(ESSAY]
ANOT HER 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.
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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 secretari1 s 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. 'Capturing the right pose was critical. It was imperative that we re-created the natural stance of the Chin ese.'2 The generic character of the exhibition is partly explained by the centre's ambition to commemorate Australia's Chinese heritage rather than simply Ararat's. The city just happens to be a site where 'the Chinese' discovered gold and built a town in Australia. The impersonal character of the exhibit may also be related to the multimedia technologies that 'nthentically re-create' the lived experience of Chinese miners rather than invite ,•isitors to learn anything about them. This, too, is consistent with wider trends.Irmovation and creativity substi tute for knowledge in all walks of life in contemporary Australia. Were we to learn something about the actual miners we might soon discover they were chased out of town by the good citizens of Ararat a hundred years ago. Then again, maybe we would not. We shall never know. Visitors are simply invited to share the 'Chinese' experience, to learn a little Chinese language, to sample Chinese tea, and to 'research their own Chinese horoscope'. There are few facilities for visitors to research local Chinese community history or their own Chinese-Australian genealogy.
THE Chinese heritage of Beechworth, in the foothills of the Great Dividing Range just south of Albury-Wodonga, can be found i:1 the gravestones and burning towers of the local cemetery. In recent years the city has supported an active local history group and, more rece n tly still, a city government that is keen to market the region's heritage. The combination is potenti lily a fruitful one. Local author ities have announced the creation of a History Precinct to highlight the historical features of Beechworth, including its Chinese he::itage.' As with Ararat, however, the local Chinese heritage does not seem to include anyone who actually lived in Beechworth. The Beechworth History Precinct was launched in 2001 with a pyrotechnic sound-and-light show focusing on a number of well-known historical figures who hailed from the district, plus a number of others who happened to pass through Beechworth on their way to a highway 10bbery or an athletic feat. To be sure, the region's Chinese heritage receives special mention. But not one of the Chinese residents ofBeechworth earns a place in this local history. Identified and )OHN FITZGERALD named Europ eans in the pyrotechnic display are supported by a fictional Chinese character who was invented for the occasion. Had the techno-heritage desig ners wanted to include eminent Chinese who passed through the region, they mi ;ht have made mention of imperial commissioners Wong Yung-ho and U Tsing who visited Bee chworth at the emperor's bidding in 1887. If they were inclined to include hoi polloi as well, they might have named the local Chine se minister, George Young, or perhaps Ah John, proprietor of the Sun Quong Goon HoteL In fact they might have mentioned any of the scores of Chinese-Australians whose names were familiar to their n eighbours in Beechworth before their Chinatown was elevated to a historical precinct. Instead, they celebrate the region's Chine:se heritage.
BALLARAT, lying in the heart of the goldfields district of central Victoria, has taken a little longer t o come to terms with its Chinese heritage than some other placesin Victoria. The Eureka Stockade may be partly responsible. Particularp laces can only have so much history and Eureka seems to occupy most of Ballarat's. Eureka s eems to absorb much of B allarat's present and future too. The many flags bearing the Eureka Cross that flutter across the city aren't merely historical curio i ties but daily reminders that the republican sentiments of the diggers still await some kind of historical resolution. People wave them with intent. Some would say that the city's racism awaits some kind ofresolution too. The last of Ballarat's Chineset emples was burnt to the ground as recently as the 1960s. Well-meaning attempts to circumvent the problem have done little to help. When tourist operators and state advisers came up with an idea for a historical theme pa rk, at Sovereign Hill, they sensibly made room for a Chinese temple at the base of the Hill. In representing the Chinese heritage of the region, however, the designers of Sovereign Hill ove rlooked much that was pa rtic ular about thei r locality. They do not appear to have consulted descendants of the Chinese miners and shopkeepers still living in Ballarat. In consequence, the reconstructed temple was soi naccurate that it had to be rebuilt some years later. They don't appear to have known about the Chinese miners' own Eureka either. In the mid-18SO.s, Chinese miners organi sed widespread protest s agai nst unfair taxation on the Victorian goldfields, under an Australian-Chinese union flag.• And local author ities seem to have forgotten that descendants of Chinese settlers were ratepayers of Ballarat, at least until re cently. Another Country
