor of ‘tuning’ and by implication of orchestration suggests two converging kinds of effort – as well as results that are harmonious, dissonant or even discordant. One kind of effort is the activity of social listening; the other, the organisational activity of directing or conducting. Applied to large public sector, officially national institutions such as state-supported national museums or TV broadcasters, this metaphor of ‘tuning’ implies a tension between polyvocal communities (citizens, consumers, audiences), who expect or hope to be left to their chosen discords or differences, and the state, which will usually prefer national harmony. This tensioned space between polyvocal communities and the state that would prefer them to get on the same song sheet has been deemed a space of debate: a democratic ‘forum for the nation’, as the mission statement of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Te Papa) has it.1 This mission statement supposes that a state-subsidised, legislated institution may act as a mediator between the state and its citizens: a sound-proofed practice room in which citizens can make some noise without disrupting civil society or attracting the attention of the Sound Police. The political benefits of such debate are both democratic in appearance and regulatory in effect. The museum may be a place in which to stage debate rather than have it. The sometimes off-key vibration between regulation and democracy is also what we might expect of a centreleft, Labour-led political coalition in government, even one that has inherited much of the radical neo-liberalism of its famous predecessor, the fourth Labour government (1984–87) of David Lange.


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The governance structure within which Te Papa is required to be ‘a forum for the nation’ is elaborately orchestrated, and the creative space it allows for the museum’s executive to improvise, shift registers or defy the sound of impatient baton-tapping will depend on the extent of the government’s wish to intervene – and on its levels of response to lobbies. The extent to which the state, in the form of the funding government, has oversight of and expectations for the civic outcomes – or ‘civic yields’, as Tony Bennett (2004) has it – is adumbrated in a summary statement above the museum’s Concept.2 The Concept (what the museum commits to being and doing) sits above the legislation that translates that commitment into a duty (what the museum is legislated to be and do).3 Statement of Intent targets contract the duties as performance measures against which the museum’s activity is measured. The museum’s Mission next mirrors and summarises the Statement of Intent; its Corporate Principles then describe the organisational culture to which its employees are expected to subscribe in order to deliver the mission to standards measured by the Statement of Intent and (re-ascending the scale) thus meet legislative duties and achieve the government’s goals in respect of national identity and the Treaty of Waitangi. There are other ways in which the tuning metaphor is apt. In New Zealand, another contentious tuning gap opens up when a broadcaster or a museum is required by its stakeholding government to return both a commercial dividend on the state’s investment and a cultural result in terms of the public good. The double whammy of neo-liberal market forces and Reithian public service expectations does not produce a democratically tensioned space in which broadcasters or museums safely mediate public debate. Instead, it produces an internal organisational tension between pragmatic programmers and ‘content providers’ (curators, scriptwriters, researchers – ‘creatives’). Programmers take care of the institutional bottom line and look for content most likely to generate good ratings and sponsor benefits. In contrast, content providers are more interested in cultural value: the cultural value of representing low-rating, uncommercial minority interests; cultural production taking place away from or regardless of major capital flows; disreputable, casual, quirky or somehow uncoached activity; ephemeral, immaterial, transient stuff; strident, oppositional, angry stuff; the voices of the soft-spoken; alterity. In this case, the tuning involves organisational structures, administrative delegations, management devolutions and the fit of business units within the ‘forum for the nation’, as well as degrees of creeping regulatory governmentality in respect of the state’s strategic orchestrations of its commercial and cultural remits. A keyword, ‘excellence’, has emerged in this tuning gap. Its origins in the mid to late 1990s coincided with the appearance of other key words including ‘innovation’, ‘creative’ and ‘knowledge’, prompted in varying degrees by Bourdieuian concepts of cultural capital. In March 1999, for example, the introduction to published proceedings of a ministerial Cultural Foresight seminar stated that ‘a nation’s cultural capital bears on its ability to deploy cultural resources within a global market, creating distinctiveness and competitive advantage’ (O’Brien 1999). An involuntarily Bourdieuian note was struck by Wellington’s local authority when it branded the city as the nation’s ‘Cultural Capital’. On song with the rhetoric of the ‘knowledge economy’, the ‘excellence’ keyword originated with high-end marketing and advertising but it has spread with viral success through governmental agencies for research, education and culture in the later, ‘fiscally responsible’ stages of neo-liberalism. ‘Centres of excellence’ are where contestable capital, and competitive economic and cultural brands converge.

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TUNING THE MUSEUM NEW KNOWLEDGES

‘Excellence’ allows the policy language of public agencies and of government to target (and reward) either commercial or cultural values, of course, preferably both at once. In New Zealand, for example, the Pacific hip-hop music industry may be deemed ‘excellent’ in terms of its economic contribution to gross national product, but may be culturally penalised through a politicised media beat-up over hip-hop opportunity-development grants awarded through the government’s Community Employment Group (CEG).4 ‘Excellence’ policy may be satisfied with the national museum’s production of a commercially successful exhibition about The lord of the rings films and may also find the project to be in harmony with statist agendas for economically driven national brands such as the ‘100% pure’ campaign featuring pristine mountain ranges. ‘Excellence’ was not, however, awarded to the national museum’s imbrication of icons of modernist New Zealand art, industrial design, Anglo-Oriental ceramics, TV commercials and town planning in its investigation of mid-century modernism in New Zealand. In the exhibition Parade, one of Te Papa’s opening projects in 1998, the ‘excellence’ of Colin McCahon’s celebrated painting The Northland panels was officially deemed incompatible with other contemporaneous aspects of New Zealand modernism, and the exhibition was eventually removed. Its riff on a local modernism was too dissonant for the ‘excellence’ terms of reference favoured by the art lobby, which was small but politically influential. In addition, the exhibition was quirky and local; it was seen to have little, if any, international brand leverage, although Colin McCahon has frequently been seen as New Zealand’s one chance for an international art profile. As well as social listening and organisational activity, a third way in which the metaphor of tuning the museum may be apt involves how the museum produces meaning, most importantly, the ways in which it produces (and is even required by the state to produce) meanings germane to national identity. These may constitute a harmonious, even celebratory, national anthem, or a polyvocal cultural cacophony, or a battle hymn of revolt. This kind of harmony – or dissonance – is projected into spaces beyond and outside the institution; beyond the hum of internal organisation, the drone of statist statement of intent and key performance indicator objectives, the clamour of contained and managed public debate. The tuning of national identity reaches out to international tourism, to the nationalist branding of economic points-of-difference, and it involves the ability of politicians to successfully serenade their constituents. A post-liberal and even re-regulatory New Zealand anthem to the excellence of national unity was generated by the politically expedient convergence, in 2004, of international tourism leverage applied across the considerable fulcrum of Middle-earth, of the pasteurised sublimity of ‘100% pure’ natural products with brand names such as Untouched World, and of the leader of the National Party Don Brasch’s Orewa-speech appeal to what Labour’s Trevor Mallard would subsequently dub ‘Pakeha indigeneity’.5 There was little sound, in this barbershop trio of effects, of the discords inherent in viewing sublime landscapes as lebensraum for ethnically purified creatures out of Euromyth, of the legislated untouchability of the world of foreshore and seabed resources,6 or of critically led debate about what might constitute the probable histories, let alone the ontologies and epistemologies, of indigeneity. Of course, none of these apparently dichotomous tune-ups – between the state and communities, between commercial and cultural, between programmers and creatives, between polyvocal and hegemonic national identities – involves anything like an absolute stand-off. The most important tunings of all might be described as harmonics: third-term effects (though perhaps not


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‘ways’) are produced by the plays across and between these dichotomous elements. Keeping the tricky harmonics in play requires a good ear, patience, an ability to listen, tolerance of dissonance and even of discord, and above all a relish of and nerve for the risks of regular retuning. And the ear, the patience, the listening, the tolerance, the nerve and risk-taking all require combinations of leadership and collectivity – what biologists, software developers and systems theorists like to call ‘loosely coupled’ organisational structures. Think again the slidey, sly and eliding tunes, rhythms and harmonies of Pacific hip-hop – it doesn’t get any looser and more coupled than this. These are anthems to supple resources not overcapitalisation, to fluidity not stasis, to the reinventions of evolving cultures rather than to the retardations of material sustainability. These are anthems to renewal, reinvention, retuning; to the ability to prosper in one sector while another is threatened; to the ability to accept and manage risk.

LOOSELY COUPLED HARMONIES During the Reinventing the Museum conference at the University of Melbourne in 2004, a number of loosely coupled terminologies were used. They almost became thematically conspicuous, as if the conference was disclosing a commonly held unease that had not been shared or discussed previously. Tony Bennett talked about ‘the reconfiguration of social objects so that they match with appropriate social formations’ – a tuning directorial and conducted, or voluntary and opportunistic, or a harmonic of both. His comment struck a warning note, though. He spoke of the museum’s ‘civic yield’, which, likewise, might constitute a public good (such as national unity) designed by the state or produced by the actions of citizens – by the Gesellschaft of duty or the Gemeinschaft of empathy – or, again, created by a tensioned combination of both. Or this might be a warning. He made a provocative and probably crucial distinction between ‘statist museums’ and ‘ecomuseums’: the fine tuning between these might resemble that between museums representing or reporting on culture or between museums shaping or containing it – again, a loosely coupled dichotomy (Bennett 2004). We heard about ‘the bounds of forces in the political domain’ and we heard Paula Hamilton say that ‘[h]aving a culture has become essential to the idea of nationhood’ – not as self-evident as it might seem, given that before about 1987 and the sharemarket crisis of the deregulated economy in New Zealand, the emphasis was on having an economy rather than, or without regard to, having a culture. The conference’s undertone of anxiety about the increasing volume of the state’s voice in the choir, about its management of excellence and even of the terms of reference for authenticity, began to surface in a phrase, ‘the teleology of the nation’, and in John Macarthur noting that cultural franchise is analogous with political franchise (Hamilton 2004; Macarthur and Stead 2004). A related scepticism about and wariness of the regulatory management of official culture emerged in James Clifford’s comparison of the Centre Culturel Tjibaou in Noumea, New Caledonia, and the Vanuatu Cultural Centre in Port Vila (Clifford 2004). Clifford was careful to describe rather than judge, to analyse discourse models rather than prefer them. Nonetheless, what emerged in his account was a kind of state-channelled ‘civic yield’ of postcolonial Gesellschaft in the case of the major tourist attraction in Noumea, and a communally activist Gemeinschaft in the case of the off-the-beaten-track centre in Port Vila. Clifford likes a Foucauldian articulation

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of power as subjectivisation with attendant effects of ambivalence in respect of identity politics: complex harmonies and shifts of register rather than monadic shouting. And he likes the contingency – the attentive retuning – of Gramscian history rather than the teleology of official, received history. The conference’s mood was with him. It seemed to be preferring a reinvention of the museum, a retuning of it, as more subjective than official, more contingent than teleological, more Gemeinschaft than Gesellschaft. The museum was envisaged as more loosely coupled Pacific hip-hop than state anthem, with national identity emerging somewhat subjectively from diverse, contingent histories, rather than getting configured as a national brand refined from state-administered contestations of excellence.7

RETUNING TE PAPA The somewhat uneasy mood of the conference, and what I intuited as its wariness of statist conductings or orchestrations of public culture, matched my own at the end of a decade’s work with Te Papa. It was a privileged adventure to work there when I did, but at the time I left – the time of the conference in Melbourne, near enough – it was also clear that a tune-up was needed and should be welcomed as a reinvigorating challenge. As I suggested earlier, this process would require a good ear, patience, an ability to listen, tolerance of dissonance and even of discord, and above all a relish of and nerve for the risks of regular retuning. In 2004, in a climate of increased governmental jitters over the management of national identity, the kind of tune-up most likely at Te Papa appeared to have been determined at a high level. What had begun to happen at the time I left, in January 2004, was a consolidation around ideological structures, a progressive simplifying or mainstreaming of cultural narratives, a reprofessionalising of records and a re-disciplining of discourses. The official founding armature of biculturalism, customer focus and commercial positivity had developed the critical inflexibility of dogma, while also becoming subject to the selective evasions of ‘excellence’: for example, the politically powerful but minority art lobby had effectively achieved the sequestration of its collection resource to the upper storey of the museum. A self-funded architectural proposal by one wealthy patron of the arts had proposed an elevator up the outside of the building to the art galleries at the top: this would have allowed him to get there without wading through or sharing elevators with the crowds in the rest of the place.8 Increasingly autonomous (rather than ‘loosely coupled’) business units had begun to be formed. The cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural field of research enabled by the museum’s diverse collections and wide public support was being reorganised into discrete silos. The symbolic stand-off between programming pragmatists and curatorial idealists appeared to be approaching an actual crisis close to dysfunction. What appeared to be happening was less a robust, critically strategic operational consolidation that retuned and moved ahead from the radical opening program of the new institution, and more a reactionary retrenchment of old museum benchmarks of excellence within an increasingly ill-fitting official armature. A similarly ill-tuned (or ill-fitting) situation was simultaneously unfolding within parallel institutions of public TV, with similar priority stand-offs between bottomliners and culturists and similarly off-key management performances. In both sectors, the word ‘excellence’ could be heard veering promiscuously across economic and cultural bandwidths; it was consistent only in its desired target outcome of enhanced national identity. The statist desire to yolk national identity, excellence and cultural production together may have reached its crisis


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threshold in the government’s – the prime minister’s – vehement public objections to the decision to send the installation artist collective et al. to the Venice Biennale in June 2005. As was the case with the CEG fiasco in 2004, the government’s reaction appears to have been stimulated by a combination of extremely poor official advice, political face-slapping in the House of Representatives and voter-critical media derision stirred principally by TV1’s Holmes show. The curator of New Zealand’s 2005 Venice Biennale presence was Natasha Conland, who was seconded – appropriately, one would think – from her position as curator of contemporary art at Te Papa, the country’s national museum. The players in this public spat about the regulation and management of New Zealand’s identity at the Venice Biennale could hardly be described as operating in a ‘loosely coupled’ harmony. The discord between government, Creative New Zealand (the administrative agency responsible for the Biennale commission) and the national museum’s seconded curator was acute. It was also consistent with and symptomatic of government’s interventionist predilection in respect of culture. A word of caution at this point: increasingly, national museums are expected to generate polysemic meanings and values, and to report on and represent the conditions of diverse cultures. The museum’s instrumentalities are diverse, the modes of reception it both generates and anticipates are complex, and many of its remits are conflicted or at best in tension. Contemporary communications, and data storage and retrieval technologies complicate the situation. The leisure, sporting and consumer environments taken for granted by most museum visitors extend such complications into the everyday. Even if it wished to – or even if government wished it to, which it does not in the case of New Zealand’s Te Papa – the museum cannot aspire to a monadic tuning. This is not about conspiracy theories. What needs to be examined is the extent of tuning that might be possible: what are the limitations and what are the signs that they exist? This can be a fairly practical, disenchanted exercise. It doesn’t need to be paranoid; it should, however, be critical.

THE LIMITS TO A TUNE-UP There will be political limits to a tune-up of the national museum. There have been many examples of the politicising of culture and of its institutions, of which the most notorious include the case of the Enola Gay exhibition in the USA in 1998, and the more recent action against Dawn Casey at the Australian National Museum in Canberra. A less highly visible stream of evidence increasingly shows culture as the vehicle of political vision in the twenty-first century, as economics was in the 1980s and ‘knowledge’ in the 1990s. In July 2004 New Zealand’s Prime Minister and Minister of Arts, Culture and Heritage Helen Clark – known as a committed champion of the arts in New Zealand – had this to say about devolution and neo-liberalism: We think that government in the 21st century needs to form partnerships beyond its ranks in order to succeed. While in many ways governments have fewer formal powers than ever before, only governments have the ability to lead at the national level. A large vacuum is left if governments fail to organise so that they can lead (Clark 2004).

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This makes sense as a centre-left Labour critique of the neo-liberal economic policies that retired government regulation from social services. However, such proactivity may be more problematic in the cultural sector. This is because culture produces signs that are easily appropriated to the expedient branding of political values, much as corporate sponsors of culture will choose to cross-brand with cultural products that affirm their brand values. Such politically expedient cultural values are often, if not usually, going to be nationalist in intention and scope. They are also likely to be the ones that will return sufficient votes to keep a political party in power, as well as the ones that will drive major revenue engines, such as repatriated or international investment and international tourism. ‘Creative’ cultural agencies may find it hard to resist risk-averse pressure to conform to, and produce, smoothly marketable national brands. Such brands have the additional advantage of absorbing and muffling alterity, contradiction and change within monumentally sustainable products – products such as very long term, capital-heavy exhibitions excluding ephemeral or time-based components and focused on the major, canonical icons of cultural and social majorities. What might such an icon be? Sir Edmund Hillary – you can’t argue with Ed, and why would you want to? He’s a great guy and a classic example of the opportunity provided by a national icon for popular metonymy: Sir Ed is seen to embody a set of national virtues that no one wants to mess around with. Ed’s with the mountains. A striking example of expediently political national branding appeared as a backdrop in a Dominion Post newspaper photograph on 26 August 2002, on the eve of the New Zealand delegation’s departure for the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Helen Clark, spoke before a banner depicting a sublime mountainscape of snow-covered peaks, with no people in sight, not even Ed, and the slogan ‘100% pure’ emblazoned across it. The banner was part of a now-famous and award-winning national branding campaign, ‘100% pure New Zealand’, commissioned by Tourism New Zealand. It can be visited at www.newzealand.com where t-shirts are available. Similarly overdetermined incongruities appeared following the success of the third of the Lord of the rings films at the Academy Awards in Los Angeles in March 2004. The day after the ceremonies, Tourism New Zealand placed full-page ads in the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times, showing a sublime, mountainous landscape, again entirely empty of people, with the slogan ‘Best supporting country in a motion picture’, an interesting neo-colonial riff. MasterCard, ‘proud partner of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King™’, also ran full-page colour ads on 3 March 2004, with the familiar backdrop of vast mountains and, in the foreground, a cavalcade of fair heroes out of Euromyth. MasterCard congratulated cast and crew ‘and Middleearth itself, New Zealand’. Not an Orc or Uruk-hai in sight – ‘100% pure New Zealand’ had been cross-branded with a racially purified Middle-earth. We may even be entertained by these instances of the expedient cross-pollination of national branding, cultural signing and political sloganeering. But then we shouldn’t be surprised when ‘culture’ is coopted or shaped to similarly expedient institutional ends. Nor should we be surprised at the spectacular success of an international touring exhibition about The lord of the rings originated by Te Papa at the centre of this nexus, nor by the exhibition’s apparently effortless reconciliation of the museum’s commercial and cultural remits within its Statement of Intent answerability to government.


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There will be governance limits to retuning the museum. An example of these appeared in a newspaper article9 reporting the publication by Te Papa of a large, splendid coffee-table book about its collections, Icons Nga Taonga from the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Smith 2004). The article was based on an interview with the then chairman of the museum’s board, Dr Roderick Deane. Dr Deane was also chairman of Telecom’s board and as such arbiter, then, of about one third of the value of the New Zealand stock exchange, with commensurate (though, in 2006, rapidly waning) political leverage. He and his wife were well known and highly respected patrons of the arts and exerted substantial supportive influence on the activities of the Wellington City Gallery, a collection-free contemporary art gallery in Wellington’s Civic Square near Te Papa. Under the influence of Roderick Deane, Telecom was also ubiquitous as a sponsor of high-profile cultural events, for example major exhibitions of contemporary art and the International Film Festival. As chairman of Te Papa’s board, Dr Deane’s key reporting line was to the minister responsible for the Ministry of Culture and Heritage, who is also the Prime Minister. The no-surprises clause in Dr Deane’s contract aligns directly with this reporting line; his governance responsibility requires him to scrutinise the national museum executive’s implementation of its Statement of Intent, which is its contract with the ministry whose officers report to the Prime Minister. In this closely monitored environment, with its potential for both support and regulation, the newspaper article about the coffee-table book on Te Papa’s collections made interesting reading. ‘Even better than the real thing’, read the headline. It went on: ‘No tourists, no screaming kids, no rides, no sore feet – Te Papa’s virtual museum, Icons nga taonga, is better than the real thing. The newly published book is a whole museum on your coffee table, says Te Papa board chairman Roderick Deane.’ Further on in the article, Deane said, ‘I’ve been very keen to change the balance so that [the museum] continues to be popular, but to upgrade the scholarship and research functions. In a way, it’s like a university.’10 As a former advocate for research and scholarship at the museum, I’m delighted to hear of the chairman’s support and I look forward to evidence that the museum’s budgets and recruitment priorities now reflect his enthusiasm. But, alas, the book in question, while excellent, is an unlikely scholarly benchmark, consisting as it does of images with 250-word captions. The book may provide a less irritating and busy social environment than the museum with its tourists, screaming kids and sore feet, but it is not (let alone better than) a museum. And finally, while discussion about the nature of museum-based research and scholarship continues internationally, there is broad agreement that its terms of reference and field of dissemination differ significantly from those of the university. If the chairman of the museum’s board, who answers to the policies of an avowedly proactive and interventionist government with strong cultural agendas, whose Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage is also the Prime Minister; if Dr Deane is able to go public with the assertion that a book about the museum’s collections is better than the museum itself, and that the museum resembles, or should resemble, a university in respect of its scholarship; and if he takes seriously the no-surprises clause in his contract with the Prime Minister, then we may logically conclude that the Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage would also prefer the national museum to be free of ‘screaming kids’, and to resemble a university.

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There will be policy limits. In December 1993 I joined the concept team that was being assembled to move the new Museum of New Zealand across the threshold of its enabling legislation and institutional concept and into its yet-to-be-built premises. In January 2004 I left the museum to return to a life as an independent writer and curator. I did so with mixed feelings. The museum is an addictive cultural and social space. I had joined the project on the strength of four aspirational planks in the institutional concept and I stayed because these planks remained challenging and in some respects tantalisingly unfulfilled. I left believing they remained unfulfilled, but also that they might always be so – that their instrumentality within the museum’s policy and performance are more about agency and ongoing process than they are about result or closure, that they are about negotiable rather than conclusive actions. The four planks were the museum’s audience, the potential for polysemic narrations of its collections, the museum’s research and scholarship, and its commitment to exploring a meaningful implementation of biculturalism. The museum made a commitment to winning a new, large socially and culturally diverse audience and this commitment formed the base of a pyramid of values. It meant, for example, that knowledge about the significance of collection items would be conveyed in exhibition narratives that were diverse in terms of narrative position, reading age, and cultural meaning and value. It meant that varieties of epistemology would be accepted and deployed in the museum’s scholarly research. And it meant that new modes of governance, new curatorial cultures, and new kinds of relationships with communities of interest would be developed within bicultural policy frameworks. There were entry-level thresholds for these aspirations. Some would seem to fall short in the interests of getting started, as well as for reasons of operational capacity and capability. Inevitably, these commencement benchmarks would produce opportunities for strategic development and change, and especially for increased nuance – for fine tuning – in implementation. Thus, the large audience would in time become more intimately known and its different needs understood and addressed in niche rather than generalist interpretations. The amount and variety of narration, and the architectural and way-finding organisation of narrative within the museum’s spaces, would become clearer as start-up confusions were analysed. The nature and variety of the museum’s research and the modes and economies of its dissemination of knowledge would become better understood, while research planning, publishing and archiving activities would become more coherent, with better and more appropriate recording, reporting and peer-reviewing procedures. Understanding of the museum’s bicultural and indeed multicultural responsibilities would evolve through incremental stages of external relationship-building and internal training and capability. The architectural structure of the museum and the ways in which it locked in policy frameworks would be broken out in new spatial formations. This bedding-in process required a fundamental commitment to on-going change and to strategic planning predicated on evolution not status-quo. This was always going to be a tough call when Te Papa’s most spectacular success occurred at the base of its aspirational policy pyramid: its winning of a large and diverse audience. It has become a place to just hang out. It’s a default destination for young families with not much dough at the weekends. During the school holidays, sadly, it’s where a lot of single working parents drop their kids for the day. It’s become a cruising destination. Such real popular, rather than merely populist, success generated an ‘If it


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ain’t broke don’t fix it’ policy attitude. A foundational and even monumental loyalty to Day One policy and structure did emerge. Institutional stubbornness around foundational policy inevitably clashed with a culturally proactive government and with powerful lobbies. Vision, patience and nerve are required of the museum’s leadership: this leadership needs to be capable of implementing change at a considered rate. Patience and nerve are also required of stakeholder lobby groups who will, however, be impatient with the museum’s slowness to recognise their special needs – many of which will derive from a sense of disenfranchisement as a result of the museum’s popular success. And patience and nerve will also be required of the interventionist government, which may, however, be vulnerable to lobbies, and especially to the kinds of lobbies represented in Te Papa’s case by art patrons such as the chairman of the museum’s board. An almost inevitable scenario unfolds at the national museum at this point: Day One loyalists determined to cement the status quo of the museum’s initial success, strategic revisionists determined to tune and recalibrate the museum’s functions, and impatient lobbyists and stakeholders (possibly including the government) will come into conflict. I suspect that the subtext of the remarks I quoted earlier in relation to the Icons nga taonga book of Te Papa’s collections is a tie breaker. The subtext’s unconcealed impatience, uttered by the board’s chair on the axis of his reporting line to the Prime Minister, appears symptomatic of a move not to retune or recalibrate the museum on the basis of its initial successes, but to place it at the disposal of a reactionary re-branding. The impatience that wants to reconfigure the museum in this way is also the product of a fundamental confusion. The re-branders have, I suspect, confused the discords of a complex, elaborately tuned and therefore sometimes dissonant museum in the start-up stages of its development, with endemic operational and conceptual dysfunction. Those with patience, nerve and a long view will recognise the essential health and necessity of institutional dissonance, of loosely coupled harmony, of risk-taking and attendant failure, and of the empathetic learning achieved through deferring rather than forcing conclusions. But there will be governance limits to their patience, nerve and long view. There will be epistemological and hermeneutic limits to the museum’s retuning. It is useful to think about this in terms of what we mean by the ‘esoteric’ – partly to demonstrate that the esoteric and the popular are not binary opposites, but more importantly to suggest that only a complex, loosely coupled suite of harmonies can deal with the proliferation of knowledges within a multidisciplinary, polysemic museum, and therefore, possibly, within a complex multicultural society. In discussions within the museum, and in ‘dumbing-down’ critiques from without, the esoteric was frequently conflated with ‘elitism’. This reflects a significant, and a significantly limiting, confusion. The esoteric is that which is culturally opaque to those who are not initiates. At its simplest, this will include what Steven Pinker calls ‘accumulated local wisdom’ and in the same book ‘shared arbitrary practices’ (Pinker 2002, 63, 64): for example, which side of the road to drive on, currency, designated days of rest, and other ordinarily ‘normative’ cultural practices. At its more complex, the esoteric will include highly exclusive normative business, such as Masonic handshakes, the arcana of regatta laws, cricket, Aussie Rules, the Kabala, the encrypted references to a history of quotation in art, architecture, popular music, cuisine or whatever.

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The chief function of the ordinarily normative esoteric is to produce broad social conformity and a sense of belonging. However, the chief function of the exclusively normative esoteric is to signal welcome to a community of initiates, while at the same time signalling unwelcome to noninitiates. One affect of the esoteric is therefore to make people feel either welcome or shut out. Another is to make them feel tantalised, intrigued and envious. What is not esoteric? Simple information, available with ordinary effort, not designed to produce conformity or induce exclusive feelings of belonging. Information that is not culturally coded, dependant on ‘tone of voice’, nuance, inflection or historical context. And socially shared information (George W. Bush is the 43rd President of the USA) and facts about the natural world (the whale is a mammal) (Searle 1995). Why would the museum seek to exclude such effects (and their attendant affects) from its cognitive environments? Why would it privilege one exclusively normative esoteric over another ordinarily normative one, or over simple information? Why would it wish to exclude feelings of belonging, tantalisation or envy? The cognitive displacements caused by the esoteric may be what stimulate audiences and rewire epistemologies. They will certainly confound any complacency in the museum’s hermeneutics, in its wish to herd or direct audiences along narrative tracks, its wish to generate homogeneous text hierarchies and ‘voices’. But in the end, the museum’s epistemological limits will tend to match the limits it places on audience segmentation and therefore on different knowledges and knowledge systems.

