As museums have been traditionally considered custodians of the past, and the cultural heritage therein, I would like to start by drawing on two celebrated quotes which seek to define the past:
'The past is another country'Both encapsulate what we will be examining at CIDOC - how, if the past is indeed another country, museums are the embassies which act as the representative of that country on foreign (that is contemporary) soil. Museums achieve this by bringing history to life through the variety of means - objects, documents, performances, cutting edge technology - to ensure that it is never dead, that it sits alongside and illuminates the present without, as the latter quote implies, oppressing it.
'The past isn't dead: it isn't even past'
Australia is well suited to host a conference on diversity - a country which celebrates the diversity of its people, whose ancestors came from places as different as Ireland, Lebanon, Greece and Vietnam, in bringing their unique values and experience to contribute to the vibrant and colourful mix that constitutes Australian society at the turn of the century.
A country where we still marvel at and are humbled by the natural physical diversity that surrounds us - from lush rainforests, to ochre deserts, to sparkling waters swarming with vivid marine life.
All Australians have their own stories to tell. Indigenous Australians bring a multitude of stories reflecting the wisdom and knowledge of a people of extraordinary antiquity. People whose cultural heritage was largely disseminated pictorially and orally - who know the importance of stories as the most compelling and immediate way of bringing information to wider audiences and communities.
The museum community must never forget this - increasingly, people are not looking to museums as repositories of objects or warehouses for dusty antiquities.
Museums must have stories to tell, stories that help people recognise what is unique in their own cultural heritage.
Museums should not be in the business of just safeguarding ancient artefacts - they should be in the business of using these artefacts to tell stories. There is no question that the artefacts themselves are essential to the role of museums: people come to see objects - whether items of everyday use or elaborate works of art - to give them a tangible sense of how other people lived in the past and in other cultures.
But museums must always be looking for innovative ways to use the objects to tell their stories, whether by presenting them in stimulating environments employing different media, or juxtaposing them against other related objects..
Indigenous Australians did not and do not translate their culture through monumental architecture or, for the most part, elaborate material culture. Instead, Australia's Indigenous people chose storytelling that blended the physical - dance, the landscape, wildlife and mythical creatures - with the metaphysical, the ever present spiritual world, that wove all the stories of the Dreaming into a consolidated whole - a database if you like - that people could visit, revisit, translate and interpret as they sought to understand their own history, culture and environment, and those of others.
This is what museums should be for: cultural storybooks where objects and technology come together to tell stories, stories that change with each visit, not because they have been replaced with new things, but because on each visit, if the visitor asks different questions, the juxtaposition of material, whether artefact or data, will provide different answers.
The National Museum of Australia will be, on opening, a premier cultural heritage resource for the Australian nation. As such, it will need to present a series of lively, lucid and compelling stories covering all aspects of Australia's cultural heritage - from indigenous and European settlement, to the present day and beyond.
I have the frustrating but exciting task of coordinating the construction and design of the National Museum of Australia and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies on Acton Peninsula in Canberra, the National Capital. I greatly look forward to joining other Australians and international visitors in March 2001 in attending the opening of the NMA and experiencing the stories it has to tell. In the end, it is the Museum staff with contributions from a range of people that will decide how they want to tell those stories. But, needless to say, we all have our personal views on what we would most like to hear.
Over the next two and half years the challenge for Museum staff is to put in place exhibitions that will tell a multitude of compelling stories, drawn from the diverse variety of artefacts in its collection, some 170 000 objects covering various aspects of Australia's social history and cultural heritage.
Addressing the community's needs was also a major consideration when selecting the design for the Museum complex on the Acton peninsula - the site, formerly host to a hospital, is already well integrated in the community life of Canberra. With the spectacular lakeside landscape it is hoped that the complex will become a cultural precinct - a community forum in both the modern and ancient uses of the term - where people will gather together to experience Canberra's community life even if they are not there specifically to visit the Museum.
The complex will feature a digital theatre, an outdoor amphitheatre and a Gallery of Aboriginal Australia dedicated to displaying and interpreting Australia's Indigenous cultures. The Museum will also feature a temporary exhibition gallery which will host 'block-buster' exhibitions from Australian and international institutions and an orientation space, some 1000 sq metres, currently known as the Main Hall. This vibrant space will serve as a venue for major public and fund-raising events as well as exhibiting objects. There will also be the contemplative Garden of Australian Dreams which promises to be an extraordinary experience in its own right, but is also intricately integrated into the circulation and exhibition experience of the Museum.
All the major elements for the Museum's construction - architect, builder, exhibition designer, funding - are now in place, and we have just enacted this month the first physical step - turning the first sod by the Prime Minister - to mark the establishment of the cultural precinct which will feature the NMA as its centrepiece. This was preceded, quite appropriately, by an Indigenous smoking ceremony which cleansed the site of the association with death arising from the former location of Canberra's major hospital on Acton.
