Museum Transformations. Группа авторов

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      THE INTERNATIONAL DIFFICULT HISTORIES BOOM, THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF HISTORY, AND THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AUSTRALIA

       Bain Attwood

In recent decades many nation-states around the globe have found it necessary or useful to address the burden of their pasts. British social anthropologist Sharon Macdonald has coined a term to delineate the nature of this phenomenon: “the international difficult histories boom” (2009c, 7). The problematic of difficult histories, she points out, lies in the fact that troublesome pasts that are now recognized as significant cannot be readily accommodated by nation-states because they are contrary to their positive image of themselves (Macdonald 2009a, 1). This change is deeply unsettling. As Benedict Anderson (1991) argued some time ago, peoples mainly come to regard themselves as part of a nation as a result of reading, hearing, and seeing narratives about the nation; but, more than this, those narratives, and especially historical ones, are the primary reason why nations command what Anderson called “profound emotional legitimacy” (4, 6). This means that it is especially important for any national community to have an account of itself that convinces its members that the polity is a moral good. Conversely, a nation’s loss of certainty regarding this can threaten people’s identification with it. Hence, nation-states must continue to produce stories about themselves that persuade their members that they are worthy of their love. In this chapter I investigate the manner in which the National Museum of Australia, in the opening decade of the twenty-first century, sought to negotiate the difficult histories that were increasingly being told about the nation’s “black history,” the problems it encountered in doing so, and how it sought to resolve these difficulties.

      In drawing attention to the rise of difficult histories, Macdonald (2009c, 7) has suggested that the phenomenon is the result of a complex amalgam of historical factors that have often been poorly understood. On the face of it, it makes sense to attribute the increasing prominence of difficult histories in contemporary museology to the growing influence of international forces such as the rise of human rights, antiracism, and decolonization or, more specifically, to what has been called identity politics, in which minority groups around the globe have sought recognition in the public sphere by articulating histories that highlight their oppression, loss, and suffering and seek reparation from the nation-state for this. Yet there are undoubtedly broader forces driving the international difficult histories boom, not least the fact that the past itself has been enjoying a boom in the public life of most democracies (Chakrabarty 2001). We will return later to the implications of this phenomenon, which can be called “the democratization of history.” Most importantly, perhaps, majorities and/or state agencies have themselves become involved in recounting much the same kind of stories about their nation’s past as those told by minority groups (Macdonald 2009b, 93). Indeed, it can be argued that many nation-states have adopted a new discourse characterized by a language of contrition, regret, and apology in which they acknowledge and even undertake to make amends for historical wrongs perpetrated in their name; and that they have done so in order to redeem or affirm the moral worth of the nation and thereby manage the problem that difficult histories have presented in respect of their legitimacy (Olick 2007, part II; Macdonald 2009c, 6–8).

      This development has placed a premium on a politics of sentimental feeling (Berlant 1999) and more particularly the transparent and sincere performance of it. In this context, museums, and especially national ones, have had an especially important role to play, Macdonald suggests (2009c, 8–9), because they are a particular kind of media complex that can provide affective encounters, which are perceived by many as more authentic than narratives presented in the form of disembodied words. Certainly, museums such as the National Museum of Australia have situated themselves and their work in the context of the international difficult histories boom (see Casey 2001, 7, 9).

The international difficult histories boom has made itself felt in democracies around the world, but the form in which it manifests itself in each case is determined in large part by particular circumstances. Much discussion has been devoted to famous examples such as Germany (in respect of its Nazi past), yet it can be argued that the phenomenon has been especially marked in settler societies such as Australia, Canada, and New Zealand and that its problematic nature is actually more fraught and so more difficult to resolve in these cases than it is in the betterknown ones. These settler nations have come to be seen as founded on their original dispossession and destruction of indigenous peoples, and the legacies of that past are deemed to be embedded in the very economic, cultural, social, and political structures of these societies. In the closing decades of the twentieth century, these nations sought to address these difficult histories in order to refound themselves on more just principles (Johnson 2008, 2011). In the case of each, or at least Australia, a series of historical factors predating the 1990s and 2000s were crucial to this process, and they must be grasped if we are to understand the rise of difficult histories, the ways in which the National Museum of Australia tried to grapple with these, and the problems it encountered in trying to do so.

Refounding settler nations

      In the wake of World War II international movements concerned with both racism and rights forced nation-states like Australia, Canada, and New Zealand to pay greater attention to the needs of their indigenous peoples. The demands made at first to overturn racially discriminatory policies and practices and to grant citizenship rights to aboriginal people could be accommodated relatively easily. They amounted to a call for inclusion within the settler state and assumed a future in which the importance of racial difference would recede. However, beginning in the mid- to late-1960s, indigenous peoples increasingly demanded indigenous rights and even asserted that they were sovereign entities. The distinctive nature of these demands were harder to assimilate because, apart from anything else, they rested on the articulation of histories that confounded the ways in which these nations had imagined their past, present, and future, not least because they rested on an assertion of the aboriginality of the indigenous people and thus their status as the nation’s “first peoples.” At much the same time as these settler states had to wrestle with this difficulty, they were confronted by the need to redefine their sense of themselves as a consequence of a marked decline in the value of Britishness by which they had long figured their national character. In Australia’s case, Britain’s weakened economy

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