Abstract

John Curtin A Man of Peace, A Time of War is at once a major social history exhibition, a rare commemoration of a significant past Australian political figure and an accomplished exercise in new curatorial ideas within contemporary museum practice.

An undeniable function of this exhibition however, has been to provide a 'human scale' interface which makes sense of the grandiose multi-million dollar John Curtin Centre development at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia. It then seems reasonable to question whether demands made of the exhibition to function as a kind of explanatory text for the wider development have effectively hijacked the independently curated content. These issues are explored in this review, not to expose complicity, but in order to acknowledge the exhibition as a complex site of multiple intent, revealing - often by default - interesting and problematic relationships to an 'enlisted past'.

Date published: January 2000