Andrew Bolt: Museum’s ban an attack on history

MELBOURNE Museum’s ban on exhibiting the bones of a long-dead Viking is cultural censorship and an attack on history, writes Andrew Bolt.

THE Melbourne Museum is meant to be a temple of Western science and culture — a collector and protector of knowledge.

So why has it banned you from seeing the bones of a Viking?

Why has it has given in to Aboriginal superstition and removed those bones from an exhibition sent to us by Sweden?

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Talk about the closing of the Western mind.

Mind you, the Melbourne Museum — like so many of our fashionably postmodernist institutions now — always seemed to me more interested in scrubbing history than telling it.

When it opened 18 years ago, it had not one exhibit mentioning the man who’d founded Melbourne, the city that gave it its name.

John Batman, who bought the site of Melbourne from an Aboriginal tribe, was blotted out as a wicked colonialist. No mention, either, of Matthew Flinders, who’d mapped the coast.

Instead, the museum devoted huge space to showcasing Aboriginal culture and alleged white cruelty, even peddling the long-debunked claim that one in three Aboriginal children had been stolen from their parents.

The Melbourne Museum is showing some 450 artefacts borrowed from the Swedish History Museum.

The Melbourne Museum is now holding an exhibition on Vikings, showing some 450 artefacts borrowed from the Swedish History Museum — everything from fossilised poo to a replica of a Viking ship. But oops. Make that 449.

Visitors have been surprised to find one exhibit — the bones of a Viking — has been withdrawn from the show.

The Museums Victoria website explains: “Human remains are not being displayed in … Vikings: Beyond the Legend due to cultural sensitivities.

“Australian First Peoples individuals and communities can experience distress and sadness from the display of human remains.

“This is due to the past practices of museums who displayed Ancestors without permission and who took these remains from their burial places to study and examine.

“It is also due to the spiritual belief that Ancestors — whatever country or people they belong to — should be laid to rest and not on display.”

Pardon? This is a shocking attack not just on the freedom of everyone else to see this display. It is an attack on science and the transmission of knowledge.

First, we’re told that we can’t see these Viking bones because they remind some Aborigines of something else they didn’t like.

But what exhibitions are safe from such exaggerated offence-taking? Should we also remove Streeton’s magnificent Fire’s on from the NSW Art Gallery in case it distresses relatives of others who died in horrible work accidents?

Melbourne Museum could simply put up a sign: ‘Human bones on display: do not enter if you will be offended’.

Same thing with a ban on seeing an exhibit because of someone’s alleged “spiritual belief”.

Must we also shut down the nearby Harry Brookes Allen Museum of Anatomy and Pathology at Melbourne University with its own display of body parts and bones?

And why stop there? Islam bans images of its prophet Muhammed. Already our newspapers are so scared of this ban — remember the murdered Charlie Hebdo cartoonists! — that none dares to publish the famous Muhammed cartoons.

Must we next burn all copies of Dante’s Inferno containing Gustave Dore’s famous image of a disembowelled Muhammed in hell?

Of course, there’s an obvious compromise here. Melbourne Museum could simply put up a sign: “Human bones on display: do not enter if you will be offended.”

Then none of us would be bound by someone else’s religious taboos, whether serious, trivial or newly invented.

Artwork: John Tiedemann

In fact, some visitors even suggested Melbourne Museum offer private viewings of the bones, but were refused even that.

The museum’s exhibitions project manager replied that its ban was total, relating “specifically to the public display of human remains and particularly those which are displayed without the consent of the individual or their relatives”.

But these bones were sent to us by the government-owned Swedish Historical Museum. That’s surely as close as we can get to the consent of relatives of this Viking, dead for many centuries and with no known descendants.

So what’s the real reason for the museum’s ban on even a private viewing? Let me guess: this is not really about offence but power. It’s about the exciting power of a privileged few to deny things to the many.

That’s the power of a bully. Worse, it is power used to deny you access to science and history.

Worse still, we now have even an Australian museum banning our access to this knowledge on the grounds of touchy feelings and superstitions.

If you don’t draw a line, what will you be banned from seeing and learning tomorrow, as this wave of superstition and tribalism smothers even our museums?

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