Australians need their national institutions more than ever – but not for the reasons you’d think

In 1913, Australia airlifted parliament – then in Melbourne – and dropped it in southern NSW. Our chosen place for a home of national things was the newly dammed Molonglo River. Our chosen name for it was ‘Canberra’ – an anglicisation of a local Indigenous word for ‘meeting place’.

The history of Australia’s cultural institutions began with the Australian Capital Territory. Australia’s first truly national cultural institution is the ACT.

Trinca was addressing the 55th Annual Academy Symposium of the Australian Academy of the Humanities at ANU. He shared priceless insight from his time at the National Museum of Australia – he was the museum’s Director for ten years from 2014.

Australia’s cultural institutions have remits ranging from art and academia to botany and astronomy. But they all march to the same drum: nation-building of the mind. The leaders who built them saw ‘Australia’ and its cultural thought as two sides of the same coin. They knew that these places would help draw them into truly national community.

“A dream that cultural institutions sustain and define national experience was once common,” Trinca said.

“When I joined the National Museum in 2003, it felt like having these dreams could get you in a lot of trouble.”

Knowing our past has always been central to Australia’s intellectual life. But the ‘history wars’ were something else entirely.

In 1997, Bringing Them Home, a report on the stolen generations written by late high justice Sir Ronald Wilson and ANU Emeritus Professor Mick Dodson, was tabled in parliament.

The Commonwealth government defiantly opposed two of Bringing Them Home’s central recommendations: financial compensation for victims and a National Apology. These had the support of every state and territory government at the time. This lit the kindling of a fiery public debate.

Having long been low-profile trawlers of archives and professors at universities, historians were thrust into the spotlight. Once-niche findings were reported on, and distorted, for the sake of headlines. As they sometimes are today, misinformation and disinformation were critical fuel for the blaze.

By the early 2000s, the history wars had become a full-on bushfire. National institutions were feeling the heat. Instead of focusing independently on entwining culture and nation, Trinca revealed that the government of the day wanted institutions to pick a side.

This flowed from an important misconception. The government wanted to use these places to curate an official rendering of Australian history. It labelled those that didn’t push their institutions into line as activist.

But to Trinca, the government’s logic fell apart at the outset. Telling one authorised story of Australia is just not possible. Especially in the information age.

“If it were unlikely in 2003 that we could contrive an idea of national history that we could retail generally, it is all but impossible now,” he said.

Cultural institutions don’t do storytelling, he emphasised. Instead, they empower Australian communities. Australians do the storytelling, by using cultural institutions.

Asking a national museum, gallery, war memorial or university which ‘side’ of the story it should tell misses the point.

“We need these places not for what they tell Australia, but for what they enable Australians to do for Australia,” Trinca said.

Addressing cuts to funding, Trinca acknowledged that governments have undervalued cultural work. But he said that institutions can still lay the foundations of national culture. If they respect every dollar.

“At some point, we have to be aware of the weight of responsibility for what we do have, not the weight of what we would like to have.”

By doing this, cultural institutions are still capable of their mission: enriching our lives.

“We should expect our cultural institutions to act more like resource centres,” Trinca concluded.

“Their greatest strength is the capacity to culturally enfranchise people across our communities.”

He reminded this audience how powerful cultural enfranchisement truly is. Empowered by participation in culture, Australians are simply better equipped to build a nation. He laid out a vision of national institutions that don’t answer – they ask.

“Our national institutions do not exist to show us who we are. They exist to help us be all that we can be,” Trinca said. “Their question is not so much ‘what does it mean to be Australian?’ It’s more, ‘what does it mean to be human?’”