Has the National Museum of Australia got it all wrong?
A response to Keith Windschuttle
by Gary Morgan
Quadrant
April 2002

In the September 2001 edition of Quadrant, Keith Windschuttle reviewed the National Museum of Australia in Canberra (How not to run a museum - people's history at the postmodern museum). His assessment was scathing. In summary, Windschuttle described the museum as "a profound intellectual mistake as well as a great waste of public money. Indeed …. it is not a real museum at all."

The National Museum and the new Melbourne Museum have opened very recently; the former in March 2001, the latter in October 2000. They are both very large museums, costing approximately $155 million and $300 million respectively. Together with Te Papa Museum of New Zealand, which opened in February 1998, they are the flagships of museums in this part of the world, vast in size and in the scope of their coverage.

Not surprisingly, and indeed quite appropriately, such large cultural capital works involving very significant amounts of public dollars have attracted attention and scrutiny. They have also attracted various views as to their success and worthiness as museums. It is only healthy that we should assess how our tax dollars are spent. It is also only healthy that diverse views are expressed and that these views are given hearing in the media.

All three of the new 'mega-museums' noted above have met with their share of criticism. All three have also been praised, on various grounds. They are all monumental works of architecture. Appreciation of architecture is a very personal thing, just as is appreciation of art. It would be rare for any striking building design to meet with universal praise. The icons of architecture tend to become that over time. Jorn Utzon's Sydney Opera House, now a candidate for World Heritage listing, was scandalously controversial, for its design and its cost, through to and following its opening in 1973. Needless to say it is now a symbol of a city, and arguably the architectural symbol of a Nation. Its inherently poor (some would say dys-) functionality as a performing arts space has been subsumed within the grandeur of its style. Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum in New York was an extension of art deco/art moderne design on its opening in 1959, looking both backward and forward in a design sense. Now an architectural destination, the Guggenheim with its unique spiral galleries presents an odd mix of challenges to the art curator who actually needs flexible spaces to display largely two dimensional - and usually flat - works of art. The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, opened in October 1997, has transformed a struggling industrial town into a site of cultural pilgrimage, as much to see Frank Gehry's building as the art works it holds.

Cultural institutions like museums, galleries and theatres offer architects great opportunities to create engineering works of art, rather more so than schools, hospitals, prisons or even office buildings. So, have the mega-museums of the antipodes achieved this?

The Museum of Melbourne designed by Denton Corker Marshall has received several architectural awards, including the Sir Zelman Cowen Award for Public Buildings in late 2001. Te Papa Museum of New Zealand designed by Ivan Mercep of JASMAX group was awarded a New Zealand Institute of Architects Regional Award in 1999.

The National Museum of Australia is a design of Ashton Raggatt McDougall. It too has been successful in attracting architectural praise and won the prestigious international Blueprint Architecture Award for Best New Public Building in 2001. But what do architectural awards mean for the general visitor? Possibly not all that much, except they do recognize something out of the ordinary and people will go to see the unusual, as the Bilbao Guggenheim has so clearly demonstrated. The fact that a building has pleased the architectural fraternity, those whom Keith Windschuttle refers to as the "architectural cognoscenti", does not guarantee a building that works perfectly in all respects for what it is intended to do. Perfection is a hard thing to achieve, and the National Museum of Australia is just one illustration of this, amongst many.

Windschuttle states, "the building simply doesn't work for the public". This is an absolute appraisal of failure, characteristic of his article in general. And also characteristically, and something I will refer to often, Windschuttle proffers no evidence for his judgment. Quite obviously, he does not like the building (and little else about the museum). Yet to assume the role of voice of the people without any supportive evidence is to assume one's own views are those of the majority.

My own view is, on this occasion, to agree in part with Windschuttle that the building internally is not as well structured as it might be. There is a degree of confusion in orientation, and some spaces seem quite claustrophobic after the sheer enormity of the entrance hall, a space that as Windschuttle notes has been called "one of the most exhilarating spaces in any public building in Australia". The various mezzanine levels mean the visitor has a less structured visit than is typical in museums where one gallery leads simply to the next. In this respect at least, the more traditional gallery structure of the Melbourne Museum, with sequential thematic spaces opening off the common thoroughfare, is easier to orientate in. To dub the National Museum building unworkable on these grounds is to be harsh in the appraisal, but this is the least of Windschuttle's criticisms.

