Is cultural democracy possible in a museum? Critical reflections on Indigenous engagement in the development of the exhibition Encounters: Revealing Stories of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Objects from the British Museum

Abstract

Recent museological scholarship emphasises visitor participation and democratic access to cultural heritage as key to securing the ongoing relevance and future sustainability of museums. But do legacies of colonialist collecting practices and hierarchical conventions of representation in museums afford the possibility of genuine cultural democracy? This paper explores this question via detailed analysis of the Encounters exhibition, developed by the National Museum of Australia in partnership with the British Museum and promoted as an unprecedented partnership between the institutions and Indigenous Australian communities. Drawing on an extensive and emerging literature on museums, community engagement, participation and democracy, in tandem with analysis of public critiques and Indigenous responses to the exhibition, the paper suggests that the extent of Indigenous agency within the collaboration fell short of the articulated goals of the project. It concludes that the concept of maximal participation and release of agency to communities of interest may be difficult to achieve within existing museum frameworks.

Keywords:

• Museums
• engagement
• participation
• inclusion
• cultural democracy
• communities

Acknowledgements

I thank the two anonymous reviewers and the Editor of the International Journal of Heritage Studies for their generous and insightful comments on this paper. I am also grateful to members of the Museums and Heritage Research Group at the University of Sydney – Jennifer Barrett, Julia Horne, Avril Alba, Cameron Logan, Steve Brown, James Flexner, Sandra Loschke and Alexandra Brown – for their feedback on an earlier version of the article.

Notes

1. ‘History Wars’ is a term that has come to describe the conflict between pluralist, multicultural and multi-vocal approaches to Australian history (aligned with a post-modern historiographical framework) and a more conservative Eurocentric view of the country’s development and culture. The clash between these two perspectives became intensified around the NMA, whose initial exhibitions and programs were criticised as biased in favour of the experiences of minorities in Australian society. For a useful summary of the NMA’s role in the History Wars see Message 2009.

2. A comparably significant Australian collection of Indigenous material was destroyed in the Garden Palace fire of 1882. The Garden Palace, built in the grounds of the Sydney Botanic Gardens to house the International Exhibition of 1879–80, accommodated the Technological and Mining Museums as well as collections of various government departments (see variety of contemporaneous newspaper articles, NLA Trove).