The Contested Frontiers exhibit at the National Museum of Australia photograph by George Serras

Contesting frontiers History, memory and narrative in a national museum

by Bain Attwood

Abstract

This article examines the ways in which exhibition in the National Museum of historical conventions can determine the Australia, it argues that an unwillingness to nature of the stories that museums seek recognise and respect differing conceptions to tell, and influence the manner in which of history can diminish the potential many expect these to be narrated. museums have to advance cross-cultural Focusing on criticisms of a particular understanding. reCollections: Journal of the National Museum of Australia September 2006, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 103–114 Introduction argued that the abandonment of the original exhibit would be a retrograde step, since In recent decades, museums in settler there were important principles at stake in societies such as Australia have been the mounting of it. forced to confront their colonial legacy In order to explore this, I will consider as Aboriginal peoples have challenged the arguments advanced in respect of ‘the the nature of their collections and their Bells Falls Gorge Massacre exhibit’ by one collecting. The place of Aboriginality of the Museum’s radical conservative critics, in museums has been transformed as the historical writer . Aboriginal people have become subjects Many of his criticisms of this exhibit were rather than objects. This has provoked both peculiar and poorly founded, as I will debate not only about who and what is seek to demonstrate empirically. However, represented in museums but also about in order to conduct a consideration of how this should be done. This has raised the broader matters raised by the exhibit matters of fundamental importance, in question, I will assume, for the sake of particularly in national museums: by what argument, that much of Windschuttle’s historiographical conventions do we tell approach is informed by assumptions stories about the past and how does this held by many professional historians, and affect how such narratives are presented I will adopt an approach which is largely and the truth claims they make? speculative in nature. Shortly after the National Museum of Australia opened in 2001, a display in its Framing an exhibit First Australians gallery was called into question by radical conservatives. They called In a broadside fired at the National the display ‘the Bells Falls Gorge Massacre Museum of Australia in 2001, Keith exhibit’.1 In response, several critics, Windschuttle damned the exhibit in question sympathetic to the new museum’s approach as ‘objectionable’. ‘The Bells Falls Gorge to its work, suggested that the display in Massacre’, he wrote, ‘was supposed to have question should be removed or should never occurred near Bathurst in the 1820s during have been mounted.2 They contended that conflict with the Wiradjuri people … The it would have been better had the history story claims that Red Coat soldiers surprised of mass killings of Aboriginal people been a party of Wiradjuri, mainly women and represented by an exhibit telling the story children. The Aborigines retreated to the of the 1838 or the edge of the Bells Falls, where the women 1928 Coniston massacre, since this could halted, clutching their children. The troops have been defended more readily against opened fire, forcing the Aborigines to jump those keen to downplay or deny settler to their deaths over the cliffs of the gorge’. violence. Such an exhibit, it was argued, ‘The National Museum’, Windschuttle would have relayed the incontrovertible continued, ‘has an exhibit on the massacre, historical truth, still unpalatable to many including a large photographic reproduction white or settler Australians, that killings of the waterfall and gorge … “This is of this nature did occur on the Australian a place of great sadness”, the Museum frontier. This recommendation undoubtedly records. “Our people still hear the echoes has considerable merit. However, it can be of the women and children who died here”’.

