Anot Her Country

(ESSAY] ANOTHER COUNTRY jmiN riT/.GEII.ALD EXAMINES OUR CIIINI:SI: HERITAGE MUSEUMS AROUND the time, some years ago, that the ABC OJuntryHour shifted across to Regional Radio, there was also something of a shift in the identity of country museums. I am going largely on my memory of the old country museums here. Once in a while on a weekend drive into the cou:ltry, my mother would persuade my father to drop in for a visit at a local-history museum. For the children it went something like this. We'd walk into a squat building made up of many small rooms cra mmed full of bric-a-brac. Moving from one room to another we'd wince at old dental equipment, squint at tiny printed tins of gramophone needles, marvel at ingenious meat safes, and pump out a heavy rhythm on a treadle sewing machine. My mother would linger over displays of Aboriginal crafts from the mission station, while my father would stroll out into the forecourt, pause in front of a hefty item of rusting farm equipment, and tell us about barbed wire, the Sunshine Harvester and the untutored genius of Australia's pioneer farmers. The museums my mother and father visited when they were children no doubt dif fered from the ones we visited toge·:her in the 1960s. Museums are certainly different today. One obvious sign of c':-eange is increasing technological sophistication indicated by video installations, laser shows, computer graphics, and digitally enhanced audioanimatronic rep cesentations of bushrangers and [59] JoHN FITZGERALD drovers' wives. Ethnkity also has a higher profile. Up in the New South Wales high countrythere are memorials to Baltic tunnel-builders, elsewhere exhibitions dedicated to Italian cane farmers, and, in rural Victoria, a fair sprinkling of Chinese heritage centres. In the late 1980s these monuments to Australia's postwar migrant heritage inspired a backlash in northern Queensland. 'With all these migrants,' a local guide confided to Donald Horne on a visit to the construction site of the Stockman's Hall of Fame in Longreach,'people are forgetting their true Australian national identity'.1 By this account, the Australian Stockman's Hall of Fame was erected in Longreach to baJance the I mmi gration Department's Secret Room of Infamy down in Canberra. The novelty of ethnicity is, I suspect. easily overstated. The way my father told it, Irish d airy farmers were the most ingenious of our pioneers aJI along. In any case, museum stories of isolation, alienation, hard grit and ingenuity have barely shifted register from the days they told of dairy farmers from Din gal to the more recent legends of hardy g oldminers from Guangdong. Non-metropolitan museums continue to celebrate contr ibutor y history-the contributions made by ordinary Australians to national development-just as they have always done. A more pronounced shifthas been the tendency to identifyAustralia's ' unsung heroes' (as they are known in Longreach} with those who forsook the cities and coastal settlements for the inland. The most powerful inspiration for the Australian Stockman's Hall of Fame was not the spectre of'all these migrants' taking over Australia but more likely a deep-seated resentment of all those other Australians who opted for the easy life in the big cities. The same might be said of many a local-history museum in what was once countr y Australia. Local museums have ch anged not just their names, their content, their focus, or their level of technical wizardry, but the place they occupy in regional identities and politics. Signs of this shift can be found in the ways museums now describe themselves, in the ways they choose to define their particular locale, and by their growing preference for commemorating generic themes rather than identifiable people or actual artefacts and events . What was once a museum may now be a heritag1: centre. A town or a shire museum has likely as not become a regional heritage centre with promotions and exhibitions directed towards the national tourist market, to international visitors, even to overseas investors. The most successful have been supported by targeted regional funding initiatives of state or federal governments--or both, in the case of the privately run Australian Stockman's Hall of Fame. Anorher Country At the same time, Australia's regional communities have been uncovering unique combinations of settlement history and pc·pulation movement that distin guish each place as a community from every ott.er region in Australia. There is something impersonal about this process. Ethnkity serves as a code referring to groups with identifiable cultural characteristics ra:her than to people who actually lived in the area. Chinese, at any rate, typically feature in regional heritage centres as an ethnic group rather than as identifiable individuals. The appearance of Chinese in this or that region provides a fortuitc•us link between the region and 'Asia: They rarely appear as Chinese Australians--as families or individuals