Exhibiting Australia: Developing the National Museum of Australia, 1997–2001

• Main Author: Wehner, Kirsten
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01.01.2007
• Subjects: Asian History; Cultural anthropology; History; Museum studies; Museums
• ISBN: 9780549431305; 0549431306

In 1997, the Australian government announced the development of a 'national showcase' for the National Museum of Australia. Four years later, in 2001, the new exhibitions and public programs facilities opened on Acton Peninsula in Canberra as the government's gift to the nation on the occasion of Australia's centenary of federation. This dissertation traces the development of the National Museum, and particularly its permanent exhibitions, between 1997 and 2001. I analyse the Museum as a site of contemporary nation-making, exploring how particular narratives of nation and history were constructed within the Museum's display practices. I elucidate how Museum producers engaged broader public cultural, political, institutional and museological structures as these were constructed within local, national and trans-national regimes of value. The Museum promoted narratives normalizing cultural difference within the Australian nation; seeking exhibition practices that included and addressed diverse social subjects. It de-centred an established, exclusionary Anglo-Celtic national imaginary, and promoted instead the world-view of an ascendant social fraction characterised by its cosmopolitanism. The Museum, I argue, interpolated a visitor defined as ideal by his or her capacity to use and consume 'difference' as a mark of distinction. In the process, the Museum reproduced, rather than contested, practices valorizing an elite social subject as the rightful constituent of the Australian nation.