Displaced culture: multiculturalism and museology at the National Museum of Australia

Abstract

It is my argument that the National Museum of Australia is similar to Australian 'national' politics of multiculturalism in that they both engage in 'cultural' debates away from the undisturbed functioning of capitalism as their necessary condition. While they both clearly reflect different kinds of 'cultures', I argue that they both represent narrativisations of a new ideology formation-the ideology of displaced culture. In what follows, I will briefly map out the history of the National Museum of Australia as a project; and I conclude with an analysis of the cultural and political climate in which the project was finally realised and suggest how the museum was related to the Howard Government's politics of multiculturalism.