COMPLEX, LOOSELY COUPLED CASE STUDY I will finish with a hypothetical research project whose civic yield might be tolerance, or rewired epistemologies, or rearticulated spatial practices in terms of the museum’s conceptual architecture. Such outcomes will only be produced in a museum willing to engage with complex and possibly dissonant narratives and to permit different epistemologies and knowledge value systems to be discordant, harmonious or harmonic. This possible project is based on entirely available, even modest resources: it does not require a large ensemble. In Te Papa’s art collection are two watercolour paintings by Captain Richard Aldworth Oliver, who as commander of the HMS Fly carried out surveys in New Zealand and Pacific waters between 1847 and 1851. Both paintings are dated 1849. One is titled Neddie, a half-caste; the other, Feast in the Bay of Islands. There’s a narrative connection between the giant hakiri (feast) platform with its ostentatious loads of food, and the ‘Neddie’ character with his high-quality firearm. Art historical research isn’t especially interested in the details of this narrative and will tend to move past it to discuss contexts of the painting’s mode of production. Social historical research will linger over the narrative and tell us about the 1849 hakiri, the scene of a sumptuous reconciliation between the warring Ngapuhi factions of the tribal leaders Tamati Waka Nene, and Hone Heke and Kawiti, and between Ngapuhi and the Crown. Discussion about the artwork will focus on the historical evidence provided by it. Military history will refine that scrutiny and draw in associated evidential images of strategic positions and fortifications.


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Figure 14.1 Richard Aldworth Oliver Feast at the Bay of Islands, September 1849, 1850, watercolour Collection of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa

As the research moves towards whakapapa (genealogy) and matauranga Maori (Maori knowledge), it tells us about the identities and futures of ‘Neddie’ and his companions and about the mana (prestige and authority) of the key players at the hakiri. This information is hidden from Captain Oliver and the intended audience for his painting, but will suffuse the painting viewed through matauranga Maori. The painting will become an ancillary taonga (treasure), a gloss on the mana retained in taonga given by these men to others as marks of respect and obligation. Also in the collections at Te Papa is a Ngati Hao taiaha kura or spear decorated with scarlet feathers that belonged to Tamati Waka Nene. A substantial narrative attaches to this taonga, including Waka Nene gifting it to the Wesleyan missionary Gideon Smales. The potent nature of this gift was conveyed by, among other signs, the red kaka or parrot feathers in the awe or decorated collar below the tongue of the taiaha. The narrative linking kaka kura (red parrot), Waka Nene, the taiaha and Reverend Smales would extend to the customary association between kaka kura as leaders of flocks and important ariki (hereditary leaders) such as Waka Nene as rangatira or chiefs of iwi (tribes). The rarity and significance of kakahu kura (kaka feather cloaks) would also be relevant. Ornithological illustrations by J. G. Kuelemans will show us the chiefly kaka; the taonga store will release not only rare kakahu kura, but also mutu kaka (bird snares) and kaka poria (bird tether pendants). Now, it becomes noticeable how often red is displayed in Captain Oliver’s painting. And what about those crimson pennants flying in the air above the hakiri platform? The advantage in the war in the north, which was concluded at Tamati Waka Nene’s hakiri in 1849, did not lie with outright military victory. It lay within the mana-sustaining contexts of manaakitanga (hospitality). The Ngapuhi of Kawiti and Hone Heke knew that victory lay not just in the military conquest of your enemy, but in the diplomatic skill with which you were hospitable to the futures that your victory had opened. Hone Heke now claimed a derisive rhetorical victory by presenting Governor George Grey, the Crown’s representative at the hakiri, with a pig as a token of peace. This mocking act of manaakitanga referenced Heke’s previous

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dismissal of Governor Fitzroy’s bounty on his head of £100, which Heke had likened to the base transaction of purchasing a pig rather than winning a victory. Oliver’s painting stresses the monumentality of the hakiri platform, which would in fact have been burned to cook the food on it. For Maori, what was monumental was the prestige of the hospitality. Its symbolic monumentality highlighted the material insignificance of Governor Grey’s presentation pig. Diverse ‘esoteric’ knowledges will be found in cultural spaces that overlap the pictorial space of Captain Oliver’s paintings – though they may not be visible there, except to viewers of the painting for whom it becomes a mnemonic. Or except – to see the tuning metaphor through to a conclusion – to listeners whose ears have been opened to tantalising, loosely coupled harmonies.

ENDNOTES 1

Te Papa’s Mission, developed in 1992, states that: ‘The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Te Papa) is a forum for the nation to present, explore, and preserve the heritage of its cultures and knowledge of the natural environment in order to better understand and treasure the past, enrich the present, and meet the challenges of the future.’ ‘Ka tu Te Papa Tongarewa hei wananga mo te motu, ki te whakaara, ki te hopara, ki te whakapumau i nga tikanga maha, me nga mohiotanga mo te ao tuturu, kia whai mana ai enei mohiotanga, mai nehera, kia mau pakari ai mo inaianei, whai ki te wa kei mua.’ Available from: http://www.tepapa.govt.nz.

2

3

‘Te Papa makes a significant contribution toward the key government goal – To Strengthen National Identity and Uphold the Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi.’ Available from: http://www.tepapa.govt.nz. The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa Act 1992 establishes a national museum with the following purpose: ‘To provide a forum in which the nation may present, explore, and preserve both the heritage of its cultures and knowledge of the natural environment in order to: • better understand and treasure the past • enrich the present • meet the challenges of the future.’ Available from: http://www.tepapa.govt.nz.

4

In March 2004, the MP Katherine Rich (National) asked a question in the House of Representatives about the award in June 2003 of a grant by the Community Employment Group (CEG – an agency of the Department of Labour) to Fuarosa and Saralia Tamati, of the Aiga Productions charitable trust in Christchurch, to ‘research and explore hip hop culture as a tool for further community development with Pacific youth’. The ensuing media frenzy uncovered significant ignorance in mainstream New Zealand about the scope, quality, ubiquity and relevance of hip-hop culture globally and in the Pacific. The Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage, Helen Clark, described the grant as ‘loopy’ and others made by CEG as ‘stupid’ and ‘odd, to say the least’ on the Holmes show (TV1) on 26 March 2004. On 20 September 2004, Steve Maharey, the Minister for Social Development and Employment, announced the closure of the CEG. The hip-hop melody lingers on: on 21 May 2006, the Sunday Star Times carried a post-budget, fullpage ad placed by the Independent Financial Review in which Prime Minister Helen Clark appeared dressed as a hip-hop rapper on a page suggesting what else her government might have done with its surplus, including ‘more hip hop tours’.


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5

Don Brasch, the newly elected leader of the National Party, galvanised public opinion with his ‘nationhood’ speech to the Rotary Club at Orewa on 27 January 2004. The ruling Labour-led coalition government swiftly appointed Trevor Mallard as its Minister of Race Relations and on 29 July 2004 he made a provocative speech in his home town of Wainuiomata on ‘Pakeha indigeneity’. On 18 August 2004, Don Brasch returned this serve with an opinion piece published in the Australian Financial Review foreseeing a future for New Zealand as ‘just another Pacific Island state’.

6

The Foreshore and Seabed Act 2004 and the Resource Management (Foreshore and Seabed) Amendment Act 2004 received royal assent on 24 November 2004. The legislation mediated complex public attitudes to ‘customary rights’ of Maori, commercial opportunity and the general public’s ‘traditional’ rights of access to the beach. It generated significant Maori protest and more than any other factor was responsible for the formation of the Maori Party in 2004. The party was registered by the Electoral Commission on 9 July 2004 and currently holds four seats in parliament following elections in September 2005.

7

Clifford 2004.

8

The noted arts patron and cultural philanthropist Denis Adams is well known for his support for chamber music and for several generous endowments, including the Adam Art Gallery at Victoria University, Wellington. In 2001 he contracted the celebrated firm of Athfield Architects to draw up a plan for the relocation of a national art gallery on the top floor of Te Papa.

9

‘“Even Better than the Real Thing”, Wellington’, Capital Times, 19 May 2004: 9.

10

‘“Even Better than the Real Thing”, Wellington’, Capital Times, 19 May 2004: 9.

REFERENCES Bennett, Tony. 2004. ‘Civic laboratories: Museums/the fabrication of cultural objects/self-governance’. Keynote address at The Rebirth of the Museum? An International Symposium. July; University of Melbourne. Clark, Helen. 2004. ‘Paterson Oration 2004’. A speech delivered to the Executive Master of Public Administration Programme, Australia/New Zealand School of Government. [Internet]. 28 June 2004; Victoria University, Wellington. Accessed 2 July 2006. Available from: http://www.beehive.govt.nz/ViewDocument.aspx?DocumentID=20149. Clifford, James. 2004. ‘Translating museums, articulating heritage: Some pacific performances’, unpublished notes for keynote address at The Rebirth of the Museum? An International Symposium. July; University of Melbourne. Hamilton, Paula. 2004. ‘Looking away: The politics of memory at the NMA’. Paper for The Rebirth of the Museum? An International Symposium. July; University of Melbourne. Macarthur, John; Stead, Naomi. 2004. ‘Allegory and populism at the National Museum of Australia’. Paper for The Rebirth of the Museum? An International Symposium. July; University of Melbourne. O’Brien, Louise. 1999. Introd. to ‘Seizing the future: Cultural value in the knowledge economy’. Proceedings of the Cultural Foresight Seminar Three. 9 March; Wellington, Turnbull House. Smith, H. 2004. Icons nga taonga from the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. Te Papa Press: Wellington. Pinker, Steven. 2002. The blank slate: The denial of human nature. London: Allen Lane. Searle, J. R. 1995. The construction of social reality. New York: Free Press.

Cite this chapter as: Wedde, Ian. 2006. ‘Tuning the museum: The harmonics of official culture’. South Pacific museums, edited by Healy, Chris; Witcomb, Andrea. Monash University ePress: Melbourne. pp. 14.1–14.14. DOI: 10.2104/spm06014.

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NEW KNOWLEDGES

BUNJILAKA Moira G. Simpson, Flinders University Moira G. Simpson is an academic, author and consultant who has written extensively about museums, Indigenous cultural politics and repatriation. Her publications include Making representations: Museums in the post-colonial era (Routledge, 1996/2001) and Museums and repatriation (Museums Association, 1997), and her current research interests are focused upon culturally appropriate ethnomuseology, and museum repatriation as a mechanism for cultural revitalisation.

Bunjilaka is the Aboriginal cultural centre and Keeping Place at the Melbourne Museum. Bunjilaka means ‘the land of Bunjil’, referring to one of the main Ancestral Beings of south-eastern Australia who created the mountains, rivers, humans and animals. It incorporates collections storage, galleries, performance and activity spaces, meeting rooms and a garden. During the development of the new Bunjilaka museum, which opened in 2000, extensive consultation was carried out with the Aboriginal community of Victoria through the museum board’s Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Advisory Committee. Their views and ideas provided direction for the museum staff and architects in the design and development of Bunjilaka and the exhibitions. Bunjilaka holds a primary position within the museum, ensuring that Aboriginal culture is presented as a key element of the museum’s focus. It was designed to be ‘integral to the architecture of the museum while being an easily distinguishable element with a unique spirit and character’ (Museum Victoria 2000, 9). Bunjilaka was positioned on the ground floor on the eastern edge of the museum complex, the closest location to the inner suburb of Fitzroy where there are a number of Aboriginal organisations. The centre is easily accessible, an important consideration for Aboriginal elders, and is available after hours for exhibition openings, community events and ceremonies.

Figure 15.1 Wayne Thorpe and Alan Brown (didjeridoo) performing in the Kalaya space at Melbourne Museum Photograph: Andrew Chapman. © Museum Victoria.


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At the request of Aboriginal elders of Victoria, south-eastern Aboriginal collections are stored separately from the rest of the museum’s collections, in a Keeping Place within Bunjilaka. This ensures they are an integral part of Bunjilaka Aboriginal Centre and can be readily accessed by elders, who can view items in an adjoining viewing room. Display cases that present historical and contemporary Indigenous cultural material signal the entrance to the public areas of Bunjilaka. To the left, a long curved wall leads into Wominjeka, the area of Bunjilaka where groups are welcomed. The wall is clad with Wurreka, an artwork by Waanyi artist Judy Watson. Made from 74 zinc panels, it is etched with designs that Watson created after viewing objects in the museum’s Indigenous collections, and travelling around Victoria visiting Aboriginal cultural sites, observing the landscape, and holding discussions with members of local Aboriginal communities. These designs include symbols and objects that reflect aspects of Aboriginal cultural heritage and the features of the Victorian landscape. Beyond is Birrarung, a bright, open gallery used for temporary exhibitions of contemporary art, for exhibition openings and other cultural events. Birrarung is the name for the Yarra River in both Woiwurrung and Boonerwurrung languages, and the design of the gallery symbolises the river, running through the centre of Bunjilaka like the Yarra River flowing through the centre of the city. Curving walls and curvilinear ceiling panels and carpet patterns mimic the flowing river. Glass walls along the rear of Birrarung and the adjoining Jumbanna galleries provide views of Milarri, an outdoor area landscaped with a stream, waterfalls and a pool below a rock wallface. External and internal areas merge visually, reinforcing the importance of the environment in Indigenous culture and philosophy. A wide flat roof positioned above the glass windows provides shade from the sun and reduces heat and light levels in the exhibition gallery. Angled supporting columns placed randomly around the roof’s curving outer edge suggest trees. The garden has been planted with native plants used for food, medicine and technology, which form a visitors trail that identifies the plants and their uses. Milarri is also used for performances and for ceremonial activities, including ceremonies relating to the repatriation of ancestral remains to Aboriginal communities. At the far end of Birrarung gallery lies Kalaya, a performance and activity space used for activities such as song, dance and storytelling, and Wilam Liwik, meaning ‘camp of elders’, a meeting room used by elders of the Victorian Aboriginal community. Kalaya is elliptical in form with a soaring roof-line creating open space above the central performance area. A ramp spirals up and around the walls leading to the offices of Bunjilaka staff members. The design of this area is based upon traditional construction techniques used by Aboriginal people in south-eastern Australia to create shelters by supporting bark sheets on a frame made from saplings: long narrow sheets of austenitic steel lean inward and log posts suggest trees in a forest. The resulting performance area is both spacious and intimate, like a clearing among the trees. The central gallery space in Bunjilaka is named Jumbanna meaning ‘storytelling’. In it are three inaugural semi-permanent exhibitions – Two Laws, Koori Voices and Belonging to Country – which explore the relationships between people, land and law.

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BUNJILAKA NEW KNOWLEDGES

Figure 15.2 Elderly couple with customer services officer handling a woven basket in the Bunjilaka Gallery Photograph: Rob Blackburn. © Museum Victoria.

Belonging to Country examines Indigenous relationships to land through activities such as gathering materials for making objects and clothes; reading of patterns, designs and body decorations that identify a person with a particular group or place; and the importance of returning the deceased to their country for burial. Key exhibits are a bark canoe and a flower-decorated hearse used by the Victorian Aboriginal community’s funeral service, illustrating the traditional and contemporary methods of transporting the deceased. Koori Voices explores the lives of Indigenous Victorians since British settlement. It deals with the effects of colonisation, including the frontier violence that marked the early years of British settlement. An audiovisual display shows images of Victorian landscapes and historical artworks interspersed with quotations from government reports and settlers’ diaries recording the views and actions of Europeans on the frontier. Some are brutally frank and shocking, recording atrocities perpetrated against Aboriginal people. Resilience and resistance are highlighted in sections dealing with Aboriginal peoples’ experiences of being relocated to government-operated institutions and reserves; coping with the changes in lifestyle brought about by the establishment of reserves, missions and schools; and engaging in political protests to reassert their rights. A wall of photographs interspersed with video screens playing films of Kooris talking about their lives put faces and voices to the history. In the exhibition Two Laws, dialogic and at times provocative approaches are used to examine Indigenous Australian knowledge, law and rights to land, property and self-representation, and their interface with mainstream Australian law. These themes are addressed in a film presentation entitled Two laws, a fictionalised, scripted dialogue between the anthropologist Baldwin Spencer and a Central Australian Aboriginal elder named Irrapmwe. Spencer was director of the museum (then the National Museum of Victoria) from 1899 to 1928 and, with his associate Frank Gillen, carried out fieldwork and collecting in the Aboriginal communities around Alice Springs. In the film, parallels are made between the knowledge and authority of the two men, each ‘a professor’


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in the context of their own cultural and educational system. Intended as a means of ‘interrogating Australian history’, it is not meant to be seen as a historical narrative but as ‘a conversation that imagines an argument mounted with a hundred years of hindsight… it necessarily engages history itself because it is a conversation about the weight of history’ (Morton 2004).

Figure 15.3 The Spencer case in the Two Laws exhibit Photograph: John Broomfield. © Museum Victoria.

Nearby, a life-sized model of Baldwin Spencer has been placed in a display case surrounded by Indigenous artefacts and their stories, a transposition suggested by local historian Tony Birch, who was senior curator on the Koorie Voices exhibition. John Morton, who curated the Two Laws exhibition, originally proposed to position a second figure, a life-sized model of Irrapmwe ‘intently viewing Spencer from outside the case’, an idea that was ‘unfortunately… sacrificed to financial or design considerations’ (Morton 2004). On the glass in front of Spencer’s figure is a quotation from a presentation by the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre at the Museum Association’s repatriation conference in London in 1997: ‘We do not choose to be enshrined in a glass case, with our story told by an alien institution who has appointed itself an ambassador for our culture’. It continues on a second panel: ‘To be a voyeur on the physical objects of other people’s culture is not a way to understand them. That understanding could come only from becoming involved in debates on the issues that are at the heart of people’s concerns today’ (Tasmanian Aboriginal

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Centre 1997). The absence of Irrapmwe’s figure somewhat defuses the intended power of the transposition, but this explicit statement from the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre sets the tone for the whole exhibition: it is designed to encourage debate. Visitors are invited to consider the historical circumstances of collection acquisition, the cultural values that circumscribed colonial encounters, contemporary debates concerning Indigenous cultural and intellectual property rights, and the ethics of museums holding culturally significant objects and ancestral remains. A small video screen shows Cracks in the mask, a film documenting an emotional journey by Ephraim Bani, from the Torres Strait Islands of northern Australia, who travels to Europe hoping to view, for the first time, objects of great cultural significance to his people, which have been held in the collections of museums for several decades. Changing policies regarding the holding of sacred objects and human remains is explicitly stated in a text panel that reads: ‘Museum Victoria once had the remains of more than 1000 Aboriginal people, and thousands of secret-sacred objects. The Museum’s policy now is to return remains and secret-sacred objects upon request to relevant communities.’ A photograph shows a scene from a repatriation handover ceremony which took place in 2004 when ancestral remains were returned to the Ngarrindjeri community of South Australia, and nearby is an artwork by Vicki Couzens, a Keerray Wurrong/Gunditjmara woman, entitled Koorrookee ngapoon alam meem mooraka (grandmother grandfather ancestors burial place. This depicts the reburial of repatriated ancestral remains at Framlingham in south-west Victoria in 2004. Through such reflexive strategies, anthropologists and museum curators analyse and consider the moral puzzles that surround their own institution, collections, and the collectors and museum staff who were closely involved with their acquisition and curation in the early years. In various ways, the exhibitions present visitors with opportunities to learn about Indigenous cultures and histories, and ponder upon moral and ethical dilemmas that surround museums and the (re)telling of history. Taken together, Bunjilaka offers a suite of spaces incorporating a cultural centre for the local indigenous community to establish their presence in the museum and reconnect with the collections and their heritage, and a space in which historical cross-cultural encounters can be re-interpreted in the light of contemporary concerns and form the basis for reflexive cross-cultural dialogue.

REFERENCES Morton, John. 2004. ‘“Such a man would find few races hostile”: History, fiction and anthropological dialogue in the Melbourne Museum’. Arena Journal 22: 53–71. Museum Victoria. 2000. Bunjilaka: The Aboriginal Centre at Melbourne Museum. Melbourne: Museum Victoria. Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre. 1997. ‘Free exchange or captive culture? The Tasmanian Aboriginal perspective on museums and repatriation’. Paper delivered at the Museums Association seminar Museums and Repatriation. 4 November 1997; London, England.

Cite this chapter as: Simpson, Moira G. 2006. ‘Bunjilaka’. South Pacific museums, edited by Healy, Chris; Witcomb, Andrea. Monash University ePress: Melbourne. pp. 15.1–15.5. DOI: 10.2104/spm06015.


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VERY SPECIAL TREATMENT Chris Healy, The University of Melbourne Chris Healy teaches cultural studies at the University of Melbourne. His publications include The lifeblood of Footscray (editor, 1986), Beasts of suburbia (co-editor, 1994), From the ruins of colonialism (1997), Cultural Studies Review (co-editor, 2002–06), South Pacific museums (co-editor, 2006) and Forgetting Aborigines (forthcoming 2007).

This essay is concerned not with celebrating the successes of Indigenous people in Australian museums – important though those achievements certainly are – but with some of the consequences of these successes for non-Indigenous museum visitors and critics. My focus here is on Bunjilaka, the Aboriginal Centre at Melbourne Museum, and, at the National Museum of Australia, First Australians: Gallery of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples as exemplifying broader tendencies. First, I argue that these Indigenous galleries have developed distinctive programs that, in important ways, set them apart from ordinary routines and logics of the museum. Functioning more as cultural centres, these initiatives supplement and perhaps open new directions for ‘the traditional museum’. Second, I explore the significance of the separateness of these Indigenous galleries/centres. I want to suggest that these distinct and, to varying degrees, autonomous Indigenous-controlled galleries/centres both concentrate attention on Indigenous knowledge, culture and history, and separate Aboriginality off from the rest of the museum. There is little doubt that across Australia, the developments in the exhibitions relating to Indigenous people offer exciting and popular opportunities for non-Indigenous museum visitors. But these initiatives have yet to be matched, intellectually or practically, by a comparable non-Indigenous reconsideration of the postcolonial inheritance of the museum. I conclude by arguing that together these two characteristics of Bunjilaka and First Australians – novel exhibitionary programs and their separateness from the host institutions – have produced certain critical reactions, protests against the ‘special treatment’ of Indigenous Australians, which, at a time of cultural conservatism, may be a worrying sign for the future.

A MARCH THROUGH THE INSTITUTION Up until very recently, the display of Aboriginal things and images in museums took place in modes that assimilated such exhibitions to the broad, general logics of the museum. It is now well known and widely deplored that, historically, Aboriginal bodies have been displayed as exemplifying the story of human biological evolution; and Aboriginal artefacts and art have been arranged for view so as to demonstrate hierarchies of civilisation. The impact of the non-Aboriginal realisation that Aboriginal people might be interested in the work of museums has been varied. John Mulvaney has given some sense of what a shock this realisation was in recalling that by the 1950s he had never met an Aboriginal person in Victoria, explaining in a telling phrase that ‘they just didn’t “exist”’ (Attwood 1989, 8). As Aboriginal people began to ‘exist’ in the non-Aboriginal apprehension of the world, collections were hidden (Sculthorpe 1989; Sculthorpe 1993) and attempts were made to ‘clean up’ the kinds of displays museums had mounted. As Allan West, formerly curator of Anthropology at the Museum of Victoria has claimed: ‘We took down displays, we renovated and sanitised displays’ (Dodson 1993, 17). It is certainly possible to ‘clean up’ displays, although whether for sanitary or secretive purposes, it may be hard to gauge. But in the museum we are clearly dealing with a world of colonial memories embedded in histories of collections, collectors and displays. The stories and residues

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of these practices cannot be cleaned up without destroying the traces of violence, pain and sadness that were part of their making. Over the past three decades, relationships between museums and indigenous peoples have been debated and contested and changed in significant ways. Particularly in postcolonial nations such as the United States and Canada, New Zealand and Australia, there have been major renegotiations of relationships between indigenous peoples and museums. Indigenous desires for the repatriation of collections have been and remain a powerful motivation (Welsh 1997; McAlear 1999). Some museums have responded to these pressures by reconsidering their policies and procedures in relation to indigenous peoples, sometimes developing innovative and distinctive processes to deal with such difficult issues. Other responses have focused more on creating new ways of representing indigenous people, and indigenous people representing themselves, in specific exhibitions (Fitzhugh 1997; Butler 1999). All of these initiatives have occurred in the midst of the ebb and flow of broader struggles for indigenous rights. They fall within broader debates about the place of indigenous peoples within the nation and are closely associated with notions of reconciliation, Native title, and indigenous intellectual and cultural property rights. These terms mark an important shift away from a narrow anthropological interest in indigenous people in museums to a much broader agenda involving historical and environmental science perspectives and a consideration of indigenous issues across a broader institutional framework. In a number of institutions in the South Pacific indigenous people have made a place for themselves in, and have sometimes been invited, and sometimes been accepted, into museums, generally through convoluted journeys. Gaye Sculthorpe has provided us with an outline of some of the results of those processes in Australia by the early years of the twenty-first century: One can say of the major state museums in Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth and Sydney: • each has some Aboriginal staff (although some more than others and not all include Indigenous people as curatorial staff); • each has an Aboriginal advisory committee or has sought external Aboriginal involvement in the development of the galleries;… • each has staff trained in archaeology and anthropology but only the Western Australian Museum and Museum Victoria employ specialists in Aboriginal history (Sculthorpe 2001, 75).

These three key changes – the employment of Indigenous staff, the establishment of consultative processes and the broadening of specialist professional knowledge in relation to Aboriginality – have taken place as many Australian museums have renovated existing, or created new, galleries and exhibitions in relation to Indigenous people. As Sculthorpe again notes: The current level of activity in developing exhibitions relating to Indigenous peoples across Australia is probably the highest even in Australian museum history: • the Australian Museum opened its new Indigenous Australians gallery in April 1997;

VERY SPECIAL TREATMENT NEW KNOWLEDGES

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• in April 1999, the Western Australian Museum opened its refurbished Aboriginal gallery; • the South Australian Museum will open its new Aboriginal gallery in March 2000; • in July 2000, Museum Victoria will open Bunjilaka, its Aboriginal Centre at the new Melbourne Museum; and • in 2001, the National Museum of Australia will open with the First Australians gallery a key feature (Sculthorpe 2001, 74).

There is no doubt that Aboriginal people will play increasingly significant roles in constructing new relationships between museums and Indigenous communities, in transforming the public programs of museums, in establishing new priorities for collection and so on. Increasingly too, this work has involved the re-working of existing collections in ways that emphasise that Aboriginal property in museums can provide more than a mirror for the colonising gaze. Museum collections are being used as resources in more dynamic processes of remembering. This is basic to the involvement of many Aboriginal people in contemporary museums, heritage centres and keeping places. Aboriginal people have recognised that some of these materials, these remnants of Western historical imagination, can provide opportunities for supplanting the ‘original’ seizure of collection and display, for remaking connections, meaning and memory between objects, culture and history. The intellectual and institutional creativity of these processes is extraordinary. However, this essay is concerned not with celebrating the successes of Indigenous people in Australian museums – important though those achievements certainly are – but with some of the consequences of these successes for non-Indigenous museum visitors and critics. My focus here is on Bunjilaka, the Aboriginal Centre at Melbourne Museum, and, at the National Museum of Australia (NMA), First Australians: Gallery of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples as exemplifying broader tendencies. First, I argue that these Indigenous galleries have developed distinctive programs that, in important ways, set them apart from ordinary routines and logics of the museum. Functioning more as cultural centres, these initiatives supplement and perhaps open new directions for ‘the traditional museum’. Second, I explore the significance of the separateness of these Indigenous galleries/centres. I want to suggest that these distinct and, to varying degrees, autonomous Indigenous-controlled galleries/centres both concentrate attention on Indigenous knowledge, culture and history, and separate Aboriginality off from the rest of the museum. There is little doubt that across Australia, the developments in the exhibitions relating to Indigenous people offer exciting and popular opportunities for non-Indigenous museum visitors. But these initiatives have yet to be matched, intellectually or practically, by a comparable non-Indigenous reconsideration of the postcolonial inheritance of the museum. With this in mind, I want to conclude by arguing that together these two characteristics of Bunjilaka and First Australians – novel exhibitionary programs and their separateness from the host institutions – have produced certain critical reactions, protests against the ‘special treatment’ of Indigenous Australians, which, at a time of cultural conservatism, may be a worrying sign for the future.

