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Look back in anger

4 January 2003 - Faced with a government review, the National Museum of Australia may be forced to reinterpret its controversial portrayal of the nation's colonial history, writes Joyce Morgan.

National Museum Opening, didgered. photo courtesy Wayne Quilliam.

The federal Arts Minister, Richard Alston, made a curious qualification when he referred to the National Museum of Australia last month. He told Parliament the establishment of the museum had been a good outcome, "certainly in terms of the structure of the building".

It sounded like a case of never mind the picture, admire the frame. Yet it's what is inside the frame that is generating considerable heat.

According to the academic Keith Windschuttle, the museum is "one in the eye for the Howard Government". But according to its director, Dawn Casey, the museum is a reflective space and a forum for debate.

Now, less than two years after its opening, the Canberra museum is facing an official review. Some see the move as a normal process for an infant institution. Others view it as far more sinister, a politically driven attempt to rein in the museum's portrayal of history and open a new front in the Howard Government's ideological culture wars. A battle royal between the black-armband view of Australian history, so disapproved of by the Prime Minister - who sees it as a belief that most Australian history since 1788 has been little more than a disgraceful story of imperialism, exploitation, racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination - and the celebratory three cheers view.

A museum that is essentially about how we see ourselves and our past will inevitably provoke strong passions. National identity presses so many buttons in an Australian psyche continuously wrestling with who and what we are.

A museum full of stuffed animals in cases is one thing, but tales of black-white relations open a can of worms. There are the those who see a museum's role as presenting a master narrative, a chronology of civilisation and its heroes. On the other hand are those who argue that there are many narratives - not frontier relations, particularly of an alleged massacre at Bells Falls Gorge near Bathurst.

The issue will no doubt surface again next month - the same time the review gets under way - when the museum publishes Frontier Conflict: The Australian Experience. The book, which has its origins in a museum forum on the subject a year ago, is pitched as dealing with the extent of armed conflict in 19th- and 20th-century Australia when Europeans seized land and the original owners fought back.

When so much of the criticism of the museum revolves around historical accuracy, some find it surprising that no historian has been included on the review panel - or sits on the museum's council, which has three vacancies.

The review will be headed by the Melbourne sociologist John Carroll and also includes Lend Lease deputy chairman Richard Longes, South Australian Museum senior curator Philip Jones and Melbourne palaeontologist Patricia Vickers-Rich.

In Carroll, who is also a Quadrant contributor, the council has selected a chairman with a strong interest in questions of Australian identity and the need for grand narrative stories, outlined in his Barton lecture "The Blessed Country" and recent book The Western Dreaming: the Western world is dying for want of a story.

Staley, the council chairman, who has been tipped for a seat on the ABC's board, defended the selection of the four-person panel, which had unanimous council approval.

"Just about every renowned professor of history or historian has been involved in setting the place up ... we believed it was important to have people come to us who have not been involved," he says.

The review panel will be funded by the Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts but report to the museum's council.

"The job will be done properly," says Staley. "The minister wants it done properly."

The review is being set up against a background of success, he says. The museum opened on time, within budget and has attracted more than 1.3 million visitors in its first 18 months, in excess of expectations.

It is not the only review about to get under way at the museum - reviewing appears to be a growth industry. Fifteen cultural institutions, including the museum, the National Gallery of Australia, the National Portrait Gallery and National Library, are under pressure to justify their existence to the Federal Government. The Government has refused to release the terms of reference of this inquiry nor commit to making the findings public. The whole process is described by the Democrats' Senator Aden Ridgeway as a secretive cost-cutting exercise designed to purge the arts.

The museum council review comes after the effective sidelining of its director, Casey, whose contract the Government has extended for just a year. For some, the events are connected. Others believe the institution should be headed by someone with a museum or academic, rather than managerial, background and that the Government had no need to extend her contract at all.

Casey, who will not comment on her tenure, is not opposed to a review, saying any museum should be open to scrutiny. But she fears some will attempt to turn it into an ideological battle.

"I hope it doesn't happen," she says. "But it's inevitable - given the act under which we were established, where we're required to cover people and their relationship with the environment, Australian society since 1788 and the history and culture of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people - that we'll be drawn up into some of the issues that are being debated today."

