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Most of the democratizing impulses I have been discussing informed the display in the National Museum under consideration here, not least because it was the product of a process of consultation with Aboriginal people that the museum undertook in keeping with its commitment to be a place of “real and challenging dialogue between cultures” (Casey 2001, 7–8; Manera 2001). Called “1823–1825 The Wiradjuri War,” it was one of four modules that made up an exhibit “Contested Frontiers: Battles for the Land 1788–1928” (which can be seen at http://nma.gov.au/schools_bellsfalls/main.html) (Figure 3.1). The atmospherics of “Contested Frontiers” were somber, indeed mournful, with subdued lighting and the sound of a cello playing. At the threshold, a text panel summarized its themes:

It soon became apparent to Aboriginal people around Sydney Harbour that the British intended to stay. As the frontiers of colonization expanded, Aboriginal groups resisted. Guerilla wars were fought along a rolling frontier for a century and a half. Today the names of resistance leaders such as Windradyne and Jandamurra are virtually unknown outside their communities.

In the center of the exhibit were “Rolling frontiers” and “Wars of conquest, wars of resistance.” “Rolling frontiers” consisted of a map of Australia showing the gradual spread of British settlement marked by flashing lights indicating the location of major episodes of conflict, which included the Myall Creek and Coniston massacres, while the place-names “Slaughterhouse Creek,” “Massacre Bay,” “Battle Mountain,” and “Attack Spring” were projected onto the floor to signify killings committed by settlers. “Wars of conquest, wars of resistance” included a major text panel that similarly focused on Europeans and reflected what had become a scholarly consensus about the nature of frontier relations: increasing conflict as the British occupied more and more Aboriginal land, a shift over time in the balance of power that favored the newcomers, and considerable loss of life, especially for Aboriginal people. This, like the introductory panel, implied that the story being told was based on historical sources but that the past the displays related was the subject of both remembering and forgetting.

FIGURE 3.1 The “Contested Frontiers” exhibit, National Museum of Australia, Canberra. Photo: George Serras. Reproduced with permission of the National Museum of Australia.

FIGURE 3.2 The 1823–1825 Wiradjuri War display, National Museum of Australia. Photo: George Serras. Reproduced with permission of the National Museum of Australia.

Flanking these displays was “1823–1825 The Wiradjuri War” (which can be seen, complete with its text panels, at National Museum of Australia 2004b) (Figure 3.2) and “The Bunuba Uprising 1894–1897.” In both, the nature of the story being told had clearly shifted. They emphasized the local rather than the national and, more importantly, an Aboriginal perspective resting on memory rather than a settler one based on history. Part of the principal text panel for the Wiradjuri display read:

In Wiradjuri country, colonists attempted to drive off Aboriginal people by violating significant sites and contaminating waterholes. On occasions, they gave friendly Aboriginal people poisoned flour or bread. It is believed that the family of the warrior Windradyne was given potatoes by a farmer and that the family was shot when they returned to take more.

When martial law was declared, Windradyne and his people launched a guerrilla campaign. They frustrated the poorly organised British forces, who began to attack any Aboriginal people they could find. Windradyne and the Wiradjuri remained unvanquished.

In the center of this display was a large photo of Bells Falls Gorge, on which was imposed a text panel containing a statement made by a Wiradjuri elder, Bill Allen, in 2000: “This is a place of great sadness. Our people still hear the echoes of the women and children who died here. They came to seek refuge but the armed white settlers found them and killed them.” To the left and the right of this was further testimony by Allen: “The British declared martial law on Wiradjuri land in 1824. This, from our point of view, was an excuse for the soldiers and armed settlers to go out and kill hundreds of Wiradjuri men, women and children” (emphasis added) and “Windradyne was a great Wiradjuri warrior. In 1823 and 1824 he led our people in a campaign of resistance against the settlers. He was driven to fight after his family were killed in a dispute over a few potatoes.” In keeping with its focus on an Aboriginal perspective, this display featured Aboriginal rather than European weapons. A further photograph, of a field, was later accompanied by a panel conveying Aboriginal oral tradition: “Wiradjuri people believe this to be the site of a major battle.” Adjudicating history

Keith Windschuttle’s attack on this display rested on an assumption that it sought to tell the Bells Falls Gorge massacre story. He claimed that this narrative was “a complete fabrication” for which there was no contemporary historical evidence, asserted that the museum had a responsibility under its charter to promote “history” rather than “mythology,” insisted it should never have mounted the display by claiming that not only was there was no proper historical evidence for the story but a thoroughly researched scholarly analysis of it (by David Roberts) had revealed that it was “spurious,” and contended that the display was misleading since visitors would fail to realize that they were simply viewing “a piece of mythology” (Windschuttle 2001, 19; 2002, 31; 2003).

Windschuttle’s criticisms, it can be argued, reveal the complex nature of the difficult histories boom in the sense that they seem to be informed by several different impulses. First, he bemoaned the ways in which the new Australian history had drawn into doubt the nation’s moral character by telling unsettling stories, most notably about its dispossession, destruction, and despoliation of Aboriginal people. Second, he was convinced the unity of the nation was being threatened by the rise of forces such as “identity politics,” “pluralism,” and “multiculturalism,” which allegedly favored “minority cultures” and “special rights” at the cost of “the mainstream” or “ordinary people.” Third, he assumed that knowledge and learning, and thus the pursuit of truth, especially historical truth, was being corrupted by those same forces and that this left the nation without an overarching master narrative (Attwood 2005, ch. 3). In summary, Windschuttle’s concerns about the museum’s display might be regarded as typical of settler conservatives, who have felt sorely troubled by the profound changes in the stories that have long and lovingly been told about their nations. Yet such a conclusion would overlook two matters.

