Remembering indigenous dispossession in the national museum: The National Museum of Australia and the Canadian Museum of Civilization

Introduction: Remembering national history

In an age when liberal democracies are marked by ‘a general crisis of meaning’, Graeme Davison (2000) wrote at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the past seems to matter more than ever, and remembering it has become a national preoccupation (pp. 2–5).The degree to which this is so has been significantly driven by the unsettling of national history that has occurred over the last decades of the twentieth century. This has been a particularly vexed process for former settler nations, which were built on the necessarily ‘double-edged’ history of European settlement and indigenous dispossession (Curthoys, 1997: 31), and for whom constructions of national identity have required particular scrutiny.

Although anxiety about the meaning of settler national identity is not new (Neumann et al., 1999: xvi), it has taken on a new kind of intensity at a time when remembering national heritage has equally entailed a growing imperative to acknowledge historical injustices against indigenous peoples. As many have argued, this imperative can be seen in light of the international momentum towards social justice that has influenced western democracies since the turn to political and economic decolonization after World War II and the rise of civil rights movements from the 1960s (for instance, Brooks, 1999; Barkan, 2000). By the close of the twentieth century, this process has been manifest not only in the increasing empowerment of indigenous peoples to negotiate political self-determination and restitution in claims to appropriated lands and material culture, but also in a growing shift of historical consciousness amongst settler populations. The year 2008, for instance, saw Australia’s and Canada’s governments apologize to indigenous peoples for past practices of assimilation, and the past two decades have seen Aotearoa New Zealand formalize an ongoing series of land settlements with Maori peoples in recognition of breaches of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi. This turn to acknowledging and examining the effects and legacies of settler colonialism has not only been important to the revision of national histories but has increasingly taken shape within a transnational context.

This apparently recent remembering of historical injustices against indigenous peoples has not simply arisen from the changing historical consciousness of a post-colonial generation. Devolved from the forums of national history-making, there has never been a time when the realities of colonialism have been hidden from view. Throughout the twentieth century indigenous peoples in settler nations have campaigned for recognition of rights, and prior to the formal organization of political bodies, have always held historical counter-narratives of dispossession that differ from, as much as they make use of, positivist national histories (for instance, Nicholson and Sykes, 1994; Ray, 1996; Watson, 1997; Nugent, 2005; Healy, 2008). Across settler-descended communities, too, the realities of indigenous dispossession have always been visible, though they have appeared and disappeared over time (Healy, 2008: 192). As Mitchell Rolls recently put it in relation to Australia, WEH Stanner’s famous conception of a ‘great Australian silence’ on indigenous dispossession could over the course of time just as readily be conceived ‘as filled with noise’ (2010: 16).

Yet the momentum of indigenous rights over the last decades of the twentieth century – represented in Australia by ‘watershed’ moments such as indigenous protests during the 1988 Bicentennial celebrations, the 1992 High Court Mabo decision and the national ‘sorry’ campaign – has brought indigenous issues to the forefront of public consciousness and called into question the very concept of a shared national history (Curthoys, 1997: 31). Rising attention to indigenous rights has triggered a similar process in other settler nations, and an accompanying rise of indigenous historical scholarship in the wake of the civil rights movements of the 1960s now means that no representation of national origins is possible ‘without reference to indigenous cultures’ (Gore, 2002: 53).

Although the call to acknowledge past practices of colonialism and assimilation has arguably produced an irreversible shift in the historical consciousness of settler-descended populations, history-making in settler nations has always been predicated on a process of ‘dis-remembering’ or ‘necessary forgetfulness’ (Attwood, 2005: 243; Turner 1999: 37), one that is not simply cancelled out by recent imperatives to ‘remember’. The enduring undercurrents of forgetting in national history-making are reflected in the controversies that have arisen in the public domain about how colonial settlement, and its counterpart of indigenous dispossession, should be remembered. What is at issue here, as Graeme Davison (2000) notes, is not ‘history’ per se but ‘the uses to which stories about the past are put’ (p. 10).

This article will compare how recent processes of re-visioning the national past have been addressed by the new national museums of two settler nations, the National Museum of Australia and the Canadian Museum of Civilization. Both national museums were developed in the light of parallel debates in both countries about the legacies of the colonial past and about how to acknowledge historical injustices in the present. In keeping with a contemporary museum agenda for social inclusiveness and debate, both museums were committed in the course of their development to avoiding a singular or positivist story of national origins and identity. How have these national museums engaged the imperatives of a post-colonial age to remember the histories of indigenous dispossession within the national story? And why has remembering these histories been limited by a persistent nostalgia for a more unifying vision of national identity?