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MUSEUM WORLDS The set of objects the Museum displays is sustained only by the fiction that they somehow constitute a coherent representational universe. The fiction is that a repeated metonymic displacement of fragment for totality, object to label, series of objects to series of labels, can still produce a representation which is somehow adequate to a nonlinguistic universe. Such a fiction is the result of an uncritical belief in the notion that ordering and classifying, that is to say, the spatial juxtaposition of fragments, can produce a representational understanding of the world (Donato 1979, 223).

This provocative characterisation of the museum is used by Susan Stewart (1993) as one way to begin to think about the cultural work that is performed by the museum collection. Her argument is that the representational work of a collection consists of two moves by which the collection comes to stand for the world: ‘first in the metonymic displacement of part for whole, item for context; and second, the invention of a classification scheme which will define space and time in such a way that the world is accounted for by the elements of the collection’ (162). For Stewart, the archetypal collection is Noah’s Ark, a world that, by containing ‘two of every sort’, literally comes to stand in for a world that is to be destroyed, a catastrophe that will erase the context of origin so that the collection is a bounded and knowable ‘whole’ journeying into the future (152). While this model of collection and display is obviously recognisable in both historical and contemporary displays, it seems clear that this model does not, in fact, underpin the development of an Indigenous ‘gallery’ such as Bunjilaka. In the first place, the program of Bunjilaka is not founded solely or even primarily on the ‘world-making’ of the object, the label and the exhibition. John Morton, who worked on the development of the initial exhibitions at Bunjilaka, comments that the ‘Aboriginal centre’: is as much an Aboriginal community space as it is an exhibition area. There is a welcome area (Wominjeka); a performance space (Kalaya); a community meeting place used by leading members of the Indigenous community in Victoria (Wilim liwik); a special gallery that mimics the Yarra River (Birrarung); an outdoor courtyard and garden containing Indigenous themes (Milarri); and the main exhibition gallery itself (Jumbunna) which, significantly enough in this context, comes from the Woi-wurrung (Wurundjeri) word for telling stories. As a whole, this mix reflects the Museum’s desire to make the centre as userfriendly as possible to Aboriginal visitors and in relation to Aboriginal aspirations (Morton 2004, 55).

And these are not abstract aspirations. These programmatic aspects of Bunjilaka were built into the centre: The Aboriginal community provided clear directions for the architectural designs. They identified the need for exhibitions, information services, education programmes, performances, fire-making, story-telling, a resources centre, meeting facilities, and changing rooms (Allen et al. 2000, 9).


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In the case of Bunjilaka, the issue is not whether the accumulated Indigenous objects now housed in the Melbourne Museum could have been used, as fragments, to create the fiction of an Aboriginal totality. In fact, the museum’s collection is vast. The issue is the project that became Bunjilaka. Here, the distinctions between the South Australian Museum’s Australian Aboriginal Cultures Gallery (AACG) and Bunjilaka are instructive. Steve Hemming has noted that the artefact-based, ethnographically authorised strategies of the AACG stand in stark contrast to those of Bunjilaka: Regarded an ‘encyclopedia’ of Australian Aboriginal cultures, the AACG has been characterised as a ‘stubbornly’ brave example of a traditional, ethnographic and artefact-based approach to the display of Indigenous cultures (Hemming 2003, 64).

Interestingly this ‘encyclopedia’ of Indigenous Australia is ‘Sold as a “gateway to the outback”, a gateway to authentic cultural tourism, and is seen as a place where you might still experience “classical” or “traditional” Indigenous culture’ (Hemming 2003, 65). In other words, not only is the world of AACG ‘internal’ to the museum in that through its displays it attempts to represent Aboriginal cultures, but also it is a part of another world that can be consumed by driving or flying north. The world of Bunjilaka is quite different. We get some sense of this from the exhibitions described by Moira Simpson elsewhere in this collection and from the objectives of the Indigenous Cultures Program: These objectives include improving the recognition of contemporary Indigenous cultures, enhancing awareness of Indigenous peoples’ right to self-determination; and improving understanding of Indigenous knowledge systems and intellectual property rights (Sculthorpe 2001, 77).

What is most interesting about these objectives is that they do not derive from the logic of the museum. There is not a word about displays, representations, objects, labels, collections and so on. I should add immediately that as far as I can judge, Bunjilaka is deeply concerned with all of the professional protocols and practices of museum practice. But my point is that the museum work of Bunjilaka is not guided by museum-like objectives. John Morton has made the point that ‘the Bunjilaka exhibitions in general were designed as a contribution to… the political process known as Reconciliation [which] occurs through a general moral questioning of colonial history in a highly politicised climate’ (Morton 2004, 57). Another way of saying this is that Bunjilaka is not a place for displays of Aboriginal cultures but a space in which ideas about Aboriginal cultures are produced as interventions in the world of the museum and beyond.

DISCRETE AND DETACHED? In architectural terms, Bunjilaka is both integrated into the overall design of the Melbourne Museum and clearly separate. The Denton Corker Marshall design works with a series of what we can think of as shipping containers stacked and sequenced to produce strong and definite patterns of connection and circulation. The roof that holds the containers together is broken by a huge north-projecting mantle enclosing an exhibition of a temperate rainforest in the Forest

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Gallery. Separated from this unifying roof are the cube-form Children’s Museum to the west and the ‘shelter’ that is Bunjilaka to the east. First Australians is similarly part of and discrete from the design and circulatory logic of the NMA building but for very different reasons. The design of the Melbourne Museum is fundamentally modular (hence my shipping container metaphor) and structured so as to enable visitors to choose to visit particular parts of the museum. By contrast, the NMA is fundamentally holistic and despite the metaphors of ‘tangled destinies’ and the invocation of George Boole, the visitor’s route through the museum is like a walk through a terrace house: down a corridor and into the backyard. In a typical first-shall-be-last reversal, First Australians is the last gallery in the NMA. Although there is access from the Garden of Australian Dreams and via the back gate, there is really only one way into First Australians. So, if it is not a centre like Bunjlaka, it is certainly discrete, and although it is definitely a key part of the normative journey through the NMA, in important respects the design separates First Australians from the rest of the NMA. Other commentators do not share this perspective. I am agreeing with Gaye Sculthorpe (2001) when she writes: ‘Indigenous content in Australian museums remains largely self-contained within an Indigenous gallery and is not integrated across the whole institution as part of an overall conceptual framework’ (80). On the other hand, in discussing the development of Melbourne Museum, Richard Gillespie (2001) insists: ‘We have tried to blur the boundaries between the galleries: there are several elements of Aboriginal history within the exhibition on Melbourne and Victoria’ (119). That may be the case but such blurring only needs to take place where boundaries are firmly in place. I think we can unpack some of these disagreements if we turn to the comments of Charles Jenks (2002) on both these museums: One will not readily find [in the USA] as sophisticated a weaving of the complex past as is present in the new Melbourne Museum. Not only do Denton Corker Marshall provide the pluralist background needed, but the curators have managed to present conflicts with an honesty and drama that is rare in an institutional setting. The same trend is more completely realised in Canberra. There is the same vivid mixture of sociological comment and telling artefact, but a clearer indication that the Aboriginals themselves were fragmented into many cultures, and they too committed atrocities. Clubs and pistols and hanging instruments, as well as artworks based on them, give presence to the simulations of Australian history (Jenks 2002, 69).

It’s hard to know what Jenks means when he suggests that Denton Corker Marshall provide a ‘pluralist background’ – apart from Bunjilaka, the Children’s Museum and the Forest Gallery there is little in the design of Melbourne Museum that is other than functional architecture – let alone what an Australian reader is to make of the fragmentation of Aboriginal culture, Aboriginal atrocities and simulations of Australian history. Perhaps it’s best to pass this by as an example of (architectural) criticism that lacks sufficient local knowledge to make a persuasive and grounded case to an Australian reader. But the argument becomes clearer in the very next passage. Jenks’s point of comparison here is with those US and British museums that ghettoise minority histories and cultures:


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Where [US and British museums]… disperse the pluralism into safely separate components, the Australian museums pull together history into one messy and conflicting whole… The curators and the Director of the NMA, Dawn Casey, have even taken clues from the architects; one of their permanent installations makes use of the metaphor “tangled destiny” and, it appears, the architects conceived of much of the content of the museum before there was even a program’ (Jenks 2002, 69).

Here Jenks is confusing architectural and museological programs, and the rhetoric of designers with the actual buildings they have helped make. Melbourne Museum and the NMA are certainly singular museums. In this sense they are unlike say the suite of museums on the Washington Mall in relation to which it is possible to assert that, say the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) is an example of safely dispersed pluralism. Although it is equally possible to assert that such a major new institution as the NMAI actually centralises the place and role of indigenous Americans in a significant fashion. Nevertheless, Jenks has not recognised the ways in which Bunjilaka and First Australians produce the separate and distinct spatial ordering of the Indigenous presence in these museums. He privileges the architectural rhetoric, ‘tangled destinies’, as if that architectural instruction has shaped not only the actual design – which is predominantly linear and processual rather than entangled – but also the program and the content of the NMA itself; mystical powers indeed. My argument in relation to Bunjilaka and First Australians as special places that are both constrained and enabled by their separateness is similar to the analysis of Te Papa provided by Paul Williams in this collection. It is a predicament that, while offering real opportunities for indigenous curators, is not without costs.

VERY SPECIAL TREATMENT The museum of the nineteenth century functioned as a general archive in which time never stopped building, in which things of all epochs, all styles, all forms could be accumulated and preserved against the ravages of time, in perpetuity. The Museum acted and in many ways still acts (and not least, conceptually) as a microcosm of the world, as a universal sacred space where Man can rediscover and reconstitute his fragmented self (Hooper-Greenhill 1990, 58).

The establishment of Bunjilaka and the Gallery of the First Australians as organisationally and architecturally distinct elements within two significant museums marks a major development in the history of these museums, and resonates with similar international developments in New Zealand and the Pacific that have been discussed in this collection and with more recent examples in North America such as the National Museum of the American Indian. I have suggested that their significance lies in the production of spaces and institutional structures that provide some measure of indigenous autonomy. As new cultural assemblages these initiatives are literally remaking (parts of) the museum as a host of indigenous spaces. As W. Richard West, the founding Director of the NMAI, said of his institution, ‘We also hope that Native people will look upon the museum as a truly Native place, where they are welcomed and honoured guests’ (Volkert 2004, 7). I’m certainly not claiming that these are utopian places of pure indigenous autonomy and indigenous ‘self-realisation’. These museums are public cultural institutions shaped in import-

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ant ways by intellectual, bureaucratic, political and economic imperatives, both internal and external. The discussion of the dispute over the Dja Dja Wurrung etchings in this collection, the recent history of the NMA and a number of examples in other essays here make that more than clear. Nevertheless, my claim is that, for indigenous people working in the museums and some indigenous communities, they have and may in the future continue to provide a base for productive indigenous cultural work. However, the non-Indigenous reaction to these developments has been mixed. I do not want to forget the overwhelmingly positive endorsements provided by museum visitors through surveys.1 Nor do I want to discount the many thoughtful and critical yet generally positive appraisals of both Bunjilaka and First Australians produced by critics including, to the surprise of some, the Carroll Review (Commonwealth of Australia 2003, 20; see Message and Healy 2004). But in addition to these responses, there has been a raft of more negative critiques.2 As John Morton (2004) has argued, most of the more scholarly criticisms have mis-recognised exhibitions in Bunjilaka as being versions of or representations of history or culture as opposed to being exhibitions about cultural and historical relationships. That is, these exhibitions are often attempts at giving form to what Tony Birch (1996) identifies as the central question: ‘the relationship between communities and museums’ (39). In a different vein, for Andrew Bolt, Bunjilaka is ‘“a propaganda unit, presenting a skewed and inaccurate account of our history and culture”… a “silly wet dream” allegedly intended to promote “the Noble Savage myth” and containing the dishonourable hidden agenda of “[making] the white man look silly”’ (Morton 2004, 59). An unlikely alliance of radical Aborigines, postmodern intellectuals and lily-livered liberals has captured this space at the very heart of one of civilisation’s great institutions, and they are corroding culture from within. Critiques like those of Bolt seem to me to resonate with a new set of reactions against Indigenous autonomy, reactions that are gaining ground in 2006. While I was revising this essay for publication, a media storm blew up in Australia ‘about’ the levels of sexual assault on women and children in remote Aboriginal communities, particularly in the Northern Territory. As a media event, such moments call forth a broad and often incoherent range of ways of talking about Aboriginality largely disconnected from the expertise of those who know about actual life circumstances and challenges of Indigenous people in such communities. One strand of this ‘crazy talk’ and of the current government’s rhetoric of ‘practical reconciliation’ is fixated with ‘special treatment’ available to Indigenous people. Whether it’s the Prime Minister, John Howard, leaping to the aid of Health Minister Tony Abbott in South Australia telling ‘indigenous leaders it was not possible to develop a culture of work when some people took three months leave to grieve dead relatives’,3 or complaints about special sentencing for Aboriginal offenders or demands for the end of ‘special’ education in Indigenous communities, there is a familiar sameness in this rhetoric. It’s a very particular configuration. It relies on the well-established tradition of identifying Indigenous people as bearing the responsibility for ‘the Aboriginal problem’; things would be better if Indigenous people took personal responsibility for observing commonsense norms rather than choosing to be unemployed, drink alcohol, eat poorly, commit crimes and neglect their children. But there is a more recent twist: Aboriginal people have been enabled in the exercise of irresponsibility and criminality by the special treatment afforded to them by their non-Indigen-


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ous supporters. So, pretty much the entire post-1972 policy framework in support of Indigenous self-determination becomes culpable. The exhibition and marketing of Indigenous culture has been a major contributor to the national economy over the last two decades, and for the most part this work, whether in the form of art, tourism, culture or branding, has been carefully managed through a range of strategies that promote and contain Aboriginality, and disseminate and disavow difference. Despite this, such work offers real challenges and genuine opportunities for those interested in postcolonial futures. Whether or not political agitation against ‘special treatment’ will produce effects in relation to places like Bunjilaka and First Australians, there are at least two risks associated with their relative autonomy. They may be singled out for reform and brought into line by managers or curators keen to reinstate disinterested scholarship and re-sanitise ‘Aboriginal propaganda’ (Bolt 2000) by eliminating the ‘slur of hindsight’ (Mulvaney and Calaby 1985, 128) and ‘voguish… didacticism’ (Jones 2002). The other alternative is that such galleries and centres might be simply neglected or starved of resources to simply become relics of a past moment when Aboriginality in the museum promised so much.

ENDNOTES 1

See, for example, Casey (2003).

2

In addition to the references that follow, here I’m drawing particularly on Morton (2004) and a debate between Gaye Sculthorpe and Andrew Bolt, ABC Local Radio 3LO, 29 November 2000.

3

‘Indigenous mourning may be too long: PM’, AAP, 6 July 2006.

REFERENCES Allen, Lindy; Bach, J; Morton, J; Pickering, M; Sculthorpe, G. 2000. Bunjilaka: The Aboriginal Centre of the Melbourne Museum. Melbourne: Museum Victoria. Attwood, Bain. 1989. ‘Writing the Aboriginal past: An interview with John Mulvaney’. Overland 114 (May): 6–8. Birch, Tony. 1996. ‘“All things are linked or inter-related in one way or another”: The recognition of Indigenous rights with the Museum of Victoria’. Unpublished essay produced for the Museum of Victoria. Bolt, Andrew. 2000. ‘Museum of Spin’. Herald Sun (20 November). Butler, S. R. 1999. Contested representations: Revisiting into the heart of Africa. Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach Publishers. Casey, Dawn. 2003. ‘Culture wars: Museums, politics and controversy’. Open Museum Journal 6: ‘New Museum Developments & the Culture Wars’. Accessed 20 September 2004. Available from: http://amol.org.au/omj/abstract.asp?ID=25. Commonwealth of Australia. 2003. Review of the National Museum of Australia, its exhibitions and public programs, a report to the Council of the National Museum of Australia. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia. Accessed 15 October 2003. Available from: http://www.dcita.gov.au/Article/0,,0_1-2_2-4_113158,00.html. Dodson, Cathy. 1993. ‘A culture exhibited: The Museum of Victoria and Aboriginal peoples 1970–1992’. Honours thesis, Department of History, University of Melbourne. Appendix Two, Interview with Alan West, former curator of Anthropology, 28 July 1993.

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Donato, Eugenio. 1979. ‘The museum’s furnace: Notes towards a contextual reading of Bouvard and Pécuchet’. In Textual strategies: Perspective in post-structuralist criticism, edited by Harari, Josue. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press. Fitzhugh, W. 1997. ‘Ambassadors in sealskins: Exhibiting Eskimos at the Smithsonian’. In Exhibiting dilemmas: Issues of representation at the Smithsonian, edited by Henderson, A.; Kaeppler, A. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press. Gillespie, Richard. 2001. ‘Making an exhibtion: One gallery, one thousand objects, one million critics’. Meanjin 60 (4): 111–121. Hemming, Steve. 2003. ‘Objects and specimens: Conservative politics and the SA Museum’s Aboriginal Cultures gallery’. Overland 171: 64–69. Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean. 1990. ‘The space of the museum’. Continuum 3 (1): 56–69. Jenks, Charles. 2002. ‘Constructing a national identity’. In Tangled destinies: National Museum of Australia, edited by Reed, Dimity. Mulgrave, Victoria: Images Publishing Group. Jones, Philip. 2002. ‘Our Hidden Histories’. The Age, 23 January. McAlear, D. 1999. ‘Repatriation and cultural politics: Australian and Canadian museum responses to first people’s challenges for cultural property ownership’. Unpublished PhD thesis, Griffith University. Message, Kylie; Healy, Chris. 2004. ‘A symptomatic museum: The new, the NMA and the culture wars’. Borderlands 3 (3). Available from: http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no3_2004/messagehealy_symptom.htm. Morton, John. 2004. ‘“Such a man would find few races hostile”: History, fiction and anthropological dialogue in the Melbourne Museum’. Arena Journal 22: 53–71. Mulvaney, D. J. and Calaby, J. 1985. So much that is new: Baldwin Spencer, 1860–1929. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Sculthorpe, Gaye. 1989. ‘What has Aboriginalisation meant at the Museum of Victoria’. Bulletin of the Conference of Museum Anthropologists 22 (April): 17–24. Sculthorpe, Gaye. 1993. ‘Interpreting Aboriginal history in a museum context’. Museums Australia Journal 2–3: 49–56. Sculthorpe, Gaye. 2001. ‘Exhibiting Indigenous histories in Australian museums’. In National museums: Negotiating histories (Conference proceedings), edited by McIntyre, Daryl; Wehner, Kirsten. Canberra: National Library of Australia. Stewart, Susan. 1993. On longing: Narratives of the miniature, the gigantic, the souvenir, the collection. Durham: Duke University Press. Volkert, James; Martin, Linda R.; Pickworth, Amy. 2004. Map and guide: National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution. Washington: Smithsonian Instituion. Welsh, P. 1997. ‘The power of possessions: The case against property’. Museum Anthropology 21(3): 12–18.

Cite this chapter as: Healy, Chris. 2006. ‘Very special treatment’. South Pacific museums, edited by Healy, Chris; Witcomb, Andrea. Monash University ePress: Melbourne. pp. 16.1–16.10. DOI: 10.2104/spm06016.


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SYMPOSIUM NEW EXPERIENCES

HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR REPRESENTATION AND VIOLENCE IN NEW MUSEUMS OF THE PACIFIC Diane Losche, University of New South Wales Diane Losche has worked as a curator at The Australian Museum in Sydney, and now works in the School of Art History and Theory, College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales. Her current research projects are focused on The American Museum of Natural History Anthropology Department, and the Pacific region and the representation of violence in Timor-Leste. Correspondence to Diane Losche: [email protected]

The 1961 film Hiroshima mon amour raises some crucial questions about the dilemmas involved in representing or memorialising violence, which are still of relevance to museums today, particularly those in new nations whose emergence has been forged in part through violence. This paper explores such questions in relation to new museums of the Pacific region, including the Centre Culturel Tjibaou in New Caledonia, and the three institutions – Arte Moris, the Uma Fukun and the Max Stahl Audio-Visual Archive – in TimorLeste (East Timor). It suggests that the paradigm of culture as contemporary and forward looking, which organises many of the new cultural centres of the Pacific region, risks eradicating the sense of history from which these nations emerged. About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well they understood Its human position: how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; … In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had on the white legs disappearing into the green Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on. (‘Musee des Beaux Arts’, Auden 1979). W. H. Auden’s poem about human suffering and the casualness with which people turn way from it in order to get on with the business of life takes place at the site of an art museum, on the face of it not the most likely location for such an insight. This ironic juxtaposition of suffering, indifference and the museum highlights a problem that faces those who engage in representations in museums. The modern museum is often born with the nation-state and the birth of the nation is often accompanied by violent struggle. How do museums deal with their own origins, and in particular, with the violence that often attends those origins? How are decisions made about representing those origins and that violence? Is the birth of the nation always depicted as a

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triumphal and hopeful narrative? Do curators think about how to strike a balance between a faithful narration of complex events attending the birth of nations versus the need to contribute to cohesion of the nation? This essay was first presented at a conference called Rebirth of the Museum, a title that directs attention to the origins of museums. It is concerned with how the new museums of the Pacific region, especially those emerging from violent colonial struggles, come into being and how they consider or ignore questions about the representation of the very recent violence from which they emerge. The Pacific region entered a phase of museum construction that coincided with the birth of new nations in the 1960s. The transitions to independence varied, and while some were peaceful, others were marked by violent struggle. In 1975 Papua New Guinea gained independence after a peaceful transition, whereas in the late 1980s the Matignon Accords between New Caledonia and France, an agreement that paved the way for autonomy, were only negotiated after a bloody struggle. By the beginning of the twenty-first century the Pacific was a region of many nations, and many new museums. In regions where indigenous peoples are part of larger nation-states, such as Hawaii, New Zealand and Australia, new museums have emerged from that attempt to give voice to the many different strands of the nation and, to some extent, depart from the heroic narrative of the cohesive nation state (Gore 2002). These new Pacific museums have emerged at the same time as new museum theories and practices. While there is no particular agreement on paradigms of this field as a whole (Marstine 2006, 6), museums in the Pacific are, nevertheless, part of this global transformation in museum cultures (Message 2006, 9). The time span covered by the emergence of new Pacific museums is broad (over a quarter century) and each institution has its own particular locale and identity. Scale varies enormously from the spectacular and costly Centre Culturel Tjibaou (CCT) to very simple structures, such as the Goondee Keeping Place and the Amaroo Museum and Cultural Centre in Australia (Aboriginal Heritage Unit, The Australian Museum). Almost all these museums call themselves cultural centres to differentiate themselves from the old museums associated with the colonial past (Kaeppler 1994). The term also signifies one characteristic that Pacific cultural centres have in common – the paradigm that organises the centres, including space, exhibitions and collections, is one in which the notion of culture is perceived as contemporary, emergent and projecting into the future. There is also an emphasis on links to other Pacific island nations, also conceptualised as contemporary (Message 2006, 9). While such an approach makes sense in terms of cultural identity, marking Pacific museums as different from the old museums of the metropolitan centres with their emphasis on a frozen past, this paradigm, like the ones it has replaced, may also become naturalised and proscriptive. The reliance on this paradigm leads to the eradication of a sense of history from most museums. If historical events are represented these tend to follow the narrative forms of the traditional museum. In many museums linkage to the nation means that struggle leading to the founding of the nation, and struggle within the new nation, which often includes internecine strife, is turned into heroic narrative (Coombes 2003). The CCT is an interesting case in this respect. Opened in 1998, after the struggles in New Caledonia led to the Matignon Accords, the CCT is both a striking example of a cultural centre and a spectacular architectural monument created by Renzo Piano. Much has been written about the centre and the building (Message 2006; Bensa 2000) and it is not my intention to repeat already well-discussed aspects of the centre; however the way in which the building encodes the life of the man after whom it was

HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR NEW EXPERIENCES

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named is relevant to this essay. The CCT is named after Jean-Marie Tjibaou, the great leader in the struggle for independence and autonomy from France. As with many colonial struggles there was conflict and violence between multiple political parties some of which violently disagreed with the conditions of the Matignon Accords, which were finally reached through negotiation and of which Tjibaou was the sponsor. Jean-Marie Tjibaou was tragically assassinated by a member of another party shortly after the signing of the Accords. The CCT is, among other things, an attempt to remain faithful to the dynamic vision that Tjibaou had for the future of New Caledonia, and to keep his memory alive. It does this in a number of ways throughout the institution that is named after him. High on a hill overlooking the centre is a statue of Tjibaou, a straightforward bronze representation that could be found in any major city honouring the founder of a state. There are reading materials about Tjibaou in the bookstore and available in the media centre. In this sense the CCT resembles more traditional memorials despite its iconic status as a harbinger of the new, and the tragic internecine violence that led to his death is nowhere explored in the institution. The CCT is an interesting example of the strengths and difficulties of following the paradigm of contemporary culture in the organisation of Pacific museums. It has been critiqued for its particular representation of culture and lack of history by both Kanak and non-Kanak (Message 2006; Pitoiset 2002). The difficulty with paradigms that ignore history and violence is that the representation of culture itself often becomes a banal utopia, removed from the lived realities of local people who should form an important part of the clientele. This irrelevance becomes particularly acute in societies such as the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea, where the institution bears no relation whatsoever to the fractured society it serves. It is not my intention to suggest guidelines for the representation of violence in new museums and cultural centres. That seems not only presumptuous but also premature, since so little is known about how those who create cultural centres in new nations make decisions about representation. What I do hope here is to draw attention to the dilemma of representation for the new museums and to suggest that despite some excellent studies (Bensa 2000; Coombes 2003; Macdonald 2002; Young 1994) more research needs to be done in the area. It is, however, difficult to know how to begin to discuss this problem in this region, this seemingly ever-sunny dreamlike tourist destination where we may often be able to ‘forget’ unpleasant, disturbing histories and memories. As Macdonald (2002, 7–8) has pointed out, very little research has been done on how those working in museums (and many other cultural organisations, I would add) come to decisions about representations, inclusions and exclusions. In particular, new forms of communication are also transforming the representational possibilities for cultural centres and digitalisation is now emerging as a major influence on new museums. Although there are exceptions (Bensa 2000), once exhibition or museum construction is complete, the records of the process are lost and few archives are preserved. Thus one of the best methods to study the origins of museums is ethnographic, as shown in Macdonald’s study of The Science Museum, London (Macdonald 2002). Recently I visited a place where forgetting is not yet possible, a place where the memory of its violent past is still so recent that there is not really any question of suppressing it – the new nation of Timor-Leste (East Timor). In particular, I want to take an all-too-brief look at three emergent institutions and how they represent, or choose to forget, the recent past. Timor-Leste is the newest nation in the world, one in close proximity to and partaking of some of the same

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cultural forms as Pacific island states. It provides an example of a place where violence attended its birth as a new state and where the emergence of institutions can be witnessed in the process of formation. The material presented here is based on my two visits to Timor-Leste, in 2004 and 2005, four years after a referendum on independence was held. Then the people voted overwhelmingly for independence from Indonesia, which, in turn, led to the outbreak of some of the most shocking military and political violence visited on a people in recent times (Taylor 1999). This is not the place to discuss, in detail, the causes and forms of violence of the events in 1999, but a brief history is necessary in order to understand the representational problems faced by the emergent institutions of this new nation. In 1999 the East Timorese people voted in UN-sponsored elections for independence, after an occupation by Indonesia whose troops invaded in 1975 and against which there was fierce on-going resistance. The occupation of Timor was very brutal with many cases of torture and murder by Indonesian police and military who were stationed throughout the area. While the resistance movement (Fretilin) was extremely well organised and widespread, there were also collaborators among the population. In 1999, in response to the upcoming referendum, Timorese militia bands were rapidly formed, composed of armed, pro-integrationist paramilitary groups funded and supplied by the Indonesian army and consisting mainly of people who had collaborated with Indonesian military intelligence (Taylor 1999, 223). During this period, there were disappearances, widespread murder, massive destruction of infrastructure including roads, telephone systems and schools, and the almost complete destruction of Dili, the capital. The violence stopped when a multinational UN force entered the country. After this there emerged widespread claims of genocide, forced deportation and rape, as well as the obvious destruction of the material infrastructure of the country. In succeeding years UN agencies and many non-government organisations have arrived to assist in reconstruction. Still, the issues facing the country are monumental. As I write in 2006, for example, many infrastructural problems have only partially been redressed and the country is now ranked as the poorest in Asia, despite massive ocean oil resources. When I visited TimorLeste, schools in the countryside were still lacking necessities such as books and chairs. Roads were almost impassable in places, water was in short supply, and medical expertise and supplies were lacking, to list only a few problems facing this new nation. Despite these overwhelming issues, there were concerns for culture and, like most new nations, there was an interest in the creation of a cultural national identity, and a number of institutions and individuals were engaged in thinking about issues of representation. There were two art schools; the Xanana Gusmao Reading Room and Library, which has a small exhibition space featuring the achievements of and memorabilia from the life of Gusmao; and a number of archives including the Max Stahl AudioVisual Archive. There was also an official cultural centre. My first visit was an official one: I went as a representative of the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, where I teach, to investigate the possibilities of developing links to East Timorese institutions, especially programs of exchange and residency for staff and students. To illustrate some key points of this paper, I propose we take a rapid tour of the new nation’s cultural institutions. Our first stop is the institution that hosted me – the Arte Moris, a hopeful name that means Living Art in Tetum, a major language of Timor. Founded by an energetic couple, Luca and Gabi Gansser, Arte Moris is currently set on a very large site of several hectares and comprises four enormous buildings. Arte Moris boards about 20 senior students, and many


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junior students come every day for lessons. The school has an exhibition wing and also houses a well-known performing group. It is a classic emergent institution, in bureaucrat speak, which, like everything else in this new nation, means money is constantly short and funding and survival is precarious. Interestingly Arte Moris is actually housed in the ruins of a museum of ethnology set up by the Indonesians, whose artefacts are gone (in off-site storage, I was told). After persistent lobbying, the Ganssers obtained the lease to the site from the Minister of Culture and were able to move from their first school, located in their own rented house. The new site initially had no water or electricity, but despite its decrepitude, the Ganssers thought the site suitable because of its enormous size. The recent violence that visited the country is not only evident in the buildings, which are still in a state of partial ruin, but also in many students, who had their educations disrupted, lost family members and, in one case at least, were themselves tortured. A number of their paintings represent this dark violent period. Indeed some of the senior students painted such dark visions, literally using black constantly and depicting scenes of rape and murder, that after a time Luca Gansser encouraged them to avoid black, thinking, if I understood him, that the catharsis about the violence had gone on long enough. The students also painted iconic and nostalgic pictures of traditional culture, symbolised by a traditional house, the Uma Fukun. These paintings, unlike the black paintings, attempt to contribute iconic symbols for the reconstruction of their culture, a utopian rebirth that the artists hope for. In addition to its role as an art school, Arte Moris functions as a de facto cultural centre and hosts events, concerts and visitors, occupying a far more important role in the small town of Dili than it might in another national capital.

