excerpts from Valda Rigg’s article looking at colonial ideology in 19th century NSW
Rigg, V. ‘Curators of the Colonial Idea: the museum and exhibition as agents of bourgeois
ideology in nineteenth century New South Wales’, Public History Review, Vol. 3, 1994
excerpt one
Inaugurated in 1827, the Australian Museum was the colonies' first state museum. The
Sydney International Exhibition — 1879-1880 — was the colonies' first international
exhibition. Each played an important role in the public articulation of bourgeois ideology. Not
only did they provide the educative and civilizing centres for its public expression but they
promulgated the 'evidence' of theories that justified expropriation of Aboriginal land and at
times the extermination of Aboriginal people.
Although the Australian Museum and the Sydney International Exhibition were not directly
controlled by the state, it could exercise and exert power by appointing as museum board
trustees and exhibition commissioners ideologically aligned men whose personal and
professional advancement benefited from involvement in the patriarchal infrastructures of
government. But they were not the only stake-holders in the public articulation of Aboriginal
inferiority. All who had a vested interest in acquiring land for settlement benefited from it.
By the end of the nineteenth century each Australian colony had a state museum and the focus
of each was natural history and natural science. The curators were not historians, they were
geologists, biologists and botanists. Their primary focus was on natural history and what was
then perceived as its concomitant category, ethnology. The Australian Museum was the first
and the primary exemplar of the colonial museum. As with the other colonial museums that
followed, the Australian Museum was conceived and developed against a background of
frontier violence. It was also informed by European racial theories which, though changing
over the century, always placed Aborigines at the bottom of the hierarchy. In the first decades
of the nineteenth century as the idea of a state museum developed, the 'Great Chain of Being'
was the accepted theory to explain European superiority. It placed Aborigines (and other
black races) at the bottom of the chain, barely advanced from the apes. As the Australian
Museum developed in the 1830s and 1840s the 'science' of phrenology (establishing
intelligence by the study of skulls) became a popular colonial belief. By the 1860s this had
given way to a theory which was given greater credence by scholars and the educated elite,
that of Social Darwinism. Darwin's evolutionary theory of the survival of the fittest was easily
corrupted to explain and justify the supposed and seemingly inevitable extinction of
Aboriginal society.
The Australian Museum was developed in the image of the British metropolitan museums. As
with these institutions, it served two purposes: the practical and the ideological. Its practical
function was primarily for scientific research for the scholarly elite; secondarily, it was a
centre of instructive and rational recreation for the masses. The museum's ideological function
was also twofold. Firstly, the edifice proclaimed the colony's civilisation, wealth and material
progress. Secondly, by employing the empirical knowledge's of anthropology, archaeology,
biology and geology, the contents of the museum demonstrated the ability of the colonising
power to collect, order and interpret the culture of the colonised.
The Australian Museum was established and developed primarily as a museum of natural
history. But in the nineteenth century, as Australian Museum anthropologist Jim Specht
reminds us, 'natural history was the a broadly defined area of study'. Aborigines were not
regarded by museum curators as part of the continent's human history and were thus
subsumed into the categories of natural history. They could therefore be scrutinised, classified
and studied in the same way as other specimens of the natural world and, more significantly,
be represented as being less than fully human. As the demand for land expanded the
Enlightenment notion of the Noble Savage lost its appeal. By the mid-nineteenth century it
was more ideologically useful for European colonists to regard Aborigines as living fossils
who having 'overstayed their time on Earth' were obstructing colonial expansion.
The first thirty years of the Museum's development was a time of open warfare in New South
Wales as Aborigines staunchly resisted European encroachment which was pushing
settlement beyond the Great Dividing Range. In 1832, when the Museum was still housed in
the old Legislative Building, Dr George Bennett, who was the Museum's secretary and curator
from 1835-1841, wrote that:
Native weapons, utensils, and other specimens of the arts, as existing among the
Aborigines, as well as the skulls of the different tribes and accurate drawings of their
peculiar cast of features, would be a desirable addition. At the present, such might be
procured without much difficulty; but it is equally certain, as well as such, to be
regretted, that the tribes in the settled parts of the colony are fast decreasing, and many,
if not all, will, at no distant period, be known but by name. Here, in a public museum,
the remains of the arts, &c, as existing among them, may be preserved as lasting
memorials of the former races inhabiting the lands, when they had ceased to exist.
Despite the scientific curiosity, a self-fulfilling prophesy of the destruction of Aboriginal
society was inherent in Bennett's statement. It was becoming obvious to the colonisers that
successful colonisation was going to require this end. While professing a scientific concern
for Aboriginal material the Australian Museum was one of the public articulators of colonial
and imperial power. Its Aboriginal exhibits were invested with symbolic value as trophies of
conquest and exhibited for a public audience. This fulfilled the museum's first functional role
of public instruction. But by representing Aborigines as the uncivilised and doomed 'other' it
justified 'settler' practices of indiscriminate slaughter. While protests were made from time to
time about frontier depredation's the imperatives of progress overshadowed humanitarian
concerns and gave de facto endorsement to entrenched practices.
excerpt two
Six international exhibitions were staged by the Australian colonies in the late nineteenthcentury. These occurred in Sydney in 1879, Melbourne in 1880 and 1888, Adelaide in 1887,
Launceston in 1891 and Hobart in 1894. Over 6 000 000 visitors attended the exhibitions.