Reconciling with ‘shared histories’ in Australia and Canada

There are numerous parallels between recent Australian and Canadian political efforts to forge a program of reconciliation between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples and to acknowledge injustices of the past. Throughout the 1990s governments in both countries supported national inquiries into the history of assimilation policies that saw indigenous peoples forcibly removed from their families and culture, recommendations from which were contained in Australia’s ‘Bringing them Home’ National Inquiry report of 1997 and Canada’s Royal Commission on Indigenous Peoples report of 1996. In Australia, the Council for Indigenous Reconciliation was established in 1992 under the Keating Labor government. Canada’s 1998 Indigenous Action Plan, ‘Gathering Strength’, emerged from the Royal Commission report with a focus on strengthening frameworks of First Nation self-governance and investing in First Nation communities and economies. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established in 2008 as an instrument for healing Canada’s history of assimilation and residential school abuses.

The degree to which such government-directed reconciliation agendas have held both practical and symbolic purchase has been much disputed. In a recent critique of the reconciliation process in Australia, Dodson (2007) argues that it has failed in recognizing ‘that modern Australia has been built on removing the continent’s resource wealth from Indigenous ownership and control’ (p. 22; also Brennan et al., 2005). In largely disconnecting the present from the past, critics have argued, ‘reconciliation’ under the Howard administration entailed a refusal of the opportunity to take trans-generational responsibility for the nation’s historical injustices (Davison, 2000: 7; Thompson, 2002: viii-ix). Unlike Australia, where historically no formal recognition of indigenous land ownership took place, Canada’s history of treaty-making and subsequent negotiations over their perceived failures has meant that the political imperatives of reconciliation have perhaps held more weight, a point Paul McHugh (1999) has also raised in explaining differences between the political imperatives of history in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand (pp. 112–113). But although Canada has arguably established stronger frameworks for bicultural cooperation in its reconciliation efforts, critics have also suggested that the recommendations of the 1996 Royal Commission report have been watered down through insufficiencies of funding and political will, leaving much to be addressed in the political recognition of First Nation peoples. They argue further that the positive view non-indigenous Canadians hold towards addressing indigenous injustices is largely predicated on the assumption that they are not ‘expected to change anything about themselves’ (Denis, 1997: 33).

Above all, agendas for reconciliation and for respecting cultural diversity within the nation will remain problematic when they are tied to ideals of shared history and social cohesion. As Goodall (2002) has argued, in Australia the reconciliation process has proceeded on an implicit ideal of national history as a ‘sum total which will produce a unified, consensual account’ rather than ‘the recognition of entangled, interacting pasts and of contested interpretations of the same events’ (pp. 8–9). Similarly, Attwood (2005) suggests that the task of reconciling with contested histories entails asking ‘how different historical narratives can talk to one another’ rather than attempting to dissolve them in order to ‘effect closure on a divided “past”’ (pp. 249–255). Baeker (2002) also raises this point in relation to the future for cultural policy in Canada. Meeting the requirements of social equity and justice, he writes, demands recasting the idea of social cohesion ‘not as the absence of conflict’ but as the capacity to accommodate it (p. 193). The reconciliatory ideal of shared history is made particularly problematic in Australia and Canada by the ways in which settler national identity in both countries has long been shaped by a foundational myth of peaceful occupation, which has obscured the active dispossession of indigenous peoples by the colonial state. This sits in direct contrast to other settler nations like Aotearoa New Zealand or the United States, for instance, where the nineteenth century history of frontier land wars has always been part of the national story. Reconciling with the past in settler countries like Australia and Canada, then, which require a more radical recasting of the national story of benign settlement, involves settler populations accepting a ‘clash of historical truths’ (Attwood, 2005: 255).

In Australia, the problematic nature of any ideal of shared history was revealed by the ‘History Wars’ debates that took place in the public sphere over the past decade and a half. As they unfolded in the media, the History Wars were unhelpful to the degree that they served to polarize what Curthoys (2006) has called a history ‘of land seizure, bitter frontier conflict [and] dispossession’ (p. 8) against a cherished national saga of pioneer struggle and progress. Yet even as the media-driven debates revealed a conservative backlash against the so-called ‘new’ Aboriginal history, their public visibility contributed significantly to reshaping an orthodox foundational story of peaceful occupation by bringing Australia’s colonial history of frontier wars to the foreground of public consciousness. In Canada, an agenda for reconciliation has proceeded without the same level of heated debate about the nature of indigenous dispossession. That this is so can largely be seen as a measure of Canada’s enduring pride in its history of centralized development, which saw land cession treaties signed with First Nations people on its expanding western frontier, and the ‘protection’ of First Nations people presumed to be ensured by their status as British subjects.

