What's Past is Prologue

“….what's past is prologue, what to come

In yours and my discharge.” The Tempest Act 2, Scene 1.

The recently opened National Museum of African American History and Culture is a staggering achievement. Located in a prime position on Washington’s mall, the museum is an imposing and thought provoking architectural presence, at once part of but apart from the raft of other galleries along the mall.

Rightly acclaimed both for its design, but more importantly its symbolic importance, its establishment implicitly challenges Australia to reconsider its own record in documenting and acknowledging the history of our First Peoples.

The genesis of the museum can be traced through advocacy and agitation over more than a century, recounted in the short account of its establishment by Mabel Wilson: Begin with the Past.   It parallels in some respects the establishment of the National Museum of the American Indian whose enabling legislation was passed by Congress in1989. That gallery adopts (in my view) a less satisfactory approach which emphasises the distinctiveness of the hundreds of different tribal groups and their traditional cultures.

The new museum adopts a more eclectic and unified approach, which traces the origins and history of slavery in the Americas, the pathways through to the civil war, reconstruction, and the arrival of the so-called Jim Crow laws which reversed most of the gains of reconstruction, and in turn the process of incremental deconstruction exemplified most potently by the passage of the Civil Rights Act due to the political skills of Lyndon Johnson. Along the way, it highlights the myriad and indispensable contributions of individual African Americans and communities to making the USA what it is today.

As President Obama said in his powerfully insightful speech opening the Museum only a few weeks ago, African Americans are not the underside of American history, but are an essential part of it. His speech is worth reading or listening to for its sophisticated defence of the proposition that understanding national history framed in terms of the lives of both the powerful and the powerless is essential to any attempt to map a national pathway for the future.

The heart of the Museum starts 80 feet below ground level, with vivid accounts of both the history and experience of the trans-Atlantic transportation of African slaves, a transporting in both physical and moral terms. The displays then wend upwards to develop into accounts of the experience of slavery, the heart wrenching break up of families, resistance and uprisings, the freedom railroad to the North, the political machinations which led to the Civil War, and the post bellum outcomes, initially positive and ultimately deeply discriminatory.

All of this is told through numerous individual narratives, of both famous advocates such as Frederick Douglas and Harriet Tubman, and ordinary people and families. This part of the exhibition is backed up by thousands of exhibits, documents, photographs, and objects. On the top level is an extraordinary and almost overwhelming melange of the tangible contributions of African Americans to the nations identity, from popular culture in all its manifestations through to the intellectual, economic and artistic contributions of both individuals and African American culture generally.

My purpose is not to describe the content of the Museum in detail so much as to give a sense of its extraordinary vitality and energy, alongside its tangible evocation of the injustice and suffering engendered in the name of commercial and economic ideology, and ultimately directed to the imposition of political domination and subjugation.

The Museum was a throng of African American visitors, vibrant, laughing, exuberantly taking in the top floors; while down below visitors were deeply subdued, apparently stunned by the visible proof of both the cruelty involved and meted out to their ancestors and struggling to take in the implications of it all. I too found it extremely moving, and was surprised that there weren’t more visitors in tears. It clearly had a deep impact on virtually every visitor. The stated purpose of the Museum, that it is designed to tell a national story as much as the African American story, appears to be how African Americans are interpreting it too.

For me, the object which has stayed in my memory is the stone block, two-foot-high, two-foot square, originally from a town square where it had been used to display slaves as they were auctioned to the highest bidder. It had been preserved over the centuries because it had also been used by Henry Clay and Andrew Jackson to give stump speeches, and this was the plaque which had been affixed. President Obama too mentioned this object in his opening speech, pointing out the irony that it had only been preserved because two powerful white men, both opponents of abolition, had given unmemorable speeches upon it.

So what are the lessons for Australia? Our history has strong parallels with North American experience: British heritage, institutions and colonialism, a shared national language (albeit one that is increasingly being replaced by Spanish in the US), genocidal wars against Indigenous peoples, nation building on a foundation of immigration and individual enterprise. Our national paths differ in key respects too: Australia’s roots are in its convict heritage; the US has come through the scarifying furnace of slavery and civil war; our immigrant inflows have come at different phases in our national experience.

Australia is yet to make the leap of imagination to establish a national museum dedicated to acknowledging our Indigenous history, and the shared experience of Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians since settlement. Our National Museum has dedicated substantial resources and effort to explaining and recording the history of our Indigenous peoples both before and after settlement. One of three key objectives in its legislation relates to Indigenous Australian histories. However, from the start it was hog-tied by a push from a small group of conservatives appointed to the Board who opposed any attempt to tell the truth about our Indigenous history, labelled it as ‘black armband’ history, and who ultimately forced the removal of Dawn Casey the first Director of the Museum, and a strong advocate for including our national Indigenous narrative in our National Museum as well as for a standalone Indigenous History Museum. The current strategic plan appears to gloss over the Indigenous objective, though the Museum does have an active Indigenous unit and newsletter focussed on Indigenous histories as well as an Indigenous Reference Group.

The US experience tells us that we have a long way to go in Australia in terms of our preparedness to acknowledge the standalone identity of Indigenous peoples. Our insistence on limiting our formal expositions of Indigenous history to our National Museum, and even then to constrain the way in which we tell the story, suggests an underlying insecurity about who we are and how we have treated Indigenous citizens.

I mention this not to re-prosecute controversies of the past, the so called culture wars, nor to criticise the National Museum of Australia, but to make the comparison between Washington and Canberra, the US and Australia, and to draw relevant lessons form that comparison.

We believe ourselves to be engaged in a national dialogue on recognising Indigenous Australians in the Constitution, but are stuck in a revolving door where we have movement but no progress. Without an agreed proposal for change, we are unlikely to succeed in recognising our nation’s Indigenous history in our founding document any time soon. While Museums are not solutions in themselves to issues such as inequality or disadvantage, or political recognition, they are powerful indicators of the tenor of the national conversations which underpin our national political debates.

In the light of the US experience, Australia’s failure to establish a national museum of Indigenous History and Culture amounts to a lost opportunity. Far from reinforcing separatism, the US experience suggests it would send a powerful signal of inclusion, while providing a platform for Indigenous achievement and contributions to be celebrated and contextualised.

Such a Museum would provide a firmer foundation for the inevitable political conversations about our intertwined national and Indigenous histories as we grapple with issues such as the republic, Indigenous recognition, and more diffusely, our distinctive national identity in a globalising world. A world which is shaped in our imaginations by global media corporations largely based in the US; where social media is ubiquitous and paramount, news feeds are tailored to our internet search histories, and events in the US have ten times the news value as similar events in China or Nigeria.

If we value our national story, our national narrative, if we believe in an Australian national identity, then we should take deliberate steps to institutionalise it and give it a tangible recognition in the national capital. We have a War Memorial, an Australian National Gallery, a National Library, and a Portrait Gallery. The logical next step is a National Museum of Indigenous History and Culture.