Figure 17.1 A state ceremony held in front of the Uma Fukun, the Timor Leste Cultural Centre in Dili This brightly painted building was originally built as a garrison under Portuguese rule. The Uma Fukun is often closed but on this day it was opened for an exhibit of paintings. © Diane Losche

Another cultural institution in Dili is the Uma Fukun, the official cultural centre of TimorLeste, located in a building that has come to represent the emergence of Timorese culture from the ashes of destruction. The building is a remnant of the old Portuguese garrison in Timor. The irony of putting the official, national cultural centre of the new state into the site of the military wing of the first colonisers is not lost on anyone. The building was gutted, like most in Dili, but most of the walls were left and it has been restored and painted a bright, bright pink. Situated

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in the centre of town with a beautiful view of the harbour, it is closed and locked. Speculations as to why this splendid building doesn’t yet function as well as it might swirl in the gossip of small town Dili, but such situations are not uncommon in places such as Timor, which have so recently suffered widespread destruction. The situation of the Uma Fukun seems to be changing slowly and events such as exhibitions (mounted by students of the Dili art schools) and festivals of culture occur periodically. This bright pink building speaks of both reconstruction and loss, the birth of the nation. The final stop on our tour is the Max Stahl Audio-Visual Archive. This is housed in one room of a new building, the Independence Memorial Hall donated by the Republic of Korea. As I write, most of the building, like many new institutions, often stands empty. The archive was founded by Max Stahl, a filmmaker and journalist who has spent most of his time in Timor since 1991, when he took now-famous footage of the massacre by Indonesian soldiers of Timorese students in a Dili cemetery. He also shot extensive footage during the 1999 events, which was broadcast around the world. Since many of Timor’s archives were destroyed in 1999, Stahl formed this one by donating his hundreds of hours of footage documenting the last 10 years of Timor’s history. This footage provides the basis of the archive at the moment, and is in the process of being transcribed to eventually form an interactive web-based audio-visual history archive. To achieve this purpose, as many tapes as possible need transcribing onto an interactive database, which translates the footage into frames with the dialogue also transcribed and translated. At the moment the dialogue on the tapes is carried out in several different languages including Bahasa, Portuguese, Tetum, and several of the other languages of Timor. The tapes are transcribed by university students and others who are paid by the hour, while some individuals donate their services. The room holds four computers and video monitors, which are run from early morning to late at night, as the students work in shifts around their other activities. For a fee, researchers can also access the archive. The archive is, like libraries and archives everywhere, a representational institution where visitors come and view the tapes. During one of my visits, a nun and priest who had been very active in the resistance movement were able to view, for the first time, tapes of significant events of 1999 that they themselves had participated in, and to see, once again, those of their friends who had been killed. Stahl hopes that the archive will also function as a place where cultural projects can be carried out. At the moment many of the tapes depict and narrate the violence that has played so great a part of the last 10 years of Timor’s history. More than the other two institutions discussed here, the archive takes as its core activity the representation of the violence that has formed the recent history of the nation, but the archive, like most, is also a less public institution than either Arte Moris or the Uma Fukun. Because of the structure of this technology the only way in which the tapes can be viewed is via gatekeepers, the staff of the archive, who are often present when the footage is viewed. Thus the viewing situation in the archive at present is neither completely public nor completely private, since a tiny audience can form when certain tapes are filmed. In discussion with me, Max Stahl voiced the opinion that the tapes represent an important document of crucial events in the birth of the nation, and hoped that the archive will assist those who seek to understand the events leading to the new nation. He indicated that while the nation must go forward and put its energies into reconstruction, it is also important to maintain a lively sense of recent history, in some cases so that justice can be seen to be done, in other cases so that there is a documentary record that cannot be refuted.


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At the moment, none of these three institutions is in a position to avoid, eradicate or suppress the violence that attended their beginnings, because this recent history is written into the material fabric of the spaces these institutions occupy, in the materials and objects they house and in the very people who work in them. The founders and staff of all the institutions also think about and discuss how, when and if this recent bloody history should be commemorated or neglected. The question for people active in representational institutions is how much of the recent past should be left behind, suppressed, forgotten, put aside temporarily, neglected. In Timor, where events are so recent and raw, institutions of representation of the new state face issues that were widespread in the twentieth century. The years 2004 and 2005 have been a turning point in the issue of representation, violence and the state. The Timorese Commission of Enquiry into Genocide completed its work in 2005 and published its report. On 31 May 2004 The Sydney Morning Herald published a photo of Xanana Gusmao, a leader of the Timorese resistance movement and first president of TimorLeste, with his arms around General Wiranto in Bali, in what was read by the newspaper as a public gesture of forgiveness (Moore 2004). This was a shocking photo to some, since General Wiranto is widely thought to have been responsible for the military orchestration of the 1999 destruction. Before we judge President Gusmao too harshly, however, and keeping in mind the cliché that diplomacy makes for strange bedfellows, we should be aware that he, along with other members of the government, most of whom were active in the resistance to Indonesia, are now responsible for lifting the country out of the dire poverty in which it has been left. The leaders recognise the need to move rapidly forward into reconstruction for the future and they must be, above all, pragmatic. This photo encapsulates this period and a sense, articulated by many with whom one speaks, that ‘it is time to move on’. But not all feel this way. The issue of representation of the horrors of the genocide and the apportioning of guilt is complex and usually couched in terms of justice. However there are also important representational issues for this new nation that have lessons for the Pacific region in general. On the one hand, justice needs to be seen to be done and records of painful events need to be engaged with rather than stored in forgotten archives, a view held by Max Stahl of the Audio-Visual Archive. On the other hand, there is now a sense that mourning, grief, fury and loss has absorbed enough energy and must be left behind, as seen in Luca Gansser encouraging his students to move away from their black paintings. The question posed by Timor is how long should we remember, how long should we mourn and how can a new nation represent this. The same issues were circulated over 40 years ago by the film Hiroshima mon amour (Duras and Resnais 1961), a film about violence, memory, relationship and representation (Caruth 1996). If Pacific museums are the topic of this essay, this film is its leitmotif and poetic heart. The film can serve as a poetic narrative with which to think about the representation of violence in memory and in museums. If there was a birth moment of the modern Pacific, it was Hiroshima, the bombing that destroyed a city, killed thousands in seconds, produced one of the major pollutions of the ocean, and simultaneously brought the region into the new global world order. The film, one of the iconic productions of French New Wave cinema by Alain Resnais (director) and Marguerite Duras (screenwriter), was commissioned by Japanese producers and shot in 1957. There is a museum in the opening sequences, montaged with intimate, anonymous shots of embracing bodies. These sequences, in the Hiroshima Museum, provide material evidence of

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the atomic bombing of the city but point to the problems of representing historical violence faced by museums. What do we experience when we see artefacts, especially those intimately connected to violence? What kind of knowledge do artefacts of history provide? The museum sequences in the film show artefacts that are meant to provide evidence of this terrible violence: photographs, human hair, burnt stone, twisted wreckage. All these are set in the new twentieth-century museum, a minimalist setting of modernist architecture. The sequence is also backed by a high-energy jazz score, in counterpoint to voiced-over dialogue, in which the French woman repeatedly tells her Japanese lover that she has seen everything in Hiroshima, and he replies repeatedly that she has seen nothing of Hiroshima. Shots of the Hiroshima Museum are montaged at regular intervals with the bodies of the two naked embracing lovers while this dialogue takes place: She: Four times at the museum… He: What museum in Hiroshima? She: Four times in Hiroshima. I saw the people walking around. The people walk around, lost in thought among the photographs, the photographs, the reconstructions, for want of something else, the explanations, for want of something else. Four times at the museum in Hiroshima. I looked at the people. I myself looked thoughtfully at the iron. The burned iron. The broken iron, the iron made vulnerable as flesh. I saw the bouquet of bottle caps: who would have suspected that? Human skin floating, surviving, still in the bloom of its agony… He: You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing. (Duras and Resnais 1961, 17–18).

This film sequence raises difficult questions about representation and violence. What is real, and what fiction, phantasm, dream, memory? How do we know and experience violence? How long should we, can we, mourn? The Hiroshima Museum shown in the film is a ghettoised institution, one designed not only to represent but also to contain the violence it commemorates. The director of the film, Alain Resnais, expressed his opinion that, in order to go on with life, individuals had to forget traumatic events; however he also seems to have believed that you cannot forget until you have properly ‘remembered’ an event, that trauma must be remembered indirectly, that obvious representations of evidence miss the point of the event itself. The Hiroshima Museum was specially designed to commemorate a terrible event and therefore faced rather different problems than those faced by cultural centres in new nations, whose brief is often to provide a positive cultural identity for an emerging civil society. Nevertheless, I suggest that the film raises, in poetic filmic form, some crucial issues relevant to all museums. When faced with the very understandable dilemmas involved in representing or memorialising violence in an institution’s own past, many museums tend to eradicate, cover over and ignore the ruins on which they are built. In the old world this erasure is so complete that we may easily forget the thefts, upheavals and murders that have often marked not only the beginning of the nation but also its history and its aesthetics. There is a cliché, one of the ten commandments of museums, to forget. One of the questions that I hope to raise here is to what extent this old world command-


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ment has been, should be or can be continued in the Pacific region where we are seeing a rebirth of the museum. I realise that when discussing this issue one enters often-trodden, indeed endlessly trodden, territory. One can find shelves of volumes that circulate around the issue of, as it is often phrased, ‘representing the unrepresentable’ and ‘imagining the unimaginable’. The Holocaust of World War II, in particular, continues to generate heated debate, which, understandably, casts a long shadow (Young 1994). Despite this plethora, there is little about the subject specifically addressing the Pacific, despite its relevance to a region with an often violent colonial history. The question of memorialisation in a Pacific museum or cultural centre is not a simple one, and is linked to many other issues, such as the extent to which codes of the representation of violence, or its suppression, are appropriate to this part of the world. There seems to be a perception that representations of the past involving violence picture a community as simply either victims or perpetrators of wrongdoing. This, in turn, leads to the notion that violence in history should be forgotten, left out, in favour of more positive, hopeful images. One may wonder, however, if perhaps this erasure has gone too far, so far that the bright spaces of the new museums seem totally unconnected from the reality that surrounds them. The lack of reference to a tortured history parallels the distaste of governments for any view of history that departs from the idea of a triumphal march. From this perspective, museums do indeed risk becoming too-obedient servants of the state. Still relevant in this region is the film Hiroshima mon amour, together with the questions it raises about memory and forgetfulness. I don’t intend to suggest that Timor or New Caledonia holds lessons about representation for other places or that a formula can resolve the issues of violence and its representation in museums in the Pacific. Timor has its own bloody, difficult birth. What I am suggesting is that Timor can reminds us, as those who work in or write about museums, of what we might like to forget, the violence of many births and beginnings. Thinking about Timor exposes the horns of a dilemma. What do we risk in remembering, memorialising and representing violence, mourning, grief and loss? Having visited Timor at this particular time I think this is a serious question. One view is that memorialisation will absorb the energy needed for the life of the nation to continue. Another view cautions against museums repressing violence. As has often been noted, repression itself has high costs, the repressed tends to return, and the return of the repressed is often marked by extreme forms of violence. Most significantly, this suppression of violence can lead to a kind of entrancement with the nation-state in its triumphant and bureaucratic mode, the state at its most banal. We also risk sterility and banality in how we speak about and write of museums, because when we erase violence or banish it from discussion we tend to erase the poetic as well. Hayden White suggests that ‘Every discipline is constituted by what it forbids its practitioners to do… The price paid is a considerable one. It has resulted in the repression of the conceptual apparatus… and the remission of the poetic moment… to the interior of the discourse…’ (White 2004, 27). Suppression of violence has a high poetic cost, one that ignores interiority and intimacy, which are, after all, a necessary part of the foundations of that community the institution is meant to serve. No matter how much we ‘forget’, the film Hiroshima mon amour suggests that chance encounters can trigger these memories. At least one critic feels that Resnais does not wish the past to reside in the present, and he pushes it back into its own realm: ‘Resnais believes one

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can keep on living only by forgetting. No matter how important is that which we have experienced and are going to forget – sooner or later’ (Lanzoni 2002, 229). It may seem that I have ignored one crucial focus of recent discussions and this is the question of how to represent violence. I don’t intend to ignore this problem. In societies entranced with consumerism one has to give much thought to the how of representation, and in what kinds of spaces. As Susan Sontag wrote: certain photographs – emblems of suffering, such as the snapshot of the little boy in the Warsaw Ghetto – can be used like momento mori, as objects of contemplation to deepen one’s sense of reality, as secular icons, if you will. But that would seem to demand the equivalent of a sacred or meditative space in which to look at them. Space reserved for being serious is hard to come by in a modern society, whose chief model of a public space is the mega-store (which may also be an airport or a museum) (Sontag 2003, 107).

The film Hiroshima mon amour signals the issue of the how, the form of representation. The questions raised by Timor-Leste’s current situation don’t have simple answers but I am concerned that these issues be raised in discussions about museums. My point here is that serious consideration of the questions of violence and its representation should be taken up by museums, otherwise they risk becoming banal empty spaces, too-obedient servants of the state.

CODA As this paper was about to be published, Timor-Leste returned to widespread media attention once again as the new nation erupted in political upheaval and street violence, particularly in the capital Dili, the site of the institutions that have been discussed in this essay. At this point the prime minister, Mari Alkateri, has resigned and an interim government will probably be formed by President Xanana Gusmao and members of the Fretilin Party, with Jose Ramos Horta the most likely candidate for prime minister. Many internally displaced people, especially women and children, have fled their homes and are living as refugees in their own country. Arte Moris, the art school discussed in this essay, has become a temporary home for hundreds of people, as staff and students at the school struggle to raise funds to feed and house the refugees. It is undoubtedly too early to predict the trajectory of events in Timor; however one thing does seem clear: recent events will make even more complex any future representation of the birth of this nation.

REFERENCES Auden. W. H. 1979. ‘Musee des Beaux Arts’. In Selected poems. London: Faber and Faber. Bensa, Alban. 2000. Ethnologie and architecture: Le Centre Culturel Tjibaou. Paris: Adam Biro. Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed experience: Trauma, narrative and history. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Coombes, A. 2003. History after Apartheid: Visual culture and public memory in democratic South Africa. Durham and London. Duke University Press. Duras, M.; Resnais, A. 1961. Hiroshima mon amour. New York: Grover Weidenfeld.


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Gore, J. 2002. ‘Representations of history and nation in the museums in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand: The National Museum of Australia and the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa’. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Melbourne: University of Melbourne. Kaeppler, A. 1994. ‘Paradise regained: The role of Pacific museums in forging national identity’. In Museums and the making of ourselves, edited by Kaplan, Flora. London and New York: Leicester University Press. Lanzoni, Remi Fournier. 2002. French cinema: From its beginnings to the present. New York: Continuum International Pub. Group. Macdonald, Sharon. 2002. Behind the scenes at The Science Museum. Oxford and New York: Berg. Marstine, Janet, editor. 2006. Museum theory and practice: An introduction. London: Blackwell Publishing. Message, Kylie. 2006. ‘Contested sites of identity and the cult of the new: The Centre Culturel Tjibaou and the Constitution of Culture in New Caledonia’. reCollections: Journal of the National Museum of Australia 1 (1): 7–28. Available from: http://recollections.nma.gov.au/issues/vol_1_no_1. Moore, Matthew. 2004. ‘Forgiving Gusmao hugs Wiranto’. Sydney Morning Herald (31 May). Accessed on 17 May 2006. Formerly available from: . Pitoiset, Anne. 2002 ‘What is the Tjibaou centre being used for? Disappointed hopes of the CCT’. L’EXPRESS, fr (10 October). Accessed 15 May 2006. Formerly available from: . Sontag, Susan. 2003. Regarding the pain of others. New York: Farrar, Straus Giroux. Taylor, John G. 1999. East Timor: The price of freedom. Sydney: Pluto Press. White, Hayden. 2004. ‘The fictions of factual representation’. In Grasping the world: The idea of the museum, edited by Preziosi, Donald; Farago, Claire. United Kingdom: Ashgate Publishing. Young, R. 1994. The texture of memory: Holocaust memorials and meaning. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Cite this chapter as: Losche, Diane. 2006. ‘Hiroshima mon amour: Representation and violence in new museums of the Pacific’. South Pacific museums, edited by Healy, Chris; Witcomb, Andrea. Monash University ePress: Melbourne. pp. 17.1–17.11. DOI: 10.2104/spm06017.

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NEW EXPERIENCES

THE AUCKLAND WAR MEMORIAL MUSEUM, TAMAKI PAENGA HIRA Elizabeth Rankin, University of Auckland Elizabeth Rankin is Professor of Art History at the University of Aukland, where she was also the inaugural coordinator for the interdisciplinary Graduate Programme in Museums and Cultural Heritage. Her research has focused on cross-cultural interchanges in Southern African art, and the representation of black and white artists and their work in galleries and museums. Correspondence to Elizabeth Rankin: [email protected]

Assembling material for the Great Exhibition of 1851 at the Crystal Palace in London was the catalyst for collecting in early Auckland, and the first items gathered for a nascent museum in 1852 reflected the emphasis on resources considered appropriate for British colonies. A duality of focus on natural and cultural history continued to characterise exhibits in various temporary premises and in the first purpose-built museum erected in Princes Street in 1876 under the auspices of the Auckland Institute. Today the museum occupies a monumental three-storey building overlooking the city and its harbour from the elevated volcanic hill-site of Pukekawa in the spacious parkland of the Auckland Domain. The majestic Greek Revival edifice has an additional purpose, for it was built in the 1920s not only to accommodate the ever-growing collections, but also to commemorate the servicemen of Auckland district who died in World War I. This is the reason for the Court of Honour and Cenotaph in front of the museum, as well as the inscription of Pericles’ funeral oration for Athenian soldiers above the columned portico, the names of foreign battlefields in the window embrasures, and the building’s unique Doric frieze with its carved reliefs on military themes.

Figure 18.1 The Auckland War Memorial Museum Photograph: Krysztof Pfeiffer. Reproduced with permission of the Auckland War Memorial Museum.


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The uppermost floor of the Auckland War Memorial Museum is dedicated to the war dead, both in the original Hall of Memories for World War I and another for World War II, each with a Roll of Honour inscribed on marble panels, paying tribute to the thousands of fallen who had come from Auckland families of both European and Maori descent. The losses of the latter war necessitated substantial extensions in 1960, again with the joint purpose of providing space for collections and commemoration. Today the building is once more undergoing extensive expansion, scheduled to open in late 2006, following a major program of structural renewal and refurbishment in the 1990s. The focus is now exclusively on museum agendas, directed at the more proactive roles museums are expected to play in contemporary society – although the temptation to move to overly ‘hi-tech’ interactive exhibits has been resisted in favour of a continuing strong focus on objects. The museum, with its fine library and resource centres, has a distinguished record in field work, publication and research, and a longstanding interest in education (the current lively children’s discovery centres Weird and Wonderful, and Treasures and Tales trace their origin to school programs inaugurated in 1930). The additions will extend outreach possibilities with a new educational unit, auditorium and conference centre, as well as a generous temporary exhibition venue, underground parking, restaurant and retail facilities – amenities expected by today’s audiences, which will also provide financial support for the institution. Expanded storage facilities are included to house the impressive holdings on site, particularly the very large Maori and Pacific collections, which are among the finest in the world and are fittingly predominant in the museum’s displays. Old style exhibits that presented the culture of the region, natural curiosities and imported objets d’art side by side – such as intriguing juxtapositions of the superbly carved Maori storehouse (Te Oha), a moa skeleton and a plaster Apollo Belvedere recorded in old photographs of the museum at Princes Street – have long since been overtaken by more conventional classifications of ecology and ethnography. A few of the casts of Ancient Greek sculptures acquired in 1878 to introduce ‘high art’ to the colony (though not the Apollo) are still to be found unexpectedly in hallways, as is the recently restored Egyptian mummy Ta-Sedgemet. Renewal of exhibitions is ongoing, but many such objects are currently in storage, including the fine collection of Asian art, except some items in Civilisations, a small exhibit of antiquities. The museum’s focus today is indisputably on Aotearoa New Zealand, and the division of nature and culture is clear. The natural history exhibits of the land and its oceans are housed on the first floor. With their high cultural significance, the Maori and Pacific collections occupy prime ground floor sites – a practical as well as symbolic position, as they are the chief drawcards for visitors, particularly tourists. The Maori Hall, the largest exhibition space at the heart of the Auckland War Memorial Museum, retains features reminiscent of its original installation, particularly the magnificent carved meeting house Hotunui, which was built into the fabric of the hall when the new museum opened in 1929. One obvious difference is the absence of the imposing Pukaki, a major carving from the collection which featured prominently in the acclaimed 1985 Te Maori exhibition that toured the United States and New Zealand. Acknowledging its responsibility to repatriate objects acquired through collecting practices that are no longer considered acceptable, the museum returned Pukaki to the Te Arawa people of Rotorua in 1997, and has negotiated the restoration of other holdings also. Notwithstanding any such significant de-accessions, the Maori collection is an extraordinarily rich one that represents all the tribes of Aotearoa New Zealand. The expans-

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THE AUCKLAND WAR MEMORIAL MUSEUM NEW EXPERIENCES

ive Maori Hall incorporates many monumental taonga – carved houses, gateways, and the last of the great war canoes, Te Toki-a-Tapiri, which stretches along nearly half the length of the display area – together with spacious, spotlit display of smaller pieces, creating a celebration of aesthetic quality as well as spiritual values.

Figure 18.2 The Maori Hall at the Auckland War Memorial Museum Photograph: Krysztof Pfeiffer. Reproduced with permission of the Auckland War Memorial Museum.

The present classification of the Maori artefacts is predominantly taxonomic, with items grouped by type rather than according to ancestral affiliations, which would arguably be of more direct interest to Maori themselves. To counter this western ethnographic framework that seems designed to meet the expectations of international visitors, the lead texts for wall panels are in Maori, and the Te Kakano information centre installed within the exhibition hall offers Maori audiences alternate ways of accessing the collection. The centre’s name means ‘the seed’, acknowledging Maori ancestry in Polynesian culture, and its special data base is a resource that can be searched by area or tribe to ascertain the museum’s holdings related to a visitor’s personal affiliations. Te Kakano also caters for the many Pacific Islands people who live in Auckland, said to be the largest Polynesian city in the world today. In the case of the Pacific Islands collection, housed in the exhibition spaces to left and right of the entrance atrium, different strategies have been deployed to present the artefacts, although both share striking centrepieces of great canoes, affording opportunity not only to place such large items on show, but also to mark the seafaring prowess of the peoples of the Pacific. The first gallery, Pacific Lifeways, is devoted to a more traditional ethnographic approach, incorporating two types of display, both with extensive explanatory texts. One set of cabinets is devoted to works grouped by themes, the other by communities, particularly those living in Auckland – Tonga, Fiji, Samoa, Kiribati, Niue, the Cook Islands, Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea are all represented. The artefacts are there to tell the stories of the nations they represent and provide an introduction for visitors


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seeking to understand Pacific culture. The other gallery, Pacific Masterpieces, shows objects in typological groupings, with minimal labelling, although a supporting interactive visual presentation supplies socio-historical information. The emphasis is on the aesthetic qualities of Pacific design, but the atmosphere is quite different from contemporary art galleries, both because of the lowlevel lighting needed for the conservation of precious fibre items and the quantity of artefacts on display in their specially designed glass cases. The aim is to share the richness of the collection with visitors and give them the opportunity to view as many fine items as possible. On the ground floor beyond the Maori and Pacific halls are galleries that have been used for temporary exhibitions and for permanent displays relating to the settler culture of New Zealand. Other than some changing exhibits of applied arts, and historical objets d’art from the eclectic Mackelvie donations of the 1880s displayed as a collection on the first floor, there have been few European-derived cultural artefacts on show recently, such as there used to be in lavish displays of fine English furniture and pottery, for example. Two galleries for design and decorative arts are planned, however, one New Zealand, the other international, in space freed up by the new extensions and in the area that until lately housed the City exhibition on the founding and development of Auckland, created in the 1990s. While another installation from that time remains – Wild Child, exploring New Zealand childhood past and present – an older exhibit on colonial Auckland, sponsored by the store Milne and Choyce Ltd. for their 1966 centennial, is also due for dismantling, although this has been delayed more than once because of its great popularity with visitors, who enjoy wandering through diminutive nineteenth-century streets and peering into domestic interiors and quaint shops. While the Auckland War Memorial Museum’s pictorial and photographic collection is an outstanding resource on colonial culture, exhibition space devoted to this field is modest at best, and there is no attempt to recount a history of European colonisation. Only the top-floor exhibition Scars on the Heart, a 1993 development replacing the old war-trophy displays of ranked armaments adjacent to the memorial halls, and renewing the commemorative purpose of the museum, addresses one thread of that history. Its compelling narrative of New Zealand at war opens with colonial conflicts of the nineteenth century, where it is the goal to represent both a Maori and a colonial perspective through paired displays, and in a video presentation especially created for this exhibit. The museum’s resolve to ensure that indigenous voices are represented is found even in the galleries depicting the country’s flora and fauna and diverse ecological regions in impressive displays dating from the 1990s renewal program. Adjacent to these, and providing a different perspective on their accounts of natural history, is the highly innovative exhibition, Te Ao Turoa, where the origin myth of the division of the heavens and the earth in the separation of the first gods, Rangi and Papa, the father and mother of all, is represented by the starry sky and the land beneath. Bringing together culture and nature, the exhibition offers a Maori interpretation of the world, recounted through a combination of artefacts and oral history with natural specimens. The desire to acknowledge Maori has been expressed in many different ways since the museum’s inauguration, with Maori artefacts collected from the outset. Even the architecture of the 1929 memorial museum, despite its classical origins, signals the earliest culture of Aotearoa New Zealand in the ingenious capitals and friezes of the interior which incorporate Maori designs. But perhaps the most potent part of the bicultural underpinning of the Auckland War Memorial Museum lies not in its architecture, collections or exhibitions, significant as they are, but in the

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institution’s governance. The Auckland War Memorial Museum Act 1996 established a Maori advisory committee, Taumata-a-Iwi, representing the main tribes of the Auckland region, and with a seat on the museum’s new Trust Board. In addition, the Maori Values Team of staff members works in parallel with customary line management to ensure operational accountability. This unique structure guarantees, in the words of Director Maori Paul Tapsell, ‘a new level of integration of Maori policy, practice and procedure in all aspects of Museum operations’ (Auckland War Memorial Museum 2002, 10).