As in Australia, where the rise of a critical historiography since the 1970s on frontier wars has significantly challenged the myth of peaceful settlement, a parallel Canadian critical historiography has examined the coercive strategies through which, by the end of the nineteenth century, the Canadian Dominion had ‘thoroughly conquered the First Nations’ (Graybill, 2007: 58–59). Unlike Australia, however, this critical historiography has had little visible impact in the public domain upon Canada’s historical story of ‘gentle occupation’, not least because of Canada’s sense of distinction from the ‘omnipresent’ story of the openly violent American frontier to the immediate south (Coates, 1999: 141). But although there have been different degrees of public controversy in Australia and Canada about re-visioning the national past, the revitalized significance of indigenous history and politics in both countries over recent decades has significantly affected how any concept of national identity can be represented.

National history in the museum

Such issues have had a dramatic impact on the museum sector over the past two decades as museums have worked to transform their social role in an age concerned with the contingencies and contestations of national identity. Until this time, museums across the west enjoyed a long history of contributing to a definition of civilization geared around the principle of progressive modernity (for instance, Bennett, 2004). These were museums in which ‘civil society articulated its universal values’ and in which ‘History provide[d] a narrative of and an explanation for the order of things’ (Healy, 1994: 38).

Yet as a large body of museum scholarship has detailed, a generation of post-colonial critique has fuelled an age of revision for museums all over the world. This changing museum culture has been evident in Australia and Canada since the 1970s, when museums in both countries began turning from a focus on natural history and ethnography to one on social history, in particular one inclusive of indigenous history (for instance, Hansen, 2005: 90.4; Ashley, 2005: 9). If the ‘evolutionary museum’ once dominated as the cultural authority on western civilization and modernity (Bennett, 2004: 2), by the 1990s it had overwhelmingly become superseded by a ‘new museology’ or ‘second museum age’ (Harrison, 1993: 165; Phillips, 2005: 83) which emphasizes the practices of cross-cultural collaboration and social inclusiveness. Indeed, it is now orthodox to observe that a museum mandate to represent different historical perspectives, to foreground cultural diversity, and to ensure community inclusion has radically replaced an ‘old’ museology of collecting, classifying and exhibiting. Few museum professionals would now disagree that a primary role of contemporary museums is to promote ‘understanding of social change and… diverse points of view’, as well as to be ‘active contributors to broader public debates’ (Kelly and Gordon, 2002: 158).

At the same time, this new museology has sparked controversy as its inclusive, self-reflective model jostles with traditional expectations of the museum’s role to uphold conventional forms of historical knowledge. Over the past two decades museum exhibitions everywhere have been subject to competing expectations about how museums should handle contentious histories and about their terms of interpretation (for instance, Davison, 2006; Ferguson, 2006; McIntyre and Wehner, 2001). One prominent case in the early 1990s that dealt with the history of colonial expansionism was the 1991 controversy surrounding the National Museum of American Art’s ‘The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier’ exhibition, which invited visitors to critique America’s foundational story of manifest destiny as heroic endeavour and to re-imagine it as a ‘vast exculpatory fiction’ (Hughes, 1991). By challenging an orthodox account of American origins, the exhibition explicitly sought to contest a deep-seated story of national identity that might otherwise be taken for granted. Yet a subsequent wave of high-profile criticism that the exhibition was politically driven and anti-American indicated the degree to which the re-interpretation of national myths has remained a controversial and, in some quarters, unwelcome undertaking by the contemporary museum. As Luke (2002) drily observes, ‘The West as America’ controversy exposed the degree to which museums as national institutions are still expected to appear objective while in fact remaining subjective in a ‘highly nationalist fashion’ (p. 4).