With two reviews about to start and a new director imminent, this year will be a critical one for the infant institution. Argument over massacres, frontier warfare and the role of museums looks set to continue. But if it all leaves museum goers cold, they can skip the debate and take a squiz at Phar Lap's heart.

It all sounds terribly academic and often is, involving debates between postmodernists, traditionalists and assorted theorists.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, two museum council members associated with the Prime Minister - Christopher Pearson, his former speechwriter, and David Barnett, his authorised biographer - are understood to have spearheaded the move for the review. It is a review that has so far produced a four-member panel but no terms of reference.

These will be released shortly, says the council's chairman, Tony Staley. The six-month review, officially announced yesterday and to begin in February, will be broad-ranging and look at the museum's performance, including its content, exhibitions and public programs, against its act and charter. The act and charter may change following the review but that would be a matter for the Government.

"There could be this or that modification, but that would be an incidental outcome rather than a prime focus," Staley says.

The review panel will consult widely, hold public forums and call for submissions, says Staley, a former Liberal Party federal president. "This is not set up to do the bidding of any government or any political party. This is set up to ensure the museum gets it right and to review the way it's done to talk about the future as much as the past ... I like the notion of a museum celebrating the nation when it's a national museum, but doing that with a proper regard to historical accuracy."

The review's opponents need fear no evil, he adds.

Yet fear they do. Professor John Mulvaney, emeritus professor of prehistory at the Australian National University, does not believe the need for a review has been demonstrated.

"The chairman is claiming this is a normal thing to do. I would have thought this is rather early ... there's no doubt [some council members] are very unhappy about the presentation of Australian history and aspects of the Aboriginal history," he says.

Mulvaney has a long involvement with the museum, having served on the Pigott inquiry that in 1975 recommended the creation of a national museum with a major Aboriginal component, and more recently as an adviser.

He has no doubt the inquiry is being politically driven by what he has called a council minority with ministerial access determined to save the museum from ideological error. "They've got a bit between their teeth and it doesn't matter what anybody says. They're going to see this is done and their main weapon is Windschuttle," he says.

Pearson, a columnist and board member of the conservative journal Quadrant, and Barnett, who co-authored Howard's biography with his wife, the Sex Discrimination Commissioner, Pru Goward, would not comment publicly on the review.

"I have never uttered a word of public criticism about the museum," says Barnett.

Perhaps not. But privately he has had a great deal to0 say. He has described aspects of the indigenous exhibits as a victim episode, objected to the inclusion of the anti-nuclear protester Benny Zable and argued that the former waterfront chief Peter Corrigan and mining boss Hugh Morgan should be included.

His criticisms, made in a confidential five-page memo to Staley and which the Herald disclosed 18 months ago, prompted an earlier review conducted by a Melbourne historian, Professor Graeme Davison. He concluded that overall the museum was based on sound scholarship.

Davison now questions the need for and motivation of the latest review. Cultural institutions must be at arm's length from government, he says.

"If there's not an arm's length relationship then what does it mean?" says Davison. "Come a change of government, it remakes the museum after its image and that can only be debilitating for the curatorial staff."

Windschuttle has been the most publicly vocal critic of the institution he has called a profound intellectual mistake. "It is a repository of nothing more than the intellectual poverty of the tertiary-educated middle class of the post-Vietnam War era," he wrote in a Quadrant article entitled "How Not to Run a Museum" shortly after the museum opened.

He has argued that many exhibits treat white culture with mockery and irony while the treatment of indigenous culture ranges from respect to reverence. European culture in Australia was largely portrayed as a series of disasters.

He has objected to the museum's frontier warfare display and what he has called its fictitious account of frontier relations, particularly of an alleged massacre at Bells Falls Gorge near Bathurst.

The issue will no doubt surface again next month the same time the review gets under way when the museum publishes Frontier Conflict: The Australian Experience.

The book, which has its origins in a museum forum on the subject a year ago, is pitched as dealing with the extent of armed conflict in 19th- and 20th-century Australia when Europeans seized land and the original owners fought back.