REFERENCES Auckland War Memorial Museum. 2002. Guide. Auckland: Auckland War Memorial Museum.

FURTHER READING Cheeseman, T. F. 1917. The first fifty years of the Auckland Institute and Museum and its future aims. Auckland: Wilson and Horton. Kawharu, Merata. 2002. ‘Indigenous governance in museums: A case study, the Auckland War Memorial Museum’. In The dead and their possessions, edited by Fforde, C.; Hubert, J; Turnbull, P. London and New York: Routledge. Park, Stuart. 1986. An introduction to Auckland Museum. Auckland Institute and Museum. Powell, A. W. B., editor. 1967. The centennial history of the Auckland Institute and Museum. The Council of the Auckland Institute and Museum. Stead, Oliver, editor. 2001. 150 treasures. Auckland: David Bateman and the Auckland War Memorial Museum. Tapsell, Paul. 2000. Pukaki: A comet returns. Auckland: Reed Books. Tapsell, Paul. 2006. Maori treasures of New Zealand. Auckland: David Bateman and the Auckland War Memorial Museum. Wolfe, Richard. 2004. A noble prospect: 75 years of the Auckland War Memorial Museum building. Auckland: The Auckland War Memorial Museum. Cite this chapter as: Rankin, Elizabeth. 2006. ‘The Auckland War Memorial Museum, Tamaki Paenga Hira’. South Pacific museums, edited by Healy, Chris; Witcomb, Andrea. Monash University ePress: Melbourne. pp. 18.1–18.5. DOI: 10.2104/spm06018.


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SYMPOSIUM NEW EXPERIENCES

THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AUSTRALIA AS DANSE MACABRE BAROQUE ALLEGORIES OF THE POPULAR

John Macarthur, The University of Queensland John Macarthur is Reader in Architecture at the University of Queensland, and Visiting Professor of RMIT University. His research interests include aesthetics and historiography of architecture, the picturesque in the 18th century and its uptake in modern times, relations of architecture and the visual arts, and critique of contemporary architectural practice. His book The picturesque is forthcoming from Routledge in 2006. Correspondence to John Macarthur: [email protected] Naomi Stead, The University of Technology, Sydney Naomi Stead is a senior lecturer in the School of Architecture at the University of Technology, Sydney. She writes architectural criticism for a number of journals and is a contributing editor to Architecture Australia. Her research interests include museum architecture, concepts of authorship in architecture, architectural criticism, and the cultural politics of architecture. Correspondence to Naomi Stead: [email protected]

Ashton Raggatt McDougall’s architectural design for the National Museum of Australia (NMA) has had a reception as heated as the institution itself. In many ways the buildings and institution are identified, one with the other, to an extent that would seem praiseworthy if not for the fact that this identification is most often made by the NMA’s vehement critics. Those who oppose the museum’s presentation of Australian history see the buildings with their various symbols of atonement as built proof of what they take to be the deleterious effects of relativism in historiography. Meanwhile some architectural critics find that the building’s general uncertainty as to its own status as an object ought partly to be blamed on postmodernist museology with its sometimes Jacobinical disavowal of artefacts and collections in favour of affects of citizenship to be found in a flux of pixels. Our aim in this paper is introduce a gap between the institution and its architecture, to describe and to speak for the buildings as significant cultural works in their own right. We claim that to understand the NMA as a whole it is necessary not to see the buildings as equipment, as hardware on which to run the institution’s software, or as a form that naturally and necessarily expresses the content of the museum, but rather to understand the buildings as art. The architecture of the NMA is a mimesis of the institution where the museum’s problems are rearranged in semblance and extended into crisis by hyperbole. With the licence of art, the buildings can and do conduct a discourse with less constraint, and less responsibility, than the institution housed. Here we are making a supposition, that the category ‘art’ and architecture understood as art have a particular role in social history museums in presenting what is otherwise unpresentable, because of lack of evidence, lack of agreement, horror or ennui. We aim to show that what non-architects might construe as matters of the discourse of cultural policy – that is, the meaning and value of the popular and of curatorial practice, and the occasioning of interpretation on the part of visitors – also become the material of an aesthetic logic in the buildings of the NMA. Ashton Raggatt McDougall (ARM) and Robert Peck von Hartel Trethowan, architects in association, competed for and won the commission for the design of the National Museum of Australia (NMA) and its neighbour the Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (IATSIS). The design team was lead by Howard Raggatt of ARM, and the buildings are located on Acton Peninsula on the shores of Lake Burley Griffin in Canberra, the capital city of Australia. The project was completed on time, and within budget, and the buildings were opened in March

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2001. Some early strategic decisions about the project underlie and constrain much of what we are about to describe, but two of these can be passed over. The NMA and IATSIS are quite small in floor area when considering the size of Acton Peninsula, which they were intended to occupy so as to complete the broader Lake Burley Griffin landscape. The architects’ decision to design a relatively thin annular building, which pushed up as close as possible to the lake’s edge, is their answer to the brief of contributing to this larger landscape. This is one reason ARM’s design was chosen, as the competition jury realised that more compact designs on the centre of the Peninsula would be largely invisible from across the lake. This decision meant a long perimeter to the building, which placed pressure on an already meagre budget and culminated in one of the most remarked aspects of the building. It is constructed largely in metal sheet and plasterboard, not the stone and stainless steel of serious institutional buildings, and has the ‘tinny’ feel of a suburban shopping centre, because its cost is, in fact, comparable. A third starting point is more relevant to the present discussion. Paul Keating, during his tenure as prime minister resisted pressure to build the NMA, saying that it might be ‘another marble mausoleum’ in the Parliamentary Triangle (Ward 2001, 39). Clearly the NMA as built avoids this charge, and yet the manner in which it has done so raises as many questions as it answers. Although the building disavows the solemnity of the mausoleum and has what we will call the ‘look’ of populism, the NMA follows the manner for which ARM are well known and is packed with coded references to the politics of Australian history and to the history of architecture. There follows a double problem: first, the amount of cultural capital and sheer effort required to interpret the buildings is truly daunting, and thus has led to charges of elitism; and, second, even dipping into this interpretive space is enough for one to realise that the building is not as celebratory as suggested by its purely sensual reception of bright colours and jaunty angles: it has, in fact, a highly choleric attitude to Australia and to architecture.

Figure 19.1 The architecture is 'produced' by a five-sided extruded red 'string', which constitutes some buildings and cuts through others. Here it carves an entry space from the bulk of the building volume. © Naomi Stead

The formal armature of the NMA’s architecture lies in the proposition of a series of threads knotted together on the site. These threads constitute some buildings and cut through others. This way of generating the form of the buildings stands in relation to a body of techniques and

THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AUSTRALIA AS DANSE MACABRE NEW EXPERIENCES

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debates about form and technique that are specifically architectural. Briefly, ARM like many architects of their generation are agnostic about concepts of ‘good’ form derived from function or from canons of proportion. They thus follow a strategy, which was common among progressive architects in the late twentieth century, of not designing the form of buildings directly, but rather designing formal systems, constraints and conceptual machines, which, when made operational by the requirements of building, produce the form. Such ‘machines’ might be geometrical, based on architectural history, or analysis of the site; but in the NMA the machine is constructed out of an analogy derived from the brief. As an analogic device the threads that generate the form face in two directions. The first analogy is to Walter Burley Griffin’s geometrical schema of axes governing the urban plan of Canberra, one of which was to cross Acton Peninsula. The second analogy is to the museum’s exhibitions, which are structured as entwined narratives of geography, population, first Australians, private and familial life, and nation. The architects take Griffin’s axes, add an extra line that would extend to Uluru, and tie these in a knot that analogises the combination of the exhibition narratives. Here the architecture takes a less affirmative tone than the museum thematic where the threads are supposed to be ‘entwined’, one assumes harmoniously, into the strong rope of Australian nationhood. In the building they are tangled, knotted and, in the case of the line to Uluru, springing back, as if a cord under tension has been cut. The abstract lines and threads, as the analogy proceeds, become a ‘string’, which is a five-sided extruded shape, and it is this string that cuts through the bulk of the building volumes and produces the sculptural loop in the centre of the site, which acts as a landmark and signature.

Figure 19.2 The Uluru line, an axis oriented towards the centre of the country, appears to recoil and spring back. © Naomi Stead

The most dramatic and memorable space in the NMA is the Main Hall. The ceiling is a notional cast taken from a knot made with the virtual string. This knot is an allegory for the binding together of the threads of Australian history, and its virtual nature, its actual non-existence, means that in the Main Hall it is the throngs of visitors who make this knot as they move through the space. This space can also be read as a built commentary on the Sydney Opera House. The grand ceiling is a series of intersecting shells in a complex geometry, which is at some level an imitation of Jorn Utzon’s building, but this is made more explicit with the window wall and skylights being framed with steel mullions that replicate those framing the glass walls of the

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Opera House on the harbour side. Architects might then notice that the ceiling comes down onto columns remarkably like those of the TWA Terminal at JFK airport in New York, which was designed by Aero Saarinen at the time he judged the Opera House competition. After returning to the USA, Saarinen redesigned the shells of TWA, and the crucial twisting columns on which they sit, with the lessons he had learnt from Utzon’s Opera House scheme. Perhaps only architectural historians will see as significant that the Opera House glass walls were designed by Peter Hall after Utzon had quit the project. These are widely admired but under threat from Opera House purists campaigning to restore the building to what can be deduced of Utzon’s original intentions. Count the readings of the Main Hall. With one’s body, on the skin as it were, this is an affecting space; it feels like the secular cathedral that the brief required. With a few visual clues and hints at the concepts involved one can mentally unravel the space in two directions – first, as the space of an enormous five-sided thread tied in a double knot and, second, as a play on the history and criticism of the Sydney Opera House and the debate as to its future. Each of these rhetorical figures, the knot and the alluded Opera House, are then the basis for an allegory. The allegory of Australian history as tangled stories being formed in the purposeful knot of citizenship requires an exegesis of the kind the museum’s guides and pamphlets will undoubtedly provide. The architectural allegory has the same structure. It is an occasion for storytelling but, in fact, most architects like the lay public would need some hints to begin the conversation. Already, this level of coding of the buildings might be distasteful to many, both in the idea of its meanings being hidden and the evocation of a knowledge of architecture that could be taken to be elitist. The NMA buildings contain references to Walter Burley Griffin, Le Corbusier, James Stirling and Daniel Libeskind. For objectors, the architecture of the NMA has worse in store, as we recount some of the other more particular significations of the buildings. But the first point to raise here is the objections that might be made in principle to a building that speaks, and when speaking requires interpretation. To an extent the architectural coding of the NMA is an attempt to expose the ignorance of what is, in Australia, a largely literary cultural elite who think of architecture as a branch of real estate. However, there are many people including architects, who, on principle rather than in ignorance, would hold that buildings could and should be completely non-semantic. The usual rationales for such a view are either belief in functionalism or an understanding of aesthetics as being strictly limited to sensory experience, and frequently these two ideas are combined. Those who do think that buildings can mean something and that sensory experience can open onto conceptual thought generally suppose that meaning should be imminent to the building and experienced in it, in some way particular to an architectural sense or media. Space has been reified in this way since the late nineteenth century, and the general direction of these ideas about architecture owe something to Hegel’s understanding of architecture as a symbolic art, able to unify sense and concept, even as it is unable to symbolise any particular thing. Ashton Raggatt McDougall’s whole practice and the NMA in particular could be viewed as an assault on such a view of architecture, and understood as a point-by-point negation. What concerns us here is not their views on utility nor their anti-aesthetic, but their insistence that architecture requires interpretation as an act exterior to it. We could generalise at this point and say that all culture, not just architecture, is various acts of interpretation in production and reception, and in this aspect the architecture of the NMA is thoroughly on song with the museum apparatus.


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In Western history the idea that buildings require a work of interpretation is, in fact, more common than the rigorously aesthetic or functionalist view. Architecture in the past had an iconography that overlapped with that of painting and literature, and was widely understood by a literate public, whose acts of understanding were exercises of a kind of franchise in culture analogous to, and often exchangeable with, political franchise. It is often thought that the rise of autonomous art from the late eighteenth century and the supposition that buildings required interpretation removed this common language and the intelligibility of architecture. However, this ignores two aspects. First, in past iconographic culture, interpretation was rarely conclusive; rather it was open, multiple and more about the display of the aptitude and wit of the interpreter than agreement as to the meaning of things. Also reading visual and spatial texts was not unmediated: buildings like paintings and poetry had published guides and indexes to their codes. Second, this practice has not stopped and, in present-day culture, buildings are opened to interpretation in guidebooks and by tour guides, and this is the typical way that lay people appropriate buildings as culture, even if they are trained, like good moderns, to feel the building affecting them after they have made the identifications. To object, therefore, to the knotted threads of the NMA either on the grounds of a refusal of an architectural semantics, or on the grounds of the present lack of common architectural language and unmediated legibility, seems to us invalid. The real challenge of the NMA is its particular view of interpretive practice, which is allegorical and what we might call baroque. Two aspects open from this name: first, the semiotics of allegory and, second, a certain cultural pessimism that will in a moment take us to the some of the political issues raised by the buildings. In his study of baroque drama Walter Benjamin contrasts the structure of allegory and that of symbolism. The symbol is a theological concept of the unity of meaning and the thing, in contrast with the practices of allegory that tend to multiple and diverging significations. The design of emblems aims to produce the largest number of significations from the one device, the power of which lies in the connections that it can make. Allegory accepts that interpretations are infinite, which is not to say that any interpretation is possible or that meaning is arbitrary or subjective. Fundamentally, allegory is mundane; its delirium of accumulating referents assumes that symbolism, true unity and stability of meaning cannot be made on earth. The sense that the alternative readings of the NMA provoke is, as in baroque architecture, that culture is the act of proliferating meaning in the face of disorder. If one begins, as the baroque did, with the fact that just about anything can come close to meaning something and that the most carefully wrought cultural artefacts fail to reach true significance, then the consequence is clear. One must either admit to the meaninglessness of existence or pile up stuff deliriously, without fear of contradiction or repetition, in the hope of the miracle of meaning. While the operations of geometry at the NMA are palpable and apparent to any observer, this is impossible to understand without diagrams, and difficult even then. But once begun, an exegesis opens not so much to a solid truth as to an infinity of interpretation. As with the Roman baroque of the seventeenth century, this geometry is always felt but never, finally, understood. When Borromini designed S. Ivo della Sapienza, Rome, he used a six-pointed star both to generate the structural form of the segmented dome and to evoke the symbol of wisdom. However, the geometrical figure never aligns with the building elements that it has generated and thus it remains, not so much a secret, as a truth anterior to the building. The star remains behind the veil which (for a counter-reformation Catholic) properly separates life and durational experience from the

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absolute and timeless world of symbols. For Borromini, a five-sided figure would be the sign of Christ represented in His five wounds, and if one thinks, with the baroque, that interpretation is infinite, then the string that makes up the NMA can be the Redeemer as well as Griffin’s axes.

Figure 19.3 ‘Blue Poles’ in the Garden of Australian Dreams © Naomi Stead

Our description, concentrating as it does on the architecture of the NMA must make it sound as if it is addressed to an architectural cognoscenti; as indeed it is, in part. But if one accepts that meaning is a practice rather than a destination, and we consider some of the other kinds of coding, this is not the simple elitism that it is frequently held to be. One doesn’t need to be an art historian, or even have good memory of the painting, to recognise Jackson Pollock’s Blue poles in the literal blue poles at the museum. The facade of large parts of the building is decorated with stipples that apparently form huge messages in braille. This does not mean that the building especially privileges giant, sighted braille readers, any more than it does architects; the ease with which one reads the braille or the architectural references is not the point. Traditional emblems have a fatto or a scene in which the iconographs are deployed, and if there is such a fatto at the NMA it is political. While much of the braille exists for the joy and humour of puzzling out messages such as ‘she’ll be right’ and ‘such is life’, at one point the buildings reputedly say ‘sorry’. This flouts the Australian Commonwealth Government’s refusal to apologise for the past treatment of Aborigines, especially for the historical policies of forced adoption, which many believe to be a form of genocide. Other references to this issue include the cartoon-like use of the colour black as a referent, an internal stair in the Gallery of the First Australians which has the appearance of a gigantic black cross, a framed view of the parliament flag on axis with the entry hall to the Gallery of the First Australians, and a comparison of the fate of Indigenous culture to that of the Jews of Berlin under the Nazis. As many in Australian now know, revisionist historians and their political patrons charge that this museum is institutionalising a ‘black armband’ view of Australian history that values


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mourning for the destruction of Aboriginal peoples and cultures over a celebration of the civilising process since the eighteenth century. Into this historians’ debate about evidence and truth in history the architectural emblems glow red: like so many boils, these are hyperbolic versions of the revisionists’ worst fears about the museum. In allegory the buildings bluntly say ‘genocide’ and ‘sorry’, words that the institution cannot utter without nuances, ‘balanced debate’ and euphemism – the inescapable consequence of Australian history not being resolved politically or culturally. To the extent that the architects have got away with these references, we could say that their success has two aspects. The first is in the allegorical practice that we have been describing which values difficulty in interpretation over easy legibility. The second is the notion that architecture is an autonomous art and that architects have a certain licence or freedom in design. While this might be small and shrinking, there is a part of every ‘high art’ building that is generally supposed to be ‘architectural’, to be transcendent and which no one is obliged to understand except as an instance of the architect’s genius. This romance has a certain tactical advantage that museums are not unaware of: artists can make works that say things that would be difficult to get through committee. This is certainly the case with the design of the Gallery of the First Australians. This segment of the NMA takes the plan form of Daniel Libeskind’s design for the Jewish Museum, an extension to the Berlin Museum. The building is actually nothing like Libeskind’s in appearance or use, being different in size, materials and internal organisation. The actual plan of the First Australians involves a ‘built shadow’ in which ARM imagined that Berlin building cast a shadow that could then be enclosed as volume. This fanciful and arcane procedure is the way that the architects allowed themselves the use of the figure of the Berlin building while still fitting the brief. The result is that the reference to Libeskind’s building is only recognisable in graphic presentations of the plan in publication, and to a lesser extent in aerial views. But representation is not at stake in synecdoche and the reference is clear. The revisionist historian Keith Windschuttle thinks that this is a coded statement that Aboriginal peoples of Australia suffered a genocide like that committed against the Jews of Europe by the Nazis; and this is a not unfair reading. In fact Libeskind’s building is not a Holocaust museum but one dedicated to the cultural achievements of Germany’s Jews. But by the time we argue about whether the referent is the celebration of a threatened culture or the process that left it so, whether genocide is cultural or actual, what degree of intent or body count is required, whether the Jewish Holocaust is historically unique, and so on, then we have opened Pandora’s box. With regard to architectural references, some spurious charges of plagiarism were reported in the newspapers and on radio after the building’s opening, which certainly confused its reception. Libeskind, or his office, were reported to be briefing lawyers at some stage, but it is hard to believe that this is true. The transgression here is not theft of intellectual property; ARM’s facile incorporation of such a recent, famous and some would say melodramatic and overly portentous building as the Jewish Museum is more like caricature. Libeskind’s whole career is built around the persona of the architect auteur and the convergence this has had with the marketing concept of ‘branding’. ARM’s quotation is something of an attack on this phenomenon. When the designs for the NMA were first shown, there was a degree of frisson in the architectural community, and many of us recognised the quotation of Libeskind’s Jewish Museum. About the same time the rumour of the braille swept the studios, and tension mounted as we all wondered if it could be built before the government found out. At one level the buildings are a

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kind of whoopee-cushion waiting to make a fart in the drawing room of authorised culture. In the end, the politics of history is the occasion, not the point, of the architecture of the NMA. The discomfort awaiting all those who play the game of allegory there lies in arriving at the point where references to architectural history have a certain, and impossible, structural equivalence with the history of the subjection of Aborigines in this country. In this reading of the Gallery of the First Australians, it is clear that we are not talking of some political awkwardness being sugar coated with art. Here two kinds of discomfort are thrown against one another and they do not chime. Putting the problems of artistic genesis in a metonymic chain with genocide risks exaggerating the former and trivialising the latter. Certainly one could question whether a comparison to the Holocaust is politically useful in getting recognition for the real history of Australia and the actual genocides committed here. It could be considered offensive that such a comparison should be made for reasons, not of justice, truth or Realpolitik but for form and obscure debates about the comportment of the architect and the relation of art and architecture. Despite a very real discomfort about this part of the NMA, a discomfort that underlies the whole experience of the building, it would be wrong to think that there is any equivalence of aesthetic and political problems claimed here.

Figure 19.4 The end elevation of the Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, both black Villa Savoye and mask of Ned Kelly. © Naomi Stead

This can perhaps be made clear with a less contentious example: the end elevation of IATSIS’s office wing. According to Howard Raggatt this is intended to appear as the mask of Ned Kelly. At the same time anyone with the slightest architectural education will recognise Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, the epitome of high modernism, but here reversed in colour from white to black. In the simplest signification, which courts a popular reading, we have an abstraction of a national folk hero, an anti-establishment figure not slow to violence. In a more complex reading, to turn the Villa Savoye black is to spin into the hyperbole of imagining a whole anti-enlightenment modernism, to see blackness as the universal potential for reversal and renewal. This is a kind of rebus, a device loved in the baroque and still a favourite in puzzles and children’s games where, for example, the image of an eye can stand for the pronoun ‘I’ in a sentence. So, there are two possible readings, and although both are apparent, each excludes the other. Either Ned Kelly or Le Corbusier, and once both designations are known each becomes unstable, tipping into its


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alternative. In the end the NMA is not, under all its levels of coding, about something, but rather about the impossibility of there being any core around which culture forms. It is neither politics in the guise of culture nor real issues of history and civics being made the occasion for the frivolity of art; rather it is about the ultimate futility of both. What critics of the NMA think of as the elitism and inaccessibility enacted by its double- and triple-coded references is something more radical, a general questioning of whether Australia actually adds up to anything much, and whether architecture, museums or culture as a whole are ‘good for you’. Thus far we might seem to have been building the case for the charge of elitism against the NRM. However, most of the comment directed at the NMA buildings centres on their apparent contravention of standards of taste and propriety in civic architecture on what is taken to be its ‘populism’. In an institution charged with the weighty task of representing ‘the nation’, ‘popularity’ has implications at every level of the museum apparatus, from its projection of allegories of nationhood and citizenship to the nature and exhibition of museum contents and to museum architecture itself. The NMA has been described by one detractor as ‘a monument to lost opportunity’ (Frith 2001), and by another as ‘a monument to horrendous political correctness’ (Akerman 2001, 91). These seem particularly interesting descriptions for a building that was explicitly requested by the organising committee to be ‘anti-monumental’ (Johnson 2001, 57). If monumentality is conceived as an undesirable characteristic, it is not hard to imagine what its attributes might be seen to be: dull, salutary, impersonal, sober and officious, a bastion of establishment values and authority, expressed in an architecture of unity and coherence. In opposition to this, the ‘antimonumental’ would presumably be fun, irreverent, engaging and unconventional, perhaps expressed in a deliberately contemporary architecture that was low-rise, ‘incoherent’ and open to interpretation. This seems a fairly accurate description of the NMA building. But while this may have overstated the opposition, what is really interesting about these two is that one is ostensibly ‘popular’ and the other is not. Asking for an anti-monumental museum seems at one level to be a simple request for a ‘populist’ building or, more specifically, for a building that looks popular. The NMA as a building and an organisation subscribes to the rhetoric and significantly to an aesthetic of popularity. The NMA opens an elaborate play on this ‘look’ of populism, and it does so by manipulating certain key aesthetic devices: the visual puns we have mentioned such as the ‘blue poles’, but also the simpler aesthetics of bright colour and non-orthogonal forms, usually associated with children’s play equipment or the advertising of discount goods. Such devices carry a weight of expectation and association; they cause a building to be read or socially recognised as being populist, regardless of other measures of actual popularity. This look of populism relies on a pre-existing set of dichotomies, specifically between ‘high’ and ‘popular’ architecture, and between ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ culture more generally. It is important to draw a distinction here between ‘populism’ and ‘popularity’; populism has the negative connotation of deliberately seeking popular acceptance at the cost of quality, intellectual rigour or formal aesthetic value. ‘Popularity’ retains its more neutral modern sense, either of actual public involvement or of things that are socially recognised as popular – in the way that football is seen to be more popular than opera. The NMA will be successful if it becomes as popular as the Australian War Memorial, an immensely popular museum in terms of visitor numbers or public sentiment, even if its sepulchral form is the antithesis of the liveliness required by the brief for the NMA. But old systems of thought endure, and politics, architecture and

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museums all have their hierarchies: each is subject to an unspoken elitism that sees ‘populism’, if not actual popularity, as inferior. Given that, as Michael Müller has observed, contemporary museum architecture is characterised by ‘ambitious efforts to consecrate or position architecture once again as a higher, indeed the highest, form of Art’ (Müller 1996, 114), the question of aesthetic elitism is particularly pointed in museum buildings.

Figure 19.5 An aesthetic of bright colour and non-orthogonal forms can cause a building to be read or socially recognised as 'populist' © Naomi Stead

The very definition of Architecture with a capital ‘A’ is based on its distinction from and elevation above vernacular building. It is the very existence of architects, then, as interlocutors between people and buildings, that prevents architecture from being a truly ‘popular’ art in the sense of being made by the people for themselves. The distinction between high and low cultures is thus inherent in architecture perhaps more than any of the other arts, and it is not easily abandoned. Populism in architecture is also hedged about with proscriptions, springing from the view that a deliberately popular architecture is somehow fraudulent. Associated above all with commercialism and entertainment, such populism is seen to work against a particular ideology of architectural morality – truth to materials, structure and function – that was articulated by Ruskin and refined through the rationalist and functionalist doctrines of modernism. Even to a contemporary liberal sensibility, for which there is no problem with popularity per se, this doctrine demands that an art which cannot be truly of the people avoids attempting to look like it is. If a work of high architecture happens to gain popular acclaim, so the logic goes, then that is a happy accident. But a piece of serious, civic, monumental architecture should set out neither to be popular, nor to look like it is – that is, it should have neither the ideology nor the aesthetic of populism.