These issues have a particular resonance for museums at former colonial sites where indigenous peoples were actively dispossessed by settlers. The rise of public engagement with indigenous issues in Australia and Canada has reshaped how museums interpret indigenous content in exhibitions, and how they consult with indigenous communities in producing a shared ‘community of practice’ (Kelly and Gordon, 2002: 156). A museum culture that would embrace inclusiveness was endorsed in both countries in the early 1990s with the almost simultaneous adoption of a national policy framework recognizing the obligations of museums to indigenous peoples. Australia’s 1993 ‘Previous Possessions, New Obligations’ policy framework emerged, Dolan (2001) has argued, not only as a reflection of changes within the museum industry over the previous decade, but also as a symptom of the Keating government’s development of the nation’s first cultural policy in line with a reconciliation agenda (p. 1). Canada’s 1992 ‘Turning the Page’ policy framework arose from a similar climate of change, and was also triggered more specifically by controversy about inadequate levels of indigenous consultation that emerged over the Glenbow Museum’s 1988 ‘The Spirit Sings’ exhibition, which then became emblematic of national debates about First Nation people’s empowerment in how their cultural heritage could be represented.

The existence of national policy frameworks has meant that, since the 1990s, museum practice in these former settler nations has included an active mandate to consult with indigenous communities in the production of museum exhibitions, to engage in processes of repatriating indigenous cultural property, and to undertake exhibition projects based on principles of community participation and collaboration. In both countries, new national museums for the twenty-first century – the National Museum of Australia and the Canadian Museum of Civilization – arose from this climate of change in museum policy and practice. The question is how, and with what impact, these national museums have negotiated recent struggles over the national history, most particularly around the relationship between European settlement and indigenous dispossession.

The National Museum of Australia opened to the public in 2001 and was conceived with a vision in keeping with the reflective practices of the contemporary museum to address the national history ‘in the broadest possible sense’, to ‘speak’ with many voices, and to promote debate about questions of ‘diversity and identity’ (McIntyre, 2006: 16). With these principles in mind, the overarching aim in the development of the Museum’s permanent exhibitions was not to present a chronological national history as a teleological arc, but to capture something of the diversity of national symbols, voices and perspectives. These principles are visible across the museum’s permanent galleries, which over the first decade of the museum’s life have been redeveloped within a set of abiding guidelines: to perform as a social history museum that will reach a wide audience, to stimulate debate, to address the overarching themes of land, nation and people, and to provide a special place to the history of Indigenous Australia (NMA Guiding Principles for Performance). Importantly, then, although the museum contains a dedicated First Australians Gallery, which introduces visitors to some of the range and diversity of indigenous cultures from primarily indigenous perspectives, the historical and contemporary significance of Indigenous Australia is also represented across the museum’s various thematized galleries. The museum’s aim was to create a forum for dialogue that would interlink indigenous and non-indigenous peoples within a pathway of histories, inviting reflection on the terms on which concepts of national identity are built (Casey, 2003).

Given the prominence of the history wars in Australia when curators were developing plans for the National Museum, it is not surprising that the First Australians Gallery included an exhibit on ‘Contested Frontiers’ which spoke to the history of indigenous dispossession. The exhibit presented modes of indigenous resistance to British occupation as well as the active campaigns of settlers, mounted police and colonial governments to disperse indigenous peoples from their lands. In bringing the violence of indigenous dispossession to the fore, the exhibit’s presence in the National Museum served as an index of contemporary challenges to an orthodox national story of peaceful settlement, and an explicit engagement with the History Wars debates that were current in the public domain.

Almost as soon as the museum opened, the ‘Contested Frontiers’ exhibit in particular and the National Museum in general came under public attack, most vocally from History Wars protagonist Keith Windschuttle. Specifically, Windschuttle (2001) attacked the ‘Contested Frontiers’ exhibit’s reference to the ‘Bells Falls massacre,’ which the museum had represented through a Wiradjuri perspective, claiming that this representation recycled an undocumented myth lacking in historical verification. Most tellingly, Attwood (2006) has argued, the subsequent controversy surrounding the exhibit revealed less about the verity of the (European) historical record than about the assumption of ‘white or settler Australians… that the National Museum is their place to tell stories, or the place to tell stories in their way’ (p. 109).

The museum’s entire presentation of the national story as ‘a dynamic forum for discussion and reflection’ was strongly contested, leading to a broad-scale review. The 2003 report of that review (National Museum of Australia, 2003) expressed the tensions that face a national museum about how much it should embody a cohesive story of the nation in comparison to its responsibilities to present diverse and even controversial perspectives on the national past (for instance, Attwood, 2004; Carroll, 2004; Message and Healy, 2004; Davison, 2006). In line with its policy to refresh its permanent exhibitions, since 2010 the ‘Contested Frontiers’ exhibit has been replaced with an exhibit titled ‘Resistance’, which through four well-documented case studies explores how indigenous people in what is now Western Australia, Queensland and the Northern Territory responded to colonial occupation through both armed resistance and peaceful strategies. Although in many ways it replicates the intent of the ‘Contested Frontiers’ exhibit, the ‘Resistance’ exhibit avoids the contentiousness of the ‘Contested Frontiers’ exhibit, which through the filter of an indigenous historical perspective more directly addressed the violence of dispossession.