A large part of Keith Windschuttle's article is his attempt to paraphrase the history of the new National Museum as a project, particularly in terms of the underpinning philosophy of its approach to exhibitions. It is clear that his concerns are not restricted to the Museum but reflect his strong opposition to and contempt for social, or 'peoples', history in general. Windschuttle takes us on a whistle-stop tour of the history of museums. He tracks the origins of modern museums, contrasting the interpretation (typified by historians such as Graeme Davison) that they were largely reflections of colonial conquest and expansion, with his own views that the early museums were primarily scientific.

This lengthy discussion is rather redundant. Early collections and museums (and by this I mean those of the 18th and 19th centuries; there are of course much earlier examples of collecting and presenting collections) were indeed often scientific, and were also developed on the crest of European expansion and colonialism. Windschuttle's example of Joseph Banks and James Cook confirms this: a scientific expedition with very strong political and colonial motives. At that time there was no discomfort in this duality of purpose and good science was done on the shoulders of colonialism. The fact that cultural treasures were taken from their countries and cultures of origin and deposited, 'safely', in storehouses on the other side of the world was not a matter for debate. At least then. It most certainly is a matter for debate now, as the issue of repatriation of cultural material is considered very seriously by all responsible museums. There is no easy answer to what should best be returned to the cultures that generated the objects of cultural significance, but a dialogue is happening between museums and community groups around the world. This is clearly not a dialogue much supported by Mr Windschuttle.

The early museums that simply displayed their collections in vast arrays, behind glass and with labels denoting all relevant details (according to the curator), are lauded by Windschuttle. This is what a museum should be. "Generations of schoolchildren who filed past their cabinets were greatly enriched by the experience". Yes? Were they? Once again - and many times more - Windschuttle presents his personal preference as that of the majority. There is no evidence or data presented to support his views on what works or does not work in museums in so far as enriching the visitor. There is in fact a wealth of published data, and endless results from audience evaluations, that clearly indicate the opposite. A still entrenched attitude of many people that museums are musty, dusty, unchanging places is because of their early experiences as children of the old style of museum. This is not an environment that works well for learning, for a good many of the users. It does appeal to some. I myself share Windschuttle's affection for the old style of museums, the cabinets of curiosities, with endless specimens transfixed for all time in a universe of glass and polished cedar. There is an air of nostalgia in these displays, of quiet spaces, a smell of dust and mustiness, and a creaking door somewhere in the distance as the only sign of life. Prominent natural scientists such as Stephen J. Gould have also expressed their love of such displays, for example in The Glory of Museums (in his book, Dinosaur in a Haystack).

We know now, and in fact have known for some time, that this type of presentation cannot be the only approach to encourage learning by the majority of visitors and in many cases is not the best way - and is often a poor way - to achieve engagement with people. There is a good and growing body of documentation on learning theory and practice in museum-type environments. Presenting vast amounts of text that tell people 'facts' is rarely an effective learning approach. Exhibitions that have personal relevance and that encourage the visitor to enquire and construct their own learning experience do work. Yet for Keith Windschuttle, the museums of the early 19th century had it right. To detour from their precedent is to betray the true role of museums - although it is not clear just what he sees as that role - to "concessions to popular demand". Concessions to popular demand? Does this mean the people liked this alternative approach? Heaven forbid that people should actually enjoy their museum experiences. Museums should be like penance or medicine - good for you but not all that pleasant in the doing. This is nonsense. Learning is likely to be more effective when people of all ages are enjoying the learning experience. Windschuttle is either totally unfamiliar with learning theory or chooses to ignore it as a diversion from his own personal view of what a good museum should do and say.