When so much of the criticism of the museum revolves around historical accuracy, some find it surprising that no historian has been included on the review panel or sits on the museum's council, which has three vacancies.

The review will be headed by the Melbourne sociologist John Carroll and also includes Lend Lease deputy chairman Richard Longes, South Australian Museum senior curator Philip Jones and Melbourne palaeontologist Patricia Vickers-Rich.

In Carroll, who is also a Quadrant contributor, the council has selected a chair man with a strong interest in questions of Australian identity and the need for grand narrative stories, outlined in his Barton lecture "The Blessed Country" and recent book The Western Dreaming: the Western world is dying for want of a story.

Staley, the council chairman, who has been tipped for a seat on the ABC's board, defended the selection of the four-person panel, which had unanimous council approval, as did the move to undertake the review.

"Just about every renowned professor of history or historian has been involved in setting the place up...we believed it was important to have people come to us who have not been involved," he says.

The review panel will be funded by the Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts Department of Communications, Information Technology, Communication and the Arts, but report to the museum's council.

"The job will be done properly," says Staley. "The minister wants it done properly."

Dawn Casey

The review is being set up against a background of success, he says. The museum opened on time, within budget and has attracted more than 1.3 million visitors in its first 18 months, in excess of expectations.

It is not the only review about to get under way at the museum reviewing appears to be a growth industry.

Fifteen cultural institutions, including the museum, the National Gallery of Australia, the National Portrait Gallery and National Library, are under pressure to justify their existence to the Federal Government. The Government has refused to release the terms of reference of this inquiry nor commit to making the findings public. The whole process is described by the Democrats' Senator Aden Ridgeway as a secretive cost-cutting exercise designed to purge the arts.

The museum council review comes after the effective sidelining of its director, Dawn Casey, whose contract the Government has extended for just a year. For some, the events are connected. Others believe the institution should be headed by someone with a museum or academic, rather than managerial, background and that the Government had no need to extend her contract at all.

Casey, who will not comment on her tenure, is not opposed to a review, saying any museum should be open to scrutiny.

But she fears some will attempt to turn it into an ideological battle.

"I hope it doesn't happen," she says. "But it's inevitable given the act under which we were established, where we're required to cover people and their relationship with the environment, Australian society since 1788 and the history and culture of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people that we'll be drawn up into some of the issues that are being debated today."

With two reviews about to start and a new director imminent, this year will be a critical one for the infant institution. Argument over massacres, frontier warfare and the role of museums looks set to continue. But if it all leaves museum goers cold, they can skip the debate and take a squiz at Phar Lap's heart.

Source: Sydney Morning Herald

Battle of the black armband

Richard Yallop

4 January 2003 - In November 2000, former John Howard speechwriter Christopher Pearson and Monash University historian Graeme Davison sat down to lunch at Melbourne's Latin restaurant to reach a civilised agreement to an argument that had dogged the planning of Canberra's new National Museum for almost a year: should the exhibition guide lines contain the statement that the museum should "challenge" the visitors to ponder and reflect on the nation's past?

Earlier in the year, the council had failed to agree on the guidelines submitted by Davison and three other historians advising the museum. The word "challenge", with its political overtones of challenging authority, caused some concerns with the museum's conservative board members – chairman Tony Staley, a former Liberal Party president, author David Barnett, a former press secretary to Liberal prime minister Malcolm Fraser, and Pearson, commentator and editor of the Adelaide Review.

Pearson flew to Melbourne with a compromise for Davison. Why not "invite" museum visitors to ponder and reflect on the nation's history, rather than "challenge" them?

Davison stood on the principles agreed by his fellow historians. The museum should commit itself to a challenging, pluralist view of Australian history. Once it became clear the historians would not budge, "challenge" was accepted.

The seemingly trivial but intractable argument over the word "challenge" has come to symbolise the broader political and historical conflict over the museum's role and interpretation of Australian history that has continued unabated since it opened in March 2001. Should it challenge, entertain and stimulate? Should it present oral tradition, or only historical fact? Does it lean too far towards the "black armband" view of Australian history?

The argument has now prompted the Government to appoint a four-member review panel.