The history of physical and cultural violence experienced by indigenous people is also addressed elsewhere in the museum: for instance, the 2010 exhibit ‘Yiwarra Kuju’ tells the story of the Canning Stock Route’s sometimes devastating impact on indigenous societies, while the 2010 travelling exhibit ‘From Little Things Big Things Grow’ traces the history of indigenous political struggles for justice. Yet the inevitably dynamic nature of museum exhibits, as well as the need to maintain attentive audiences, indicates some of the difficulties faced by national museums in negotiating the complex relationship between contested histories and national identity.

The National Museum of Australia is not exceptional in this regard. Comparative analyses of the National Museum of Australia and the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, which opened three years earlier, have examined their parallels in enlisting recent reassessments of the colonial past to engage current social debates about the complex history of settler and indigenous relations (Gore, 2002; Veracini and Muckle, 2003). On Te Papa’s opening, controversy over the museum’s bicultural approach was sparked by its perceived polarization of the national story, and has since continued with criticism: on the one hand, that it does not adequately present New Zealand’s European cultural heritage (Gore, 2002: 234–235); and the suggestion, on the other, that it does not adequately address continuing Maori land rights struggles, which still ‘connect the nation to its colonial origins’ (Williams, 2005: 90).

In some key respects the issues that faced the National Museum of Australia, as well as Te Papa, have been echoed at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, which after long planning opened in two stages in 1989 and 2003. Like the National Museum of Australia and Te Papa, the Canadian Museum of Civilization was developed in line with a contemporary understanding of the role of the museum to encourage public dialogue rather than to encompass an assumed history of the nation. Canada Hall, which opened first in 1989, rejects a teleological model of the progressive Canadian state in favour of an animated ‘panorama’ of the diversity of Canadian heritage. Like these other national museums, Canada’s national museum emphasizes the significance of indigenous history within the national story in a dedicated First Peoples Hall. Developed in collaboration with a consultation committee comprising indigenous representatives from across Canada, the First Peoples Hall seeks to present the richness of indigenous cultural traditions, as well as the contemporary political struggles still facing First Nations peoples today.

Like the First Australians Gallery at the National Museum of Australia, the First Peoples Hall at the Canadian Museum of Civilization is explicitly designed to foreground the significance of indigenous history and contemporary concerns in a re-scripted vision of national identity. This emphasis on apprehending the national story through ‘different eyes’ is continued across both national museums in exhibitions that avoid a progressive model of national history and that reflect, as Phillips (2006) puts it, the concerted efforts of contemporary museums ‘to deconstruct and supersede the histories that visitors already “know”’ (p. 79). Yet, as at the National Museum of Australia and Te Papa, this approach at the Canadian Museum of Civilization was marked by controversy. The absence of a clear story of national development in Canada Hall incited criticisms of historical inadequacy and a bent towards ‘political correctness’ (Dean and Rider, 2005: 38), leading to an external review which again highlighted the tensions between a contemporary imperative to represent different understandings of the national past and an enduring expectation that a national museum should prioritize the nation’s ‘familiar touchstones’ and thereby serve as a ‘beacon’ by which its citizens ‘can orient themselves in a rapidly changing world’ (Dean and Rider, 2005: 39).

The constraints created by tensions of expectation about what this national museum should ‘do’ and ‘be’ are further complicated by the fact that, unlike at the National Museum of Australia, indigenous and non-indigenous histories at the Canadian Museum of Civilization are self-contained in the First Peoples Hall and Canada Hall, which were planned as separate projects with different schedules and budgets. As Dean and Rider note (2005), since Canada Hall remains the single most popular feature of the museum, this separation of indigenous and non-indigenous Canadian histories could enable visitors to ‘leave the CMC thinking that Canadian history begins with the arrival of the Europeans’ (p. 36; cf. 10).