from China who happened to live in the area under the impression that they were Australian. Paradoxically, this interest in the cultural pa rticularity of regions creates an entree for e thn icity in the most unlikely of places. No city-based pastoral company, railway manager or law firm, least of :Ill a bureaucrat from Ca nberra, will ever be elevated to fame in Longreach, de>pite the crucial roles of cities, markets and governments in creating the stockman of legend. In time, though, Chinese cooks and storekeepers, Afghan camel- herders and Japanese pearl-divers will in all likelihood be nominated for the Hall of Fame. Their ticket of entry will be their regional heritage, not their ethnic ont!. Regional heritage centres are discovering not ethnicity, but regional ethnicity. .. This development is illustrated on a small scak in the proliferation of Chinese heritage sites and museums in Victoria. Chin•!se heritage museums are to be found all over the country. Darwin has a Northern Territory Chinese Museum in the Chung Wah Community Hall, located beside the Chinese temple in Wood Street. Perth also has a Chung Wah Association. Although not technically a museum, the Perth association occasionally hc·sts exhibitions on the premises. Chinese community associations in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne from time to time furnish artefacts and documents on O.inese settl ement and history for exhibitions in state and city museums, includ.ng the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney. Some heritage sites exhibit on the web. <)ne of these, 'Golden Threads', is a travelling exhibition on Chinese communit? history in regional New South Wales supp orted by a virtual museum. Created and directed by Janis Wilton, of the University of New England in Armidale, th1: online museum is sponsored by half a dozen brick-and-mortar museums and h•:ritage agencies, and mounted on 161] )OHN FITZGERALD the web by Australian Museums Online (http://amol.org .au/goldenthreads). Its travelling exhibition is scheduled to tour Wagga, Narrandera, Bathurst, Welling· ton, Manilla, Uralla, Maryborough, Bendigo and three of the capitals--Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide-in 2001 and 2002. For regional Chinese history, however, Victoria takes the cake. An impressive $3.2 million Gum San Chinese Heritage Centre recently opent.xl at Ararat, 200 kilometres along the Western Highway from Melbourne. In 1857, Chinese sojourners walking overland from the port of Robe past Mt Ararat n route to the fabled Sandhurst goldfields, in central Vic toria, discovered the Canton Lead at the present site of Ararat . In recent years, Ararat councillors and business leaders have been jog· trotting to the Chinese Consulate-General in Toorak and marketing their city as the only one in Australia founded by Chinesein the golden days of the nineteenth century. Today Ararat lures Communist Party secretari1s and corporate investors from the People's Republic with promises of new things to be found in Gum San (Gold Mountain). The Gum San Centre claims to be an important base for the 'understanding and discovery' of Chinese culture in Australia. It has already made one impor tant discovery. Excavating earth for the foundations near the site of the original Canton Lead, building workers came across an underground mine constructed in the Chinese style. The mine offerssubstantial refutationof the popular furphy that Chinese miners lived offthe tailings of hard· working dinkum diggers. 'Understanding' is cultivated through cultural empathy with 'the Chinese'. Visitors enter through a Chinese-style forecourt and garden designed with an eye to the geomantic principles of feng shui. Next comes a short video, followed by a series of static and interactive displays expanding on the story of the 'Chinese people', 'their culture' and their search for gold in Gum San. Interactive facilities 'allow the visitor to follow the journey of the Chinese as they leave their families and loved ones in China, and travel thousands of miles over sea and land to a foreign country in search of their fortune: Not a single identifiable person is represented in these displays, nor in the centre's expensive online and interactive facilities. In place of personal identity the designers have striven for ethnic authenticity. Pride of place in the Gum San exhibit is taken by four strategically placed life-size fibre-glassfigures of Chinese miners. One depicts a person sitting cross·legged on a boat, another, a man trekking from Robe with a load on his back, the third a miner pushing a wheel·· barrow on the goldfields, and the fourth shows a man panning for gold. These are unmistakably Chinese men. 'Every aspect of the Chinese miners from their {62] Another Counrry body shape, their stance, how they carried their leads, their eye contact, down to their hairs tyles and clothing had to be right,' said the designer.

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