With the 'progress' that had occurred in New South Wales in the fifty years since the inception
of the Australian Museum, the 'mother colony' saw its international exhibition as a stage for
its promotion. External imperial progress was also of significance. With the opening of the
Suez Canal in 1869, which eased the tyranny of distance for the colony, and the national and
international linking of the telegraph in 1872, the colonies could claim their place more easily
on the world stage. Furthermore, the Aboriginal cricket team sent to England in 1868
demonstrated to the old country the extent of the civilising effect that the colonisers had
exercised over the 'uncivilised' indigenes. Given the 1870s 'long boom' and a nascent colonial
nationalism which was a component of colonial pride in material progress and the delivery of
civilisation to an 'uncivilised' land, the international exhibitions could proclaim
conspicuously, and thus justify, bourgeois settlement ideologies that had displaced an existing
order…
Some regard for presenting Australian history emerged out of the Sydney Exhibition but that
history was one of colonial progress. In the Sydney International Exhibition's sumptuous,
purpose-built, fast-tracked building which was erected in the precincts of power in the outer
domain of Government House, a life-size statue of Captain Cook enjoyed a place of
prominence. Cook symbolised discovery and enlightenment, but it is significant, as Shirley
Fitzgerald has observed, that 1879 was also the centenary year of his death at the hands of
other 'savages' in Hawaii.
While artefacts from Australia's colonial past comprised only a handful of exhibits the display
of Aboriginal material from the Australian Museum served a useful ideological purpose rather
than any historical function. The exhibits were included in the ethnological court, part of the
exotic curiosities of the 'other', and were in no sense an attempt to integrate Aboriginal and
colonial history as Australian human history or present it as material evidence of indigenous
culture. Although the ethnology court was a late addition to the Exhibition, and its genesis is
unclear, its advocates were all trustees of the Australian Museum Board. Among them were
the surgeon Dr Alfred Roberts (a trustee from 1858), Mr W J. Stephens (from 1862) who was
largely responsible for the development of the Macleay Museum at the University of Sydney,
Professor Liversidge, professor of geology and mineralogy at the university and E. P.
Ramsay, curator of the Australian Museum. The display of Aboriginal material, consisting
largely of weapons and tools to highlight the Aborigines' hard primitivism, was useful to the
state to underline the triumph of advancing civilisation in supplanting the 'savage' and
'primitive' culture of the indigenous people with the civilisation of the English empirebuilders. The ideology inherent in the three-dimensional presentation was reinforced in the
Official Record in which the Commissioners, all government appointees, wrote that:
'the Australian aboriginal native... seems incapable of the improvement of other native
races to which we have referred (Maori, Fijian and Hawaiian); he appears to have few
aspirations beyond the satisfying of the necessities of nature, and indulgence when near
European settlements in acquired but questionable tastes'.
excerpt three
The Australian Museum no longer presents the racist theories of the nineteenth century. Their
Aboriginal Gallery is informed by input from Aboriginal people which does much to change
out-dated perceptions of them as inferior and lacking the traits of civilisation.
Clearly the reclaiming of their history by Aboriginal people and their control of its public
presentation will continue to influence and inform Aboriginal galleries in the museums of the
state. As Aboriginal people establish their own space in public history and claim it within
state institutions, it is to be hoped that we have seen the last of state-promulgated perceptions
of Aboriginal people as part of natural history, the de-contextualised presentations of
Aboriginal artefacts harnessed to serve bourgeois ideologies and the offensive display of
Aboriginal remains to support racial theories. But Aboriginal curator Gaye Sculthorpe warns
that if museums seek to present Aboriginal history, they should not forget their own role in
this history'. Henrietta Fourmile, another persuasive Aboriginal critic of non-Aboriginal
museum practice, argues that it remains the case that 'the interests ot science are put before
the interests of the people scientists purport to study' and that 'the distribution of power and
resources between the two groups is organized to favour science'. Fourmile gives a sobering
reminder that scientific imperialism continues as cultures are globally prescribed by the
concepts of world and national cultural heritage and ratified by international conventions. She
suggests that though the killing and grave-robbing may have ended, colonisation of the
Aboriginal people and their culture continues. Museums, she asserts, 'are becoming symbols
of our cultural dispossession.' To the nineteenth century colonialists, convinced of their right
to collect, interpret, order and exhibit the cultures of colonised indigenous peoples, museums
were symbols of their triumph.