Abstract

In 1998, Fremantle Prison, a heritage space in Western Australia, made a ritualised, commemorative intervention into the memories of the violent and contested events of a riot a decade earlier.

This paper analyses the commemoration. A chapel service and an exhibition, Riot: Fremantle Prison 1988, commemorated the riot that took place in the complex of buildings when they were used as a functioning prison. The commemoration raised many issues in relation to the voice of museums and the voice of commemorations.

Using the prison example, this paper explores the place of the institutional museum voice in relation to commemoration in terms of hegemony and exclusion, apparent objectivity and ritual, and deconstructive counter-hegemony.

It argues that commemoration reveals contradiction and hesitancy in contemporary museum voices as they take the opportunity to become cultural commentators while still looking back nostalgically at institutional museum voices which spoke from the authority they derived from an empirical approach to objects.

Date published: January 2000