Given the weighty expectations of national museums, the potential to explore alternative or even competing perspectives on history and identity might be more available at regional and provincial museums, since these can address a more specific historical network of events, relationships and places. Australia and Canada both yield strong examples of how, through the changing museum culture of the last two decades, indigenous historical knowledge has been prioritized in ways that either challenge or bypass altogether a positivist history of settler national identity without attracting the kind of controversy that has arisen at the national level, and that offer alternatives to settler-oriented historical narratives (Simpson, 2007; Kelly and Gordon, 2002; Carter, 1994; Krmpotich and Anderson, 2005). Yet if such localized, collaborative museum models might hold wider potential than national museums to re-script settler histories of place and identity from an indigenous perspective, regional museums might just as likely face similar constraints as national museums from a competing set of demands, including an expectation to reinforce settler identification with place at the expense of indigenous perspectives (for instance, Dolan, 2001: 10-11), or state intervention into what kind of history the museum can represent (for instance, Carment, 2002: 171). That this should be so is hardly surprising, since as state institutions, both regional and national museums are in many ways bound to broader political frameworks and the expectations of administrative boards which might hold a liberal mandate for change, but might just as readily envision a more conservative museum role.

Conclusion

Much has been written in recent years about the potential of contemporary museums to shape as well as be shaped by changing conceptions of history in the wake of a movement across the west revising positivist accounts of the nation state (for instance, Chakrabarty, 2002; McIntyre and Wehner, 2001). It is little wonder, then, that across the world they should have become sites of struggle over national history and identity. Many museum commentators regard this as generative in a positive sense; Kavanagh (1999), amongst many others, has argued that the turn to historical revision in the museum ‘has the potential to be one of the most effective and thought-provoking means of generating debate’ (p. 173). In Australia and Canada, as elsewhere, museum professionals have regarded the trend in museum culture towards pluralistic, collaborative and self-reflective modes of representation as a positive opportunity to engage recent historical debates about colonial national origins.

Yet as criticisms of these national museums – as well as criticisms of other national museums such as Te Papa and the National Museum of American Art – have equally demonstrated, struggles over how to remember national histories of settler expansionism are not over. Three decades ago, in considering the emerging engagement in Australian settler society with social justice for indigenous people, historian Colin Tatz (1979) expressed the view that it was unlikely to produce meaningful change in part because ‘a mainstream society can never empathize with an oppressed minority’ (pp. 3–5).

Thirty years on, Tatz’s projection seems both too pessimistic and still relevant. On the one hand, a tipping point has been reached with a broad shift in public historical consciousness such that settler populations are now compelled to acknowledge the connections between indigenous injustices in the past and ongoing struggles for indigenous rights in the present. On the other hand, as Yarrow (2010) puts it, to this day in both Australia and Canada ‘there has been little or no unambiguous recognition of indigenous sovereignty’ (pp. 85–86). The problems of this ‘infidelity’ to the past, as Yarrow describes it, are reflected in the public controversies that have followed our national museums in their efforts to invite reflection not only on the nature of our settlement histories but more particularly on the ways in which these histories have been shaped and remembered. With reference to the National Museum of Australia’s review, Hansen (2005) observes that such controversy points not just to the question of how to present national history in a museum context, but perhaps more tellingly to the ‘very different conceptions’ of history in our society (p. 90.2). Other commentators have agreed. Given the vexed nature of national narratives in the current social climate, Dean and Rider (2005) suggest, it is too much to expect that our national museums should be able either to keep pace with ‘contemporary historical and political priorities’ or to meet the competing social roles ‘that critics on all sides demand’ (pp. 44–45).

Their point seems particularly appropriate in light of the fact that it is hardly the business of museums to reconstruct history, contested or otherwise. Yet the difficulties that have dogged museums as forums for representing different perspectives on history usefully open onto the larger question of how and why indigenous and non-indigenous communities in settler societies remember a past which at one level they share and at another they do not: re-examining national history has become of concern everywhere, but ‘the rhetoric of identity in history’ (Neumann et al., 1999: xvii) remains both complex and ambivalent. The observation that moving towards historical justice entails not so much the pursuit of a shared history as an acceptance of differing and even competing historical understandings is an apt one for settler nations whose histories have always been ‘double-edged’. In so far as national museums of countries with contested pasts have worked to engage this double-edged history in the service of contemporary social debate, they serve as a measure of the changing cultural and political priorities of post-colonial societies. At the same time, however, the controversies they have attracted might be less indicative of a linear turn from forgetting to remembering, than of a continuing vacillation within settler societies between an imperative to remember and a desire to forget.