The panel, which will report in four to six months, includes La Trobe University sociologist John Carroll, South Australian Museum curator Philip Jones, paleontologist Patricia Vickers-Rich and businessman Richard Longes.

Staley said the review would accept public submissions and meet with historians and other experts to gauge opinion on the museum's present exhibits and establish a future focus.

The museum has been a popular success, with 1.5 million visitors since it opened, but it has sparked controversy since architect Howard Raggatt included in his design a zig-zag flash inspired by Daniel Liebeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin.

Critics argued that by linking itself architecturally with the Holocaust, the museum was supporting implications that the Aborigines had suffered genocide.

Barnett and Pearson made it clear from the time they joined the council that they were not going to acquiesce to the leftist historical orthodoxy prevailing in academia, and embodied by historian Henry Reynolds, who has written prolifically on frontier conflict.

Staley was equally determined to get a museum that "got the facts right and didn't push barrows".

So concerned was Barnett at a possible lack of balance in the portrayal of Australian history that he asked to see 80,000 words of exhibit labels. Barnett says two other council members also viewed the labels.

On the advice of historian Geoffrey Blainey, Staley asked Davison to review the labels and, although he didn't agree with all the labels, he found them based on sound scholarship and believed that overall the exhibits showed balance.

Barnett had other concerns, that the inspiring stories of the great pioneers and the pastoralists were being ignored in order to find room for suburban historical trivia like the Hills Hoist.

Barnett yesterday said he was not an "outspoken critic" of the museum, as he had been portrayed in the media, and all of his comments had been made internally, within council, or to Staley. He did not remember questioning the use of the word "challenging" in the exhibit guidelines.

The ideological cracks in the museum opened further in September 2001 when controversial historian Keith Windschuttle savaged the institution in Quadrant magazine, alleging leftist bias, and attacking it for presenting Aboriginal oral tradition as historical fact. What the museum presented as a massacre of Aboriginal women and children at Bell's Falls, near Bathurst, in the 1820s, was no more than local oral tradition, according to Windschuttle.

The Museum's acting director, Darryl McIntyre, yesterday defended the exhibit, saying it showed there was fierce fighting in the Bathurst area at that time, and as a whole presents a fair and evocative representation of violence on the frontiers. He said the exhibit made clear that it was referring to Aboriginal oral history because it used the voice of a Wiradjuri elder.

Historian Geoffrey Bolton, who also advised the museum, believed it made an injudicious choice to represent the Bell's Falls massacre.

"There were other examples of frontier conflict over which there was no argument," he said. "The issue is, which is more authoritative – an oral history of an Aboriginal fight with the police, or police records? I think you have to sit on the fence."

Staley declined to comment on whether the Bell's Falls exhibit would be scrapped, or any other review outcomes. "I think the museum needs to make clear what sort of history it is relying on – oral tradition or historical fact," he said.

Professor Bolton, from Murdoch University, sees no problem with the word "challenging". Recalling his time on the council of the National Maritime Museum, he said conservative male council members had been startled when female curators insisted that a ship should be referred to as "it" rather than "she".

"The old salts were a bit taken aback, but they didn't try and stop it happening," he said. "My concern is that the boundaries have been fudged between what the council does and the curatorial staff."

Museum director Dawn Casey, an Aborigine who was previously a senior public servant, organised a conference in December 2001 to air some of the differences of interpretation of Australia's frontier history. Windschuttle presented the view that frontier violence had been exaggerated and, according to one participant, "the conference was like the breaching of a dam wall".

Windschuttle's view has received even more publicity since the release of his book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History.

"The matter is so polarised after Windschuttle," Bolton said. "We hoped as historians coming in as advisers that we'd be able to find a middle ground, but the argument has continued. These subjects have to be presented, and it's impossible to reach a consensus."

Des Griffin, former director of the Australian Museum in Sydney, has monitored the debate over how the National Museum should handle historical truth. "What we expect of museums is very good scholarship and a variety of views which stand up to scrutiny," he said.

"It's obnoxious that people should say a museum should not be challenging. There seems to be a wish to stop inquiry. People go to museums to be touched and engaged by big ideas."