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Now it is hardly surprising that the architects have breached this unspoken rule in the NMA, given ARM’s previous work and their self-defined role as architect provocateurs. An engagement with both ‘popular’ taste and ‘elite’ conceptual approaches could indeed be seen as idiomatic of Melbourne architecture, but its logic is basic to avant-gardism. The concept of an avant-garde, which is ‘ahead’ of the main body or ‘van’ of a culture, involves a play of popularity and historical time. Avant-gardes are constituted, in part, by a lack of popular acceptance in the present – in order to connote the better future in which their works will be popular. A work such as the NMA, which draws elements from both low and high culture, is thus enacting a complex game, weaving together both vanguard and avant-garde positions. It is critical of the utopianism and futurity of the avant-garde position, and in its pop-ish colours and popular references claims a van-gardist, whole-of-culture-in-the-now position. But in its depth of architectural references, it imagines a future in which knowledge of architecture will be much more widespread in a population with a greater patience in engaging with it. If the NMA can be said to manifest this idea, then perhaps it is fair to describe it as an architecture that has the look of the popular, but without the intention of a simple or naive populism. The NMA instead undertakes a sophisticated discourse on the politics of popularity in architecture, revealing some of the contradictions inherent in the very idea. Complaints about the NMA do not centre around its popularity in the positive sense of being liked by many people, but more around its apparent populism – that which connotes inferiority in material, form and finishes, and which furthermore sets out to win favour. This is the general position taken by Stephen Frith, reviewing the building for the Canberra Times. After first saying that postmodern appropriative practices such as those advocated by Robert Venturi, of ‘high art using low art’, are themselves ‘dated, tired and conservative in their application in the National Museum’, Frith (2001) complains that the building is a major work of civic architecture which in the end is not ‘public’ at all, but manages to speak to only a tiny minority. As he writes, But why such tongue-lashings and breast-beatings over what has quickly established itself as a happy theme park to mediocrity? Surely its condoning of the ruthless kitsch of petty capitalism in its imagery and finishes provides for some spectre of merit? The problem becomes one of the civic domain in which architecture and its rhetoric is interpreted. For a supposedly public work, the museum is an intensely private building, privately encoded with in-jokes, and in the end hugely un-funny… The confection of cheap cladding and plasterboard is a spurious sideshow of magpie borrowings passing themselves off as cultural reference (Frith 2001).

Everything in this passage decries what Frith reads as the NMA’s verisimilitude of popularity – the reference to theme parks, sideshows, commercialism – a confection constructed with poor quality materials and finishes, which nevertheless flirts ‘pretentiously’ with the canon of modern architecture. To Frith the building reads not as a cheap and cheerful reflection of the Australian vernacular, but as a demeaning attempt to raise a laugh from the elite at the expense of the uncomprehending masses. He concludes that the building isn’t truly ‘popular’, but rather ‘intensely private’ and ‘hugely un-funny’. Ultimately, Frith laments that ‘[s]urely the representation of our collective experience on such a beautiful site, and the potential for a shared account of our heritage

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with Australia’s Aboriginal peoples, deserves more than the hollow laughter of architectural injokes and superficial mockery?’ (Frith 2001). As will be already clear we disagree with Frith on the nature of the coding, its privacy, and on the possibility he thinks the museum has forgone of a legible public culture in building. But what of his claims of its ‘look of popular’ being dissemblance and deceit? There can be no question that the NMA sets out to be, and is, a work of serious Architecture. The objection is not necessarily with its appropriation of elements of popular culture for serious architectural reasons, but rather its indecorous treatment and appropriation of other works of high architecture as though they were popular architecture. Or, to put it another way, the problem lies in the NMA’s appropriating both high and low art without distinguishing between them, and thereby flattening longstanding cultural hierarchies. Libeskind’s affronted response to the ‘quotation’ of his Jewish Museum in the plan of the Gallery of the First Australians is surely a simple expression of this: the widely held belief that while popular culture is fair game, high art deserves a more dignified treatment. There is something of a mise en abyme in the NMA: it is a ‘popular looking’ work of high art appropriating other high art as though it were popular art, while simultaneously also employing genuinely ‘popular’, vernacular elements from the broader sociocultural milieu. Throughout the critical reception of the building there is a complex interplay between questions of whether the NMA is too ‘populist’: that is, that it deliberately seeks to be popular, or whether the building isn’t popular enough; that it plays at the ‘look’ of populism without actually achieving popularity. Effectively it has been criticised simultaneously both for being too popular and not popular enough. That these seem to be contradictory criticisms is itself an indication that the building challenges established notions of the place of architecture in civic life and its expected comportment in relation to ‘the public’. Ultimately, the only possible conclusion is that the building is complex enough to be read on a number of levels: it is both populist and elitist, literal and encoded, private and public, and it confounds traditional binary oppositions between these categories. We would argue that the very uncertainty and indeterminacy of the NMA building is an appropriate representation of problematics that already exist in the material – not only in definitions of Australian national identity, but also in the very idea of a national museum, a popular museum and a popular museum building. That the design does not paper over these cracks but rather expresses them in formal architectural terms is an index of the courage of the architects, given that a less sympathetic reading such as Frith’s sees this as a weakness of the architects, rather than an exposition of the problems of architecture, museums and Australian civic culture. In conclusion, then, the NMA does seem to be a paradoxically offensive edifice. It is a building so populist as to question the possibility of public taste in buildings, and, at the same time, so loaded with cultural capital as to be a stern test of the credentials of the cultural elite. Having shown the near symmetrical opposition of these criticisms we are not attempting to have them cancel one another, nor would we want to claim that this is some kind of dialectic that is sublated or transcended in the building. The architecture of the NMA is contrived for such criticisms to meet head to head and the wreckage that results has something to tell us about the problems for architecture in the ‘Re-birth of the Museum’. Calling on the spinning figure of the rebus we have tried to show how these problematics expose one another: moments of facile identification and simple sensuous pleasure turn out to contain recondite messages of cultural


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poverty, and visa versa. Regarding the NMA as a danse macabre of Australian culture and history, we cannot remain maudlin and in mourning without being made to dance, even though every joke concerns loss, death and the failure of meaning.

REFERENCES Akerman, Piers. 2001. ‘Museum is an original imitation’. Sunday Telegraph (8 April). Frith, Stephen. 2001. ‘A monument to lost opportunity’. The Canberra Times (20 March). Johnson, Anna. 2001. ‘Knot architecture’. Monument 42 (June/July): 54–60. Müller, Michael. 1996. ‘The shopping arcade as a museum: On the strategy of postmodern aestheticization’. In The critical landscape, edited by Speaks, Michael. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers. Ward, Peter. 2001. ‘Enigmatic theme park’. The Australian (9 March).

Cite this chapter as: Macarthur, John; Stead, Naomi. 2006. ‘The National Museum of Australia as danse macabre: Baroque allegories of the popular’. South Pacific museums, edited by Healy, Chris; Witcomb, Andrea. Monash University ePress: Melbourne. pp. 19.1–19.13. DOI: 10.2104/spm06019.

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THE MUSEUM OF SYDNEY Kate Gregory, Fremantle Prison – a heritage listed convict establishment Kate Gregory, at the time of writing, was a research associate at Curtin University of Technology, working on a history of heritage interpretation in Western Australia. Her doctoral thesis situated the effect of contemporary art on new exhibition practice within a broader study of how the museum has figured in Australian art. She is now exhibition coordinator at Fremantle Prison, a convict-built heritage site on the National Heritage list. Correspondence to Kate Gregory: [email protected]

The Museum of Sydney on the site of First Government House, a museum managed by the Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, opened in May 1995 amid controversy over the site’s interpretation. Rather than recreating First Government House, which was the first permanent building in Australia and the seat of colonial power in the British colony until 1846 when it was dismantled, architectural firm Denton Corker Marshall designed a new museum using Sydney sandstone and glass set back on the site, creating a forecourt under which the original foundations of First Government House were preserved. The foundations were mapped in the forecourt with granite paving and steel studs. A granite slab placed on an angle in the forecourt revealed a section of the foundations and in the entrance of the museum the foundations were visible under transparent panels installed in the floor. Part of the facade of First Government House was recreated here and a film explored the site’s changing use over time. Many believed that such a significant building deserved to be completely reconstructed, in homage to the colonial beginnings of the nation. Instead, the original building itself was absent, only evident in the fragmentary form of its foundations. These fragmentary remains of First Government House inform the museum’s approach to interpretation in using historical evidence as only part of the story. The museum explores wider aspects of Sydney’s history to 1845 using gaps in the evidence as productive entry points for imagining life in the past. Most significantly, the Museum of Sydney explores the social history of Sydney and eschews a glorification of the nation’s founding fathers. The place of the Indigenous Eora people within early Sydney and their negotiations with the early settlers are particularly important in the museum’s exhibits. The contested nature of the place and the idea of ongoing dialogue, difference and dispute characterise the philosophical underpinnings of the museum. Conceived of as a Pandora’s box rather than a collector’s chest, the museum producers hoped to spark debate, continue unfinished dialogue and represent difference (Emmett 1994, 7). An emphasis on the everyday life of early Sydney inhabitants is crucial to the museum’s concept of an unfinished dialogue. The everyday helps to place social history in the present by rendering the detail of past lives and their complexity. Chronology and the grand narratives of progress and development are abandoned, and in their place, we find thematic displays, a variety of media, snippets and fragments from the archive, and stories. To develop the various elements of the museum, the director of the Historic Houses Trust Peter Watts and senior curator Peter Emmett assembled a team of people including historians, filmmakers, artists, archaeologists and multimedia producers. This collaboration among different practitioners, who at that time might not have worked together in a museum context, made innovative exhibits possible. A creative approach to history and the use of moving image, sound and art installations are a feature of this museum. Permanent museum exhibits cover the themes of Sydney’s natural


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environment, the everyday in the early colony, trade and the Eora people, as well as the history of the site of First Government House. Exhibits make use of film and video, documents from historical archives and artefacts from the museum’s archaeological collection. Such creative methods and focus on aesthetic experience have attracted criticism, with many critics feeling that the aesthetic and creative dominate at the expense of historical fact, grand narratives and a chronological understanding of historical events.1 The opening exhibits of the museum, some of which remain installed, portray a complex set of relations between the local Indigenous people and settlers. Eora knowledge and governance of the land is explored alongside the settler’s incomprehension of the landscape and their efforts to shape the foreign into something familiar. The public sculpture in the forecourt of the museum, Edge of the trees, by Janet Laurence and Fiona Foley, invokes these different understandings of the landscape and the layers of meaning embedded and inscribed upon the land. Giant wood, sandstone and steel pillars, some inscribed with Eora words and Latin names of plant species, form a forest through which visitors can wander. Shells, bones, ash, feathers, oxides, wax, hair and honey – substances that the Eora people traditionally used in ceremonial life and as body paint and adornments – are encased in transparent containers set into some of the pillars. A soundscape of Eora and Latin place and plant names can be heard emanating from some pillars, leading visitors through the sculpture as they listen. Edge of the trees is a site of layered meaning, which shows how for the Eora the place is rich with custom and knowledge and for the European settlers it was claimed through naming and classification systems. Exhibits also attempted to represent a sense of the daily interaction between the two peoples in the first years of the colony. Upon entering the museum, visitors move through a glass box that plays a poetic sound installation by Paul Carter, The calling to come. An imagined conversation of sorts is taking place between an English-speaking man and an Indigenous woman. Neither speaks very much of the other’s language, and the conversation is peppered with mimicry, stuttered possibilities of meaning, playful sounding out of words and gasps of frustration. There are moments of comprehension, ambiguity and misunderstanding. Carter based the script on Jakelyn Troy’s study of First Fleet lieutenant and astronomer William Dawes’s notebooks on the Eora language, produced between 1788 and 1790. In The calling to come visitors eavesdrop on Dawes’s conversations with the Eora woman Patyegarang. The museum uses film, video and digital images in many of its exhibits. As visitors move between levels two and three, they can view from the stairwell platform a giant video wall, playing life-sized images of Sydney’s natural environment. Foreshores, escarpments, ridges and local plants move slowly across the screens. Even the showcase of artefacts relating to Eora life contain two small screens suspended at eye level, which play over 200 European images of the Eora. These include watercolour pictures, drawings, and animated images of the artefacts showing their use. Three large screens also play a film of a contemporary Aboriginal family, living in the inner-city suburb of Redfern. In this film, vistors follow a family picnic in which Eora places are visited, and stories and memories of those places retold. On level three the Panorama exhibit comprises large screens forming a grid and playing images to create a panoramic view of Sydney. Sources vary from early etchings, lithographs and paintings to postcards. Panoramic images slowly dissolve from one to another, and they are interspersed with images of small-

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scale details and views of individuals. A visual history of Sydney is brought together in this exhibit, in which individual stories interject with the grand narratives of the place. Perhaps the most innovative use of new media was in the exhibit The bond store, which was developed by Ross Gibson and displayed in the museum from 1995 to 2002. This exhibit was a darkened room in which visitors were drawn towards lit artefacts of everyday life such as fragments of crockery. Upon approaching the artefacts and peering at them more closely, lifesized holographic images of early Sydney inhabitants were triggered, unleashing their stories about the objects and their lives. The stories were based on historical archives but spun into fictional narratives to convey an impression of everyday life in the past. Film footage was also used to dramatise the stories of these characters. The narrative reconfigured in different sequences, allowing a variety of combinations of storytelling. Objects, however, are not lost in the museum, though they are treated in a unique way through exhibits such as Collector’s chest by Narelle Jubelin. Here three polished aluminium chests with 76 drawers in total contain fragments of artefacts combined with photocopies of historical documents and images. The artist juxtaposes elements so as to create playful visual and conceptual analogies and wide-ranging associations on diverse historical subjects. Here artefacts are treated as part of a broader archive of material working to reveal traces of past lives and forgotten aspects of history. The chests are highly interactive, needing to be opened by visitors, and can be viewed in any sequence. The colony showcase wall contains artefacts grouped according to a spatial map of Sydney work sites in the 1820s unearthed through archaeological digs. Artefacts found on the site of First Government House and the Hyde Park Barracks, for example, were housed in this showcase. Videos showed dramatisations of colonial characters narrating their stories and conversations were screened within the showcase. Described by the museum as ‘witnesses’, these figures animated the otherwise static display with subjective stories. Some exhibits have changed since the Museum of Sydney opened in 1995 with more attention today given to the lives and activities of the governors of the colony, the First Fleet ships and a specific focus on the Cadigal clan of the Eora on whose land the museum stands. Interpretation has shifted over the years in the museum. For example, in 1995 the arrival of the First Fleet was described as an invasion of the Eora people and land; today the event is cast in softer terms as the first contact between the Eora people and ‘British exiles’. These changes in interpretation respond to criticisms made about the museum and perhaps also correspond with changes in the broader political climate. In 1995 Keating’s Labor Government embraced reconciliation, pluralism and historical revisionism. Today ‘history wars’ wage in the Australian media, with revisionism subject to criticism and grand historical narratives being reasserted at the National Museum of Australia. The Museum of Sydney is perhaps less of a Pandora’s box than it once was; however its use of creative methods in interpreting social history and its experiential form, which place the subjective at the heart of the museum, have left an indelible mark on Australian and international museology.

ENDNOTES 1

See, for example, Young (1995, 667); Young (1998, 30); Marcus (1999, 41); Hansen (1996, 18–19). See also Gregory (2006, forthcoming).


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REFERENCES Emmett, Peter. 1994. Contested ground – contested histories – contested futures policy statement. Sydney: Museum of Sydney. Museum of Sydney Archives. Gregory, Kate. 2006 (forthcoming). ‘Art and artifice: Peter Emmett’s curatorial practice in the Hyde Park Barracks and Museum of Sydney’. Fabrications: Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand 16 (1). Hansen, Guy. 1996. ‘Fear of the “master narrative”: Reflections on site interpretation at the Museum of Sydney’. Museum National (November): 18–19. Marcus, Julie. 1999. ‘Erotics and the Museum of Sydney’. In A dark smudge upon the sand: Essays on race, guilt and the national consciousness. Canada Bay, New South Wales: LHR Press. Young, Linda. 1995. ‘Museum of Sydney’. Australian Historical Studies 26 (105): 667. Young, Linda. 1998. ‘Wanderlust: Journeys through the Macleay Museum’. Museum National (November–December): 30.

Cite this chapter as: Gregory, Kate. 2006. ‘The Museum of Sydney’. South Pacific museums, edited by Healy, Chris; Witcomb, Andrea. Monash University ePress: Melbourne. pp. 20.1–20.4. DOI: 10.2104/spm06020.

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HOW STYLE CAME TO MATTER DO WE NEED TO MOVE BEYOND THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION? Andrea Witcomb, Deakin University Andrea Witcomb is an associate professor in the Faculty of Arts at Deakin University. She has also worked as a curator at the Australian National Maritime Museum and at the National Museum of Australia, and is the author of Re-imagining the museum: Beyond the mausoleum (2003). This article was written when she was a senior lecturer at Curtin University, Western Australia. Correspondence to Andrea Witcomb: [email protected]

In response to the increasing difficulties facing museums that attempt to work within a pluralist framework as a strategy for representing cultural diversity, this essay argues for the need to move beyond a characterisation of museum work as either progressive or conservative, pluralist or consensual. Central to my arguments is an attempt to extend our understanding of possible narrative structures in museums by focusing on questions of style as much as of content. I do this by looking back at two case studies in which questions around the political intent of narrative structures were determined as much by the form of the exhibition as by its content. This focus enables a recognition that fragmentary narrative styles are not by definition associated with a lack of strong narratives. Quite the contrary. An alternative approach to exhibition making might therefore lie in an approach that moves away from eclecticism but does so not by returning to progressive, chronological narratives but by privileging an understanding of ‘shared experience’. I attempt to open up what I mean by this term towards the end of the essay. A 1950s complete kitchen display with mum in an apron on the wall – please, why do the curators think our mothers were a joke? (Goward 2001). The NMA remains an unmitigated disaster, an obscenely extravagant monument to architectural ego, faddishness, misguided political correctness, parochial vanities, compromise and technomania (Schofield 2004).

It seems clear that the increasing political censorship of state-funded museums around the world marks a new moment in their history. If the last 25 years in museums were marked by an increasing desire and willingness to respond to changing constituencies by developing an exhibition culture that attempted to represent a plurality of voices and contested histories, the last 10 of these have been marked by a conservative backlash against such efforts. Public cultural controversies in the USA, Canada, New Zealand and, most recently, in Australia have all involved the State undermining the capacity of museums and galleries to produce and represent revisionist histories. It would appear that the ‘new museology’ as a political project is in trouble. This essay seeks to add to our understanding as to why this is so and what might be done about it by arguing that the difficulties cannot be reduced to a question of narrative content – whether an exhibition is structured by a pluralist vision or a consensual one. It is also a matter of form, since pluralist perspectives are often associated with a fragmentary narrative style that has its parallel in the aesthetics of contemporary exhibition design, which are dominated by the use of multimedia, the juxtaposition of unlikely materials and the creation of a ‘busy’ environment. A significant number of critics register a degree of restlessness with these aesthetics. The Review of the National Museum of Australia: Its exhibitions and public programs (Commonwealth of Australia 2003,


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17; hereafter the Carroll Review) expresses this very well when it claims that the main weakness of the National Museum of Australia (NMA) is a lack of coherence. There is, the review argued, ‘little narrative thread connecting a staccato of images, and snapshots of people who deliver their own fragment of opinion’. In particular, it is the use of irony, humour and an eclectic style that appears to cause the most problems. Addressing the culture or history wars in museums would appear to be as much a matter of thinking about the style of exhibitions as about narrative structures and their political implications.1 As a movement, the new museology was an attempt to recognise the political nature of museum representations (Lumley 1988; Vergo 1989) – how, historically, museum practices ‘othered’ nondominant groups (Ames 1992; Bal 1992; Bennett 1995; Clifford 1997; Riegel 1996), and how museums supported the interests of capitalism (Duncan 1995) and patriarchy (Porter 1988). As well as the role of critique, new museologists sought to change these practices by advancing the notion that museums might become forums rather than temples, that their proper social role might be to represent and foster cultural diversity (Bennett 1998; Karp et al. 1992; Sandell 2002). The most obvious context for this pluralist impetus was the ‘new social movements’ of the 1970s and 1980s. Also important, however, was the emergence of a new popular aesthetics influenced by electronic media and mainstream commercial culture. These developments have combined to project traditional public museums as ‘mausoleums’ (Witcomb 2003), at once oppressive and lifeless. For committed pluralists, the only way forward for museums was to embrace the politics of representation, to become places of cultural diversity committed to an aesthetics of eclecticism, narrative disruption and surprise. These developments have, of course, been resisted. In the 1990s, northern American museums were racked by the culture wars. The Smithsonian Museum, in particular, was the target of conservative attacks on purportedly revisionist histories promoted in exhibitions such as Enola Gay and The West as America. The Royal Ontario Museum’s Into the Heart of Africa exhibition became a focus for similar attacks. Closer to home, the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa had its fair share of controversy. In Australia, the intense debate around the opening exhibitions of the NMA and the Carroll Review that followed was also a significant moment in the history wars (MacIntyre and Clark 2004). The most obvious rationale for these attacks has again been political; museums have been charged with advocating for minority groups and undermining not only social cohesion but also fundamental social institutions. But disquiet with the new museology is more complex than it sometimes seems. While the most prominent critics of pluralism have been self-identified conservatives, there have also been increasing voices on the ‘left’ who lament the loss of an ability to imagine ‘common dreams’ (Gitlin 1995). Rather than dialogue, what we have is a cacophony of voices (Witcomb 2003). Furthermore, abstract political arguments intersect with aesthetic responses to actual museum spaces. Criticisms of pluralism have gained strength from evidence that a significant number of museum visitors are not so much ‘excited’ by narrative disruption and multiple sensory stimulation as confused and alienated. For example, Natalie Heinich (1988) suggested that many visitors did not have the cultural knowledge to cope with the new approaches to display developed by the Pompidou Centre in Paris.2 Ironically, the traditional masternarrative was seen as more accessible. Likewise, an audience study immediately after the opening of the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney found that the majority of visitors found the

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lack of a strong chronological framework disorienting (Witcomb 2003). For them, an accent on the plurality of voices equated with a lack of narrative. Still some audience studies have found that an accent on pluralism can be taken not as a representation of a democratic impulse but instead as an ideological critique that is against populist narratives of celebration. For example, Zahava Doering (2002) found that the majority of Americans expected American national institutions such as the Smithsonian to focus on unifying celebratory narratives. Pluralism, if focused too much on establishing and recognising difference within national communities, was seen as a negative. As she put it, ‘visitors don’t generally expect their national museums to be debating the significance or meaning of their contents or to embody a wide range of viewpoints’ (Doering 2002). This evidence has been particularly damaging to new museologists as such responses appear most common among groups with relatively little formal education or other cultural capital. It has allowed critics to represent supposedly ‘democratic’ pluralism as the ideology of an educated, cosmopolitan elite insensitive to the feelings and aspirations of ‘ordinary people’ (see Foot 2003; Windshuttle 2001). In this context, a response to these debates that is framed as a battle between conservatives and progressives, between consensus and pluralism, seems rather limited. As Ian McShane (2004, 14), a former senior curator at the NMA put it, ‘how does a museum construct a coherent and compelling narrative that gives voice to competing perspectives? How can museum programs resist declaring themselves for either consensus or pluralism, as if a simple choice between the two existed, but draw productively on both impulses?’ Part of the problem may lie in the ready association we all tend to make between the fashion for a fragmentary narrative structure and the lack of a strong authoritative voice. For while this is a common assumption, both ends of the political spectrum also recognise that such narratives have a politics to them. When conservatives complain that critical and fragmented narratives fail to produce appropriate forms of collective identification, they locate the problem in the Marxist underpinnings of such work. The left, however, can sometimes criticise a fragmentary approach to narrative structure as not political enough. This contradiction can be brought to the fore if we follow two different moments in the history of the new museology in Australia. The first is the opening of the Museum of Sydney (MoS) in 1995; the second, the opening of the NMA in 2001.3 While many staff in each museum would see themselves as committed to pluralist practices of representation, the way their exhibits were read by both the left and the right are completely different. In that difference is a lesson about the importance of matters of style in thinking about narrative.

HOW STYLE CAME TO MATTER: THE CRITICS’ RECEPTION OF THE ARRIVAL OF THE MUSEUM OF SYDNEY Should aesthetic impulses play a role in the interpretation of history? Is history so serious a business that it should be left in the hands of historically trained curators rather than offered as raw material for artists to play with? To a large extent, these were the kinds of questions that informed much of the museum profession’s response to the opening of the MoS in 1995. That their response should be framed by these questions is not surprising. The museum was indeed different in its approach to the representation of history, believing that historical understanding could be reached through forms of interpretation that worked through embodied, sensory expe-


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riences rather than the more traditional linear forms of historical narrative presentation, in which objects were illustrations of ideas. For its inaugural director, Peter Emmett, a museum space is ‘a spatial composition, a sensory and sensual experience, a place to enter, senses and body alive. Its meanings are revealed through the physical experience of moving through it’ (Emmett 1996, 115). Extensive use of multimedia resulted in a series of installations that played to these senses – auditory, visual and kinetic – as a means of calling forth imagination and eliciting emotional responses. Unlike traditional uses of multimedia, however, which are based on oral history or archival sound and visual grabs, these installations were artistic creations based on historical research but fictive in nature. The nature of the available evidence, which was itself fragmentary, was used not to anchor historical narratives but to set them adrift. The museum offered historical traces as a base from which to imagine the past rather than to know it, thus creating an ongoing presence in the present. The past came alive but only through the echoes of its traces. It was transitory and fleeting. For example, in Paul Carter’s The calling to come, a soundscape installed into the liminal space of the entry, visitors heard voices ‘from the past’. What those voices said was not quite comprehensible – but that was the point. Set at a low volume, they were echoes of an attempt at translation between two very different worlds – those of the Eora people and their colonisers. Using the diary of William Dawes, an officer from the First Fleet who was also an astronomer and a linguist, the installation used the traces of his attempt to understand the Eora people documented in his diary where he recorded his conversations with Patyegarang, an Aboriginal woman with whom he had a relationship. The installation, which re-enacted their attempts to communicate with one another, was an attempt to recall a moment of cross-cultural encounter that was still full of potential for conversation and not yet tied to the pressures of colonisation. In attempting to recapture that moment the museum was, of course, also speaking to the present, which, back in 1995, appeared more open to the possibilities of reconciliation with Indigenous Australians than it does now. Likewise, in the Bond store tales, archival research into early Sydney was used to construct a series of small narratives around the trope of encounters using the fact that Sydney was a port as a starting point.4 In this installation, which took place in a darkened gallery set up to resemble a bond store, the movement of visitors triggered a number of holograms representing convicts, servant girls, officers and their ladies, and traders from all over the Pacific. In this parade of motley characters, each told a story or had a dialogue with another character. The particular combination of dialogues and stories at any one time was determined by the movement of the visitors in the space rather than set by a predetermined loop. The result was not a re-creation of real conversations between real historical characters but an attempt at a rendition of conversations that might have occurred. As Ross Gibson, the curator of this installation, commented at the time, ‘suggestion and persuasion rather than unequivocal proof are now probably the best you can hope for when using imagistic and sonic “documentation” to present “truths” about the world’ (Gibson 1994, 64). The use of multimedia to support this fragmentary approach to the production of historical narratives was replicated through other aestheticised presentations of ‘documentary’ evidence. There was, for example, the Kosuthian5 treatment of literary and archival quotations engraved or carved onto the walls as if they were objects in their own right, giving them a visual as well

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as a documentary status. There was also a ‘new’ cabinet of curiosities in Narelle Jubelin’s installation, which used juxtaposition to create imaginary narratives between different kinds of records. ‘Video walls’ created temporal narratives of continuous Indigenous presence in the Sydney area by bringing together old rock carvings and paintings with contemporary cultural expressions of indigeneity while the aesthetic treatment of archeological objects called them forth as ghosts from the past. These installations were striking for their aesthetic qualities and the effort to direct the senses to experiences that refused to tell ‘how it really was’. All the museum presented was a series of fleeting but powerful experiences about the relationship between the past and present in the Sydney area.6 This use of unconventional exhibitionary forms and the refusal to ‘tell a straight story’ sent a good number of leading museum practitioners into a frenzy of criticism. The masternarrative that these critics wanted to see in the MoS was that of the dispossession of Indigenous people. For them the museum was too positive and made too much of the moment of cross-cultural encounter. As a result, they argued, it did not pay sufficient attention to the effects of power. The suggestion was that a proper, professional use of existing historical evidence would have told the story as it should be told. In a now ironic piece, given his later role in the creation of the Nation gallery at the NMA,7 Guy Hansen (1996) accused the MoS of a lack of political commitment as a result of their ‘fear of the masternarrative’. Uncomfortable with the notion that history could only ever be interpretation, Hansen accused the museum of sitting on the fence in regard to the history of Aboriginal dispossession. Julie Marcus (1996) made a similar point. Even more caustic in her criticisms, Marcus accused the MoS of consciously and willingly marginalising Indigenous people. When put side by side with the equally emotionally charged critiques from the Friends of Government House group – who had pushed for the initial excavation of the site of old Government House on which the museum sits and for whom the museum should have been a representation of the birth of the nation, rather than a politically correct revisionist account of colonial experiences8 – it becomes clear that lack of narrative was not the museum’s main problem. The problem had more to do with how that narrative was expressed and what view of the nation it offered. Too revisionist for some, not sufficiently revisionist for others; not sufficiently appreciative of archaeological methodologies and finds, or too playful and arty with historical evidence. For critics from both positions, the museum’s sense of playfulness with the available evidence meant a lack of respect for the narratives that they saw as mattering. Playfulness and its association with a fragmentary approach to narrative was not seen as able to carry the weight of either the birth of the nation nor the dispossession of Indigenous people. The problem was that its political valence was not fixed.

