Australia's controversial new national museum

By GREG ANSLEY

In the final stages of the construction of the new National Museum of Australia, a carpenter slipped down to the adjoining shore of Lake Burley Griffen, baited a hook with bread, and threw in a line.

At the end of his lunchbreak he returned with two European carp, the voracious marine equivalent of the cane toad, and released them into the large pond formed as part of the Garden of Australian Dreaming.

Unnoticed by any but his workmates and lost when the pool was later drained, it was a gesture as quintessentially Australian as any depicted in the eclectic collection that opened to vastly mixed response last Sunday.

After 25 tortuous years, Australia finally has a National Museum, minus carp or cane toad, but filled with the iconic and quirky, trivial and profound, and surrounded in the kind of controversy any cultural newcomer would relish.

If the echoes sound familiar to New Zealanders, it is not coincidence.

The development of Te Papa, its conceptual heresies and its adaptation of technology, were watched closely as the Australian National Museum fought for its own birth against political resistance, broken promises and blinkered vision.

"Te Papa was very influential for us," says museum media manager Martin Portus.

New Zealand's national museum was also a good indicator of the passion that would be aroused for and against an institution that broke architectural conventions, flouted perceptions of how national history and identity should be portrayed, and poked fingers into deep racial and historical wounds.

"We are doing everything very differently to what's previously happened in Australia and the world," says director Dawn Casey.

"In Australia, for the most part, the museums are natural history museums. We are a social history museum."

Casey is herself an unlikely director, with a story worthy of its own inclusion in the snapshots of Australian life that punctuate the story told in the museum: an outsider by gender, race and profession.

Casey was born in Rockhampton to Aboriginal parents of the Gulf of Carpenteria's Tuckala people.

Her grandmother was exiled to the hell of Palm Island, a virtual penal colony, for talking back to a white woman when Casey's mother was 12. The two were not reunited for 30 years. Her father was taken from a reserve as a youth to work on cattle stations.

Casey dropped out of school at 16 to have a child, but beat the odds to later enter business college - really, secretarial training - and to complete high school through a job with the federal Education Department that launched a career with the bureaucracy.

She was in Washington with the aid agency AusAid when she had a call offering work with the staff planning the museum. By the time she was given the top post in 1999, 12 years after the project was officially launched, she was its fifth director, enduring criticism for her lack of relevant experience.

This has been the way of the museum, first idly mooted before federation 100 years ago and given form in a 1975 inquiry that recommended a national institution that would explore both pre-European Aboriginal society and the relationship between European settlers and their environment.

Neither had been comprehensively addressed by any Australian museum. The concept would become the mission of the new National Museum.

But it was no easy road. New federal legislation for the museum was passed by Malcolm Fraser's Conservative Government in 1980; Bob Hawke's Labour promised a museum in time for bicentennial celebrations in 1988 but delivered nothing; Paul Keating's Labour tried to bury it; and, finally, John Howard brought it to reality.

In between times, the museum was an information hut beside the lake and a vast collection of 170,000 relics of Australian life - among them 95,000 Aboriginal stone tools - and a perpetual political storm.

Money has always been a problem.

Howard allocated just $A155 million ($186.4 million) for its construction - Te Papa cost $80 million and the new Museum of Australia $A288 million - and its acquisition budget has yet to top $A400,000 a year.

The nearby National Gallery of Australia paid $A4.6 million for David Hockney's A Bigger Grand Canyon; Melbourne's National Gallery of Victoria spent more than $A200,000 in February acquiring New Zealand artist Colin McCahon's 1965 work One.

Exhibition space shrank from an originally envisaged 10,000 sq m to 5300 sq m.

And when the time came to start work on the museum, another tragic Australian story was written.

The site chosen was Acton Peninsula in Canberra, a small promontory jutting into Lake Burley Griffen across from Parliament House and occupied by an abandoned hospital.

In 1997 the Australian Capital Territory Government turned the planned implosion of the hospital into a public picnic day, watched by tens of thousands of people.

In the disastrous blast that followed, 12-year-old Katie Bender was killed by one of the blocks of masonry that peppered the lake and foreshore like an artillery barrage.

Last week, architect Howard Raggat put all this behind him in an impassioned precis of the new museum, extending down the peninsular past a new and associated Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies to a striking complex of buildings.

Painted in bright greens, yellows and reds, looking a little like a sports stadium and capped with a long, angular canopy, it in a stark, even jarring, contrast to the lake and the tidy conservatism of downtown Canberra.

The museum's gentlest critic has likened it to a multicoloured oil tanker run aground.

Others are much harsher. Art historian Tim Bonyday says it is as puerile as it is ugly; Susan McCulloch-Uehlin, the Australian's visual arts writer, sees the museum as "standing out ungraciously ... like a lollipop in a box of fine Swiss chocolates."

And controversy does not stop at the doors.

The museum is formed into five galleries: the First Australians Gallery, tracing indigenous life from pre-European culture to land rights; the Stolen Generation and the fight for reconciliation; Horizons, tracking European settlement; Eternity: Stories from the Emotional Heart of Australia; Tangled Destinies: Land and People in Australia; and Nation: Symbols of Australia.

None are quite as they sound.

First Australians holds not only a vast collection of Aboriginal art and artefacts, but also personal histories told in words and on video, from Frank Gurmanamana trap-fishing to stories of children torn from the parents to the Torres Strait Islands culture assembled in a British expedition in 1898, and now the only record of pre-Christian society on the islands.

For the rest, the Australian story is told in snapshots that give a feeling of warm familiarity, a sense of the Australian identity but without its substance.

It is a world of cameos that personalise and shape to suburban scale even the most significant moments of Australian history, reducing federation to a half-size model of the temporary 1901 arch erected in Melbourne (Union Jack at its peak) and slipping by Reg Mombassa's Mambo art, The Wiggles and the World Wars with equal speed.

The human tales flit from offbeat Tasmanian coffin-maker Susie Aulich to Hungarian uprising refugee Geza Varasdi; from William Buckley, an escaped convict befriended by Aborigines who became famous as the wild white man, to Mary Reiby, transported as a child for horsestealing, who later built a thriving shipping and pastoral business and whose face is now on the $A20 note.

Lilja Brackmani's pedal-powered dentist drill is there - she brought it when she fled Latvia ahead of the Russians, but was never allowed to practice - around the corner from a 1995 neo-Nazi National Action poster urging Australians to shoot boat people out of the water.

There is explorer Charles Sturt's leather-bound telescope; bushwalker Jessie Luckman's boot; the preserved egg and embyonic stages of the platypus; a chunk of rabbit-proof fence; a prickly pear; the tragically-preserved corpse of a Tasmanian tiger; a buffalo catcher (a battered Toyota with a mechanical beast-grabbing arm on its side); a Victa lawnmower; and a model Hill's Hoist.

The museum even holds Phar Lap's enormous heart in a jar, and baby Azaria Chamberlain's black dress, with its red ribbons and lace edging.

Suburban Australia has yet to work out how it feels about the museum. Many of the early visitors were at once bemused, amused and impressed, though leaving with more a fuzzy warm feeling of familiarity than a sense of discovery or education.

But professional critics have charged with knives drawn.

Sydney's Daily Telegraph attacked the museum's "sneering ridicule for white Australia ... The whole museum is a lie, its design has been vilified."

Howard's former women's adviser, Pru Goward, complained that the lack of emphasis on women "reflected not just inferior scholarship ... [but] also decades of poor teaching, poor thinking and poor public debate."

In the words of Ned Kelly (not represented at the museum): such is life.