Over the last four or five years, the city has taken steps to preserve a substan tial part of the old Chinese cemetery as a mu .eum in situ. In this case, the groundwork was laid by teachers from the Unive·:sity of Ballarat and a few local schools. Staffof the university's Asian and Chinese Studies programs invited two visiting academics froma partner university in south China to record and trans late the many Chinese-language gravestones that are laid out across the hill, and to match them against extant cemetery records. The outcomes were published shortly afterwards.sSince that time, the city has Ctlmmissionedfeng shui masters to draft a conservation plan that is said to be sensitive to the traditional geoman· tic principles applying to Chinese graveyard . The gravestones have been repointed and repainted, exotic Chinese trees have been planted around the periphery, and a large red gate invites passing I raffle to stop and take note of Ballarat's Chinese-Australian history. Plans are alsoafoot to rebuild one of the Chinese temples that once dotted the city, this time with the help of the local Chinese-Australian community. While the university cancelled its Chinese language and studies programs, the schools have continued to take up their Chinese heritage in a variety of ways. They teach Chinese language and studies with strong community suppor t and the assistance of Education Victoria and the Asia Education Foundation. Some have invited elderly Chinese-Australians to talk to their classes about life in the old days. This is a remarkable and largely unremarked historical achievement for Ballarat: bcal residents are finally gaining recognition as Chinese-Australians.
RECENT developments in Ballarat have drawn that city closer to the commu nity-history model developed over the past two decades in the nearby city of Bendigo. The Golden Dragon Museum in Bend igo is one of the finest commu nity museums in the world. Housed in the orig:.nal premises of a local Chinese organisation dating from the White Australia era, the museum is an organic offshoot of the Chinese-Australian community organisations that firstbuilt the premises. The museum bears the traces of this heritage. Its Federation stained glass windows, for example, feature a pair of Chinese Republican flags. This is a uniquely Australian work of decorative art Tod:\y the flag is nowhere to be seen in China or Ta iwan, certainly not on stained glass. The five-striped flag of the early republic disappeared from China in 192.8 following Chiang Kaishek's Nationalist Revolution (some two decades before Mao Zedong raised the five JoHN FnzGERALD star flag of the Communistp arty- state) . Even the museum's rejuvenated web site
(http://users.netcon.net.au/gdmbl) features th e flag, now found only where the Chinese diaspora has made a successful transition to local and modern art forms. The museum stands as testament to the tenacity of the Chinese community organisations that fought to overthrow the Manchu rulers of the Qing Dynasty, in China, and then struggled against institutionalised racism in the outer reaches of the British Empire over the early decades of the twentieth century. In Bendigo, these organisations have made a museum of themselves. There is no shortage of surnames at the Bendigo museum either. The director, Russell Jack, is an influential figure in regional and state politics. What Russell plans to do, he does, the saying goes, and what he wants he gets. Joan Jack manages the museum. Greeting visitors at the door, she escorts them to an office where she rifles through filing cabinets and pulls out a newspaper clipping , a cemetery listing, or a court record in answer to questions about family genealo,;y and local history. One in four families of the district, she will tell you, has. a Chinese ancestor. Joan herself has collected personal, public and family records numbering 35,000 Chinese-Australian names in the Bendigo area. In the face of so many people there is little room for fetishising Chinese culture. It lives on in everyday Bendigo among Chinese-Australian people. Today, one in four Bendigo families seems to furnish a volunteer to serve at the museum's ticket co unter, or to s ell souvenirs, cut sandwiches, polish and arrange artefacts, research local newspapers, compile indexes, update clippings files, and maintain the museum's impressive web site. Their efforts are constantly rewarded by local and state governments, by prize-giving public committees, and by regional arms of government or semi-government corporations. The museum is the regional hub for a vast array of employment schemes, youth rehabilitation schemes and corporate vote-buying. Telstra subsidises the museum's web page under its recent 'regional' initiative. Russell and Joan Jack don't appear to mind at all.