Staley said he regarded the differences as healthy when dealing with issues that cut to the bone of national history. "No one's suggesting we should change the museum root-and-branch," he said. "But it's important that it be seen as authentic and historically accurate. Because social history touches on issues of contention, it will be challenging, but it should not set out to be polemical."

Source: The Australian

Museum set for fight over who owns the past

Glenn Milne

30 December 2002 - The so far abstract, academic debate about the "genocide" theory of Australian history, sparked by Keith Windschuttle's The Fabrication of Aboriginal History is about to have its first real policy consequences.

The publication of Windschuttle's critique of the use of historical sources by defenders of the "genocide" view of Australia's past, such as Henry Reynolds and Lyndall Ryan, coincides with an internal review of the National Museum in Canberra. This is political happenchance. But the accidental timing could result in some very deliberate consequences.
Influential figures close to the Howard Government believe that in the context of the Windschuttle debate the four-person review should be charged with settling the central question that has hovered over the museum since its opening two years ago: Do the exhibits overall present a view of Australian history that implicitly assumes the deliberate destruction of the Aboriginal race, at the expense of celebrating white achievements in the time since European settlement?

In the end the review could be a compelling judgment on the bearing Windschuttle's charges will have on future policy making, particularly under John Howard.

Those being asked to take on this onerous charge are chairman John Carroll, sociologist at La Trobe University, Patricia Vickers-Rich, who developed the Monash Science Centre, Phillip Jones, senior curator of the Museum of South Australia and Richard Longes, an investment banker.

Carroll is also a long-time friend of Senator Rod Kemp, Minister for the Arts, and a prolific contributor to the Institute of Public Affairs journal, the IPA Review. The IPA is reviled by the Left as a privately funded right-wing think tank.

The committee has been given a broad charter over six months; to assess the content of the museum's exhibits and to judge whether it has complied with the role and functions as set out in the relevant act. The act itself specifically mandates that the museum shall contain a "gallery of Aboriginal Australia". Its general charter directs the museum "to develop and maintain a national collection of historical material". Within that rather vague purview the critics of the museum's current cast of exhibits believe the committee will have the right to make a judgment about its ideological content.

The museum council's influential chairman, Tony Staley – a former Fraser government minister and federal Liberal Party president, will not stand in the way of the committee if it seeks to take on such a brief. He has told colleagues he's "agnostic" on the question of whether the museum is biased in its balance of white versus black history. But Staley always adds the caveat that the exhibition must achieve two central aims: it must, he says, be an "authoritative and objective" account of Australian history.

That is proper and right. But what it also means is that the committee would be justified in going to questions of ideological balance.

The Australians who wander into the museum to gawk at Azaria Chamberlain's torn nightie and share a Christmas Cornetto with the children would probably be amazed to know that what they're looking at is now the centre of a fierce dispute that goes back to the establishment of postmodern philosophy under the French deconstructionist, Jacques Derrida. But what might sound remote is also intensely political. And all politics is local. What this debate represents is a battle for the hearts and minds of middle Australia. The way they view their history will affect they way they vote.

What has now been joined at the NMA is a fight for ownership of the past in the sure knowledge that whichever side of politics owns the past will also own the future.

Derrida's theory rests on the claim that the British empirical method of establishing facts and recording them is inadequate because such history is polluted by existing class values. Therefore, says, Derrida, history should be revitalised using contemporary values. Within Derrida's world view, "facts" in the old sense cease to exist.

In a paper delivered to a conference at the NMA, Windschuttle attacked Derrida's theory at its core. He said: "If you abandon the principles of empirical history – that evidence is independent of the observer and that truth is discovered rather than invented – you consign everyone to their own cultural cocoons, from which all they can do is talk past one another. No debate can ever be resolved."

"The replacement of history by mythology," he calls it.

Windschuttle went on: "A public institution like the National Museum does not have the right to pander to theoretical fashions this way. As it stands now, the museum's frontier conflict display is dominated by such thinking with the prominence it gives to the Bells Falls Gorge Massacre – a completely mythical event – and the romantic treatment it gives to Jandamurra, who has as much claim to be a patriotic freedom fighter as Henry Reynolds's mythical guerilla warriors of Van Diemen's Land."