As I said in opening, the theme chosen for CIDOC98 is, therefore, strategic for the NMA development and will need to be considered and reconsidered as we work towards a successful opening of the Museum in 2001 as the flagship for Australia's Centenary of Federation celebrations.
Documenting Cultural and Natural Diversity could not be more relevant to Australia approaching the millennium. People of diverse cultural heritage - Indigenous Australians, 1st settlers in the 18th C, settlers from the gold rush and pastoral expansion in the 19th C, settlers from waves of European and Asian immigration in the 20th C - will come together in a true community forum and contemplate their shared cultural heritage and achievement.
It is the responsibility of the NMA to present their stories in innovative and exciting ways which will make the visitor to the Museum feel part of the story - that he or she is looking through an interactive prism, rather than on the outside of a window looking in.
This underscores the responsibility of museums to find new and stimulating methods of opening up their stories for popular consumption, comprehension and, in many instances, interaction. The NMA intends be a new kind of cultural institution, employing cutting edge communications technology. Not only does it wish to dispel the notion of museums as elite institutions whose messages are only comprehensible to a select few, it will have failed in its mission if a broad range of Australians do not find relevance in and access to the Museum's stories, and engage with them accordingly.
The NMA must also be a museum about history in the making. It is important for cultural institutions to take a broader view of their roles as custodians of historical and heritage data. In the future, it will still be important for museums to maintain their collections of historical manuscripts, films, objects etc. It will be equally important for them to have facilities which allow them to participate in the recording, interpreting and broadcasting of historical and cultural developments as they happen.
For example, the Main Hall and the theatre of the NMA will be promoted as a centre for political and cultural interaction among the people of Canberra in particular, and visitors generally. With imaginative promotion and programming, the huge video screen in the digital theatre could become established as a kind 'people's wall' for direct political interaction - 'history woven as you sit here' as it were.
Major political events, such as the recently held Constitutional Convention and the Wik debate, can be broadcast live from Parliament and followed with a discussion of events before an interactive audience, with two or more key participants.
Sophisticated media and communications facilities will provide the NMA with the capability to exchange media programming and data with schools, museums and other institutions around the continent and the world. This feature places the National Museum firmly at forefront of museum technology and is particularly appropriate for a national museum that will open in the new millennium with an aim to coordinating and facilitating museum activities particularly in rural and remote communities.
The NMA is already exploring possible projects through which the Museum could profitably collaborate with other research institutions, particularly the use of the Museum's broadcast facility for data service delivery to other museums and research institutions. Similarly, it will be increasingly important for the NMA, in common with other museums, to a develop a reputation for the electronic service delivery of lively and interactive educational material to tap into the already comprehensive on-line community within the Australian Secondary School system.
This educational angle is vital, as education is the only response to ignorance and prejudice. We must use the facilities and resources of the Museum to explore Australian identity in an inclusive fashion, rather than dismissively pointing to what Australians are not. This will be a cornerstone of the NMA's mission to portray an Australian heritage that includes recognising the significance and value of diversity.
On-line educational facilities will also be vital in communicating key messages from the NMA to Australians who live in remote communities and might otherwise be denied access. It represents one of the most practical and effective ways of bringing Australians together and undermining the 'tyranny of distance' that has long been an obstructive feature of communications in our country.
Australians are accustomed to finding imaginative and resourceful ways to bridge the gaps in communications imposed on us by our geography - for instance the flying doctor service and the school of the air, which continue to service the health and educational needs of people in remote communities. The technical facilities at the NMA will make it possible to take this tradition in new directions.
In addition to the potential for distance education offered by the Museum's on-line facilities, we are beginning to examine the possibilities for incorporating the new media technologies in the NMA as a means of facilitating communication between remote Indigenous communities - as well as other dynamic models of community outreach.
The Museum will establish links to remote regions of Australia through satellite dish, the Internet and other technical facilities, to present Australia from an Indigenous perspective - broadcasting performances from rural communities and displaying aspects of Indigenous cultural heritage in situ. The conference heard Dr Ric West speak on this subject. It is a very difficult issue and one from which museums cannot shy away. This will be a vital aspect, which it will need to continue to address.
This will be a pivotal aspect of the Museum's function. The NMA will be a place where Australians can see representations of Indigenous life, and at the same time it will be developing avenues through which culturally important objects can be returned to their communities. Accordingly, the Museum will impart its curatorial knowledge to Indigenous communities so they can conserve their artefacts.
Today there is a clear expectation that museum professionals will respect the cultural values and taboos when documenting or interpreting Indigenous objects in their collections, or the stories that those collections tell.