It is interesting that elsewhere in his article, Windschuttle argues the case that public tastes change over time, and that methods that worked with one audience in a given decade may not work, or may be broadened to contact other audiences, at a later date. In this instance, he argues that the use of, say, elements of live theatre is unlikely to be effective in engaging broad audiences in museums as live theatre is now the domain of the educated middle class. This is a very and clearly deliberately narrow interpretation of live theatre. The intention of advocates is to provide interaction between the museum visitors and living people doing things. The intention will rarely be to stage a full performance of Wagner's Ring Cycle, and Windschuttle will be well aware of that.

He goes on to quote two directors of Australian museums as supporters, as it were, of his cause, although it is doubtful either of them would want to be publicly associated with the case he makes. Tim Flannery has been a quoted critic in the popular press (The Age, The Australian) of the National Museum and Museum of Melbourne. In his perception, they have downgraded research. Mike Archer certainly supports research - as do I and all other museum directors in Australia - but has not to my knowledge publicly criticized other museums for their research efforts, or lack of them. Museums have many and varied roles and each director and Board must assess what the best balance is between those roles. Research is only as effective as the effectiveness of its communication, and that in turn is a balance between scientific publications, books, popular articles, exhibitions, seminars, education packages and a multitude of other outputs. I do not see a single 'right' balance. Yet Keith Windschuttle obviously does and that balance is the one he likes. Perhaps I am just too pluralist.

Which means that I would have to disagree with Windschuttle even further. Let us return to the broad approach to history that he finds so offensive, not only in the National Museum of Australia but wherever it rears its ugly head - or heads I should say, like a sociopathic Hydra. This is the pluralist approach of social or people's history. The author equates this several times in his article to 'political correctness', a term that for some has become the universal pejorative, whatever it may mean. Windschuttle particularly identifies the triumvirate of gender, race and class, or "women, ethnics and indigenes" as he more pointedly writes, as the beneficiaries of politically correct history. In contrast, those excluded in this scenario are the "dead white males, especially those who once occupied positions of authority".

Let us look a moment at Windschuttle's women, ethnics and indigenes and how social history and museums like the National Museum "pander" to these fashionable interest groups. It is true that Aboriginal Australians make up quite a small percentage of Australia's population. At the 1996 census, around 353,000 or just on 2% of Australians claimed Aboriginality. Given that the estimated population of Aborigines in Australia in 1788 was between 300,000 and 1,000,000, this reflects quite a diminution in Aboriginal representation in the Australian community. (In the 1920s, census figures indicate that the population of full and 'half-caste' Aboriginal people was as low as 70,000.) It could well be argued, and often is, that 50-60,000 years at least of land occupancy and First Nation status does convey a particular standing that outweighs the simple statistic of population size. Great cultural museums of the world, such as the Canadian Museum of Civilization and the National Museum of the American Indian (a branch of the Smithsonian Institution) recognize the particular place of indigenous peoples in the matrix of cultures of modern societies. This does not belittle other cultures; it is a recognition of something special and unique in terms of relationship with place.

But if numbers are the stuff of minorities, then Aboriginal people could be called a minority group. So let us turn to "ethnics". Presumably Keith Windschuttle means those who are not of Anglo-Celtic stock or from one of the English speaking countries. I doubt he would call a white Canadian or American "ethnic", although many of these people will have ancestors from Poland, Slovakia or the Ukraine. Perhaps he would not include a German or Netherlander as ethnic, or perhaps he would, but an Italian, Greek or Chinese would certainly be a Windschuttle ethnic. Let's take ethnic to mean those who were born in a non-English speaking country. In 1999, approximately 25% of Australians were born overseas and of these 61% were from a non-English speaking country. This equates to 15% of the Australian population being 'ethnics', without including their descendants born in Australia who will still carry a lot of the cultural traditions of their ethnic parents. Quite a large minority group. Yet Windschuttle could argue that this is the current mix in Australia and the past was characterized by larger percentages of people from the British Isles. That is of course true.

