Other people's pain: trauma and testimony in Australian museums

Abstract

This thesis examines how testimony has emerged as a key strategy for representing and interpreting the past in contemporary museums, particularly in the context of traumatic histories. When testimony appears in exhibitions, personal trauma becomes public memory. The thesis asks of this transformation: how, why and with what effects? Through three case studies, the thesis explores how traumatic testimony is curated and encountered in exhibitions. In deploying testimony, museums seek not only to give recognition to those who have experienced traumatic pasts and advance human rights claims, but also to solicit empathic, ethical response and action on the part of audiences. Now positioned as witnesses to traumatic testimony, museum visitors are challenged to feel, acknowledge and take responsibility for the suffering of others. Empathy is widely accepted to be the vehicle through which this takes place.My research critically examines the social, political and ethical consequences of these new museological strategies and claims. As such, its aims are twofold. Firstly, the research contributes to a critical examination of contemporary museum practice, highlighting how some contemporary museums, in taking on the responsibility of “working through” traumatic histories, are intervening in issues with high political, ethical and social stakes and positioning themselves as agents of social inclusion and advocacy, even activism. Secondly, it aims to make a theoretical contribution about how testimony impacts upon the ways that museums shape and consolidate collective narratives and understandings of the past, especially regarding contested or suppressed histories.This is a qualitative research project that focuses on three cases studies, each a temporary exhibition about traumatic history in Australia that uses testimony in a variety of ways. Reflexive ethnography is the primary methodology, with my personal experiences as a museum curator essential to the study. Using autoethnography, the research examines projects where I have had varying levels of involvement, as curator, participant observer and researcher. Augmenting my ethnographic approach, I draw on interviews and participant observation, along with archival research and analysis of exhibition content and visitor comments.The first case study is an exhibition at the Ration Shed Museum in the Aboriginal community of Cherbourg in Queensland. Many Threads, which opened in 2014, presents the history of Aboriginal women’s experiences as domestic workers in Queensland during the 19th and 20th centuries. The case study focuses on the “yarning circle”; a process of testimony and witnessing that was used to generate the exhibition content—a series of artworks created by Cherbourg women. The second case study is Remembering Goodna: stories from a Queensland mental hospital, an exhibition at Museum of Brisbane in 2007-08 that presented the history of Queensland’s largest, oldest, longest-operating mental hospital. This chapter examines video testimony in the exhibition. The third case study is the exhibition Inside: Life in Children’s Homes and Institutions shown at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra in 2011-12, which also travelled to state museums in 2013-14. This exhibition came about because of the Australian Government’s National Apology to Forgotten Australians and Child Migrants and presented the experiences of some of the half-a-million children who spent time in institutional “care” in Australia in the 20th century. This case study looks at how a blog was used to invite testimony from Forgotten Australians, and formed the basis of the exhibition itself. Visitor comments collected by each of the museums are the focus of analysis in a further chapter.In dealing with trauma, abuse and neglect due to institutionalisation and forced removal from home or country, the histories presented in these exhibitions raise issues of justice and restitution in the present and the future. Given that in each of these case studies the ultimate responsibility for the trauma and suffering experienced by these citizens lies with the state, the use of testimony in these exhibitions is unavoidably political, with implications for the meanings and instrumental functions of national history in contemporary Australia. These histories reverberate through present-day Australian life. The ways they are interpreted and understood have consequences not only in the lives of victims, survivors and perpetrators but also in terms of the collective, public recognition of responsibility for past wrongs, and current policy. The thesis therefore enables an extended interrogation of the roles, obligations, potentialities and limits of museums in negotiating political, ethical and social issues.