Within most cultures there are clear distinctions about what is public and what is private. Some matters can be discussed only in certain situations and with certain people. This is particularly evident in what are referred to in Indigenous cultures, such as my own, where references to certain ceremonies and rituals are generally forbidden in public, but there are also some examples within European Christian cultures, such as the sanctity of confession.
It is very difficult to give examples of private knowledge or secret or sacred objects because of their very nature. By contrast, most non-Indigenous cultures respect few restrictions on information, and until comparatively recently the same unbridled approach applied in museology and collecting. Objects and information were gathered, analysed, displayed and interpreted without any reference to any cultural sensitivity. Secret/sacred objects and skeletal remains were put on display. Recordings, photographs and movies of secret ceremonies were published. Knowledge was pursued, so it was said, for the sake of knowledge alone.
That is not to say that cultural sensitivities were completely disregarded. Often the sensitivities themselves were known, but considered subsidiary to the culture of the collecting institution - the sacredness of the object perhaps adding a titillating effect.
Repatriation of cultural property has been a hot topic in recent years, and the popular press has tended to sensationalise some efforts to repatriate cultural property, whether it be the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum or the Indigenous human remains collected by European and North American museums from sites in the Americas, Africa, Australia and the Pacific. The article on Dr Ric West's speech covered in the major Australian national newspaper The Australian, 'Museum tussle on native art', is a more recent example.
Museums have all too often, in the eyes of Indigenous peoples in Australia and throughout the world, been the despoilers, desecrators and robbers of Indigenous cultures.
Museums in Australia have in the past been no less imperialistic in approach than their counterparts overseas, and have collected the cultural heritage of Australia's Indigenous inhabitants, including items of special cultural significance, since the time of first contact with European colonisers. Museums in Australia are estimated to hold:
However, attitudes within the Australian museum community, as indeed within the international museum community, have undergone a significant transformation over the past 20 years. Most museums in Australia now have policies and programs, albeit limited, which acknowledge that Indigenous peoples have the right to decide what will happen to ancestral remains and secret/sacred objects relating to their community.
Many museums, including the National Museum of Australia, now work in partnership with Indigenous people. They have come to recognise Indigenous cultures as living cultures, with a rich and continuing cultural heritage. They also recognise the extent to which the cultural meaning of an object is enhanced if it is viewed in its proper cultural context, which can include its original cultural setting.
It is one of the paradoxes facing museums in their mission to document the past that often the most exciting and stimulating way to display artefacts is to give them back. Indigenous artefacts displayed in situ in their communities of origin - whether Arnhem Land or the Cape York Peninsula - carry with them a cultural resonance through their relationship to the community and physical environment that no amount of technical simulation can hope to replicate.
I have been fortunate to have been Head of the Australian Federal Government's Heritage Branch in a period which saw the implementation of a number of important programs designed to protect Indigenous cultural places and artefacts and to return Indigenous Australians' ancestral remains to their communities of origin.
This is not just an issue specific to Indigenous people. I mentioned the Elgin Marbles earlier as a focus for the repatriation argument in Europe. There is no question that these superb statues from the pediment of the Parthenon are displayed memorably and effectively in the British Museum. But anyone who has visited any of the museums at archaeological sites in Greece - such as the Kerameikos in Athens or the museum at Elefsina - knows the wonderful way that ancient Greek artefacts evoke a completely different story and significance when viewed in their original cultural environment.
These are the sorts of questions museums will need to address in the next millennium - to balance the right of specific communities to retain objects of distinct cultural value and the right of the general community to have access to the full complement of items included in its cultural heritage.
In some instances, as I have already alluded to, resolving these questions can be achieved by employing new technology-based approaches to conservation and documentation. If museums such as the NMA are truly to adopt the role of community fora that we all hope they will, they must be seen as having something to say to the entire community. The rapid advances in media technology that have taken place over the last few decades allow museums to address people in ways which dispel the notion of the audience as passive receivers of information.
It would be a serious mistake not to take advantage of the opportunities such advances in media technology present for museum exhibition design - such as theatrical settings and other interpretive exhibits. And this is not as revolutionary a concept as one might first think: in 18th Century Europe the voyages of Cook and other European explorers of the Pacific were presented to the public through exhibitions featuring special effects extravaganzas which used cutting edge technology to create simulated Pacific environments. The idea of making the transmission of history an interactive experience is by no means unique to our own time.
While this approach carries with it a variety of challenges, there is an abundance of truth in the old aphorism that challenges are also opportunities - opportunities to collaborate across the museum industry and the cultural sector, nationally and internationally. Opportunities to find new ways to make messages relevant, engaging and fresh, and to use creatively developing virtual/multimedia technologies Opportunities to explore new methods of documenting the past, which is central to both the preservation and communication roles of museums.