Finally, women. While the early years of white settlement in Australia were characterized by much larger numbers of men than women this imbalance has been corrected over time and today the number of women slightly exceeds the number of men. So if we combine the women, ethnics (by the narrow definition used above) and indigenes, we get around 60% of the Australian population, a substantial majority, in comparison to the Anglo-Celtic males amongst us.

So, is to address the stories of 60% of the population pandering for interest groups or reflecting large parts of modern society? Windschuttle's answer is the former, because history should reflect the doers - the agents - of history, rather than the objects of history. Much of our past major events were done or caused by white males, and hence they should occupy a commensurate proportion of our history books, history courses and, naturally, museum displays. There is an old expression that history is written by the victor, and Windschuttle's recommendation is precisely that. He does not entirely repudiate social history. He acknowledges that there is a place for ethnic museums that "preserve relics and symbols of the home culture (as they) are obviously important to members of those ethnic groups." Not to anyone else who is outside those cultures mind you, and who might benefit from an understanding of them, but to those cultures at least. He also acknowledges that women have stories to be told, even if they are peripheral to the real plot. Ultimately though, you need the grand narrative - read white male narrative - to have the proper overview. Only then can you get "a complete explanation" of events.

I do not intend to attempt a defence of social history in this article. There are others, far more learned and better able to do so. I daresay that Geoffrey Bolton, quoted by Keith Windschuttle as recognising the need to "repudiate the view that one grand narrative should predominate", would be one of them. What I would question is the judgment that because the National Museum has taken an approach that gives multiple voices to history, that shows history from various perspectives rather than a single view (the white male view), it has failed as a national museum and as a place for Australians to visit and engage with history. If we want the museum to be purely the taxonomic, scientific showcase, so beloved of Windschuttle, then the single grand narrative, heavily dominated by bearded white faces (but with some token detours exploring women, ethnics and indigenes) would be the way to go. Everything in its 'proper' place, classified, with text panels written by a curator, preferably a white male curator as they mostly all were in the days of the old museums - neat and simple, and immediately recognisable (and comforting?) to a white male audience.

Yet this is not the Australia of today. This does not reflect the complete audience of modern museums. Windschuttle seems dismissive of this notion of changing audiences; he is disparaging of this in his discussion of the principles of new museology. As I have discussed already, the old museums were good at what they did, for a part of the population - the part of the population that responded well to simple static displays of objects, curated from a single viewpoint, that of the 'expert'. Audience research shows that has not been the greater part of the population for a long time. And even that part has changed, as all things do, over the centuries. We see a broadening of the audiences of museums, not the excluding of the old audience, unless that old audience is offended by the inclusion of more stories about more groups and told from the perspective of the people involved. Does this deviate from a single grand narrative? Yes, of course it does. Does this tell stories that relate to groups who would hardly have rated a mention in the old days? Yes again. Are these stories often about the impacts on people rather than just about the causes? Yes one more time. Is that a bad thing? Very definitely yes, according to Keith Windschuttle.

Museums must be relevant to the people they serve and they serve the widest audience of any educational institution. This is especially true of the large national and state museums such as those in Australia. Having relevance is not just about telling people that one thing happened after another. It is exploring the impacts of those events, and impacts are about people's lives. Living history is not a book full of names and dates. I hated that at school and did not persist in studying history as a result, just as many people have memories of awful school visits to museums when they were young and don't come back until they feel obliged to do the right thing and take their own children. Many then are pleasantly surprised at how museums have changed, although this would be advocating the "popular demand" that so irritates Keith Windschuttle.

The learning of history in school and university, another focus of Windschuttle's criticism of modern approaches to history, is not a topic I am qualified to comment on, apart from my personal recollection noted above. However, again his focus is clear as he laments the unlikelihood that the National Museum's exhibitions would appeal to "your average male undergraduate". Your average white male undergraduate is probably what he is trying to say, and even then, is the comment justified? Again, he provides no evidence whatsoever that male undergraduates in history do not enjoy the museum. While I am not a commentator on historical studies at university, I am sufficiently informed to know that the reasons for declines in numbers of history students and staff are many, and can scarcely be attributed (solely) to the perceived irrelevance of current courses, as Windschuttle so casually asserts. Indeed, there are recent reports of an upswing in interest in the humanities at university.