Windschuttle proceeded to address claims the museum's architects had borrowed the idea for its central structure – a lightning bolt striking the land – from the Jewish Museum in Berlin. He recommended it be reconstructed on the grounds: "The Aborigines did not suffer a Holocaust. To compare the policies towards Aborigines of Governor Arthur Phillip or Lieutenant-Governor Arthur, or any of their successors with those of Adolf Hitler towards the Jews is not only conceptually odious but wildly anachronistic. There were no gas ovens in Australia or anything remotely equivalent. The colonial powers wanted to civilise and modernise the Aborigines, not exterminate them. For the Australian Government to construct a permanent, national structure that advertises such a grotesque historical misinterpretation is an insult to the nation and to all its members, white and black."

Carroll and his committee are going to have an interesting six months.

Glenn Milne is chief political correspondent for the Seven Network.

Source: The Australian

Over the top in the culture wars

Gerard Henderson

14 January 2003 - The man leading the review of the National Museum is no stranger to controversy, writes Gerard Henderson.

Forget about any Australian participation in any (second) Gulf War. Right now, there is more conflict on the home front as the intensity of what has been termed the culture wars notches up. The National Museum of Australia (NMA) is the immediate battleground.

The NMA was opened by John Howard on March 11, 2001. In his address, the Prime Minister commented that "when, in 1997, the Federal Government decided to commit $1billion to a federation fund, we decided that the flagship project ought to be financial support for the construction of the National Museum of Australia". He went on to describe the NMA as a "unique museum" that "very attractively" seeks "to interpret the history of our nation".

Yet there was some disquiet in the ranks. Shortly before the opening,the Herald reported on March 3 that David Barnett had criticised the NMA's displays and how they were depicted.

Barnett had been appointed to the museum's board by Howard in January 1999. It soon emerged that Christopher Pearson, another board member, was also concerned about how the NMA presented Australian history.

The NMA's chairman, Tony Staley, responded to the Barnett critique by asking for advice from the historian Geoffrey Blainey. Blainey recommended that the Monash University historian Graeme Davison head a panel of historians to review Barnett's criticisms of the NMA's exhibit labels. Davison has written that "after carefully reviewing them, I found that almost none of his [Barnett's] criticisms could be supported by reputable scholarship" (The Age, December 12, 2002).

Davison has complained that none of the advice and assurances that he has provided with respect to the NMA "has assuaged the critics". What did he expect? In cultural warfare, one skirmish does not resolve a war. In late November, word got out that the Arts Minister, Rod Kemp, had advised the museum's director, Dawn Casey, that her contract would be extended by one year. She would probably have expected a renewal of between three and five years.

Then, on January 3 (after yet another leak), Staley announced that "a major review will be undertaken into the exhibitions and public programs" of the NMA. A review committee, headed by John Carroll (reader in sociology at La Trobe University) will report to the museum's council, apparently before the end of the year.

Staley has described as "tripe" claims that the intention of the Carroll review is to bring the NMA exhibitions into line with the
Howard Government's view of history (The Australian, January 13). And Carroll has declared it was "wrong" to depict him as "conservative". Rather, he declared, his views were best described as "both culturally and politically eclectic" (The Age, December 30, 2002). Sure are.

In view of the controversy surrounding the NMA, it would have been expected that Kemp would have favoured a pragmatic type - either historian or curator - to head the review committee. But, instead, he favoured a sociologist - of eclectic disposition. Stand by for more (cultural) explosions in Australia's battle of ideas.

Carroll, a columnist in The Australian Financial Review, has recently written that "since the last federal election the Howard Government has hardly put a foot wrong" (AFR, January 9). He has also alleged, without evidence, that Paul Keating attempted to "turn Australia into an Asian nation" (AFR, October 18, 2002). How could he do so, even if he wanted to?

Carroll was not always a supporter of the Howard agenda. In the early 1990s he was one of the loudest barrackers for protectionism, foreign exchange controls and a highly regulated industrial relations system.