THE BATTLE FOR THE EVERYDAY It is somewhat ironic, therefore, to find the MoS critics practising and supporting the appropriateness of representing history as fragmentary and provisional as the only way to respond to the problem of how to represent diversity and difference in historical experience. It seems that in the years between the openings of the MoS and the NMA, Australian historians and curators became receptive to less linear forms of historical representation. A certain degree of playfulness and even irony became allied with a critical perspective, a perspective that also came to be associated with what it meant to be a ‘new museum’ (Message and Healy 2004). To side with the discourse


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of the ‘new’ meant to leave linear narratives behind and to make museums part of the contemporary mediascape. However, these developments were entirely out of step with the dramatic change in cultural tendencies between the Hawke/Keating and Howard governments. As Greg McCarthy (2004) has convincingly argued, the Howard government is resolutely modernist, rather than postmodernist, in its approach to both history and the representation of national identity. Inevitably, the two positions clashed, not least because, as Message and Healy (2004) point out, the NMA clearly announced that it wanted to be a player in the culture wars. The differences between the critical responses to the MoS and the NMA are instructive. Whereas the MoS was regarded as lacking ‘a politics’ because of its exhibitionary strategies, the NMA was regarded as too political because of very similar strategies. Nonsensical as this may seem, a fragmentary approach to the telling of history actually became understood as a form of masternarrative because of its association with a revisionist historiography. The NMA opened in March 2001 amid a storm of political controversy, as various conservative elements in academia, in the media and on the museum’s own Board moved to attack what they perceived to be its ideological bias in favour of revisionist history.9 This bias turned out to be nothing more that the museum’s acceptance of the last 20–30 years of scholarship in the fields of history, anthropology, cultural studies and museology. What all of these disciplines have in common is a faith in the desirability and indeed the political necessity of paying attention to issues of class, race and gender; a questioning of claims to absolute knowledge; a consequent support for what are sometimes taken as relativist positions; and a deep awareness of postcolonial politics. Alive to the problems of representation, practitioners in these fields have developed methodologies appropriate to new objects of study and methodologies that can give voice to those not represented in traditional narratives. In a large part, the everyday – the ordinary, the quotidian, the popular, the non-canonic – has become their privileged space. The NMA is but the latest manifestation of these practices and ideals. Thus, rather than the traditional masternarratives of Australian history (for example, that of pioneer history or exploration) or even a chronological approach, the NMA conceived of its brief to view the relationship between land, people and nation through a pluralist lens. It did this in the belief that the multicultural nature of Australian society and the presence of an Indigenous population demanded such an approach. In practice this meant not only being able to ‘tick’ all those on the long list that need to be included, but also to pay attention to questions of form, of presentation. Thus, much of the material is presented in the first-person voice through oral history as well as private documents, the material culture of everyday life permeates the museum, and popular mediums of communication are also used – such as multimedia, film, photography and sound. The everyday and the figure of the ‘ordinary Australian’ have become central to the ways in which Australian national identity is expressed for both the left and the right. Given its central importance to contemporary expressions of national identity, it is not surprising that the mode of its display is at the centre of some of the bitterest animosity shown towards the NMA as well as some of the warmest receptions the museum has encountered. What I want to suggest is that some of the reasons for such different reactions to the inclusion of the everyday in the NMA have to do with questions of style. In particular, it is the use of irony in how the everyday is represented at the NMA that creates the opportunity for the different interpretations that emerge around it.

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Figure 21.1 Victa lawnmower and Hills hoist demonstration model, in the Nation gallery, National Museum of Australia, 2003 Photograph: George Serras. © National Museum of Australia 2001.

From the very first day the museum was opened, commentators were either for or against how the museum represented the everyday and the ordinary Australian. A considerable number of the positive reviews celebrated the museum precisely because they recognised the representation of diversity through the inclusion of the everyday as part of its attempt to be a museum for all Australians. For them, the theme-park allusions of the museum’s architecture, its shopping-centrelike Main Hall, the inclusion of the Hills hoist and the Victa lawnmower, the 1950s kitchen and icons of popular culture made the NMA a people’s museum. Exhibitions such as the Eternity gallery with its focus on a diverse range of individual life stories, some of them famous, some of them completely unknown, made the ordinary and the everyday part of national history. Thus in a promotional article published a few weeks before the museum opened, Alison Barclay (2001) from the Herald Sun focused on the material culture of everyday life as an indication of the likely popularity of this museum: ‘The “icons” show the way as do the legends’, she says. As well as


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quoting then director Dawn Casey who proudly pointed out that ‘we have the earliest Hill’s Hoist… and… the earliest Victa lawnmower’, Barclay also noted the less iconic detritus of everyday life: ‘There are cups and sauces salvaged from the Ash Wednesday fires, a dugout, the desk at which new immigrants were “processed” and a jeep with a robotic arm’ (Barclay 2001). For Linda Young, the Eternity gallery was an innovative contribution to museological practice, offering a ‘contemplation of the human condition’ that was ‘pungent’ and at times ‘poetic’ (Young 2001, 155). The appreciation of the representation of the everyday at the NMA was about more than just simply its inclusion. It was also about the form that this inclusion took. Many ‘everyday items’ (both iconic and ordinary) were displayed with an explicit sense of humour that played on the iconic role of many of these items in popular culture. For quite a few critics, the ability to have a tongue-in-cheek representation of the everyday and its importance in popular culture represented a degree of comfortableness with Australian culture – a kind of fond, but also slightly critical, look at it. It was the museological parallel to Kath and Kim, the highly popular take on Australian suburban lifestyles produced by ABC TV. In the same way that the TV series plays with the audience’s uncertainty as to whether to laugh or cry at the representation of Australian suburban life, the representation of everyday life, including suburban life, at the NMA is tongue in cheek. As recorded by the designers (Anway and Guerin 2002, 163), the curatorial aim was to represent Australian humour and sense of irony in the form of the exhibitions as much as in the choice of content. For the curators, irony was a part of the national character. Exhibiting a Hills hoist as an Australian icon was thus not only a challenge to the traditional authority of the museum, but also a joke in itself and a comment on the way the Hills hoist had become part of popular culture, thanks also to its use in the opening ceremony of the 2000 Sydney Olympics. The resulting focus of this type of approach on everyday life produces, according to Message and Healy, an ‘eclectic ensemble that sabotages suburbia, history and the artefact all at once!’ (Message and Healy 2004, 3). The comment is not made as a criticism, although it is made with a high degree of awareness that such strategies are not unproblematic in the way they address the museum’s audiences. The potential for misunderstanding is clear in the conservative reaction to the way in which the detritus of everyday life was included in the museum. For the conservatives, the focus on everyday life and popular culture was not a friendly celebration of the ordinariness of Australian identity. Instead, they saw it as an alienating and condescending take on the ‘ordinary’ Australian. In part this was a result of the way in which this material functioned as one half of the NMA’s pedagogical approach. If making the ordinary and the everyday into an expression of national identity was one of the main messages of the museum, then the other, as Message and Healy (2004) point out was that the past was alive in the present. This second message was largely communicated through the Gallery of First Australians, told from a postcolonial point of view. The result was that the issue of race became the bedrock for understanding Australian national identity leaving out the dominant group as not only a main player but as not having contributing anything of any real significance since the everyday implies its difference from the extraordinary. But the problem was not limited to the fact that settler culture was largely defined by the representation of the everyday as central to Australian identity and that Indigenous communities were represented within ‘stronger’ masternarratives. That the inclusion of the everyday was read in this way was largely an effect of the way in which the items were displayed rather than that

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they were displayed at all. For some critics, the ironic manner in which the material culture of everyday life was treated spells not an attempt to use an Australian sense of humour in the form and content of the exhibition – as had been the intension – but rather a devaluing of traditional Anglo-Australian culture. Rob Foot, for example, one of the most strident and longstanding critics of the museum, claimed that ‘Their ideological rhetoric is condescendingly delivered, as if to an audience of none-too-intelligent schoolchildren, and brushed up with modish postmodernism – the intellectual vehicle of choice for Left idealogues following Marxism’s crisis of credibility. But the story the NMA tells is the radical’s own, not Australia’s’ (Foot 2003, 9). For him, as for almost all the conservative critics, the result is ‘disdain for mainstream Australia’ and its patterns of everyday life. Thus the 1950s kitchen, the Hills hoist and the Victa lawnmower, so proudly pointed to by the museum itself, become evidence not of pride in the everyday but its opposite. For Foot, ‘In its most prominent displays, the gallery (Nation) repackages the goldfields digger, the shearer, even the “Australian way of life” as merely artificial constructs – fabrications, as it were, for the gullible crowd, entirely emptied of their traditional values, meanings and emotional associations. We have no reason to care about them. One finds no trace of affection or respect in the National Museum’s ironic treatment of these elements of Australian culture’ (Foot 2003, 9). The clash between such differing interpretations of the museum’s treatment of the everyday can be understood if we recall that irony works precisely because there are two audiences – one in the know and the other not. As Henrietta Riegel (1996) explored in relation to the Into the Heart of Africa exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum, this doubled-edged nature of irony is made problematic in the museum context because historically, museums have tended to produce exhibitions in which there is no sense of a shared identity between the maker of the exhibition, the maker of the objects on display and the viewing audience. This distance between the various participants is particularly strong in ethnographic exhibitions, but it is also there in the notion that museums explain the world to their audiences. Implied is a distance between the viewer and the viewed. In the case of the Into the Heart of Africa exhibition, it was the attempt to be reflective about this lack of a shared space that caused problems because the attempt relied on a use of irony that effectively re-enacted the colonial gaze in the way it produced a difference in the viewing positions of two sectors of its audience. To progressive whites, the exhibition was an example of good museological practice, critiquing, as it did, past modes of ethnographic collection practices by Canadians in Africa using the museum’s own African collections. To them, the exhibition was a model of good reflective practice that recognised the inherently political nature of the act of representation. To the descendants of the colonised Africans now living in Canada as well as of the missionaries, however, the exhibition was offensive because its ambiguous use of irony – it was never quite clear when the museum was being critical and when it wasn’t – actually replicated the colonial gaze by not allowing for the fact that not all visitors have a rational, intellectual distance from the subject matter on display. And thus it became clear that in the museum context, emotional involvement in, let’s say slavery, may not be amenable to ironic handling. Taken to the NMA, this insight shows how from the perspective of the conservatives, the NMA was actually othering the ‘ordinary’ Australian, rather than aligning itself with them. It would seem that its attempt to de-mythologise national identity by showing its constructed nature undermined its attempt at inclusivity. We are never quite sure whether the inclusion of the


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everyday has a ‘truth’ value whose aim is to connect the institution of the museum with ‘ordinary’ Australians, that is to validate through simulation its reality and value to the nation, or whether the playful mode in which this inclusiveness is achieved actually betrays a cultural distance from the cultural practices and identities on display. The difficulties with how the everyday is represented at the NMA are also an effect of the lack of contextual information that accompanies the exhibitions. As the Carroll Review put it, the NMA’s approach to everyday objects does nothing to give such objects ‘numinosity’. The snapshot approach, which allowed an eclectic mix of objects to be presented in a confined space, became part of a chaotic environment in which objects, reproductions and multimedia stations competed for attention in a flattened out environment. The lack of an overall narrative meant the lack of both a visual and a discursive sense of drama, of hierarchies in which objects and stories are ordered into an interpretative framework that brings them together. With no sense of perspective there was no story and hence no sense of the relative importance of what these objects stood for. This was the problem of the Nation gallery, which, in using Benedict Anderson’s concept of ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson 1983) as the basis for dealing with the concept of national identity, was unable to link the various icons and myths it presented into an overall sense of what it was to be Australian. For the conservative critics, this fragmentary, decontextualised approach was made worse by the use of humour and irony, which, without a strong narrative context embedded in traditional narratives of national history, seemed to them to be demeaning of Australian values rather than celebratory. For some critics, the problem was sufficient to almost claim that it would be better not to have those objects on display at all. Keith Windshuttle, one of the most prominent and vociferous critics of the museum commented that ‘The intelligentsia might find it witty to see the familiar objects of suburbia housed in a museum, but not those who still keep these things in their backyards. It is telling them that they are so out of date they have become objects of curiosity’ (Windshuttle 2001, 14). Miranda Devine, however, made the link between the way in which everyday objects are treated and the museum’s more serious interpretation of Indigenous culture, which was strong on narrative context. For her, the consequence of this difference is that the underlying message of the museum ‘is one of sneering ridicule for white Australia. It is as if all non Aboriginal culture is a joke’ (Devine 2001, 30). As Windshuttle’s barbed comment on the intelligentsia indicates, this take on the museum’s agenda makes it easy for the right to represent the museum’s professional staff as part of a cultural elite, which does not have the interests or values of the ordinary Australia at heart. As Graeme Davison puts it, ‘The critics… portray the museum’s curators and historical advisors as members of the “new class”, pushing their own radical “post-modernist” political agenda against the will of the silent majority of Australians whose taxes they are spending’ (Davison 2003, 8; see also Marcus 2004, 135). While he attributes this hostility to the interpretation of contact history in the Gallery of First Australians I would also add that the museums’ approach to the representation of everyday life and popular culture is incompatible with the government’s agenda to take middle Australia with them by appropriating the language of the everyday to their own ends. There is, of course, some discussion of the way in which Howard and his allies have attempted to take over the ground of the everyday in order to achieve Howard’s dream of a ‘relaxed and comfortable Australia’. As Don Watson pointed out, ‘John Howard’s language rarely steps far

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from the ordinary for the good reason that ordinary language is what people use’ (Watson 2003, 101). In addressing his audience as ‘My fellow Australians’ Howard places himself alongside the ordinary man or woman in the street, invoking the language of mateship and positioning himself in opposition to the ‘chattering classes’. Unlike the latter, he is interested in ‘the things that unite us, rather than divide us’.10 It is a form of language that, as Julie Marcus (2004, 135) points out, makes it very easy to promulgate an association between Howard’s notion of a comfortable Australia and a reinvented Australian legend as the basis for the Australian story. To support her argument Marcus points to the way in which the language of the Carroll Review privileges a version of Australian identity which rests on the identification of national character traits – traits that are found in the pioneer story, in the explorers, in the Gallipoli story, in mateship, larrikinism and so on. As the Carroll Review itself put it, the challenge to the museum is ‘to present the ordinary and the everyday in order to open up and reveal the national trait’ (Commonwealth of Australia 2003, 8). Rather than being used to represent cultural diversity, the everyday and the ordinary become the means to represent a unified national culture. The Carroll Review makes a number of points and recommendations that implicitly speak to the range of issues raised by the way in which the everyday has been understood in relation to the museum. The recommendation which shocked the left and came as a complete surprise was that calling for a greater use of masternarratives. The museum, the review claims, is weak on strong narratives, on storytelling. Part of the reason for this weakness, the panel of reviewers argues, is that there are ‘too few focal objects, radiant and numinous enough to generate memorable vignettes, or to be drawn out into fundamental moments’ (Commonwealth of Australia 2003, 68). Items belonging to the field of the everyday do not, they imply, make either a good collection or a strong exhibition. More importantly, they do not enable the representation of the grand narratives of Australian history. This is in line with Windshuttle’s complaint that pluralism in the museum context results in lack of coherence: ‘By abandoning the traditional approach to history based on a narrative of major events and their causes, in favour of equal time for every identifiable sexual and ethnic group, history loses its explanatory power and degenerates into a tasteless blancmanage of worthy sentiment’ (Windshuttle 2001, 16).

CONCLUSION Rather than being used as a political football, moving between the pluralist and consensus camps, I want to suggest that a focus on the everyday could be used instead to neutralise this opposition. For the meanings around the everyday are not exhausted by the two positions analysed so far. However, a first step in this process would have to be an attempt to disassociate a notion of shared histories from consensus. The first point that needs to be made is that there can be a plurality of experience at the heart of shared histories. To make this move would be to disagree with two of the strongest defenders of the museum’s pluralist approach – Bain Attwood and Graeme Davison – as well as with the authors of the Carroll Review. For them, the opposition between pluralism and consensus has been absolute and central to understanding the developments around the museum since its opening. Pluralism cannot include an understanding of shared experience and, by extension, difference cannot be found within shared experiences since these are taken to be, by definition, consensual in nature. It is an opposition that is clearly articulated in


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the way the Carroll Review summarises its differences from Davison’s understanding of appropriate narratives to represent the nation. For Davison, Rather than suppressing difference by imposing a single authorial voice, or brokering an institutional consensus, the NMA might better begin with the assumption that the imagined community we call the nation is by its very nature plural and in flux. In practice the degree of difference should not be exaggerated; there are many topics of high interest on which there is a substantial consensus of opinion. A national museum might then expect to play host to several interpretations of the national past, stirringly patriotic as well as critical, educationally demanding as well as entertaining (Davison in Commonwealth of Australia 2003, 8).

Embedded in this submission to the review panel is an opposition between difference and consensus that is left unchallenged. It is taken as the ground upon which choices must be made. In its use of this submission to advance its own arguments, the review panel also assumes that this opposition and the intellectual frameworks that support it are a given: ‘While this view is forceful, the Panel is inclined to read more consensus than plurality at the core of the national collective conscience’ (Commonwealth of Australia 2003, 8). Attwood too, makes this opposition a definite one by arguing that ‘The review panel apparently believes a nation must have a dominant, unitary historical narrative and all its peoples should “share” this history’ (Attwood 2004, 280). He then contrasts this approach with the pluralist approach of the museum in which ‘the nation is seen as a community heterogeneous in nature and a work in progress rather than as a singular, completed entity. History is treated as largely a matter of perspective, of interpretative stories, rather than as a single, consensual body of facts’ (280). For Attwood, the new museology pays respect to the notion of diversity by recognising the constructed nature of society. If we were to move away from the notion of the construction of history, however, and pay more attention to the ways in which history was experienced by people through the fabric of everyday life, there may be ways in which it might be possible to develop stronger narratives that pay homage to traditional historiographical frames while also pointing to the diversity of those experiences. Attention to the differing experiences of class, race, gender and location would continue; but rather than using these categories separately, they would be in dialogue with one another by virtue of their place within a shared historiographical theme. Indeed, such an approach would illuminate the tensions generated by the very frameworks used to describe that history, eliminating the danger of essentialist approaches to the representation of experience. A focus on the variety of ‘experience’ would require a continued focus on the everyday for the notion of experience demands a focus on lived lives. But the everyday nature of these lives would be contextualised by narratives that were greater than any one individual example. At the same time, careful selection of each example could ensure that the complexity of any one experience could be represented. Diversity would still be an important criterion, ensuring that the focus on experience would never become an essentialist one. With this approach to the representation of history, it would be possible to develop exhibitions that dealt with pastoralism, for example, from the point of view of the experiences of all those who had contact with the station. Embedded

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within this account of a major theme in Australian history would be an account of exploration, colonisation, settlement, cross-cultural encounters and immigration, all of which would be deepened by the focus on the daily lives of those involved. Comparison across the experiences of different states within this theme would also allow a focus on place to speak to differing experiences, offering a further layer of complexity. Such an approach, while pointing to shared themes or human experiences within the framework of the nation, could not be reduced to a progressive account of the nation or to an exclusionary one. What it would do is offer the advantage of a dialogue across the barriers of difference, thus offering an interpretation of shared contexts that have affected the daily lives of all. A focus on the experience of everyday life might make it possible to present a history that is held together by a strong sense of narrative but is nevertheless not presented as ‘the’ history – that is, a masternarrative. The narrative has an integrative element but it is not consensual. There are points of contact but their meanings may not be the same for everyone. If complexity were to be explored not by thousands of micro stories but by exploding historical experiences from the inside out, attention would need to be paid not only to the content but also to the style of these narratives. Given that a chaotic, sensory-rich environment that allows for no hierarchies in visual presentation has been an important aspect of the way in which fragmentary approaches to history have been communicated, designers would also have to come up with a new visual language, one that provides for depth of context, drama and narrative without masses of didactic text on the walls. Hopefully, there would still be a space for imagination and emotion – for museums to reach out and touch.

ENDNOTES 1

2

3

4

5

6

I am very grateful to Mark Gibson and Mathew Trinca for the many conversations around the idea that we may be witnessing the end of ‘the politics of representation’ as we have come to know it. Mark and I gave a joint paper at the 2004 Crossroads Conference in Illinois on the theme titled ‘Beyond the politics of representation? The negotiation of cultural difference at the National Museum of Australia’. This chapter is a further development of the ideas we had then. The Pompidou Centre is often taken as the first of the new museums that engaged in thematic and fragmentary narrative styles. See Kylie Message (2006). Another possible entry point here would be the Bicentennary Travelling Exhibition in 1988, also curated by Peter Emmett. This exhibition too was critiqued on the basis of its narrative approach and the way in which this played to a postmodernist aesthetic style. See, for example, Cochrane and Goodman (1992). It is interesting to note that the trope of encounters figured very highly in attempts to revisit Australia’s colonial history. It is there in the work of Greg Denning (1992), Henry Reynolds (Reynolds 1996a; Reynolds 1996b) and Nicholas Thomas (1997). Joseph Kosuth is often taken as the first artist–curator to use text directly onto walls as if it were objects in his exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. See David Freedberg (1992). For a more detailed discussion of the place of aesthetic modes of interpretation at the MoS see Gregory (2006).


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7

This gallery, under the leadership of Guy Hansen, based its interpretation of national identity on the work of Benedict Anderson (1983). In using this framework, the gallery proposed to the visitor that Australian national identities were constructed rather than a given and expressed through a variety of official icons as well as more popular expressions through mythologies, the media, our sense of place and space, mass cultural products and so on.

8

For a more detailed account of these debates see Andrea Witcomb (2003) as well as Museum of Sydney on the Site of First Government House (1996).

9

There are now a number of published accounts as to what occurred in the museum’s own board and attempts to explain and critique the political process that led to the Carroll Review in 2003. Detailed accounts can be found in MacIntyre and Clark (2004) and in Marcus (2004).

10

For another analysis of the way John Howard has used language to define a populist sense of ‘Australianness’ while suppressing a sense of diversity, see Carol Johnson (2000).

REFERENCES Ames, Michael. 1992. Cannibal tours and glass boxes: The anthropology of museums. Vancouver: UBC Press. Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso. Anway, A.; Guerin, W. S. 2002. ‘A complicated story’. In The National Museum of Australia: Tangled destinies, edited by Reed, Dimity. Mulgrave: The Images Publishing Group. Attwood, Bain. 2004. ‘Whose dreaming? Reviewing the review of the National Museum of Australia’. History Australia 1 (2): 279–292. Bal, Mieke. 1992. ‘Telling, showing, showing off’. Critical Inquiry 18 (Spring): 556–594. Bennett, Tony. 1995. The birth of the museum. London: Routledge. Bennett, Tony. 1998. Culture: A reformer’s science. London: Routledge. Barclay, Alison. 2001. ‘Junk to icons’. Herald Sun (16 February): 93. Clifford, James. 1997. Routes: Travel and translation in the late twentieth century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Cochrane, Peter; Goodman, David. 1992. ‘The great Australian journey: Cultural logic and nationalism in the postmodern era’. In Celebrating the nation: A critical study of Australia’s bicentenary, edited by Bennett, Tony; Buckridge, Pat; Carter, David; Mercer, Colin. St Leonards: Allen & Unwin. Commonwealth of Australia. 2003. Review of the National Museum of Australia: Its exhibitions and public programs. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia. Available from: http://www.nma.gov.au/shared/libraries/attachments/review/review_report_20030715/files/552/Revie wReport20030715.pdf. Davison, Graeme. 2003. ‘Museums and the burden of national identity’. Public History Review 10: 8–20. Denning, Greg. 1992. Mr Bligh’s bad language: Passion, power and theatre on the Bounty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Devine, Miranda. 2001. ‘A nation trivialised’. Daily Telegraph (12 March): 30–31. Doering, Zahava D. 2002. ‘Serving the nation: Lessons from the Smithsonian’. Museums Australia National Conference. 18–22 March; Adelaide. Accessed 17 June 2004. Formerly available from: http://www.museumsaustralia.org.au/events/htm Duncan, Carol. 1995. Civilizing rituals: Inside public art museums. London and New York: Routledge. Emmett, Peter. 1996. ‘WYSIWYG on the site of First Government House’. In Sites: Nailing the debate; Archaeology and interpretation in museums, edited by Museum of Sydney on the Site of First Government House. Sydney: Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales. Foot, Rob. 2003. ‘Showcase for ideology’. The Australian (21 July): 9.