Windschuttle further attacks social history as being, together with the architecture, the reason for the National Museum experience lacking direction. As I have said earlier in this article, I agree with him that the museum is not easy to navigate and needs better orientation methods. The internal spaces and their layout contribute to this. That the "meaningless nature of the exhibitions" is contributing to this is far less clear. There is always a close synergy between exhibition dynamics - the way people move through them and interact with the components - and the exhibition layout. It is not necessary to have a single pathway through a gallery, but if that is not so, then the exhibition content has to be structured in a way that allows interpretation to happen in a non-linear fashion. I do not think the National Museum has got that right. It can be hard to know where you are at a given moment and how to get to where you want to go, both in terms of your physical and intellectual exploration.

Does this mean the entire philosophical approach to the museum is wrong however, as Windschuttle contends? Absolutely not in my view. You don't have to have a single story line, told from one viewpoint, to ensure the visitor maintains their interaction with the exhibition. In any case, most visitors spend very little time at any one part of an exhibition. Very few read all of the text - I cannot remember the last time I read the entire text of an exhibition I have visited - and many use more physical signposts to orientate or congregate. Usually certain elements of an exhibition attract more people and hold their attention longer than others. The physical layout of the Museum of Melbourne is more traditional than that of the National Museum in the sense of entering and leaving discrete galleries to common thoroughfares, but again, there is no grand narrative that takes the visitor in a linear chronological time frame through that museum's spaces.

Windschuttle subscribes too to the view that the exhibition elements that are non-Aboriginal are dismissive of mainstream Australian values. He describes them as being "presented in terms of mockery and irony". One can only accede that this must be a matter for personal opinion, and some others such as Miranda Devine in a particularly vitriolic review of the National Museum in Sydney's Daily Telegraph, have expressed that view as well. I was part of the Te Papa Museum of New Zealand project, which attracted its own share of controversy, but I do not recall ever reading a review of that museum as scathing as the one by Devine. It was as if the National Museum had deliberately offended all of her sensibilities. While I was not part of the National Museum project, I can say with confidence that it was never the intention of the museum's staff to cause public offence although they will most certainly have wanted to engage with issues that would be challenging and provocative. In any case, other reviewers, including professional journalists, have been far from offended and often complimentary - sometimes very complimentary - of the Museum's approach (for example, John McDonald in the Sydney Morning Herald and Stephen Brook in the Weekend Australian.)

Perhaps some people are just too sensitive. I grew up in Australian suburbia with a Hills hoist in my back yard and I did not find the examples hanging from the ceiling in one gallery of the National Museum mocking me or my background. Windschuttle suggests this is the "intelligentsia" making fun of ordinary folks, "telling them they (Hills hoists, Victor lawn mowers) are so out of date they have become objects of curiosity". Presumably he also was offended by the display of precision Victor lawn mowing at the opening of the Sydney Olympics. I had not seen them as being on display because "they are so out of date they have become objects of curiosity". I had seen them as being on display because they reflected aspects of something most of us have in common in Australia, and reinforcing a positioning of museums as something other then repositories of old things that are no longer used. Whatever your view as to the worthiness of this approach at the National Museum, to see in it only a concerted attack on Australian values is an extreme reaction.

Has the National Museum adequately profiled the good things the nation has achieved since 1788? Windschuttle lists a number of examples of negative profiling of European history in this country. For example, he lists twenty-five snapshots of Australian history from 1838 to 1998. It would be a daunting prospect to attempt compiling 25 events that gave a cross-sectional insight into Australia over that period. I suspect that each of us, given time, would collate a different assemblage. I have agreed with Keith Windschuttle on a number of things, and I would agree that, on balance (if balance can be struck in such matters) the 25 listed events are somewhat skewed towards profiling opposition or resistance to conservative authority. Personally, I would not feel that those 25 events defined my background as an Australian, but I scarcely expect that is what the National Museum intended it to do. If anything, this reinforces the position that a simple string of events cannot do justice to the complexities and interwoven stories that make up a nation's history.

