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“The National Museum brings to life the rich and diverse stories of Australia through compelling objects, ideas and events,” says its website. Instead of showing everything, the museum offers a sampling of what it considers “compelling.” And of all the things that could be shown, “[w]e focus on Indigenous histories and cultures, European settlement and our interaction with the environment.”³⁹ In the museum, long stretches of “interpretative” text belabor “compelling” narrative. Interpretation here means that “we,” the curators, are here to help you to understand.

“Love Wheels” went on display at the Museum in 2018, the year after Australians voted in a referendum to support marriage equality. Although the museum said it was documenting both sides of the debate, on display was just one “compelling” object, representing just one side.

“Eloise Murphy,” the curator explained, is a “yarn bomber” and member of the guerrilla crochet movement, “bringing unexpected bursts of colour to cities, and covering ordinary objects – such as street signs, trees and bicycles, with extraordinary crocheted decorations.” She had placed the bicycle, crocheted in rainbow colors, outside Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s house – his decision to put the issue to a referendum had been controversial. But later he with his wife came to the opening of the display at the museum.

“Artist’s motivation: I wanted to be able to say how lovely it would be if everyone could have the same feelings Malcolm did all those years ago by being free to marry the person they love as well.”⁴⁰ It’s not clear whether “Malcolm’s” feelings had been quite so straightforwardly lovely during this contentious political process.

Here we encounter the paradox of closed and open texts that Umberto Eco addresses.^§AS2.1.1 The Indian Museum is a closed text for its empirical exhaustiveness but it leaves a lot of space for the visitor to find things that interest them, or to resist them when they reach the glass case of skulls. The Australian National Museum is open for its “inclusiveness,”⁴¹ welcoming of cosmopolitan diversity. But its rhetorical strategy is closed. We might want to agree (or not) with its directly expressed sentiments, but it feels didactic, a “politically correct”⁴² plea to conform with the curator, while the Indian museum does not.

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³⁸ Shakunt Pandey, 2014, “The Indian Museum Completes 200 Years,” Science Reporter, October: 38–41.

³⁹ www.nma.gov.au/about_us

⁴⁰ www.nma.gov.au/about_us/news/articles/love-wheels-canberra

⁴¹ Amareswar Galla, ed. 2012, World Heritage: Benefits Beyond Borders, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

⁴² Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, 1997a, “White Noise: The Attack on Political Correctness and the Struggle for the Western Canon,” Interchange 28(4):283–329.

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 204–205. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Eloise Murphy’s “Love Wheels” §AS2.1.2a