ONE museum that might well be compared with the Bendigo Golden Dr agon Museum is the Museum of Chinese-Australian History in Cohen Placj!,
Melbourne . This is a metropolitan museum and not a regional one. Still, c ompar ison with some of the regional centres is instructive. Comparing levels of government subsidy, for example, the Melbourne Chinese museum comes off
[66[ Another Country rather poorly. It received $1.8 million in government capital works funding over the past decade, far less than the sum invested in :he small Ararat regional centre in only the past few years. The level of community support across the city and regions is also disappointing. Melbourne's generous Chinese communities are regularly asked to donate to worthy causes around the state. Among the most generous of these is the Melbourne-based Sl:e-Yup Society. Last year, the Melbourne museum received more or less the sa me share of Sze-Yup generosity as half a dozen different regional community centres in Victoria. In fact, the city based society donated more to Ararat's Gum San Centre than it did to the Melbourne museum. The city museum is also handicapped by the size and complexity of the city itself. Where Bendigo has a Chinese community, Melbourne has Chinese community organisations-perhaps eighty independent ones and half a dozen umbrella groups working tc• a common cause. These organ isations and their members make up a community only in the sense that a census category creates a community, or that a commudty takes shape around a public event such as the lunar New Year festival. Some of the city's Chinese organisations are very old, ranking among the earliest Chinese community associations in th world. (A scholar at Nanjing University recently claimed that the NSW Chine1.e Chamber of Commerce is the oldest Chinese chamber to be found anywhere in the world, including China.6) Melbourne's Sze-Yup Society dates back to the I asos, as does the Nam-Pun-Sun Society. The precursors of the Chinese Masonit: Association reach back to the secret societies that came over with the earliest arrivals, later linking up with refugees from the Taiping Rebellion in the 1860!;. Other Chinese associations in Melbourne are of more recent origin, representing immigrants from Malaysia, Hong Kong , Singapore, Taiwan and the People\ Republic. New and old do not always get along. For some years now, one batch cf recent arrivals has been caught up in a costly legal dispute with one of the oldest organisations over the owner ship of community property. Lawyers' fees might better have been spent supporting the museum. Nevertheless, the Melbourne Chinese museum maintains a strong commu nity focus. Its files and exhibitions record in detail the lives of people who lived in the city and its environs. Volunteer guides lead tourist groups through historic tours of Little Bourke Street and its grid of lanes and alleyways. Schools come in large numbers to see the permanent exhibition>. The curator, Paul Macgregor, has been involved with important historical and archaeological projects that are giving names and faces to the people who once lived in the city and its margins. jOHN FITZGERALD
A comparison of the most recent exhibitions mounted by the two museums isillu minating as welL The Bendigo and Melbourne museums each prepared a major touring exhibition for the Centenary of Federation in 200 l. Bendigo's Golden Dragon Museum produced 'Showing Face: Chinese Identity in Rural Victoria from the 1850s to Federation'. The Melbourne Chinese Museum curated 'A Chinese Reformer at the Birth of a Nation: Liang Qichao and Australian Federation'. With 'Showing Face', the Bendigo Chinese Museum brought the story of regional Victoria to the city of Melbourne. This exhibition was designed for the road. It focuses with economy and effect on uniquely Chin se aspects of daily life in regional Victoria. Objects on display include a splendid hexagonal 'gaming table',
sample opium pipes and smoking paraphernalia, an altar st ool and Chinese candles, a number of merchant account books and scales, a glass case of medicine bottles and herbal remedies, samples of clothing and footwear, and a variety of sketches, photographs, paintings and original scrolls and inscriptions. Among the latter is an ornate 'voting certificate'commemorating the participation of a certain
