Kevin Rudd's Indigenous museum was a good idea. But let's not leave it to politicians
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Version 0 of 1. Former prime minister Kevin Rudd’s failed “secret” plan for a national museum for Indigenous Australians highlighted a negligent omission in this country’s celebration and preservation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture and 60,000-year civilisation. In 2009 Rudd, it seems, had in mind a “significant architectural monument and educative institution” in the vein of or Washington’s Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian or, perhaps, the recently dedicated National Museum of African American History and Culture. But Labor rolled him, the idea died and was never, apparently, resurrected when he was back as prime minister in 2013. Rudd, it should be said, was not the first prominent Australian to determine the need for such a museum. Indeed, plenty of people continue to agitate behind the scenes for an institution rooted not only in history, anthropology and archaeology but in living culture, which would fill the present yawning void. Museology, especially in the Indigenous space, is on the edge of a significant global reformation. The Smithsonian is in some ways at the vanguard. Increasingly, museums that supposedly serve as portals into Indigenous worlds must re-evaluate whether their primary purposes rest in collecting or repatriating, keeping or returning. These vexing questions are challenging some of the world’s oldest collecting institutions with significant Aboriginal holdings, including the British Museum, which has some 6,000 Indigenous Australian pieces in its collection. The British Museum is under increasing pressure, not least from Australian Indigenous peoples, to permanently return items in its collection, many of which were acquired under circumstances that were at best ambiguous or at worst extremely violent, as frontier conflict raged across the Australian continent in line with dispossession and pastoral settlement, after invasion in 1788. In Canberra earlier this year Richard West, chief executive of the Autry Museum of the American West and founding director of the Smithsonian American Indian museum, said that in the past decade both museums had returned tens of thousands of objects to contemporary native communities in the US and other parts of the Americas. “In the early days I would occasionally receive a letter decrying my purported decimation, as the director of the NMAI, of the native collection over which I presided,” he said. My response was simple, and it ran along these lines. First I am required to abide by federal laws with which, by the way, I happen to agree. Second the NMAI’s collections originally consisted of almost 1,000,000 objects, and we have to date repatriated 30,000 of them which leaves us with 970,000 – I think we will be able to remain in business as a museum. In addition, as direct collateral of repatriation, both the NMAI and the Autry learned much more about their native collections. Meanwhile John Carty, the new head of anthropology at the traditionally conservative South Australian Museum, says he is determined to “open the museum’s custodianship” of the collection and to start new discussions about best-practice models of curating Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artefacts. “There are many questions, many discussions, to be had about how and why museums must really only hold these things in trust for their owners – there are big discussions about how some materials should be reconnected with their people and country of provenance, loaned to them or, indeed, even returned,” he said. So, precisely what functions should any new institution dedicated to celebrating and showcasing Indigenous Australian history and culture serve? Canberra already has the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) – a celebrated research and collecting institution with an extraordinarily rich collection of archives, material and oral history, and much else besides. (It is, unfortunately, not physically capable of mounting large public exhibitions.) The National Museum of Australia also has a significant holding of Indigenous material. So, too, does the National Gallery of Australia (the only national institution in Canberra with a monument dedicated to the many tens of thousands of Indigenous Australians who died in frontier conflict). Significantly, the national museum is also the repository of remains belonging to hundreds of Indigenous Australians whose bodies were stolen – after murder in frontier conflict, from institutions or from their graves – and amassed in collections throughout the world. Museums in every Australian state have holdings of Indigenous human remains that cannot – for a variety of reasons – be returned to country. There is a pressing need for a “keeping place” for these remains. The national capital would be the ideal place for it. Why not, then, combine such a keeping place with a memorial to those Indigenous people killed in the frontier war – and a museum/educational institution dedicated to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, culture and history? Such an institution could serve as a repository for Indigenous items returned from overseas museums such as the British Museum (which invariably cite as an impediment to repatriation the unavailability of suitable permanent keeping places for precious items in Indigenous communities). It could be a hub for repatriated items that could be returned temporarily to country or loaned to other smaller regional museums and galleries. The primary aim of the collection function of the museum could be reconnecting – physically, spiritually and in a literal sense of ownership – communities with long lost, significant cultural items. If mutually agreeable conditions could be met, such items could be returned to country or be hubbed in and out of Canberra to communities, nearby galleries and museums, as part of the conditionality of repatriation. But they would belong once again to communities to which they’d be taken on visitation. Think, then, of a kind of reverse museum – one that exists not to appropriate and amass the cultural property of Indigenous people, but rather to repatriate them, to effectively turn collections back over to country. Successive federal governments have stalled on the need for a keeping place. Tony Abbott, self-declared prime minister for Indigenous affairs, sat on a report recommending the immediate establishment of a keeping place. The Rudd-Gillard-Rudd governments, cognisant of the need, never moved on it. Rudd, of course, was the PM who apologised (in tightly legal terms so as to avoid reparations) to the stolen generations. But he never moved adequately on acknowledging the evils frontier war and the many other malevolent elements of Australian history that stemmed from invasion, violent dispossession and assimilation. There is a pressing need for a cutting edge museum/keeping place for the Indigenous Australian. But best we keep it out of the hands of the politicians. |