ABSTRACT
Like the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington DC, the First Australians Gallery at Australia’s National Museum in Canberra avoids discussion of domestic genocide. While the Gallery promises to ‘deal frankly with contact history’, there is a paucity of information on the genocide claims arising from twentieth-century assimilation policies and nineteenth-century massacres.2 At one level, memory and forgetfulness in Australia parallels the American experience. However, Gallery architect Howard Raggat was deliberately subversive. His design featured a not-so-subtle condemnation of Australia’s turbulent past – another salvo in the ‘History Wars’ that so dominated the 1990s. The design was based on the Jewish extension to the Berlin Museum, which was commissioned by the German government as a memorial to the Holocaust. As Raggat argued of the Gallery’s shape:
This was the mark of the Jewish Museum in Berlin just completed, designed a decade ago, that mark of a jagged break in the star of David, of Jewish history in Berlin, broken by the Holocaust. A mark becoming as if the object of that terrible gap, the object of that unnamable void.3