In contrast to the white histories, Windschuttle acknowledges the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander - the First Australians - galleries as having worth. They are "the only good reason to visit (the museum)". Moreover, they house "an invaluable ethnographic collection that alone justifies the institution's existence". Faint praise perhaps, but some praise at least.

However, they are still deeply flawed in his view. The use of soundscapes "makes it difficult to concentrate on reading the captions of other displays nearby". The use of sound in museums is a challenging methodology, and the negative impacts on adjacent areas must always be considered. There are technological ways of doing this. It may be that the National Museum needs to review how sound is used to best effect. However, as I have noted already, different methods enhance the learning experience for the visitor, and sound and video can certainly do that. Most visitors, on the basis of documented audience assessments, do not relate well to vast screeds of text. This may be the type of experience Keith Windschuttle enjoys and expects in a museum but he is not representative of the majority.

There is another dimension to this. Windschuttle seeks to enjoy, undisturbed by intrusions like video or sound, "the relics of the great variety of indigenous peoples who pre-dated British colonization". Note the wording … the relics. Things from the past, evidence of dead cultures. The video and sound are profiling recent events, evidence of the living and assertive Aboriginal cultures, as they strive to establish their place in a modern Australia. I believe absolutely in the value of real objects as the cornerstone of museum interpretation but objects can be seen as, and can be presented as, evidence of things gone. Museums today are telling the stories that link past with present and show options for the future, and this means setting those objects within contextual frameworks, not as disembodied things to be gawked at just because they are quaint, or exotic, or even beautiful.

Windschuttle does recognise "balanced history" in the exploration of Aboriginal-British relations, which presumably means that the depiction aligns reasonably well with his views of that history. Up to a point. That point is the issue of frontier wars. Frontier warfare is a topic on which Keith Windschuttle has written before. His The Myths of Frontier Massacres in Australian History appeared in Quadrant in three issues from October to December 2000. As in his review of the National Museum, Windschuttle in his frontier warfare articles focused on a small number of examples. His argument was that killings were rare, and often exaggerated. In his National Museum article, as in the earlier piece on massacres, he supports writers such as Rod Moran, who disputes one such event, the Forrest River killings. To read Windschuttle's account, the case against frontier massacres has been proven. Most didn't happen, and those that did are few and involved small numbers of individuals, as victims and perpetrators.

Given the illegality of murdering Aboriginal people, it is scarcely surprising that details of the events are often patchy. However, as is noted by Robert Manne in his essay, In Denial, the Stolen Generations and the Right, there is clear and documented record of hundreds of killings of Aboriginal people, involving at times large numbers of victims. Again, I do not mean to defend every record of frontier killing or to suggest that there is no uncertainty regarding specific events. What Windschuttle does is to focus on cases that he regards as having some elements of doubt and to use those to substantiate a sweeping claim that the killing of Aboriginal people was uncommon. The evidence is overwhelmingly against him, but you would never know it in his articles.

It may be of interest to know that the National Museum hosted a workshop on frontier conflict in December of last year. Mr Windschuttle participated. The views and perspectives expressed at the workshop were diverse, with many speakers taking a position very different from Windschuttle's. The fact that the museum was prepared to host a forum on the topic shows an interest in exploring history in an interactive way, and a preparedness to give opportunities for those holding various views to express them.

In concluding his article on the National Museum, Keith Windschuttle returns to the public, the users of the museum. Quite rightly, as museums are service organisations, providing a range of vitally important learning and recreational, as well as commercial, services to a very diverse public. If museums are not well servicing their audiences, then what is driving their outcomes? He concedes that "in the short term, (the museum) may well have a good story to tell" in terms of audience numbers. He does that begrudgingly, and with some measure of doubt it would seem as to the "word of the director" on what attendances are. His conclusion is dismissive however. "Most people who visit once will find it a turn-off and will tell their friends not to bother". As I have noted throughout this paper, the lack of any supporting evidence will never be an obstacle to Keith Windschuttle in arriving at a conclusive view. On what basis is he assessing visitor reactions to the National Museum? Does he have, or did he ask for, audience evaluation data that might support his claims? If so, he does not refer to it. Instead, it is much easier to assume a position of enlightened critic, acting on behalf of the greater public. I know what I like; I don't like it; and hence neither will anyone else. But let us give Windschuttle the benefit of doubt. Perhaps he wrote his article before any supporting data were available.

