As I wrote recently, I was lucky enough to catch the National Museum of Australia’s Discovering Ancient Egypt exhibition in Canberra, which was the only reason anyone would actually bother going to what is otherwise a pretty dull excuse for a museum. But then, most Australian museums are, these days. Because, instead of the dinosaurs and Egyptian mummies that so fascinated me as a kid, modern Australian museums expect kids to be wowed by… baskets. Which are apparently the most interesting things 40 millennia of Aboriginal culture could come up with.
If you want to see the Long March through the Institutions in action, just visit a contemporary Australian museum. It might not be interesting, but it’s as woke as all get-out.
Mostly thanks to preening idiots like this.
The National Museum of Australia’s new council chair, Clare Wright, took an activist position during the voice referendum last year, and she’s not sorry.
“Yes, I became an activist,” she says. “I took an active role in a political campaign that was important to me. I thought constantly during that campaign of what it would mean to my yapa (sister) and the children and grandchildren of the Yolngu people to have a voice to parliament.”
You have to laugh at how these fatuous white narcissists slip in the odd bit of Abonics to boost their cred. Like Grey Lynn hipsters sprinkling their conversations with te gibberish, it’s a kind of woke secret handshake.
The cultural appropriation doesn’t stop there, though.
Wright is not indigenous, but she says she was “adopted” into the Yolngu in northeast Arnhem Land in 2010, by Valerie Ganambarr, who was the fourth and youngest tribal wife of a former Australian of the Year, Yunupingu.
Leaving aside the casual normalisation of polygamy – it’s illegal! – it might be noted that Ganambarr was 38 years younger than Yunipingu (younger than his own daughter) and a half-sister to his ‘first wife’. Ganambarr also took out a domestic violence order after Yunipingu after he tried to strangle her, punched her in the face and dragged her along the floor by her hair.
But, hey, it’s just that ‘world’s oldest living culture’ we’re supposed to fawn over.
So, what’s the basis of her claim to be ‘adopted’?
Wright was living on community at the time, with her then husband Damien Wright, who is a craftsman and furniture maker, and their three children. He had been invited to explore the possibilities of a timber mill.
“If you are on community for any length of time, essentially you need to be adopted by somebody, because you don’t make sense otherwise,” Wright says.
So… she totally just reckons.
Riiiight.
Just like Bruce Pascoe totally just reckons he’s Aboriginal.
Sounds to me an awful lot like cultural appropriation.
As I said, though, this is the Long March in action. It’s not as if there’s a central planning committee issuing orders, it’s more that there’s an army of like-minded over-educated fuckwits who’ve been stewed their entire lives in an echo-chamber of groupthink. They instinctively know exactly what they’re supposed to think and do, because they’re so insular they can’t imagine any other possibility.
Take this, for example:
Wright says Arts Minister Tony Burke asked her to join the museum council’s board two years ago because he “thought it was crazy that the board of the national museum” did not include a historian. Last month she became the first female chair of the council. The new director, Katherine McMahon, is also female, as are seven of the nine council members.
So, the gender imbalance is 80 per cent. If it was 80 per cent male, of course, there’d be no end of outraged screeching.
Then there’s this howler.
Wright says she is committed to “truth-telling” in history, adding: “If we don’t tell the whole story, it’s like a family pretending that everybody is doing well … nobody’s unemployed, nobody’s unwell, nobody’s divorced, nobody has jealousies and rivalries, we’re just all courageous and harmonious and perfect. Show me that family, and I’ll show you a family that is probably deeply dysfunctional and certainly in denial. It’s the same with history. We have to tell the whole story, even if it’s uncomfortable.”
Cool. So tell us the whole story of traditional Aboriginal culture. The endemic violence, the brutalisation of women, the grotesque patriarchy, the Stone Age superstition…
Or is that all too uncomfortable for you?
It’s pretty easy to ignore all that when ‘on community’ is a holiday destination, far away from the rarified confines of a cushy government sinecure in Canberra.
