ICOM International Council of Museums - Museo Estancia Jesuitica ...

Harris: The Museum is not transparent
soldiers were injured – one, Captain Ellis, died two weeks later. The British party
quickly departed the scene of carnage leaving Aboriginal bodies where they had fallen.
Ellis was buried with full military honours.”
In this statement which was juxtaposed to the two statements quoted above, the
museum appears to be following its ironic theme by stating that the victors did not bury
the bodies of the vanquished although their own dead was given a proper funeral.
However, the meaning effect of the museum’s word choices are not confined to irony.
In the paradigmatic choice of “British” as the word to describe the villains and victors,
the museum also had available “settlers”, “colonisers”, “invaders”, “future Australians”
or - following a quoted voice of 1834, George Fletcher Moore - “Europeans”. By
choosing the word “British” the museum blames the British for the killing and achieves
a comfortable moral and historic distancing for itself, and for many of its Australian
visitors – after all, there is a long history of antagonism between Australians and British
which could make this choice of word seem logical.
This is a crucial moment in the unravelling of this exhibition text because it shows that
the museum, even in the choice of this single word, seems determined not to accept
historic responsibility for the colonial enterprise although its actions as a cultural
representative of the coloniser clearly implicates it in colonial activities. For the
museum to push the blame away to the British is to fail to take historic responsibility for
its part in history.
Dealing with shameful history
Habermas’s (1988) consideration of the problem of the Nazi period of history for
contemporary Germans sheds light on ways to engage with shameful memory. He
considers the relationship between future generations and the atrocitites of the 1930s
and 1940s and concludes that they are necessarily linked. He argues that there is no
way to repudiate these events because they function also to produce the contemporary
nation.
“Our own life is linked inwardly, and not just by accidental circumstances, with that context of life in which
Auschwitz was possible. Our form of existence is connected with the form of existence of our parents and
grandparents by a mesh of family, local, political and intellectual traditions which is difficult to untangle – by
an historical milieu, therefore, which in the first instance has made us what we are and who we are today.”
(Habermas 1988: 43-44)
He goes onto argue that the events are best treated as a filter.
“The Nazi period will be must less of an obstacle to us, the more calmly we are able to consider it as a
filter through which the substance of our culture must be passed, insofar as this substance is adopted
voluntarily and consciously.” (Habermas, 1988: 45)
History as a filter for contemporary experience is a useful way to think through the
problems of museums and history. For Western Australians, the dispossession of
indigenous people and their subsequent harmful treatment is a painful and on-going
public issue which is debated endlessly. Seemingly intractable contemporary issues for
Aboriginal people have flowed from the colonisation process including endemic
poverty, cultural disruption, poor health and short life expectancy. It is clear that these
problems are the results of the colonising process and some of these are covered in
Katta Djinoong, for example, disproportionately high rates of imprisonment, but it could
have been done more powerfully had the museum not distanced itself from colonial
actions. Had the museum used its own role as one of the filters for analysing the issues
then it could have produced a very strong statement about the filtered connection
between past and present. However, although the museum has tackled some of the
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