Arrogant Leftist architect

Excerpt from Miranda Devine. Good to hear that the Australia-hatred is being expunged from our national museum

Conceived by architect Howard Raggatt as "one in the eye for John Howard" - as one critic put it - and the taxpayers who footed the $155 million bill for its construction, the chaotic structure on the shores of Canberra's Acton Peninsula featured giant braille symbols pressed into the anodised aluminium cladding. "Forgive us our genocide" was one of the messages intended as a reproach to John Howard's Government for refusing to apologise for the mistreatment of Aborigines by previous generations. "Sorry" was written in braille several times as well as "Resurrection city", a reference to a 1968 civil rights protest in Washington DC. Other messages were: "God knows", "She'll be right", "Mate", "Who is my neighbour?", "Time will tell", "Good as gold" and "Love is blind".

At the time of the museum's opening in March 2001, rumours swirled about hidden messages in the braille dimples, but nothing was proved. That is because, 10 days after the opening, all evidence had been quietly erased by Craddock Morton, the public servant in charge of construction, who was appointed museum director in 2004. He hired a braille reader to translate the dots and then had a set of silver discs made, which were affixed in strategic lines on top of the controversial messages, thus rendering them illegible. Others were disrupted by swapping aluminium panels, so "sorry" became "ryors", or something similarly incomprehensible.

Morton, 59, a former senior adviser to Paul Keating, thus laid the foundations of a fine working relationship with a government angry at being hoodwinked into creating a museum that "adopted the left-wing position in every conceivable historical issue", as one guest told me at the opening.

From the sculpture of black figures hanging in effigy and the monuments to Gough Whitlam, alone among prime ministers, to the contemptuous trivialisation of non-indigenous Australian culture, the national identity portrayed by the museum was designed to make visitors hang their heads in shame. As one museum council member said, it made "people leave the museum hating other Australians".

Little can be done about other attempts by the architects to falsely equate Aboriginal history with the Jewish Holocaust in Europe. The imagery is embedded in the design, copied in part from Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin, which combines a broken Star of David with an SS symbol. But, under Morton, what he calls the "black T-shirt" view of Australian culture is being replaced by something more complex and accurate. "I want people to come out feeling good about Australia," he said at the museum on Thursday.

The hanging effigies are destined for deep storage, as is Michael Leunig's infamous anti-Semitic 2002 cartoon. A painting by Aboriginal artist Queenie McKenzie, titled Mistake Creek Massacre, was bought last year for $30,000, and is prized by Morton, but because of disagreement among historians over whether the massacre occurred, it will not be included in the National Historical Collection, for now, though it will be displayed.

Pathologist Howard Florey, who developed a way to mass-produce penicillin, finally has a presence, as does the CSIRO and myxomatosis, the car industry and a new sport section. Add to that the history of the wool industry, once summed up by a merino skeleton and two tubes of fleece, which is fleshed out in a collection donated by the Maple-Brown family last year, featuring memorabilia since 1792 from their sheep station near Goulburn. Along with a colonial uniform worn by ancestor William Pitt while battling the Gilbert-Hall bushrangers, there are 19th century copybooks with copperplate handwriting repeating the line: "Jealously oppose all that is not good."

Morton is systematically reworking the collections, with attention to "scrupulous historical accuracy", following recommendations of a 2003 review by a government-appointed panel led by sociologist John Carroll. After all, this museum will be the Prime Minister's one grand bricks-and-mortar legacy. Inadvertently, the museum's troubled birth aptly symbolises the struggle for control of the national identity that has marked his tenure.

(For more postings from me, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and DISSECTING LEFTISM. My Home Page. Email me (John Ray) here.)