First, it can be argued that much of Windschuttle’s attack was informed by a series of assumptions that were commonplace among historians trained in the 1960s and 1970s, if not beyond. By the time that Windschuttle (b. 1942) studied history at university, historians had begun to pay attention to the pasts of women, the working class, migrants, indigenous peoples, and so forth, but they nonetheless tended to treat these as subordinate to a mainstream past. While they were increasingly expanding their methodological repertoire to include historical sources such as oral history and historical approaches such as local history, they remained committed to the traditional empirical goals of the discipline. In the decades since, many scholars have called into question the universalistic claims that academic history had made for its knowledge of the past, and have tried to show the ways in which memory, tradition, myth, and legend have their own conventions for establishing historical truth and which enjoy an authority of their own. But this approach has by no means found favor with all historians.

Second, Windschuttle’s attack seems to have been informed by a further commonly held apprehension, namely one about the grounds on which conflicting historical truths are to be adjudicated in democracies today. The democratization of history has meant that this is a much more difficult problem to negotiate than it was in the past. As Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000, ch. 4) has argued, this matter has been particularly vexed in cases where “minority histories” or “minority pasts,” like the stories told about Bells Falls Gorge, have raised fundamental questions about the discipline of history. In settling disputes about the past, he points out, the discipline has long insisted that historical narratives be assessed according to whether or not they meet its particular conception of the real and its rules for determining what is truthful. However, as we have observed, minorities like Aboriginal people in Australia seldom tell their histories in a manner that satisfies these criteria. Chakrabarty (2000) expresses the problem thus: “If minority histories go to the extent of questioning the very idea of fact or evidence, then[, it is asked], how would one find ways of adjudicating between competing claims in public life?” (99). The problem is all the greater, Chakrabarty (2007, 2008) has noted, in a context in which a conception of democracy that has long emphasized development and taken the nation as both a given and a unified whole is being challenged by a conception of democracy that emphasizes diversity, and where memory or the voice of experience has become a marketable commodity in the realm of the media, providing a means of persuasion which, in contrast to the discipline of history’s long insistence on a mode of persuasion that appeals to rational argument and demands the time-consuming process of marshalling evidence as proof, appeals instantaneously to emotion. Many, and not just the likes of Windschuttle, have insisted that a shared understanding of what constitutes historical knowledge must be maintained or even imposed so that national institutions like museums, as well as their visitors, are able to determine which historical narratives are true and which are not.

In the case of the Wiradjuri War display, some of the critics who were sympathetic to the museum’s treatment of frontier conflict suggested that the display should never have been mounted or that it should be abandoned, and contended that it would have been wiser for the museum to have presented the history of mass killings of Aboriginal people by means of a display that recounted instances that are uncontested because they can be “properly documented” (Geoffrey Bolton, quoted in Yallop 2003; see Macintyre and Clark 2003, 215). However, this response, at best, overlooks three crucial matters. First, the museum had sought to tell a story not so much about settler violence as about Aboriginal resistance. Second, its mounting of this display was the outcome of an attempt by Aboriginal people to challenge settler authority or even sovereignty by presenting their stories and asserting their forms of historical knowledge and truth. Third, the museum’s staging of this display was in keeping with its commitment to presenting accounts of the past that had not always been part of the country’s history. Consequently, abandoning the Wiradjuri War display could be interpreted as a retrograde step by the museum and one that smacked of colonialism.

In the wake of the conservative attack on the Wiradjuri War display, the museum made a series of moves. First, the curator responsible for the frontier conflict exhibit pointed out that the purpose of the display was to provide a present-day indigenous perspective on frontier violence, though he also tried to defend it on empirical grounds by claiming that there was an autochthonous tradition for the massacre that had been passed down through the generations (ABC PM 2001; Manera 2001). Second, the museum held a conference to debate the way in which frontier conflict was represented there, in the course of which the historian Graeme Davison (2003, 212) suggested that it might have adopted a firmer position in the story being told in the display, even if only to make clear to visitors that it was presenting them with an account that largely sought to foreground a modern-day Aboriginal perspective of frontier conflict. Third, in a context in which conservative members of the museum’s council were characterizing the controversy over the display in terms of whether its accounts of the past should rely on “oral tradition or historical fact” (Tony Staley, quoted in Yallop 2003), and senior staff at the museum realized that any reference to a Wiradjuri oral tradition rendered it vulnerable to attack (all the more so as they grasped that Aboriginal people’s account was probably derived from the settler tradition), it sought to de-emphasize the importance of the Aboriginal account to the display (Foster 2003; McIntyre 2003). Fourth, the museum adopted a recommendation that Davison had made at the conference to prepare some supplementary material, creating a web-based student kit about “how we know what we know about the past” which focused on the Wiradjuri War display as a case study (Davison 2003, 212; National Museum of Australia 2004b). Fifth, the museum decided it would prepare new text panels for the display in order to shed light on the controversy that had come to envelop the exhibit (National Museum of Australia 2004a, 10). And, finally, in the wake of a report of a review of the museum ordered by the conservative government barely a year after the museum had opened (to be discussed shortly), the museum decided to abandon the display and have a changeover of the story lines in the “frontier conflict” exhibit (National Museum of Australia 2004a).