Locating the “Museum” in Public Pedagogies of Indigenous/Settler Relations: The Case of the South Australian Museum

• In Event: Critical (Post)colonial Pedagogies of the Contact Zone

Abstract

Objectives or purposes
1. Argue that critical postcolonial pedagogy can find conceptual resources by analysing the public pedagogical work of Museums and especially the ways in which Indigenous peoples are represented. We assume, that for critical pedagogy to unsettle old and new formations of colonisation, we need to understand the pedagogical project of colonisation that is still very evident in public institutions such as museums.
2. Analyse the public pedagogy of the South Australian museum as an example of a contemporary colonial museum.
3. Analyse the pedagogical work of key texts of anthropologists of the S.A. Museum as examples of new formations of colonisation.
4. Propose some possible strategies for critical pedagogy to counter a contemporary colonial pedagogy of museums.

The South Australian Museum as a research, tourism and educational institution is an active agent in the contact zone between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. The South Australian Museum sits in the middle of Adelaide’s cultural precinct, as a comfortable, privileged position for an institution with a long history of authorising Eurocentric world histories and scientific accounts of cultures and identities (Young 1990; Hemming 2003).
We are interested in how its location, galleries, publications and resources are activated in this contemporary contact zone. Australia’s south-east, from Adelaide to Sydney, is constructed as part of the settled, white heartland of the Australian nation. The South Australian Museum’s exhibitions contribute to the construction of the south-east as settled and its high-profile involvement in national Indigenous rights debates such as the Hindmarsh Island Bridge controversy, have reinforced its traditional ‘expert’ and ‘Protector’ function in relation to Indigenous cultures (Bell 1998; Simons 2003). The antiquarian Aboriginal Cultures Gallery seemingly masks the contemporary pedagogical relevance and agency of the Museum with ‘de-politicised’ myths of peaceful and completed Australian settlement. These myths provide the backdrop for the interventions of its curators and researchers into broader Australian debates such as the ‘crisis’ in Indigenous affairs and Indigenous culture, the ‘failure’ of Indigenous self-determination and the so-called ‘history wars’. We are interested in tracing the relationships between the influential constructions of the ‘contact zone’ found in Peter Sutton’s Politics of Suffering and Phillip Jones’ Ochre to Rust. We argue that researchers and educators alike need to examine the politics of knowledge and the public pedagogical and colonising practices of institutions such as the South Australian Museum as part of the reception of its cultural products – its publications, exhibitions and public interventions.

Against the colonising pedagogy of such museums as the SA museum, critical pedagogy needs to work with the fact that Indigenous nations and Indigenous interests challenge the legitimacy of the Australian nation itself. This means that those advocating critical pedagogy need to engage in the public debates and contest the colonising logic of our public institutions that deliberately silence both historical and contemporary Indigenous struggle for an honourable place in the nation state. Pragmatically this means providing resources to the community including schools for critiquing the colonising pedagogy of institutions such as the SA Museum.

Authors

• Steve John Hemming, Flinders University

• Robert James Hattam, University of South Australia