104 Contesting frontiers Windschuttle asserted that the story that age or sex”’. Windschuttle, it can be argued, the Museum has told was ‘spurious’ and disconnects the mid twentieth-century ‘a complete fabrication’.3 history provided by the ‘local amateur On what grounds did Windschuttle historian’ from its grounding in a nineteenth- make these claims? He asserted that reports century settler tradition, thus creating a of this event did not appear until the early rupture between the past of the frontier and 1960s, some 140 years after it apparently the settler tradition that sought to represent occurred. If we accepted Windschuttle’s it, thereby diminishing the current story’s implication that the story of this frontier potential authenticity and hence its claim to violence only emerged quite recently, many historical authority.5 professional historians would probably be Windschuttle’s criticism of the exhibit inclined to countenance his criticisms of the is informed by a singular way of framing Museum’s exhibit. I suggest, however, that it. He asserts that an exhibit of the Bells Windschuttle’s claims are only persuasive if Falls Gorge massacre is a ‘section of the we accept three things: his account of the [Museum’s] “frontier warfare” display’. In story of Bells Falls Gorge, the way he frames fact, the exhibit in question is a part of a the exhibit, and his premises. section called ‘Contested Frontiers’. Naming For his account of the story’s history, is, of course, one of the principal ways a Windschuttle drew heavily upon historian storyteller presents a narrative to an audience. David Roberts’s research. However, he Windschuttle seems to be oblivious to the omitted vital information provided by significance of the Museum calling this Roberts. Windschuttle’s formulation — particular section ‘Contested Frontiers’. ‘The first reports of the event’s existence Presumably the Museum’s curators gave did not appear in print until 1962, that is, it this name because they wanted to draw 140 years later, when … a local amateur attention to the fact that the frontier has historian reported it as one of the oral long been contested — in both the past legends of the district’ — failed to note the and the present. The main text panel for existence of an earlier, written nineteenth- this exhibit concludes: ‘Research suggests century tradition regarding a mass killing that over 2000 Europeans and some 20,000 in the area of Bells Falls Gorge. And so he Aborigines died on the frontier — these exaggerated the degree to which the story estimates have been contested’. of the Bells Fall Gorge massacre merely In the Museum, it should be noted, comprises an oral tradition.4 Roberts had the frontier encounter between Aboriginal argued that the Bells Falls Gorge massacre people and settlers is not only represented tradition could be dated to 1887. At that in terms of conflict. Contested Frontiers is time a settler, WH Suttor jnr, wrote down a merely one part of a much larger section story his father and grandfather, who were of the Museum’s First Australians gallery prominent landowners in the district, had called ‘Negotiating Coexistence’, and apparently told him about a mass killing that its introductory text panel reads in part: had occurred a few years after his forebears ‘Over a 200-year period marked by conflict had settled in the district: ‘Suttor related an as well as by efforts at cooperation and incident in which Aborigines were enticed to friendship, Aboriginal and Torres Strait approach a group of soldiers and “were shot Islander peoples continue to negotiate down by a brutal volley, without regard to coexistence’. One of the other sections of

