National museum almost scrapped before being built, cabinet documents reveal
By Craig AllenNewly released government documents reveal the National Museum of Australia (NMA) was almost killed off at the cabinet table more than a decade before it was built.
The National Archives of Australia has released cabinet submissions and minutes of the third Hawke government which covered the time when the NMA was being debated.
The NMA was first proposed with the passage of the National Museum of Australia Act in 1980.
"A national museum offered the opportunity to mend several intellectual rifts which affect those major museums founded in the 19th century," cabinet papers from March 1989 said.
"These museums tended to divorce Aboriginal people from non-Aboriginals and to divorce non-Aboriginal people from nature."
But by the time that submission was written, there were concerns about mounting costs and questions over the viability of the project.
The then Hawke government had not yet committed capital funding to build a permanent home for the collection which was originally intended for Yarramundi Reach in Canberra.
The NMA was eventually opened by the Howard government in 2001 on Acton Peninsula on Canberra's Luke Burley Griffin.
'Inadequate resources' plagued early NMA
"The history of the National Museum of Australia ... has been characterised by inadequate resources due to lack of firm commitment from the government in recent years and exposure to the Expenditure Review Committee," 1989 cabinet papers said.
"We cannot continue on the present course in view of its effect on museum staff morale and the Government's statutory responsibility for the collection."
At the time, the NMA collection consisted of some 186,000 objects, of which only 8 per cent had been catalogued and just 5 per cent had been adequately preserved, stabilised and repaired.
Concerns national collection would be broken up
Cabinet was given multiple options to proceed, from storing the collection with minimal physical security, to transferring the NMA's collection to various state institutions for storage and display - effectively killing off the concept of a national repository.
"Some state and local museums would, no doubt, claim the most significant items from the general historical collection ... the Commonwealth would be required to store the residual collection pending disposal," the cabinet papers revealed.
Cabinet finally agreed to provide a "basic level of physical control, stabilise the condition of the collection [and] store as much as necessary under suitable environmental conditions".
With the agreement of cabinet and the injection of emergency funds to keep the collection intact, the NMA was saved.
It would be left to future governments to argue over where it should be built, what it should look like, and how much it should cost.
Selected cabinet papers from 1988 and 1989 are available online through the National Archives of Australia.