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Freedberg, David. 1992. ‘The play of the unmentionable: An installation by Joseph Kosuth at the Brooklyn Museum’. In The play of the unmentionable: An installation by Joseph Kosuth at the Brooklyn Museum, edited by Kosuth, Joseph; Freedberg, David; Brooklyn Museum. New York: New Press. Gibson, Ross. 1994. ‘The ether of everyday life’. Metro Magazine 1000 (Summer): 63–65. Gitlin, Todd. 1995. The twilight of common dreams: Why America is wracked by culture wars. New York: Metropolitan Books. Goward, Pru. 2001. ‘Making an exhibition of ourselves: Women get short shrift in the National Museum’s sketchy overview of history’. The Australian (13 March): 13. Gregory, Kate. 2006 (forthcoming). ‘Art and artifice: Peter Emmett’s curatorial practice in the Hyde Park Barracks and Museum of Sydney’. Fabrications: Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand 16 (1). Hansen, Guy. 1996. ‘Fear of the “masternarrative”: Reflections on site interpretation at the Museum of Sydney’. Museum National 5 (2): 18–19. Heinich, Natalie. 1988. ‘The Pompidou Centre and its public: The limits of a utopian site’. In The museum time machine: Putting cultures on display, edited by Lumley, Robert. London: Routledge. Johnson, Carol. 2000. Governing change: Keating to Howard. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press. Karp, Ivan; Mullen Kreamer, Catherine; Lavine, Steven D. 1992. Museums and communities: The politics of public culture. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press. Lumley, Robert, editor. 1988. The museum time machine: Putting cultures on display. London: Routledge. MacIntyre, Stuart; Clark, Anna. 2004. The history wars. 2nd edn. Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press. Marcus, Julie. 1996. ‘Erotics and the Museum of Sydney’. Olive Pink Society Bulletin 8 (2): 4–8. Marcus, Julie. 2004. ‘What’s at stake? History wars, the NMA and good government’. Cultural Studies Review 10 (1): 134–148. McCarthy, Greg. 2004. ‘Postmodern discontent and the National Museum of Australia’. Borderlands 3 (3). Available from: http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no3_2004/mccarthy_discontent.htm. McShane, Ian. 2004. ‘“Living dangerously” at the National Museum of Australia’. Museums Australia Magazine, 12 (3): 12–15. Message, Kylie; Healy, Chris. 2004. ‘A symptomatic museum: The new, the NMA and the culture wars’. Borderlands 3 (3). Available from: http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no3_2004/messagehealy_symptom.htm. Message, Kylie. 2006. ‘Contested sites of identity and the cult of the new: The Centre Culturel Tjibaou and the constitution of culture in New Caledonia’. South Pacific museums, edited by Healy, Chris; Witcomb, Andrea. Monash University ePress: Melbourne. pp. 4.1–4.20. DOI: 10.2104/spm06004. Available from: http://publications.epress.monash.edu/doi/full/10.2104/spm06004. Museum of Sydney on the Site of First Government House. 1996. Sites: Nailing the debate; Archaeology and interpretation in museums. Sydney: Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales. Porter, Gaby. 1988. ‘Putting your house in order: Representations of domestic life’. In The museum time machine: Putting cultures on display, edited by Lumley, Robert. London: Routledge. Reynolds, Henry. 1996a. Frontier: Aborigines, settlers and land. St Leonards, New South Wales: Allen and Unwin. Reynolds, Henry. 1996b. Aboriginal sovereignty: Reflections on race, state and nation. St. Leonards, New South Wales: Allen and Unwin. Riegel, Henrietta. 1996. ‘Into the heart of irony: Ethnographic exhibitions and the politics of difference’. In Theorizing museums: Representing identity and diversity in a changing world, edited by Macdonald, Sharon; Fyfe, Gordon. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers/The Sociological Review. Sandell, Richard, editor. 2002. Museums, society, inequality. London: Routledge. Schofield, Leo. 2004. ‘Object lesson: The National Museum is a disaster area and can only be saved by imitating more successful museums’. The Bulletin 122 (36).


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Thomas, Nicholas. 1997. In Oceania: Visions, artifacts, histories. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. Vergo, Peter, editor. 1989. The new museology. London: Reaktion Books. Watson, Don. 2003. Death sentence: The decay of public language. Sydney: Knopf/Random House. Windshuttle, Keith. 2001. ‘How not to run a museum’. Quadrant 45 (9): 11–19. Witcomb, A. 2003. Re-imagining the museum: Beyond the mausoleum. London: Routledge. Young, L. 2001. ‘Federation flagship’. Meanjin 60 (4): 149–159.

Cite this chapter as: Witcomb, Andrea. 2006. ‘How style came to matter: Do we need to move beyond the politics of representation?’. South Pacific museums, edited by Healy, Chris; Witcomb, Andrea. Monash University ePress: Melbourne. pp. 21.1–21.16. DOI: 10.2104/spm06021.

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THE AUSTRALIAN CENTRE FOR THE MOVING IMAGE Natalia Radywyl, The University of Melbourne Natalia Radywyl is a doctoral candidate at the University of Melbourne in the Media and Communications Program and The Australian Centre. She has been undertaking empirical investigations at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image as a part of an ARC-funded Discovery Project, ‘The spatial impact of digital technology on contemporary art and new art institutions’.

The Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) opened its doors to the public in 2002 as part of a large-scale site redevelopment of Victoria’s much-maligned ‘Gas and Fuel’ towers. The latter structure was razed to the ground and in its place rose the Ian Potter Centre (National Gallery of Victoria) dedicated to Australian art; the Melbourne headquarters for Australia’s multicultural public service broadcaster, the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS); the Australian Racing Museum; National Design Centre; ACMI; and a swathe of bars and restaurants. Angle nestling against angle, the jutting profiles of these neighbours fit entrance to exit, shard to shard. This new cultural precinct and protruding contributor to Melbourne’s skyline is called Federation Square, and its design is the work of Lab Architecture, who envisioned their task as contributing to ‘a reaffirmation of the original interactive nature of civic existence’ (Lab Architecture 2005). Indeed, in recent years Federation Square’s sun-kissed red and yellow cobblestones, mined from the outback, have been thoroughly traversed by festival goers, sports lovers, tourists, protestors, locals and onlookers.

Figure 22.1 ACMI with Federation Square © ACMI

In many ways, Federation Square has been a space for transit, as it is flanked by a major tram and train intersection point, St Paul’s Cathedral, the Yarra River and Melbourne’s newest public parkland, Birrarung Marr. Federation Square is also the location of Melbourne’s most


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visible public screen and events stage, and has become a metropolitan heartland for the arts, sport, community activities, political expression, and wining and dining. From the moment that visitors step off the undulating, cobbled warmth of Federation Square and into ACMI’s smooth white foyer, a distinctive space for public participation presents itself. In the same way that Federation Square reframes the experience of cultural and environmental spaces by mining stone from the Kimberleys to relocate a small part of the outback in metropolitan Melbourne, ACMI reframes cultural and physical experiences of art by offering an institutional interface for the intersection of image, art and technology. From the reception area, a heavy-set cement staircase leads up to two state-of-the-art cinema theatres. These have played host to forums, symposiums and a diverse range of events, such as international film festivals, Melbourne’s weekly Cinematheque, late-night cult film sessions and digital cinema programs. Moving past these stairs, an escalator takes patrons down to the main foyer. This space flickers with 42 plasma screens, a digital wallpaper connecting the entrances to ACMI’s Screen Gallery, the Memory Grid, Games Lab and Screen Pit. Also located within this space is a brightly lit reception desk, the collection and drop off point for ACMI’s lending collection and an information hub for visitors.

Figure 22.2 ACMI foyer and reception desk © ACMI

ACMI is spread over 7000 square meters and four floors at Federation Square. It was established as a part of the Film Act 2001, where, in an attempt to boost Victoria’s film industry, ACMI was formed as a cultural centre for film along with a new film-financing body, Film Victoria. ACMI runs educational programs and has links to educational institutions, and the film, video and digital media industries. It also attempts to satisfy a remit of enhancing screen literacy by developing educational programs; engaging with technological and content production of the moving image; funding research; pushing for innovation within creative industries by collaborating with international, interstate and community groups; and expanding its archive of moving image material. ACMI’s Memory Grid has kindled an integration of many of these initiatives. Created and submitted by members of the public, the Memory Grid is a collection of over 100 hours of film that tells the tales of everyday experience. The growing collection is exhibited in interactive

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THE AUSTRALIAN CENTRE FOR THE MOVING IMAGE NEW EXPERIENCES

‘pods’, where groups of visitors sit together and curate their own intimate viewing program via a touch-screen interface. Visitors can ‘MAP’ visual memories of Victoria’s backyards, streets and towns in Memory and Place, or, alternatively, seek out the more recent histories of their neighbourhoods in Women’s Qesa: Stories of Sudan, an exhibition of digital stories told by newly migrated Sudanese women.

Figure 22.3 Descent into ACMI’s Screen Gallery © ACMI

Adjoining the Memory Grid are ACMI’s production spaces, the Digital Studio and Screen Pit. The Screen Pit is a fully equipped television studio and hosts a number of educational programs, which allow children’s imaginations to roam free in a chroma-key fantasyland. Alternatively, it can be transformed into an amphitheatre for the research, development and exhibition of experimental new-media works. The Digital Studio is a media workshop fully equipped with the hardware and software capable of assisting participants in the conceptualisation, production and execution of their own moving image projects. A little further down the corridor is the Games Lab. Bright green and busy, this is a space for all things gaming and game-related, such as machinima festivals, in-house networked games, forums about gaming hero and superstar Sonic the Hedgehog, and Escape from Woomera, a critique of detention centres in Australia. By shifting the parameters for participation with art, the Screen Gallery explores our relationship with the moving image in a different manner. To attend the gallery, the visitor descends below street level into a dark underworld of art and technology, housed in the empty belly of a former train platform. This history gently reveals itself in the faint vibrations of neighbouring platforms, a soft rumbling that accompanies ACMI’s audience on their visit. Descending from the foyer into the gallery, small beacons of light cut the dimly lit passageways, leading visitors into rooms and corridors, and opening lines of enquiry into the ghostly sounds that seep from the exhibits. Dark and ambient, this space devoted to screen-based art plays on sensory perception, the visceral and kinaesthetic, a distinctive art experience as compared with the white walls, polished wooden floorboards and bright lights of the nearby Ian Potter Centre. This is a place for re-imagining. While the gallery’s grey concreted entrance appears unyielding to the flow of people and projections that have passed through it, the passage of descent marks


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its transition into an underground space to be inscribed by visitor experience. With each new exhibition, rooms may form, corridors can collapse and disappear, and the ceiling may split in half, as moveable walls and a retractable mezzanine are curated as a part of the exhibition design. Here the pliable architecture contributes to new spatial experiences of media art. Over the years, the Screen Gallery’s exhibitions have surveyed the breadth and depth of moving image art in a number of ways. Thematic explorations have considered issues of space, memory, globalisation, apocalypse, art history and identity. Artists have pushed scientific boundaries through the use of new, highly interactive technologies such as infra-red sensors, surveillance cameras and computer interfaces. Artworks have reflected the rich and multifarious possibilities of aesthetic form, including dance works, music clips, narratives, networked art and abstract art. The Screen Gallery has also been the site of large-scale collaborations with the National Gallery of Victoria, including 2004: Australian Culture Now, a survey of over 150 recent Australian works, and more recently 2006 Contemporary Commonwealth, which featured artists from across the Commonwealth. The Screen Gallery’s main exit is a glowing escalator placed in the middle of the exhibition space, a curiously situated point for departure. In some ways, the escalator references the fluidity of arrival and egress at ACMI, perhaps alluding to the gallery’s occupation of a site historically designed for transit. These notions of arrival and departure could be considered a metaphor for ACMI’s unique tenancy at Federation Square. Like the square, the passing of time and bodies through space and the embedding of experience have fashioned it as a distinctive public space in Melbourne. However, unlike Federation Square, ACMI is a quiet place nested within the chaos and bustle of the city. It also offers the public a point of experiential departure, whether immersion in the dark spaces of the gallery and cinema, occupation of places of fantasy in the studios, or stepping into the worlds of others in the Memory Grid. By inviting heightened levels of participation with the moving image in this way, ACMI is distinguishing itself as part of a new breed of cultural organisations. Interactivity has become a key mechanism for enhancing the quality of experience and depth of meaning to be drawn from encounters with art. With agency and subjectivity preferenced in this manner, ACMI has come to occupy a space away from Federation Square. With each visit, interaction, moment of learning or aesthetic response, ACMI evolves in the realm of visitor experience, meaning that in coming years ACMI will continue to grow not only as a resident of Federation Square or as an experimental public art space, but also in the creative imagination of its visitors.

REFERENCES Lab Architecture. 2005. ‘Federation Square’. [Internet]. Accessed 15 May 2005. Available from: http://www.labarchitecture.com.

Cite this chapter as: Radywyl, Natalia. 2006. ‘The Australian Centre for the Moving Image’. South Pacific museums, edited by Healy, Chris; Witcomb, Andrea. Monash University ePress: Melbourne. pp. 22.1–22.4. DOI: 10.2104/spm06022.

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SPIRIT HOUSE Ross Gibson, University of Technology, Sydney Ross Gibson makes books, essays and films, and produces multimedia environments and IT systems for museums and public spaces. Now Research Professor of New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Technology, Sydney, he is also a board member for the NSW Film and Television Office and a fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities. Correspondence to Ross Gibson: [email protected]

This paper examines the embodied sensual experience of visiting a museum, in particular, the feeling of wonder experienced by the museum visitor. It argues that museums, like bodies, are suffused with an activating spirit that has the potential to somatically transform visitors through the sensory power of exhibits. A successful museum, then, can be regarded as a ‘spirit house’, a place made lively by a flowing, connective, integrative force that can be felt by a visitor encountering the somatic and semantic configurations. This essay combines the film theory of Fereydoun Hoveyda, the architectural theory of Bernard Cache and Elizabeth Grosz, and the Indigenous Australian philosophy of David Mowaljarlai, to suggest a trans-disciplinary understanding of this sense of wonder experienced by the visitor of the vivacious museum spirit house.

WONDER This essay ponders the sense of wonder you sometimes feel when visiting a museum. Do you know this sensation? Partly, it’s a feeling of care for the artefacts on display. More precisely, it’s a ‘structure of feeling’ (Williams 1977, 128–135), a carefully composed configuration of intrigues and affirmations moving you and moving through you when you contemplate the system of objects and propositions laid out in the galleries. More than just the apprehension of meanings in the displays, it’s a feeling of involvement, with all the emotive forces generated in you by the entire array of the exhibits. It’s a palpable sense of being absorbed and altered by everything on offer when you are engaged as much by the textures, heft and scale of the materials as by their curatorially determined significance. And because you feel the museum getting into you somehow, you sense a burgeoning responsibility for the material on display. You care for the exhibits as you would for yourself and you want to comprehend how the museum is defining and expanding your sense of self, how you’re getting this sensation of a real, historical continuum folding into yourself, past into present, through these artefacts. I always get this curious urge, for instance, when I visit the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. A knot of emotions and hunches cinches inside me as I feel the acquisitive lust, the surreal ravaging of meaningful categories, and the catastrophic displacements and realignments that were enacted by colonialism across the globe. Moving amid the massed displays, I get some sense too of the vivacious originating cultures that produced the singular marvels that are recontextualised so astonishingly in the museum’s great glass-roofed chamber. By adhering to the typological ‘logic’ of General Pitt Rivers’s taxonomic principles, the museum’s curators make sure that several sense-making systems from Europe, Africa, Asia, Oceania and beyond are all put in contention and made just a little more palpable because of how startling most of the conjunctions feel. Without fail, I always get shocked bodily by the tangles of shape, size, colour and provenance


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that are so provocatively assembled all around me, as thousands of musical instruments, for example, press against the innumerable weapons, cooking utensils, love charms and ‘fetishes’. Places such as the Pitt Rivers Museum are made vivacious by the organising force of their combined somatic and semantic systems. So disturbing, so stimulating, such places are inspired, which is to say they are suffused with an activating spirit the same way a living body must have breath in it, the way anything vital is always inspiring, expiring, respiring. After all, ‘spirit’ and ‘breath’ are words for each other. It’s in this context that a successful museum can be regarded as a ‘spirit house’, a place made lively by a flowing, connective, integrative force that can be felt by a visitor encountering the somatic and semantic configurations. Thus museums can be more than just representative models of the world, more than just secondary commentaries on primary experience. Rather, because of the way their artists and curators can select and conjoin particular aspects and artefacts from lived experience, the social and sensory constructs called museums can offer intensifications of the world’s vitality. A museum can give you the chance to discern vivacious aspects of experience that are usually too obscure or attenuated to be well apprehended in the ‘outside world’. The system of exhibits can focus some of the vital forces that move through our shared world of space, matter, labour, passion and time. The sensory power of exhibits is crucial to museology. Granted, the structured feelings that a museum can give you are not necessarily more important than the information that you might garner. But if the feelings are missing, if there is no sensory involvement, then people aren’t roused to care about the exhibits, and the museum won’t have fully succeeded, for the visitors won’t have undergone any transformative relationship to the world that’s been intensified by the system of artefacts. This transformation is a palpable, somatic response that’s not readily decoded like a message or a batch of data. Not entirely reasonable, this transformative urge is a passion: something that passes through the visitor’s sensibilities while artefacts and people and time-scales fold into one another and alter one another within the overall patterning of the museum. How might you become more adept at installing and ‘channelling’ this transformative feeling? How to harness it for the purposes of more effective museological display? This feeling, which I’ve described as ‘somatic’ a couple of times, is precisely an aesthetic concern rather than a semantic one. Aesthetics is literally a field of study concerned with whatever is ‘perceptible by the senses’ (Wilkes and Krebs 1991, 24). When studying museum aesthetics, you try to comprehend how the senses can be engaged and enriched in a curated display that causes an organised urge to move through the perceiver. Pondering all this, I’ve learned that some overlooked aspects of film theory are useful. Also snippets of unorthodox architectural theory make some sense, along with portions of Indigenous Australian philosophy. I have a hunch that it’s feasible to combine all these in an attempt to understand the experience of wonder in museums, to see what this trans-disciplinary melding might yield. We can start with the film theory.

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SPIRIT HOUSE NEW EXPERIENCES

SUNSPOTS Every now and then, I delve in my files to puzzle over an essay published in 1960 by the French journal Cahiers du Cinéma. It’s called ‘Sunspots’, by a young Iranian scholar named Fereydoun Hoveyda (1986). Each time I read it, I marvel at how it’s beautiful and strange, possibly meaningless, possibly brilliant. Using image-ideas not customary in conventional European aesthetics, Hoveyda explains that cinema works best when it captures and channels an ever-unfolding force that runs through the spaces, objects and temporal rhythms of a film and also through the audience in the dark room. When a film really works, he explains, some kind of energy pulses coherently in space, in time and in people so that the animus of a scene flares through all the components of an individual shot and then arcs like electricity from shot to shot, from moment to moment, from screen to audience and back again. This is the mise en scène of the film, the manner in which space and time are manipulated to make a special place for the viewer. The way mise en scène works, a charge is generated that carries, excites and transforms every portion of the filmic experience. Characters, objects, spaces, luminance, time-patterns and viewers all get altered as the aesthetics and semantics play out during a cinematic session. The result is somewhat pantheistic and plainly expansive of yourself. When a film lights everything up like this, a world of urgency is harnessed, swirling around you and through you in much the same manner as radiation emits from the flares that sometimes burst off the surface of the sun. These elemental energies, so lucidly evoked by Hoveyda, have always been in Western culture. For example, in the 1890s when the Lumière Brothers first showed their films, viewers flocked to the screenings when they heard some amazing accounts of trees. At the time, Maxim Gorky recorded how he was disturbed by some kind of ghost-power that seemed to shiver the leaves, causing every element on the screen to appear oddly alive. For Gorky, cinema offered life in a spectral form. He called it ‘the kingdom of shadows’ (Gorky 1996, 5–6). He saw not an intensification or clarification, but a stark, leached trace of natural vitality. It worried him. But it galvanised him too. The vivacity of his writing betrays this much. For Gorky, all the things moving on the screen were like kindred creatures signalling to the human beings in the darkened room, as if the screen were transmitting a fellow-feeling that jumped out of the trees, across the auditorium, into the audience, and back again. In such an animated system, all things that could be shown to have vitality in them might be considered part of each other somehow. These notions are similar to the theories of ‘suture’ and ‘enmeshment’ that arose in film theory during the 1970s, for example in the writings of Jean Pierre. Oudart (1977/8, 35–47), Daniel Dayan (1974, 22–31) and Stephen Heath (1981, 76–112). Analysing how editing works in character-based narrative cinema, ‘suture theory’ describes how the viewer is purposefully shifted through several points of view and alignments of identification. As these different vantages on the represented world line up, the viewer’s subjectivity is repeatedly cut and re-stitched, causing in the viewer a sensation of being commingled with the many characters, objects and spaces that have been presented through the unspooling sequence of the film. Viewers feel the film’s systematic, organising force moving though them, stitching them into the larger body of the film’s dynamic universe. The viewer and the film – all its characters, settings, moods and sounds – each moves through the others, each gets into the others. A holistic sensation develops as you view the film. No one element in the film, yourself included, can be construed as separate from the others.


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SYNTHESIS In recent times, the practice of ecology has helped us understand how an interconnecting energy might weave through space and time so that the definitions of what is inert and what is alive must undergo extensive redefinition. Many cultures give spirit names to an animating force that binds places, things and rhythms into the lively world. Now, I’m not so pantheist as to insist that there is a quantifiable lifeforce in all the objects that comprise the world. There may be, but it’s not crucial to the museological argument that I’m developing here. The key point is that in an aesthetically designed environment an urge seems to flow through and from each object because of an energy generated within the senses of the people encountering the objects. It’s a psychic energy that can become a social energy. Attending a film, for example, the viewer’s communal affections are intensified firstly by the ritual of gathering in the auditorium and secondly by the crowd’s collective attention to the shuttling interweave of rhythm, luminance, scale, sound and language all passing through yourself and your benighted fellows in the irradiated theatre. Determined to be thoroughly secular about the Hoveyda’s fabled energy, I keep coming back to the ‘Sunspots’ essay because it helps me understand not only cinema but also installation art and museum exhibition. Moreover, Hoveyda’s ideas about integrative energy and spectatorship link with some notions in Indigenous Australian philosophy and metaphysics. From recent times, one of the most inventive examples of adaptive Indigenous thinking comes from the late David Mowaljarlai, who spent the final 20 years of his life creating a spiritual system – pragmatic, ethical and ecological – that he was determined to communicate to non-Indigenous Australians (Mowaljarlai and Malnic 1993). This system was based on ritual knowledge stored in his country in north-western Australia. Mowaljarlai asserted that the country has psychic, social, geological and botanical life all synthesised into a vitality that guides a person to sensible actions. Literally sensible. Mowaljarlai described how he could feel the presence (or not), the valence (or not), the direction (or dissipation) of this country-vitality and he described how he could act in communion with it. He could find spots in space and moments in time where the urgency in country is intensified, where this force signals most emphatically. He could sense the land’s animus ‘swinging’ around him. This was no mystical ability. He could attune to this animus because of all the cultural work he performed, all the ritual taletelling and remembering, all the ceremonies that he enacted to frame and intensify the force in the country. This attunement was the result of relentless cultural labour – marking the ground, lodging painted figures in caves, determining sightlines to other sacred zones, bouncing songs off cliff faces. In other words, he was constantly arranging a mise en scène of country and from that mise en scène he was getting his cues for action, taking direction from the scene because countless ancestors have already fashioned the country into a kind of sense-generator that he could cleave to (Mowaljarlai 1995).

FORCE-FIELDS One would expect Mowaljarlai and Hoveyda to understand good portions of each other’s beliefs. And one would expect them to respond well to the ideas of French architect and philosopher, Bernard Cache, as expressed in his startling book Earth moves. Cache declares that architecture is best understood as ‘a cinema of things’ (Cache 1995, 29). Interlocking a set of directive frames, Cache explains, an architect works more with dynamics than with status, more like a film director than a builder. An architect channels the continuous flow of light and sound in consort with the

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trajectories of objects and people all moving in time and space so that every component of the built environment becomes implied and available to all the others. Every object, surface, sheet of light, vault of air and volume of sound gets integrated in an aesthetically complete environment that is felt as a dynamic, flowing experience in the sensorium of everyone inhabiting and appreciating that environment. Amplifying Cache’s provocations, Elizabeth Grosz (2005) has suggested that architecture can be regarded as the primary art, because its frames are applied to preternatural forces. The act of constructing a wall forms a floor, thus transforming raw ground into something domestic, making cultural order from the given, Adamite chaos. A soffit emphasises the built shelter of a roof combining with a wall to parry the attack of the prevailing elements. Think of the frame around a window as a focusing device that directs the trajectories not only of light and wind but also of eyesight. A directional cairn of stones might show travellers how to bring a sense of optimism as well as a river toward them while making tracks through a savannah. Grosz describes architecture as a process whereby space gets rendered lively so long as the architect harnesses and organises the tendencies both within the citizens and within the territory that is being constructed for them. You can extrapolate that architecture can do for space what social history and personal memory do for time – providing momentum, shaping unstable experience, exposing and harnessing the world’s tendencies and dynamic potentialities. Seen like this, Cache’s conception of a world made by architecture is close to Hoveyda’s vision of cinema’s integrated and irradiated universe. Which is close also to what museum exhibits can do for artefacts and interpretations. The material world can get arrayed and interpreted so that an organised, aesthetic spirit connects and excites people in relation to places, time-scales and objects. Dylan Thomas once wrote of ‘the force that through the green fuse drives the flower’ (Thomas 1974, 77). This force is like that energy detected by Hoveyda, Mowaljarlai, Cache and Grosz, and it is comparable, I think, to the stimulation you can feel in ‘spirited’ museum exhibits. Or as Nicolas Bourriaud’s influential book Relational aesthetics has proposed, contemporary museums are most relevant to contemporary life when they help visitors grasp not the essential material qualities of the displays but the full potential of relations among people and artefacts. In the arrangement of these relations you set right conditions for generating propositions and feelings (Bourriaud 2002). As Bourriaud argues, museums can set up scenes where negotiations can occur, where people can feel secure enough to speculate about the associations and affections required to make sense in a world where all the constituent parts exist in a constantly altering force-field of power and possibility, a world shivered by globalisation, ecological change and accelerating accretions of information. So to conclude, I’d like to make an exhibit here on the page, an exhibit of the visions generated in this essay. It’s a way of relating the various theories of Mowaljarlai, Cache and others. Each brief definition is a separate but related vision of a vivacious museum. We can arrange them as an ensemble, as if in a showcase, to see whether they make sense for us, to see if they correlate to give us a cogent feeling about what a museum can be. Here then, to finish the essay, is my little exhibit of definitions all flowing in and out of each other. Might they conjure ideas and feelings of a museum worth visiting?


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Museum: a place where we can assay the moving forces organising the world of matter, power and feeling. Museum: a place secure enough, imaginative enough to help us trace lines connecting the existing and the potential relations among all aspects of our shared experiences of space and time. Museum: a place where the vivacity in our built cultures can be shown to be collaborating with all our given natures. Museum: a place where the breath of the world can be intensified so that it can be discerned. Museum: a spirit house.

REFERENCES Bourriaud, Nicolas. 2002. Relational aesthetics. Paris: Les Presses du reel. Cache, Bernard. 1995. Earth moves: The furnishing of territories. Boston: MIT Press. Dayan, Daniel. 1974. ‘The tutor-code of classical cinema’. Film Quarterly (Fall): 22–31. Gorky, Maxim. 1996. ‘Newspaper review of the Lumiere programme at the Nizhni-Novgorod fair, Nizhegorodski listok, 4 July, 1896’. In In the kingdom of shadows: A companion to early cinema, edited by Harding, Colin; Popple, Simon. London: Cygnus Arts. Grosz, Elizabeth. 2005. ‘Chaos, territory, art, Deleuze and the framing of the Earth’. IDEA Journal 2005 6: 15–25. Heath, Stephen. 1981. ‘On suture’. In Questions of cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. pp. 76–112. Hoveyda, Fereydoun. 1986. ‘Sunspots’. In Cahiers du Cinéma, 1960–1968: New wave, new cinema, re-evaluating Hollywood, edited by Hillier, Jim. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Mowaljarlai, David. 1995. ABC Radio Feature, The Law Report, Tuesday 31st October. Formerly available from: http://www.abc.net.au/rn. Mowaljarlai, David; Malnic, Jutta. 1993. Yorro Yorro: Everything standing up alive. Broome: Magabala Books. Oudart, Jean-Pierre. 1977/8. ‘Cinema and suture’. Screen 18 (4): 35–47. Thomas, Dylan. 1974. ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower’. In Dylan Thomas: The poems, edited by Jones, Daniel. Rev. edn. London: J. M. Dent. Wilkes, G. A.; Krebs, W. A., editors. 1991. Collins English dictionary. 3rd edn. Sydney: Harper Collins. Williams, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Cite this chapter as: Gibson, Ross. 2006. ‘Spirit house’. South Pacific museums, edited by Healy, Chris; Witcomb, Andrea. Monash University ePress: Melbourne. pp. 23.1–23.6. DOI: 10.2104/spm06023.

23.6


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