Like most large museums today, the National Museum is undertaking ongoing audience evaluation that allows a feedback loop into decision-making about the public program and visitor experiences. Windschuttle is right on at least one count: the National Museum does currently have a good story to tell. The Museum's Annual Report for 2000/01 shows output measures, and in the slightly more than three months of that year, approximately 350,000 people visited the museum. If this were maintained, it would equate to over 1 million visitors in a year. Of the visitors surveyed in audience tests, more than 90% indicated they were satisfied or very satisfied with the museum experience.

Will these attendance figures be maintained? Who knows? There is likely to be a drop from the initial peak - that is the norm with major attractions. It also depends on the National Museum keeping up a dynamic and exciting program that gets people to return. A large percentage of visitors to Canberra attractions are tourists, both interstate and overseas, so the percentage of repeat visitation may not be as high as it is for say, the Western Australian Museum in Perth. Having a program of attractive temporary exhibitions may help to keep repeat visitation up. If we look at Te Papa Museum of New Zealand, it is attracting almost 1.5 million visitors per year, a large part of which are repeat users.

When I read an article like that of Keith Windschuttle's, I have to ask why has someone arrived at such an absolutely negative position? While acknowledging, very briefly and in passing, some strengths in the museum, he is overwhelming critical, to the point where his final assessment is "The National Museum is a profound intellectual mistake as well as a great waste of public money". It would be hard to be more definite in one's assessment than that.

Windschuttle's perception that the National Museum is a social history of anti-conservative thought is clear enough. He makes that point succinctly when he refers to "attempts by the left to write the history of the nation or to mount a national social history museum". In short, as a conservative, Windschuttle finds the National Museum, and history theory today, are rather too far left for his liking. Add to this the museum's assumption of a position in variance with his views on Aboriginal-white relations, typified in the frontier massacres, and you have the recipe for an article such as he has written.

As I note in my opening, debate about museums is good. It makes the museum community healthier, more resilient and more responsive. Museums should be subject to scrutiny, from all of the audiences and stakeholders who use them or support them. It is ironic perhaps that Windschuttle's' criticism of pluralism in history today is combined with his assessment that the National Museum has told the wrong possible version, that is, made the wrong choice, of Australian history.

As a museum director, I take a particular interest in what museums are doing and how they are doing it. I have not attempted here to review the National Museum of Australia as a total experience, although it will be evident that there are aspects I believe work well, and those that I feel work less well. This is hardly surprising as I was not involved in the project, and even if I had been, doubtless I would not have done everything exactly the same if time could be had over. Developing a large complex museum is not the same as putting people on the Moon or Mars, although both are very complicated tasks. A Lunar or Martian landing has a very prescribed outcome and must be set within modern technologies so there will be only a very limited range of options for doing it successfully. Developing an exciting and engaging museum can be approached from many perspectives, with many different final outcomes, as the diversity between the National Museum of Australia, Melbourne Museum and Te Papa demonstrates.

I would end where I began, on one of Keith Windschuttle's most telling lines. He describes the NMA as "not a real museum at all". The notion that there is one right kind of museum, a formula that all museums should adhere to, is both naive and frightening to me. It speaks of a narrowness in program delivery that is neither practical nor desirable, and moreover would be incredibly boring if it were implemented. This does not in any way belittle the scholarship that underpins what good museums do. It does however emphasise that communication of knowledge should be done in many and varied ways that can contact and engage with much broader audiences, including the white males of society.

Speaking as a white male like Keith Windschuttle, I anticipate there will always be a place for Keith and me in Australia's National Museum.

Gary Morgan is executive director of the Western Australian Museum.