I love museums for their stories. It doesn’t matter to me if the tale is about the opulence of a boy god-king, the negative forms of people trapped in black ash, or the paintings by the lovers of a rich woman with a house along the Grand Canal.
I know so little that almost everything is a surprise to me. It’s like standing in front of a painting that you have only seen in a book.
On our recent journey, we visited both the Museum of New Zealand: Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington and the Melbourne Museum in Melbourne. Both museums had exhibits that depicted each country’s racist history, while simultaneously celebrating the art, culture, and survival of the natives for the bus loads of visiting school children and wandering tourists.
This is not an easy task. Public history must be, not just neutral, but carefully neutered. No offense can be given to any group with lobbyists, generous donors or a penchant to demonstrate.
Compared to the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, the Maori got a much, much better deal from their British conquerors. In 1840 the British Empire signed the Treaty of Waitangi, gave the Maori the same rights as other British subjects and guaranteed their property rights.
Of course, they got cheated out of their land, decimated by European diseases, and subjected to a plague of missionaries. Today Maoris make up 15% of New Zealand’s population, but only own 4% of the land on the North Island and 1% 0n the South Island. Over half of the children living in poverty in New Zealand are Maori.
Still, the Maori were lucky: they were brown but the warm, romantic brown of Polynesia. White and Maori people could and did marry each other without being confronted by lynch mobs.
Today, even more importantly, they are now major tourist attractions. I mean how many people would fly that many miles (in cattle class) to view dairy cows and sheep?
On the other hand Australian Aboriginal peoples were black. They were casually murdered from when the first ship load of British convicts landed in 1788 through the1920s. After 1920s, the government was restricted to merely kidnapping their children and sending them to be educated as maids and household help.
In one part of the First Peoples exhibit in Melbourne Museum was a map of massacres, where one location after another popped up across Australia. A red and black painting showed an aerial view of one of the massacres.
On a monitor in the corner, hundreds is not thousands of names scrolled by. A nearby sign invited people to add the names of unrecorded massacres, so the murders would at least be recorded: the Goulbolba Hill Massacre, the Mistake Creek Massacre, Battle Hill, the Whiteside Poisoning….
For example in 1924, a group of Gija and Worla men were tried for spearing a milk cow. After being convicted, they were forced walked 200 kilometers to the scene of the crime at Bedford Downs. There they were made to cut firewood for their own cremations. They were then given food laced with strychnine. As they writhed in pain, the white station hands clubbed them to death. The police then burned the bodies.
My first reaction to the murders of the Australian natives was one of righteous shock, until I remember our own history. My country too had casually murdered native peoples and Blacks. And far worse, we had slavery.
However, there was another takeaway from the exhibits. Both museums credited the African American Civil Rights movement as a critical model for the struggles of both the Maori and Australian First Peoples. They not only adopted the tactics of sit-ins, boycotts, demonstrations and other non-violent acts, but more importantly understood real change was possible.
The arc of justice is not only long, but appears in unexpected places.