Around this time, Carroll declared that "the most important contemporary example of economic success is Japan" (The Age, August 29, 1992). Japan has been in almost continual recession for the past decade. So grim was Australia's economic outlook, according to Carroll, that he opined that "the import of virtually all consumption goods will have to be banned in the short term" (see his chapter in Shutdown,which Carroll has co-edited with Robert Manne).

It cannot be predicted how Carroll will view the NMA. But it is known that some of his views are, well, eclectic. Take for example, the drowning of prime minister Harold Holt in December, 1967. In fact, this was a mundane, albeit sad, event - of a kind all too common at Australian beaches in summer. But Carroll depicted the occasion as part of the "martyrology of our country" (see his chapter "National Identity" in Intruders in the Bush).

In an interview on ABC Radio National's The Religion Report on September 11 last year, Carroll described as "mad" the decision of New York authorities to DNA test "every bit" of refuse from the World Trade Centre site, overlooking the fact that the researchers were after body parts. There are similar bizarre comments in his book Terror (Scribe, 2002).

The Government may, or may not, have found the best person to review the NMA. Certainly, after viewing the museum, there is at least a case for a reconsideration. But the time to assess the role of the museum was before it opened. It is invariably difficult to change an institution once it has been established - even to attempt such a task would be counter-productive.

The fact is that the NMA was the creation of the Howard Government and its advisers. If Kemp and his colleagues are not happy with the outcome - after all the expense - then the blame should be directed inwards. Perhaps a battleground court martial or two is appropriate - in a cultural sense, of course.

Gerard Henderson is executive director of the Sydney Institute.

Source: The Sydney Morning Herald

related links :

• The National Museum of Australia
• White Settlement in Australia
  In his recent book, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Keith Windschuttle charges academic historians with a series of wilful misrepresentations intended to portray Australia as a society marked by atrocities against Aborigines. In this important debate, Keith Windschuttle and Pat Grimshaw outlined competing accounts of white settlement and explained what’s at stage in the debate.
  AUDIO MPeg3 files: Chair’s Introduction | Keith Windschuttle | Patricia Grimshaw | Discussion Part I | Discussion Part II
• Cradle of culture but stories boring: museum review
  16 July 2003 - The National Museum of Australia had a firm grip on our indigenous history and culture, but when it came to story-telling, particularly of post-European settlement, the new institution was often just plain boring. That was the conclusion of the long-awaited review of the museum carried out by Melbourne academic John Carroll and a team of three other experts from around the country.
• One country, two histories
  17 January, 2003 - The Guardian (UK) - Conservative Australian historians rewrite accepted view that colonists massacred Aborigines. When a historian publishes a book accusing his peers of poor scholarship, most people would dismiss the ensuing argument as just another academic row. Not in Australia, where a dispute over history has broadened into a public debate which threatens to change the politics of race.
• Decrying the memories of Mistake Creek is yet further injustice
  27 November 2002 - Paul Sheehan uncritically accepts and repeats historian Keith Windschuttle's dogmatic denial of any non-indigenous responsibility in relation to the killing of Aborigines, including women and children, at Mistake Creek in the East Kimberley. In so doing, he conveys a falsepicture upon which he bases some criticism of me. I am led to respond only by reason of the hurt that Sheehan's article, if left unanswered, may cause to the Kija people of the region.
• Pieces in the 'Puzzle' of Australia
  9 June 2001 - International Herald Tribune - The brand new National Museum of Australia here has brought together, for the first time, the story of Aboriginals with the cultural history of the European settlement of Australia.
• Australia's shock of the new
  28 May 2001 - The Guardian (UK) - The National Museum of Australia seems to be designed to shock, rather than educate, says Patrick Barkham.
• Debate rages over "peaceful" white settlement
  16 April 2001 - Tony Jones speaks with Henry Reynolds and Keith Windschuttle. Henry Reynolds is one of Australia's most influential historians, who's responsible for some of the most comprehensive and original research, documenting the violence on Australia's frontier. He's written nine books and is presently a research professor at the University of Tasmania. Historian Keith Windschuttle's recent series in the conservative magazine 'Quadrant' attacked the work of Henry Reynolds and others. He's also the author of 'The Killing of History', how literary critics and social theories are murdering our past and he's the publisher of Macleay Press.

Further information: history issues page - includes news index and external links

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