This week, the National Capital Authority is likely to approve the start of work on the National Museum of Australia on Acton Peninsula. The museum has a troubled history. It came into being with an Act of Parliament in 1980.
In the ensuing 18 years there have been many promises and false starts. Originally the concept was to move away from the big monumental building with static displays. The museum was to depict human interaction with the environment of Australia. To that end the 88-hectare site at Yarramundi would have been uniquely positioned. Others, however, argued that Yarramundi was too far away and that it was more important to get activity into the Parliamentary Triangle or at least the central national area.
The Hawke Government did virtually nothing about the museum. When Paul Keating was Prime Minister he raised objections to another monumental building by the lake.
But in the last years of his prime ministership the Federal Government agreed with the ACT Government to a land swap. Acton was to become federal and Kingston was to become territory land. There was a lot of logic to that swap. The original designations were largely determined because of existing land use: hospital on one site and federal semi-industrial occupations on the other. But transient uses apart, Acton was always more suited to some national purpose once the need for it as a hospital site was gone. (And that need, of course, disappeared because an earlier federal government built a new hospital in Woden.)
The land swap suited the ACT Government’s purposes. It wanted to clear the site, so that the empty Royal Canberra Hospital would no longer be a monument and a reminder to voters who were upset at the decision to close it. The ACT Government also wanted the Kingston site. Kingston has great potential, but economic circumstances are likely to delay any action; but it is probably a good thing not to have developer pressure on the design of that site.
The national government got the Acton site. Given its proximity to the central national area it is an ideal site for national uses — a new Lodge; a President’s residence; or the initial part of the museum.
But the Government rushed with the Museum and it did not set aside enough money either for the design or for the project itself. The rush and the penny pinching has produced a poor result. The result is in obvious disharmony with the rest of Canberra as a garden city. It is in disharmony with the strong emphasis on landscape in Canberra. The building is too dominant.
Some have argued that we should go back to scratch and put the museum at Yarramundi where there is space to present the exhibits to best advantage and to draw the picture of humans in the Australian environment. There is merit in this argument. Against it, though, is the tyranny of distance. The museum will be stuck kilometres away from the Parliamentary Triangle and the Australian War Memorial. There are two answers to that. One is that the great spaces involved reflect a significant element of Australia. The other is that transport must be improved. Moreover, it is no longer possible for a visitor to “”do Canberra” in a day or two. It needs several visits or at least a week, so a separate day devoted to the museum, including the several kilometres to get out there, is of no moment.
At present, two things seem to be driving the museum: the political history of the site and the centenary of federation. Neither is a wise determinant.
One government in the 1970s made a ideological decision to build a new hospital in Woden. This caused an economics-based decision to close the older hospital a decade and a half later. This in turn caused a politically motivated decision to do a land swap. This cause a blank piece of land and a hungry construction industry wanting to build something – almost anything – on it. And now there is a rush to get a building in place for an opening on January 1, 2001. Moreover, in the rush there seems to be an untoward emphasis on ancillary matters like restaurants and shops.
It is certainly too late to unwind all of that history. Acton is a site for a national institution, not for an odd collection of health facilities and community uses. But is it the best site for a museum. The argument about bringing more life and activity into the heart of Canberra has a lot of merit, but it seems as if this first attempt at fitting a museum on Acton has revealed the short-comings of the 11-hectare Acton site. If it were the only site available it would be worth persevering with other designs for that site. But the 88-hectare Yarramundi site is still vacant and still invites the museum.
It would now be better not to be rushed by the impending centenary. In the rush the design competition drew widespread and valid criticism from the architectural profession. It would be better to acknowledge the mistake. A new competition inviting preliminary-ideas submissions for both sites or either site would enable the public, the Parliament and the Government to be better informed and to have a greater understanding of the lost opportunity if Yarramundi is abandoned. After that exercise, Acton might still win, but the existing design for Acton, necessarily compromised by the cost and timing imperatives, is not inspiring enough to draw that conclusion.
Friends of the museum and others have despaired at the delay. It has forced them reluctantly to take the position, Give us a museum, any museum, anywhere to place our 200,000 objects which now sit in warehouses with the odd outing for travelling shows.
It is better to get it ultimately right.