This conference is a chance to explore how original and innovative approaches to documentation can help shape museology for the next millennium, which builds on past strengths and expands in new directions.
By way of illustration, if we look at the turn of the last millennium - European history brings us an example of how imaginative recording of the past, using original media, can keep historical heritage alive and immediate in ways that can elude written documents.
Mention of the famous Bayeux tapestry immediately evokes to all who have seen it on display or in reproduction the vivid pictorial narrative depicting the story of the Norman conquest of Britain in 1066. It is an image that has remained fixed in the collective memory of Western Europe, and of countless students of European history in Australia and internationally, for nearly 1000 years now.
Why is this? What immediate relationship does William the Conqueror's victory over King Harold at the battle of Hastings almost a millennium ago have to the cultural heritage of Australian students as we progress towards the new millennium?
One would be tempted to say very little - but this would be a blinkered view. Those who rendered this dramatic and arresting account of a key event in their history had obviously thought long and hard about what we would describe as museology - about how the past could be captured and documented through clever use of media and kept alive so that the victorious message inherent in the historical narrative could still be heard and experienced clearly over the distance of time.
Here is the key to our focus as we examine what museology means to Australians - because Australians are drawn from a multitude of rich cultures, all of which have experimented, often for over thousands of years, with keeping aspects of their cultural heritage alive by keeping them immediate:
When we link such a formidable cultural tradition of documenting the past with the breathtaking possibilities offered by ever emerging multimedia and on-line technology, one gets a picture of the extraordinary potential of institutions like the NMA to present evolving stories that will see it, and similar institutions, become places that Australians, and people internationally will want to visit to engage culturally with their own stories and the stories of others.
Places where issues of national importance, both past and present, can be examined, and through the offerings of new technology debated, either live of virtually.
It is the responsibility of conferences such as this one to recognise the growing importance of museums as places which must examine and illustrate issues of national historical importance in ways that give them contemporary relevance.
This is reflected, to cite one example, in the extraordinary interest in New Zealand which greeted the opening of the Museum of Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington in February this year, which I was fortunate enough to visit recently.
While not everyone agrees with the approach Te Papa has taken to telling the various stories of New Zealand, the fact that the museum attracted 1 million visitors in its first 6 months after opening leaves no doubt that it has struck a chord with New Zealanders, who are visiting from all over the country with their children and friends to be part of a shared cultural experience.
The success of Te Papa also confirms the value of conferences such as this for sharing information and learning from each other's experiences to deliver successful outcomes in providing world class attractions of which all can feel proud.
Te Papa has overcome many of the challenges faced by the NMA. It is a new building, purpose built on the waterfront in the national capital. Its exhibition content features leading edge technology, including high-tech virtual reality entertainment, with a strong national theme.
It also recognises the special contribution of Indigenous people to the cultural identity of the nation through the Maori welcoming and meeting place, Te Marae, at the heart of the museum - the equivalent of the proposed Gallery of Aboriginal Australia in the NMA.
In a broader sense, the issues facing the NMA and Te Papa are the issues facing us all. National introspection seems to be a world wide phenomenon with the approaching millennium, as people search for new meaning in national identity and heritage.
Sometimes this works for good, sometimes for ill.
For ill, when examining one's cultural identity and origin carries with it an implication of superiority over other cultures.
But for good, when it brings the community together to examine and seek answers to collective questions - to take pride and comfort in cultural identity that is a mosaic; a compelling picture made of different parts. A number of diverse stories that collectively, make up a great anthology.
The date of the opening for the National Museum of Australia, to be co-located with the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, which has its own priceless collection of books, manuscripts and film material relating to Australia's Indigenous cultural heritage, and the ACT Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Cultural Centre, coincides with the celebration of a pivotal event in Australia's history.
In 2001 Australians will come together to explore our collective cultural achievement through celebrating, examining and debating the 100 years since our passage into nationhood.
This offers the NMA a rare opportunity - as part of a cultural precinct where not only national successes are explored, but also national mistakes. The key objective of the museum, as I stated at the beginning, will be communication - using dynamic and imaginative exhibition design, multimedia displays, broadcasting, the Internet, theatrical productions and all the other resources available to it to communicate compelling stories of Australia to the widest possible national and international audience.
In undertaking this task, if the NMA can play a part in identifying and exploring all aspects of Australia's cultural heritage, both the exhilarating and the painful, it can help promote understanding and acceptance. In doing this it will live up to its mission of examining the Australian experience from the many diverse perspectives that make up our historical narrative, while providing a living cultural reference point through which this narrative can develop new chapters.
Dawn Casey
October 1998