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History on display
It is time for a
museum of the
First Peoples
of Australia.
By Ragbir Bhathal
16
U
nlike the African-Americans who have
recently received their own museum at the
gateway to the prestigious Smithsonian
museums in Washington, and the American Indians
who have the National Museum of the American
Indian, we have still to see a standalone museum of
Aboriginal history, politics, art, music and culture that
tells the collective history of the Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander peoples and the history of Australia
through Indigenous eyes, and not the eyes of Anglo-
Australians and others.
Even the convicts who arrived in Sydney with
Arthur Phillip have a museum (the Hyde Park Barracks
Museum) devoted exclusively to their history in a
prime location near the NSW Parliament House in
Macquarie Street.
It would appear that Australia wants to forget
the history, politics and culture of the First Peoples
of Australia. We need a museum that gives us and
future generations of Australians a holistic view of
their triumphs, suffering, darkest episodes, freedom
fighters, massacres and treatment as the "flora and
fauna" of this country, as federal MP Linda Burney put
it a few years ago. One recalls how they were herded
and had chains slung around their necks in their
own country. As 19th century French philosopher
Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote, “man was born free
but everywhere he is in chains”. This was amply
exemplified in the case of the Aboriginal people.
They were not recognised and are still fighting
to be recognised in the constitution of their own
country. It is time the premier of NSW bit the
bullet and built a museum of the First Peoples in
Campbelltown, close to the massacre site of the
Aboriginal people at Appin, or in the Botanic Gardens
close to the Opera House. This was a government-
sanctioned murder of innocent men, women and
babies. The Aboriginal people were not troublesome
blacks but freedom fighters who were fighting for
their land and country, which should have rightly
belonged to them by international law.
Take a tour of Australia’s state and regional
museums and you will be surprised at the way
the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’
story, which stretches back over 60,000 years, is
depicted. Most of the displays are just tokenism or
sanitised or represented from a white historical and
anthropological point of view. The Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islander voices of dissent are not seen
through black eyes but through the eyes of the
descendants of the invaders. For example, in Sydney
their story is displayed in a natural history museum