Hot topics : museums and Australia's culture wars

The research presented in this chapter provides a signpost on how museums are or could potentially be positioned as agents in Australia's ongoing culture wars. The situated responses of staff and communities to our research in the context of the culture wars that prevailed at the time are indicative of how institutional agency follows climates of public debate in which institutions have important roles to 'fill in the gaps' in terms of critical information to more proactive advocacy and activist positions. At the individual level, museums have important roles to play in making sense of one's own placement in the culture wars. It is also clear that public perceptions of museums and museum work in Australian society has expanded in the past few decades with a stronger focus on information in a more critical mode to politically active roles through convening forums to facilitate broad-based mobilisation including activist and advocacy roles and in the context of the cultural wars recognising the capacity for strategic actions at appropriate scales. Many museums have become braver, probing what is beyond the surface. We see this in the recent Australian Museum exhibition Unsettled. This is a First Nations led exhibition on the untold histories of Australia of devastation, survival and the fight for recognition through oral histories, historical documents, immersive experiences, artworks and powerful objects. A generation after the history wars broke out the so-called 'black armband' interpretation of Australian settler-colonial relations and their legacies can no longer be denied. But some continue to refuse to accept them. This was recently demonstrated in in the Federal Senate's passing of Senator Pauline Hanson's motion to remove critical race theory from the national curriculum.