Dialogue: New Canberra museum highlights our unease

Australia has a new national showpiece which, when compared with Te Papa, says much about how the two countries see themselves, writes KERRY HOWE*.

Can you find a nation's soul in its national museum?

They blew up a hospital on the peninsula in Canberra's Lake Burley Griffin and built the National Museum of Australia. It is fundamentally different from New Zealand's Te Papa in its architecture, the way it depicts the histories and cultures of the country, and, indeed, in its underlying purpose.

These differences embodied in and within the respective buildings symbolise the many differences between Australia and New Zealand, and contain clues as to why Australia seems optimistically to be going places while New Zealand remains introspective and uncertain.

Te Papa's architecture is monumental, serious, formal, which its contents, often frivolously presented, cannot live up to.

The National Museum of Australia is housed in large but essentially low buildings arranged around the theme of a Boolean knot, and encloses a large Garden of Australian Dreams. Its highly unusual colours and unexpected shapes, profiles and textures include a centrepiece roller-coaster loop structure.

Unlike a monumental structure, it promises nothing, but excites curiosity, even puzzlement.

Its contents are arranged in themes - Tangled Destinies (land and people), Eternity (stories from the emotional heart), Horizons (immigration), Nation, and First Australians Gallery.

While much is cluttered, there unfolds logically a broad overview of Australian history, unlike Te Papa's idiosyncratic and decontextualised displays.

It is a grand story that includes the less respectable aspects of the nation's past - the treatment of Aborigines, White Australia policies, destruction of the environment, protests and controversies, political scandals. The most crowded spot was a small display and recorded story of Azaria Chamberlain.

The attempt at warts and all suggests honesty and, indeed, enhances the more traditional and triumphal features of Australian nationhood, such as a gritty self-dependence and egalitarian spirit, as well as the inevitable Flying Doctor and Victa mowers. Pre-European Aboriginal life is stunningly presented.

And there is also on display much that in New Zealand would be regarded as politically incorrect, such as a huge citizens' arch, which welcomed the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall and York in 1901.

Overall, there is a sense of respect for Australia's history, even its dark episodes, seeing it in a broader evolving context.

By contrast, New Zealand's public history is often characterised by a sense of unease, disapproval, and even guilt about our past. What is most revealing about Te Papa is what it leaves out.

The underlying theme of the National Museum of Australia is the emergence of a multicultural Australia. One might snort at such rhetoric, but it does actually matter. It facilitates a sense of different people encouraged to share a single country, participating, adopting some fundamental common values, without minimising group values and identities, to build a single nation.

The idea of multiculturalism enables a finite geographic and social space to be shared. Australia can be everybody's home.

The central Garden of Australian Dreams encapsulates this philosophy. It is only vaguely recognisable as a traditional outline of the country since it is derived from overlays of Australian space - tribal, political, cultural, meteorological, geological.

It ponders how landscape is constructed, written, imagined and projected.

"We sought to create a new place," said the architect, "which teeters between the strange and the familiar, the contemplative and the celebratory. But it is still one space."

New Zealand's dogged official insistence on biculturalism offers something quite different. It sets up a false binary world of two supposedly different people, which implies some sort of division or contest.

Moreover, it excludes those increasingly larger immigrant groups, such as from Asia and the Pacific Islands, who don't fit those two categories. It is a recipe for unease about ourselves and our country.

Which is precisely what Te Papa demonstrates with its sanitised and unbalanced presentation of our history, and with its reluctance to make any statement about our nation, where it has been, what it is, what it might stand for, what its shared values might be.

New Zealand has got itself into a state of uncertainty. Thus, Te Papa offers a jumble of images, events and artefacts that don't connect, have no contextual explanation, and so seem to offer minimal content.

This is not an argument that New Zealand should, as sometimes in the past, adopt a narrow form of cultural nationalism.

But, like Australia, we should think about ourselves as a single nation, one home for all of us, one that can be expressed in many ways, one that celebrates our growing social and cultural diversity and complexity, rather than fearing it.

And we should have more respect for our past, its achievements and its disasters.

* Kerry Howe, professor of history at Massey University, Albany, is a visiting fellow at the Australian National University, Canberra.