Bain Attwood 105 Negotiating Coexistence, called ‘To conciliate that Roberts’s approach was informed their affections’, illustrates the attempt of by a framework that we might call ‘local government officials and settlers to negotiate knowledge’ in order to distinguish it from a friendly relationship with Aboriginal Windschuttle’s normative assumption that people. In other words, the Museum’s the nature of knowledge is universal, or emphasis on settler violence is much less than else he refused to accept that this approach Windschuttle would have his readers believe.6 was legitimate. Windschuttle’s account erred, moreover, The nature of historical work done in in describing the display in question as universities has changed in many respects a ‘massacre’ exhibit. In fact, it makes no since Windschuttle was a student. Historians specific reference to massacres, let alone to have become more interested in ‘local the Bells Falls Gorge massacre. Given this, knowledge’ or what was once called ‘minority why does Windschuttle characterise the histories’ — the pasts of women, the exhibit in these terms? It can be argued that working class, migrants, Aboriginal peoples this reflects Windschuttle’s own, peculiar and so forth. Academic historians were concerns. He was preoccupied with attacking studying the history of these peoples in ‘massacres’ at the time he wrote — witness Windschuttle’s student days but they tended his series of articles in 2000 in the radical to treat these as subordinate to a ‘mainstream conservative magazine Quadrant entitled ‘The past’ and ‘mainstream history’. By contrast, myths of frontier massacres in Australian more recent generations of scholars have history’.7 Alternatively, it could be argued that interpreted ‘minority histories’ in such a Windschuttle wanted the display in question to way as to draw into question the universalist be a massacre exhibit since this allowed him claims that ‘mainstream history’ has made to conscript it for his aggressive campaign for its knowledge of the past. In particular, against the history and the historiography of they have challenged the claim of so-called frontier killings. In fact, the Museum seldom mainstream history that it alone is history uses the word ‘massacre’ in Contested and that all other histories (such as traditions, Frontiers. In its display ‘Rolling frontiers’, myths and legends) are merely stories for example, only two of the twenty sites of whose accounts of the past can seldom conflict are called ‘massacres’, both of which be countenanced. (Myall Creek and Coniston) Windschuttle In this case, David Roberts does not accepts as ‘genuine massacres’.8 treat the tradition of Bells Falls Gorge as merely local knowledge but uses it instead Conceiving a history to challenge the claim of national history to be universal — to truly represent the past In order to consider the broader matters at of Australia. More importantly, Roberts stake in this exhibit, it is useful to speculate does not conceive of the Bells Falls Gorge why Windschuttle approached this display in tradition as subordinate to Windschuttle’s the manner he did. It can be argued that he notion of history which privileges a adopted a philosophical framework which particular kind of historical knowledge we was informed by his intellectual training can call empiricist (rather than empirical) as a historian in the 1960s and 1970s. In history. Rather, he considers it to be a his reading of David Roberts’s work (from legitimate form of knowledge about the which, readers will recall, he derives his past, one which has its own conventions attack on the exhibit), he failed to realise for establishing historical truth and which

106 Contesting frontiers enjoys an authority of its own among those comes to Contested Frontiers she stops and who know and acknowledge this form of reads its introductory panel, which makes historical narrative.9 it clear that the exhibit principally focuses Arguably, Windschuttle proceeds to on Aboriginal responses and Aboriginal the National Museum assuming that his perspectives: historiographical tradition remains dominant It soon became apparent to and so will be shared by the institution. Aboriginal people around Sydney In other words, he does not expect it to treat Harbour that the British intended to 10 the tradition of Bells Falls Gorge as history. stay. As the frontiers of colonisation However, national museums no longer expanded, Aboriginal groups resisted. necessarily regard such stories as an Guerilla wars were fought along a inferior form of historical knowledge. rolling frontier for a century and a At various points in the First Australians half. Today the names of resistance gallery, the National Museum tells history leaders such as Windradyne and by using the narrative forms or conventions Jandamurra are virtually unknown that are often adopted by Aboriginal people. outside their communities. Doing this is, of course, part and parcel of This Aboriginal focus is reflected in the the very reason why this part of the Museum objects chosen to tell this story. Ten of the was created in the first place. This approach military weapons in the Wiradjuri war exhibit obviously informs the exhibit in question: are Aboriginal; only two are British. a Wiradjuri man tells a history, about settler Our visitor moves on to look at an violence against his people, in the form of illuminated map of Australia showing a myth. This means that the Museum is, contested frontiers before going to displays for the most part, not seeking to tell the on one or the other side of this. Each case story of Bells Falls Gorge in the manner contains regional exhibits, one regarding empiricist history treats an event, that is, as the Bunuba people (led by ), the a particular, verifiable historical occurrence. other regarding the Wiradjuri people (led by Instead, it tells a story in which it treats an Windradyne). In the Wiradjuri war exhibit, event as symbolic of a general phenomenon our visitor is provided with further context that really happened, which is how myth in order to make sense of the display: a text commonly relates the past. panel labeled ‘1823–1825 Wiradjuri war’. This — ‘1823–1825 Wiradjuri war’ — The Bells Falls Gorge exhibit or is actually the name of this exhibit. (There the Wiradjuri war exhibit? is in fact no exhibit called ‘the Bells Falls Gorge exhibit’. If we were to use Let us imagine someone making a visit to Windschuttle’s language, we would have to the section of Contested Frontiers where describe that exhibit as a fabrication on his the exhibit in question is housed.11 We could part.12) The text panel for the exhibit points now call this display ‘the Wiradjuri war to a war between settlers and Aborigines exhibit’. This will help to reveal how naming in the region. It does include the passage can influence how visitors might receive the Windschuttle quoted in his attack — ‘This is knowledge an exhibit presents. a place of great sadness. Our people still hear To begin, our visitor does not go to the echoes of the women and children who the Wiradjuri war exhibit but through the died here’ — but these are not the Museum’s parts of the display preceding it. When she words, as Windschuttle claimed. Rather, they

Bain Attwood 107 The Rolling Frontiers interactive map of Australia in the Contested Frontiers exhibit, National Museum of Australia photograph by George Serras are the words of a senior Wiradjuri man, Bill Wiradjuri war exhibit are ones in which Allen, and they are clearly attributed to him the texts are anonymous, and this probably in the exhibit. Moreover, as Graeme Davison encourages visitors to assume that the has pointed out, ‘nowhere in the display does other panels follow the same pattern. They the Museum actually affirm the popular story might not grasp the fact that every exhibit of women and children being forced over is informed by the particular perspective of the edge of the falls’.13 the curatorial staff who conceived them. One might be tempted to say that only Yet, there are actually several text panels someone with a blinkered vision could miss that include Allen’s words and make it clear the various signs the Museum has provided that he is the speaker, while one explicitly in order to help its visitors understand the says that this exhibit is his people’s ‘point nature of exhibits such as this one. Perhaps of view’. Furthermore, the overall framing this would be unfair, as many visitors might of this exhibit makes it clear that this is a have missed the various signs in Contested Wiradjuri story. For example, part of the Frontiers. All around the text panels in the central panel for this display is accompanied

108 Contesting frontiers by a map of Australia with a label ‘The particular area (Wiradjuri territory) rather Wiradjuri people’, and its text concludes: than a specific locality (Bells Falls Gorge), ‘When martial law was declared, Windradyne over a period of time (1823–1825) rather and his people launched a guerilla campaign. than a particular day or week (say 18 March They frustrated the poorly organised British 1824), and a group of aggressors (‘British forces, who began to attack any Aboriginal forces’) rather than particular settlers (who people they could find. Windradyne and the have names), and a group of the slain (the Wiradjuri remained unvanquished’. Perhaps Wiradjuri) rather than named individuals. Windschuttle missed the significance of And it gives a rough indication of those these signs simply because he did not expect killed (‘hundreds’) rather than a specific an Aboriginal person to be telling a story number (such as 28, the number killed at about this part of the country in Australia’s Myall Creek). By naming it the ‘Wiradjuri national museum. If so, there is a racial war exhibit’, the Museum signposts that this blindness at work here — an assumption that history is being told within the conventions white or settler Australians are normative of Aboriginal history, and thus alerts its and that their dominance should prevail so visitors to the fact that they should not that the National Museum is their place to expect an account of the nature privileged tell stories, or the place to tell stories in by history told in the empiricist tradition. their way — and this is very telling. It might be objected that the Museum could Let us consider further the implications have done more to alert the visitor to the fact of the name the Museum has given our that this story was being told in a particular exhibit to see how visitors might sensibly idiom common to Aboriginal storytellers. approach it. If you had an exhibit called However, it can also be argued that this is, ‘the Myall Creek massacre’, a visitor might after all, the First Australians gallery and that reasonably expect the Museum to tell a story the Museum does not declare elsewhere that that provided the facts about that particular most of its stories are told in another idiom, event in its particular place on its particular and so why should it do so here? day and provide the particular names of those whites who did the killing, and the Culture, location and nation particular number of those killed and even perhaps their names, because this story has There might be a further reason why often been told by professional historians the Wiradjuri war exhibit has proven and is well known among settler Australians. controversial: it seems that settler Australian (This massacre is one of the rare examples audiences are reluctant to accept the in Australian frontier history where detail of truthfulness of Aboriginal histories when this kind is available.) they are narrated by people who are located With a display called ‘Wiradjuri war in the way the Wiradjuri are. Arguably, exhibit’, though, it is reasonable to expect this is the result of this audience’s lack of that another kind of story will be told. The familiarity with such storytellers, which in Museum announces through the exhibit’s turn is a consequence of those narrators’ title that it is telling a big regional history lack of power in what we might call the about a general phenomenon (a contested realm of culture. frontier it calls a war), not a small local Instead of the Wiradjuri war exhibit, history (about one incident in that conflict). let us imagine that the Museum mounted And it says it is doing this in reference to a an exhibit of the Coniston massacre in

Bain Attwood 109 Central Australia in 1928; that this narrative apply a double standard. Settler Australian is told by the Aboriginal people in that audiences have become accustomed to their area; that they narrate this history on their own history-makers changing from one own country; that they tell it in their own form to another, shifting from one place languages; that they tell this story in the to the next and borrowing things — form of myth; and that it is recorded by a for example, telling stories of Gallipoli film crew. I suggest that the critics of the by using the themes of Biblical stories Wiradjuri war exhibit would have found this or ancient Greek myths — without ever more acceptable than the other exhibit, not being accused of inauthenticity. However, just because they accept the truthfulness of they tend to be unfamiliar with Aboriginal this particular massacre story on empirical history-makers changing genre or/and grounds but because they regard Aboriginal locality and borrowing (even though they people located in ‘remote Australia’ as have been doing this since the beginning ‘real Aborigines’ and accept that these of British colonisation), and so they reject people have different ways of relating the the truthfulness of the stories told by these past. There is a reality effect at work here, narrators. which depends on two factors. First, these Critics of the Wiradjuri war exhibit Aboriginal people seem authentic because are probably not alone in holding the they are familiar to a settler Australian assumptions about Aboriginality I have audience as a result of the wide circulation just sketched. Museum curators seem to of accounts of ‘traditional Aboriginal prefer that their Aboriginal storytellers culture’ originally derived from classical remain bounded by a purely Aboriginal anthropology; second, their authenticity is tradition rather than accept that they cross guaranteed by a well-known fiction that these cultural boundaries and so are hybrid just Aboriginal people are radically different from like everyone else; they apparently fear that settler Australians, their ‘ancient’ life-ways exhibits such as the Wiradjuri will lose their fundamentally unchanged by ‘modernity’. authenticity if it is admitted that they rest on In contrast, the Wiradjuri are probably stories which are told by both settlers and located very differently in the settler Aborigines. In the course of responding imagination. Being positioned in ‘settled to the radical conservative attack on this Australia’ rather than ‘remote Australia’, Bill exhibit Brad Manera, the curator responsible Allen and his people confound the historical for Contested Frontiers, has insisted that expectations of most settler Australians. there is a separate, autochthonous tradition They are not deemed to be truly Aboriginal of the Bells Falls Gorge massacre. This, since they are not regarded as being ‘other’ of course, is possible, though the only in any of the ways classical anthropology or evidence Manera has adduced for this its popular offshoots have made known to is contemporary Wiradjuri testimony. settler audiences.14 To make matters worse, (Roberts, in his original work on the subject, while they might be seen to be telling a story implied that an Aboriginal account of in a form which is recognisably one used Bells Falls Gorge was derived from by ‘traditional’ Aboriginal people, they are the settler tradition.)15 deemed to have borrowed the story of the In seeking to defend the Wiradjuri war Bells Fall Gorge massacre from a written exhibit, some have also been inclined to argue settler Australian tradition. In rejecting the that this particular narrative has a sound Wiradjuri story on these grounds, critics empirical basis. (The exhibit itself also implies

110 Contesting frontiers this. 16) This amounts to an attempt to justify produce. If this is to overstate matters, there the exhibit on much the same intellectual can be little disagreement that a marked grounds advanced by empiricist history. sense of distance (rather than proximity) between past and present has long been Shared and sharing histories the hallmark of historical work; so much so, Mark Salber Phillips has argued, that Accepting these ways of justifying the it is difficult for historians ‘to distinguish Wiradjuri war exhibit — or adopting the between the concept of distance and the idea recommendation to abandon it and install a of history itself’.19 more conventional historical exhibit of the The consequences of this for Myall Creek massacre instead — constitutes both historical practice and historical an approach which spurns the opportunity, consciousness are threefold. It tends to deny provided by the current exhibit, to advance the fact that the past often continues to be historical understanding in a multicultural present; it tends to deny the presence of context.17 the history-maker, and hence the present, The weakness of the approach critics in contemporary representations of the have recommended is arguably part and past; and it tends to deny the relationship a parcel of the broader one which has long history-maker has with the subjects we treat characterised modern professional history. and our implication in the ways we present As Michel de Certeau has argued: these. Most importantly, historians do not acknowledge openly the fact that our work Historiography … is based on a is inherently dialogical — that it is inevitably clean break between the past and the the result of a dialogue between past and present … Historiography conceives present, present and past, and thus the the relation [between past and present] as one of succession (one product of a fusion of two horizons, past after the other), correlation (greater or and present. less proximities), cause and effect (one This has undoubtedly been the case in follows the other), and disjunction the work academic historians have done on (either one or the other, but not both the Australian frontier. The anthropologist at the same time).18 Gillian Cowlishaw has remarked on the way in which academic histories of the In other words, the discipline of settler violence have filled a gap in our history in the modern world has long rested understanding of the Australian frontier on an arbitrary temporal rupture which violence but have done so in such a way historiography itself has constructed. that this is not seen to be ‘an organic and Gabrielle Spiegel has described this rupture ongoing part’ of Australian society: as the discipline’s ‘founding gesture’: ‘to keep These histories seem to present with the past in the past, to draw the line, as it ease a view of the past that fills us, were, that’, she remarks, ‘is constitutive of as readers, with horror at the same the modern enterprise of history’. In many time as it distances us from it. How critical respects this ‘clean break’ between is it that in reading these accounts we past and present has been fundamental to position ourselves on the side of the the way professional historians have done Aborigines and identify our forebears their work and to the truth claims we have as the enemy? These violent and racist made for the historical knowledge we men could be our grandfathers and

Bain Attwood 111 they certainly left us something, if In the light of this, the principal not the land they took or the wealth weakness of the Wiradjuri war exhibit they made from it, then the culture is arguably its failure to provide enough 20 they were developing. space in order to demonstrate that white or The approach of historiography settler Australians have told stories like the described by de Certeau has been one presented in the Wiradjuri war exhibit. contrasted to one that Spiegel, among Adding more of their accounts of the others, has called ‘memory’. Unlike history, frontier, told at the time and since, would she argues, ‘memory “reincarnates”, have allowed settler visitors to grasp that resurrects”, “re-cycles”, and makes the stories of settler violence have not only past “reappear” and live again in the been told by Aboriginal people but by their present … History re-presents the dead; own, which could have provided a point of memory re-members the corpse in order identification for them, and which could to revivify it. To be sure’, she adds, ‘memory have enabled the exhibit to convey more as a social phenomenon forms part of the effectively the relationships which have vast apparatus that civilisations construct often existed between Aboriginal and settler to preserve the fragments of the past, stories, oral and written accounts, memory but unlike the backward-gazing history, it faces forward from the living present and history, past and present. to an imagined future’.21 I trust readers can understand why I am The Wiradjuri war exhibit was largely reluctant to endorse the suggestion that the shaped by an alternative conception of National Museum of Australia’s Wiradjuri history informed by ‘memory’ and, as war exhibit be removed and replaced by one such, it addresses the problem of historical of the Myall Creek massacre or the Coniston distance. In large part it conceives of history massacre. This would be tantamount to as comprising a collection of narratives told saying that the Museum should only tell by differently situated or located peoples stories according to the traditions which and hence contingent on who the teller is, usually privilege white storytellers. In effect, what their purpose is, the context in which it would concede ground to those who are they tell their story, and who their audience really claiming, ‘This museum is my place is. It is an approach, quite clearly, which for telling stories, not yours’. Is this what we reveals connections between past and want in a national museum in a democratic present. In the context under consideration nation? Or do we want to continue to seek here, this conception of history offers museums — and nations more generally ways of exhibiting history which convey — the opportunity for deepening different perspectives of the past and understanding among and between different visions for the future? peoples by demonstrating both the similar and different ways in which they have This paper has been independently related to each other and to the past.22 peer-reviewed.

112 Contesting frontiers Notes 9 Roberts, ‘The Bells Falls massacre and oral tradition’, p. 155. 1 I am indebted to Alan Atkinson, Stephen 10 Windschuttle assumes that all will be lost Foster, and the two referees for their comments if his tradition of history does not remain on an earlier version of this article. My thanks, absolutely dominant, as this typically hyperbolic too, for comments made by participants in the statement betrays: ‘to take oral history, Australian National University’s Collections legends, mythologies as some kind of sacred, seminar series, where I gave an earlier version or sacrosanct statement, is really to give away of this paper in April 2005. history altogether and to engage in myth- Bells Falls Gorge is near a small town, Sofala, making’ (in Claire Lasko, dir., The Museum of about 245 kilometres north-west of Sydney, Conflicting Histories, BBC/Open University, New South Wales. London, 2002). 2 See, for example, Stuart Macintyre and Anna 11 I am borrowing here an approach adopted Clark, The History Wars, Melbourne University by Davison in ‘Conflict in the museum’, Press, Melbourne, 2003, p. 215. See also pp. 210–12. Graeme Davison, ‘Conflict in the museum’, 12 In fact Windschuttle is aware that this display in Bain Attwood and SG Foster (eds), Frontier is called ‘1823–1825 Wiradjuri war’: see Conflict: The Australian Experience, National Windschuttle to Ashe, 3 March 2003. It might Museum of Australia, , 2003, p. 213, be noted that he rejects this naming on the though Davison recommended reorganisation grounds that the term ‘Wiradjuri’ is ahistorical. and relabelling of the exhibit. In his submission to the review of the Museum 3 Keith Windschuttle, ‘How not to run a in 2003, he wrote: ‘I would like to add now that museum’, Quadrant, vol. 45, no. 9, 2001, p. 19. this exhibit is also misleading in asserting that 4 In a submission to a review of the National there was such a thing as a “Wiradjuri War” Museum of Australia, Windschuttle asserted: or “Wiradjuri country” in 1823–1825. This ‘All “evidence” about this incident is based is because there was no group of Aborigines on oral tales told in the twentieth century’ known as the Wiradjuri in existence in the (Windschuttle to Ruth Ashe, National Museum 1820s’ (ibid.). This is as fallacious an argument of Australia Review Secretariat, 3 March 2003, as the one which claims that the ideas about www. sydneyline.com, my emphasis). Aboriginal land ownership we associate with 5 WH Suttor, Australian Stories Retold, Glyndwr the term ‘terra nullius’ did not exist in the Whalan, Bathurst, 1887, p. 45, cited by David early and mid-nineteenth century because Roberts, ‘Bells Falls massacre and Bathurst’s the term was not used then (see Wilfrid Prest, history of violence: Local tradition and ‘History cries out for more charity’, Australian, Australian historiography’, Australian Historical 18 January 2006). Arguably, Windschuttle Studies, vol. 26, no. 105, 1995, p. 623; Roberts, adopts a double standard on such matters. ‘The Bells Falls massacre and oral tradition’, He makes no reference to the ahistorical use of in Attwood and Foster (eds), Frontier Conflict, ‘Australian’ in the Museum. Apparently settler p. 153. Australians can change their names and their 6 Windschuttle’s misrepresentation of the work sense of self (from English to Australian, for he attacks is notorious. See my account of this example) and still be regarded as authentic; in Telling the Truth about Aboriginal History, Allen Aboriginal people cannot. & Unwin, Sydney, 2005, Part II. 13 Davison, ‘Conflict in the museum’, p. 210. 7 For a further discussion of the role of massacres 14 Witness the reaction to Aboriginal claims to in particular and violence more generally in land in settled Australia, such as the Yorta Yorta Windschuttle’s work, see ibid., pp. 111–12. native title case in Victoria. 8 Windschuttle, ‘The myths of frontier massacres 15 Roberts, ‘Bells Falls massacre and Bathurst’s in Australian history, Part I’, Quadrant, vol. 44, history of violence’, p. 630; Roberts, ‘The Bells no. 10, 2000, pp. 13, 19. Falls massacre and oral tradition’, p. 156; Brad

Bain Attwood 113 Manera, ‘Fighting for the Land exhibition: of Aboriginal people as a crime. It can also be Bunuba and Wiradjuri modules’, unpublished observed that the Myall Creek trials seem to paper, National Museum of Australia, 2001. have had the opposite of the effect intended 16 One of the text panels refers to the declaration by government, driving much settler violence of martial law in 1824. underground (see Andrew Markus, Australian 17 Radical conservatives would probably welcome Race Relations, 1788–1993, Allen & Unwin, Myall Creek as an exhibit since it could provide Sydney, 1994, pp. 46–49). an opportunity to advance an argument that 18 Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the the subsequent trials, in which several of the perpetrators were eventually found guilty Other, trans. by Brian Massumi, Manchester and sentenced to death, demonstrate that the University Press, Manchester, 1986, p. 4. rule of law worked to check settler violence 19 Gabrielle M Spiegel, ‘Memory and history: and protect Aboriginal people (see Keith Liturgical time and historical time’, History and Windschuttle, ‘The fabrication of Aboriginal Theory, vol. 41, no. 2, 2002, p. 161; Mark Salber history’, New Criterion, vol. 20, no. 1, 2001, Phillips, ‘Distance and historical representation’, www.newcriterion.com/archive/20/sept01/ History Workshop Journal, no. 57, 2004, p. 125. keith.htm, p. 7). In fact, there can be no doubt 20 Gillian Cowlishaw, ‘Studying Aborigines: that these trials were exceptional. There are only Changing canons in anthropology and history’, four known cases in which whites were executed in Bain Attwood and John Arnold (eds), Power, for the murder of Aborigines during the era of Knowledge and Aborigines, La Trobe University frontier conflict; and only ten whites are known Press, Melbourne, 1992, pp. 26–27. to have been executed for killing Aborigines in the nineteenth century, and seven of these were 21 Spiegel, ‘Memory and history’, p. 162. those men hung for the same deed at Myall 22 Heather Goodall, ‘Too early or not soon Creek. Consideration of the controversy the enough?: Reflections on sharing histories as trials provoked reveals, moreover, that many process’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 33, no. colonists were unwilling to regard the murder 118, 2002, p. 12.

Citation guide

Bain Attwood, ‘Contesting frontiers: History, memory and narrative in a national museum’, reCollections: Journal of the National Museum of Australia, vol. 1, no. 2 (2006), pp. 103–114.

Author

Bain Attwood is associate professor of history at Monash University and adjunct professor at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, The Australian National University. He has authored and edited many books in the field of Aboriginal history, including (with Stephen Foster) Frontier Conflict: The Australian Experience (National Museum of Australia, 2003).

114 Contesting frontiers