WELL, THE BOYS DID OWN IT, RIGHT?

The great diversity of Australian life is lost in the boy's own view of history. (Ann McGrath, July 24, 2003, Online Opinion)

Captain Cook and cricket caps. The review of the National Museum of Australia, with its heartfelt yearning for the return of great-white-bloke stories, makes for rather vexing reading.

Predictably, the review team's maiden voyage of museum discovery washes them up onto the familiar shore of great male discovery narratives. This lost white Australian dreaming doesn't get messed up by facts about the usurpation of Indigenous land and human rights and doesn't foreground women. In their proposed upstairs/downstairs narrative of Australia, terra nullius stays downstairs where it belongs. Captain Cook and other ocean-going discoverers get reified upstairs. Non-British immigrants go altogether, unless they can make good cappuccinos.

The panel's plan starts with Circa, the multimedia introduction to contemporary Australia that's extremely popular with all age groups. Circa is criticised on various grounds but mainly for presenting a diverse range of opinion. The three majority panelists recommend replacing the two major galleries Nation and Horizons with two chronological "white history" exhibitions - "European discovery to Federation" and "Federation to contemporary Australia".

The first would begin with Burke and Wills; the second with a 1961 world record Test crowd at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. The previous track record of such themes at inspiring Australians is weak. Remember the Centenary of Federation? Maybe not. While making Federation a central framing device for two main gallery treatments, even the review panel suggests that Federation is a bit too boring.

The review's findings are influenced by an undisguised yearning for a grand, if somewhat schoolboyish, national narrative. Commending the "courageous warrior hero" stories of Homer's Iliad or the American Wild West, they mistakenly believe coloniser cowboy epics are deeply unifying narratives. Although few references are cited, the report's intellectual underpinnings conform with Keith Windschuttle's Quadrant article of September 2001, which lamented the absence of grand historical narratives in the National Museum. The review panel has obligingly filled in the dots with the outlines and textures of a highly exclusionary and tired formula.

In its vision of nation, the panel does not reject differing versions of history, but it certainly rejects multiple identities, contested identities, interrelated identities of nation.

The Left makes two contradictory arguments about Western history: on the one hand, they point out--seemingly correctly--that a variety of prejudices and chauvanisms led to a culture overwhelmingly dominated by white Christian males, with all others being discriminated against, even oppressed; but, on the other hand, they argue that the study of what is important in Western history should not predominantly focus on those men and the culture should not primarily be attributed to them.

The motivation driving this incoherence is fairly obvious: Western culture is mankind's greatest achievement and everyone wants to be able to claim not just a piece of it, but a major piece. Sadly for them, their first argument has convincingly proved that the second is false.

However, it is one of the crowning accomplishments of Western men that though our past has not been the product of a terribly diverse group of people, our future will be, precisely because of the ideology the non-diverse ancestors handed down to us and the inevitable and eventual triumph of the idea that all men are created equal. Women, blacks, etc., have shaped our recent past and will continue to shape our future and will do so because they have been empowered by the ideas of dead white Western males. Why not then celebrate those men and their ideas? Posted by Orrin Judd at July 28, 2003 12:17 PM