Pung Nah in the 1899 Federation referendum, and a letter, signed by the first governor-general, Lord Hopetoun, acknowledging the loyalty to King Edward VII displayed by the Chinese community of Bendigo. Bendigo's Pung Nah presum ably imagined that he was an equal and sovereign subject of the British Empire. The exhibition celebrates a fragment of time inaugurated by the gold rush and concluded by Feder ation. It pays little attent ion to changes over time or space either in the sequence of the displays or in the selection of objects for display. Federation drives the story: it is presented as a significant historical closure that spelt the end of vibrant regional communities of Chinese residents and signall x:i the start of institutionalised racism in the Commonwealth of Australia. Racism, though, is only half the story. The point of the exhibit is that Feder· ation marked a turning point in the ratio of regional to metropolitan residents
among Chinese settlers in Australia. At the entrance to the exhibition there is a.n intriguing series of district maps showing the number of Chinese who lived in various shires in regional Victoria in the nineteenth century. It seems that well over 90 per cent of Chinese lived in regional areas of Victoria and New South Wales in the 1860s. The proportion hovered at a respectable 80 per cent in the 1880s. In the next fiftyy ears it fell to around 20 per cent. Between 1850 and 1950, in other words, the proportion of Chinesel iving outside Australia's major cities fell from nineteen in twenty to around four in twenty, before falling further still
!681 Another Country over following decades. The exhibition asks us to concede that Australia's Chinese heritage had a vibrant regional history long before it invented a multicultural metropolitan one. The focus of the exhibition is on space rather than on place. The exhibition organises its material around the social and political space inhabited by male Chinese migrants in nineteenth-century regional Victoria. 1n this case regional Victoria is the res idual space left when Melbom ne is extracted from the map: everywhere outside the metropolis and yet nowhere in par ticular. In effect, the exhibition speaks loudly for the periphery against the claims of the centre: it stakes a strong claim for the historical priority of the gold-diggers, farm hands and shopkeepers of regional Victoria against the Chinese immigrants of metro politan Melbourne in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Significantly,it does much the same for China. Migrants to regional Victoria, we are informed, had no sense of relating to any kind of metropolitan centre back home and showed little consciousness of belonging to a greater Chinese nation when they came to these shores. Early Chinese immigrants simply shifted from one region in China to another in Australia. Their home district was their homeland, their lineage their patria. In both pla<.es, it appears, regional Chinese immigrants were marginalised by metropolitan elites. The nationalist hullabaloo that convulsed Australia and China at the turn of the twentieth century passed them by except, unfortunately, where they became victims of institutional racism at the hand of a new (metropolitan) nation-state. By contrast, the Federation exhibition in do·Nntown Melbourne recounts a story of metropolitan intellectuals and business and community leaders making connections with big-city China. In ten large and beautifully designed pastel panels-also designed for the road-'A Chinese Reformer at the Birth of a Nation' illustr ates the history of mainstream connections between China and Australia from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-tw!ntieth centuries. A pseudo-king of the great Taiping Rebellion flees to Australia in the 1860s, an official delega tion of the Chinese Empire tours colonial capital!; in the 1880s, Chinese Christian elders combat immigration restrictions in the u:sos and 1890s, upright Chinese community leaders press for an end to opium importation in the 1890s, Chinese merchants form their earliest chambers of commerce and the firstnational polit ical associations in Australia in the first few years of the new century, and prominent Chinese-Australian businessmen invest their earnings in Hong Kong and Shanghai in the 1910s and 1920s. The last pa:1el displays a dozen or so promi nent Chinese-Australians who have been elected to city, state and federal JOHN FITZGERALD assemblies over the past two decades. The effect is to highlight significant but neglected connections between the national histories of China