post-modern dominant narratives

Since I'm on a roll as regards blogging, here goes another...


I visited Australia's National Museum in Canberra this week. It's a curious place.

Constructed in the last decade, here is a museum of the current age. It is far from being constructed along 19th century lines, with separate galleries for natural history, technology, artifats from colonial days,and so on. Instead, there is a blended presentation, exhibits arranged according approximately to a time-line of Australian existence.  Many are presented alongside words from those for whom they were of particular significance: the whole impact is multi-voiced, with a sense of the rich diversity of cultural heritage.

And yet, there is unmistakably a single framing narrative.  The Story of Australia --- that time line --- is even set out at the beginning, in an expensively-produced multimedia presentation (complete with multiple screens and seats on a rotating dais).  Without any narration, it shows a series of images (many at once, on different
screens), but the totality is the single Australian Story.  [For those unfamiliar, The Story is one of a unique and diverse ecology, with the Aboriginal people living in harmony with it; European colonial settlers bring great dislocation and more than a little pain; eventually colonialism declines and Australia takes its place as a nation in an increasingly interconnected world; previous hurts are gradually diminished through reconciliation with the Aboriginal peoples. This is The Story; there is no other.]

There is essentially just one path through the museum: it follows The
Story. The perspective is almost entirely a social history: the
nautral history, for example, is presented through the narrative of
those who helped to understand it. We learn about the duck-billed
platypus from the tale of the fellow who established that though it is
a mammal, it does lay egges: he proved this extravagently by
collecting a thousand of them to study.

This presentation leaves little room for science, or anthropology, or,
indeed, much rigorous mind-stretching at all. I was reluctantly coping
with that lack, when I came upon a gallery devoted to the Aboriginal
Australians. Here, the over-arching story was The Dreaming: the
Aborignial mythical creation tale.  Here, we had a largely
uninterpreted presentation of Aboriginal myth and culture, including
the poentially surprising information that Aborginies have lived in
Australia "since time immemorial" (because that is how they conceive
of themselves).

Presenting that history is fine, but it did seem a little reminiscent
of what I've heard of being in the Creationist Museum. It's an
interesting story, but quite out of keeping with scientific - or even
historical - scholarship. There seems a missed opportunity here to
present - perhaps in a separate gallery - what we know about early
migration into this continent.  There was a tantalizing mention of
some cave paintings which date from the time "when the sea-level rose
150 metres and changed the whole landscape": but no mention of
time-scale (nor facsimiles of the paintings - I recall that
photographs of these are taboo).  An interpretation of the changes to
the landscape over millenia, illustrated by aboriginal artifacts,
would have been fascinating.

My point, and my fear, is that it is too easy to allow acceptance of
many voices to become a substitute for critical thought.  Mistreatment
of Aboriginal people has made their culture and history politically
sensitive, of course, but I fear that to refuse to ask rigorous
questions is a cop-out.  There were lots of children in the museum:
I'm pretty certain that they went away with The Story strongly
impressed upon them.  I'd be quite surprised if many went away
stimulated to think hard thoughts about how we know what we know as a
society, how to organise ideas, and how to make sense of the world we
live in.  That seems like a decadent waste of a museum; a true missed
opportunity.