Abstract

The opening of a new interpretation gallery at the Port Arthur Historic Site in 1999 marked the latest transition in heritage management strategies at a place that touts itself as 'Australia's premier historic site.' In both style and content, the gallery rejects the site museum's interpretation of Port Arthur as a 'Place of Misery,' replacing it with a convict identity game called 'The Lottery of Life.' By introducing individual convicts' stories of triumph and not just tragedy, gruesome images of dehumanising punishment have been modified and moderated. In the interpretation gallery Port Arthur appears as an unfree labour site, albeit one in which the coercive apparatus that extracted that labour is comparatively less visible or audible than work itself.

The new gallery (like the museum before it) is marked by the intellectual, curatorial, and political context of its production. Heritage sites never display everything of the past; therefore all forms of historical interpretation entail making choices about material selection and arrangement in relation to each other and to interpretive texts (Bennett, 1995). The key distinction is that interpretation galleries, through their overt constructedness, make those curatorial considerations obvious, whereas museums present the undisputedly real remnants of the past, a practice that reinforces the truth effects of artefacts while diverting attention from curatorial predilections.

Free from the strictures of selecting artefacts that were accessible and intact, the designers of the interpretation gallery literally made things up. Nevertheless there were practical and interpretive constraints on the stories and perspectives that the gallery could present. Some of those strictures were logistical and beyond the control of gallery planners: a tight budget, a limited amount of space in which to cover significant issues; managerial pressure to open to the public. Yet firmly held conceptual convictions - particularly the decision to interpret the convict experience at Port Arthur the industrial labour site, rather than trace the long and multi-hued history of Port Arthur the place - significantly narrowed the range of stories that could be told in the interpretation gallery.

Through the design and planning process some aspects of Port Arthur's past were inevitably muted whereas other elements were amplified. As it transpired, the convict site's coercive mechanisms, as well as its pre- and post-convict history received less attention than its significance as an early industrial complex in a wider imperial regime of forced migration.

Furthermore, by concentrating on the early convict period (the 1830s and '40s) and devoting the greatest amount of display space to representations of convict gang and artisanal work, the interpretation gallery perpetuates the site's historic practice of leaving matters of race and gender (specifically Aboriginal and women's history) unaddressed. And while it boldly rejects both right and left-wing versions of convict history it avoids taking risks when it comes to interpreting sensitive issues, such as homosexuality. The gallery certainly confronts and disrupts visitor assumptions about Port Arthur as a place of misery but it does not challenge popular perceptions that European history and male convictism are the historic features of the site most worth remembering.

This paper is based on on-site ethnographic work, interviews with site staff, and an excavation of site records concerning the planning, design and implementation of the interpretation gallery. In addition a small qualitative survey and informal discussions with site visitors were conducted to establish what patrons make of this new approach to the interpretation of Port Arthur's history. Rather than review the gallery (by asking, "does it work?" or "how well does it work?") this paper examines and analyses the effects of the interpretive processes - intentional, improvised, and unplanned - that combined to produce this latest rendition of the past at Port Arthur. It concludes by observing that critical engagement with the unsavoury past ultimately depends less on the forms or content of presentations than on the willingness and ability of visitors to stop and think.

Date published: August 2000