and Australia over the period leading to Federation and over the century that followed. Regions don't feature as regions here. Panel by panel, the exhibit traces a tour of Federation Australia by a brilliant Chinese intellectual, Liang Qichao, who meandered back and forth across the coast and the outback from the west coast to the east of Australia in 1900-01. Liang Qichao was to late nineteenth-century China as Samuel Johnson was to eighteenth-century Britain. A prolific essayist, he invented the modern style of literary Chi nese, founded the colloquial Chinc se press, championed the novel idea of'public opinion', and popularised secular history through his vernacular scholarship. By inclination a progressive liberal, Liang visited Australia hoping to raise funds for the constitutional wing of the reformist elite in opposition to the revolutionary nationalism of Sun Yatsen and the republicans. He was in the country when it celebrated Federation and launch· d the White Australia era. Fittingly, we owe our record of his visit to the Chinese jottings of the personal secretary who accompanied Liang on his tour of Australia. What lends coherence to this tour-in fact, what lent unity to the continent around the turn of the century-is a transcolonial elite located firmly in the British Empire. Liang's encounters w ith this elite and his movements and recep tion in Australia serve as a kind of counterfoil to the celebrated anti-Chinese nationalism of the day. Wherever he went, Lia ng was received as a dignitary. He was feted by city mayors from Geraldton to Perth and from Bendigo to Ballarat, hosted in Adelaide by the solicitor-general of South Australia, taken on guided tours of the Argus building and the Botanic Gardens when he reached Melbourne, welcomed by the director of the District Hospital in New England, and invited to an audience with the ubiquitous gover nor-general, Lord Hopetoun, in Sydney. He even dined with our first prime minister. Plans to visit Queensland and Darwin were thwarted by news of serious problems attending the birth of his son in Japan, in April 190 l. Liang leftSydney for Yokohama shortly afterwards. Where 'Showing Face' brought regional Victoria to the city, the Melbourne exhibition carried metropolitan Australia to what Paul Keating used to call 'Our Region'. The Melbourne Chinese museum arranged an exhibition tour of China and South-East Asia from October 2000 to March 2001. The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and the Department of Communications, the Envi ronment and the Arts (through the National Council for the Centenary of Federation) contr ibuted generously towards the development and international touring costs of the exhibi tion. DFAT missions in China and South-East Asiawere Another Country especiall y helpful.The major corporate sponsor C.)rthe tour was Central Equity. Happily, the exhibition's touring schedule in Asia coincided precisely with the centenary of Liang Qkhao's visit to Australia. The exhibition was well received. In Shanghai, it attracted 60,000-80,000 visitors over ten d ays. Two million more saw it on state-run television. From Shanghai the exhibition moved to the Provincial Museum in Canton and from the re to Beijing, where it was opened by the fedc:ral Minister for Communica tions and the Arts, Senator Richard AJston. The txhibition subsequently toured Hong Kong, Taipei and Singap ore before being :rated back to Melbourne and going on display at the Chinese museum in the heart of the city. In Australia, however, the exhibitionlang uish largely unseen. The Melbourne museum was encouraged to take the travelling exhibit abroad but has received little or no support to transport it around Australia. There is a paradox here. Bendigo carried the story of the regions to the city, and Melbourne the story of the city to 'Our Regi on'. But there no longer seens to be a country-something we might call Australia-that seeksto present its<:If to itself. Based in a metropol itan centre, in a marginal country, the Melbourr.e Chinese museum has little to say to regional Australia and little room to manoeuvre in contemporary Australia.
NOTES The author wishes to thank Judith Brett for stimula·:ing ideas, and to express appreci ation for advice and corrections to Joan Jack, Paul Macgregor, Jim Quinn and Janis Wilton.
I Donald Horne 'The Stockman's Hall of Fame,' Co.rtinuum: The Australian Journal of Media and Culture, 3 (1990), pp. 10-15. 2 Ararat Centre web site: