Australia Yearbook - 2001

Chapter 12—Culture and recreation 539
example, Henry Parkes proposed a Memorial
State House for Sydney’s Centennial Park that
would celebrate the centenary of colonial
settlement. The monument would include a great
hall containing documents and relics illustrating
the historical, material and industrial stages of the
Colony’s progress, and the “customs, languages
and ethnological characteristics of the aboriginal
races of Australia”. 13 A second proposal at the
time of Federation suggested a grand arch
standing in Sydney which might contain a room
for historical records and curios. In 1902, Arthur
Woodward, Head of the Art Department at the
Bendigo School of Mines, proposed a museum,
to be located in the federal capital, covering
archaeology, paintings, prints and drawings,
Australian and natural history, and a portrait
gallery; and Walter Burley Griffin’s plan for
Canberra included a monument storing archives
and relics and located on Capital Hill. None of
these projects ever got off the ground.
The 1920s saw two further proposals for national
museums, although these retreated further from
any interest in national history. By 1924 Professor
Colin Mackenzie had secured government funds
to build a National Museum of Australian Zoology
displaying the comparative anatomy of Australian
fauna. Opened in 1931 as the Australian Institute
of Anatomy, the institution focused on natural
history and ethnological collections. In 1927,
A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, Professor of Anthropology
at the University of Sydney, also proposed a
national museum focusing on ethnology,
primarily Australian but encompassing eventually
“all peoples and ages of the world”. The museum
was designed to prevent the ongoing export of
Australian ethnological collections to Europe and
also to function as a resource for anthropological
research. When Radcliffe-Brown’s proposal was
submitted to Cabinet, a Departmental submission
suggested that the museum should encompass
not only ethnological material but also “articles of
historic interest and articles Australian in
character”, such as a Cobb & Co coach owned by
the Government and Charles Sturt’s surveying
equipment. 14 An inquiry into the proposal,
however, reduced the museum again to a focus
on natural history, and eventually the project
foundered in the face of the 1930s Depression.
This lack of sustained interest in Australia’s
history since 1788 derived perhaps from the fact
that Australians felt little direct connection to the
kinds of events which, at the time, were
understood to constitute history. European
museums housed objects of classical antiquity,
royalty, imperial conquest, nation formation
and war. Australians, however, brought little
consciousness of their national identity to
their experience of such events until the war
of 1914–18. Moreover, the study of Australian
history was born at a time when history was
understood as a discipline of words, and a
discipline dedicated to calculating the
progress of civilisation and the formation of
the state. Written or printed evidence,
records, correspondence, documents,
registers and census data were constituted as
the key material remains of history in
Australia. 15 It is perhaps consequently
unsurprising that the first major museum
which explicitly took the historical
experience of Australians as its focus was the
Australian War Memorial.
Developed since 1918 and eventually opened
in its permanent home in Canberra in 1941,
the Australian War Memorial was intended
both to commemorate the sacrifice of
Australians in war and to present the
experience of Australian servicemen (and, to
a lesser extent, women). This latter function
was to be achieved through extensive
exhibitions of objects, images and dioramas
evoking the experience of battle. The War
Memorial was to be a place to which
returned veterans could bring their families
to help explain to them what they had
experienced, and a focus for grieving for
widows and parents whose husbands, lovers
and children had not returned home. 16 The
Memorial emphasised the subject of patriotic
sacrifice within the frame of the Australian
nation, its displays centred around the figure
of a serviceman who, while of European
stock and still rather fond of England, was
definitively Australian. 17 As such, the
Memorial became the first major museum in
Australia to explicitly imagine its audience as
a national community, rather than an
imperial or a racial one.
Audiences and their
behaviours
Apart from the establishment of the
Australian War Memorial, it appears from the
available research that there was little
substantive change in the way Australia’s
museums understood their purpose and
character between the close of the
nineteenth century and the middle of the