In the context of the politics and anxieties generated by attempts to regain control of a nation-building program that was ostensibly ‘Australian’, it was unsurprising that the 2003 NMA Review appeared at a loss when it came to actually prescribing or explaining how the museum might adopt its key recommendation to reframe national identity (and thus revisit its methodological pluralism). The review states that ‘[a] museum must…give some sense of the diversity of views, customs, and beliefs that occupy the shared cultural space that is modern Australia’, and yet cautions against ‘presenting an assembly of ill-coordinated fragments’.^[76] Consistent also with Howard’s commitment to avoiding using the term ‘multiculturalism’ at all is the NMA Review’s sympathetic evasion of the term. Of the 86 pages of the document, reference to migrants or immigration is made 13 times, while reference to multicultural/ism is made just once—a mention of the museum’s Multicultural Collection.^[77] Given that the 2003 NMA Review was widely seen as an attempt on the part of a conservative government to force an end to pluralist models of representation in favour of a more unifying historical master narrative, it was to the surprise of many that the review expressed cautious admiration for the Gallery of First Australians (although this response might equally have been due to a perception that the separate gallery distinguished Indigenous peoples as ‘people of culture’ in opposition to the majority, who were defined through their relationship with the nation).^[78] On the other hand, the review members were dismayed by the pluralistic and multicultural approach to representing ‘nation’ that occurred in other parts of the museum.

The Gallery of First Australians was designed as a large dedicated space that would recognise and enable Indigenous Australians to present their own accounts of historical events and experience in their own voices. The distinct space suggested a riposte to the exclusionist and assimilationist policies, mistreatment and marginalisation of Aboriginal people that had tended to characterise relationships between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians. The Gallery of First Australians could, however, have been perceived as uncontroversial by the NMA Review because the political rights discourse it embodied was not substantively carried through into the Horizons and Nation exhibitions, which were dedicated to representing Australian history since settlement.^[79] The only exception to this was the rotating theatre, Circa, which contextualised Indigenous claims for restitution against the dominant nation-building mythologies of the post-contact period. Demonstrating the growing public taste for reconciliation, Circa showed Indigenous and non-Indigenous people interacting in a shared public sphere and talking about what it meant to be Australian at the turn of the century. The NMA Review singled out Circa for the most vehement criticism. It complained about its ‘content and lack of coherence’^[80] and proceeded to offer a series of suggestions to improve it. In a letter to the Sydney Morning Herald, historian and former NMA employee Ann McGrath observed that the NMA Review represented an attempt to reintroduce into the national imaginary themes of ‘great white bloke history’ constituted primarily by ‘Captain Cook and cricket caps’.^[81]

In line with the conservative ideologies about tolerance and the underlying economic discourse of comparative advantage and nation-building that was favoured by the 2003 Multicultural Australia policy,^[82] the NMA Review called for strategies of representation that would re-centre recognisably Anglo-Celtic ‘Australian’ values such as mateship and the ability to extend a fair go to others, and sought to distil the museum’s existing attention to pluralist and inclusive approaches to representation. It ultimately recommended that greater attention be paid to the economic contribution made by migrants and nation-building activities such as the Snowy Mountains Scheme to demonstrate the positive influence that migration to Australia had had on the great numbers employed by the project.^[83] Similarly, it recommended that the museum deploy cultural diversity as a form of cultural add-on or enrichment: ‘The Panel considers that more could be done to address the concern that the NMA should represent the impact of migrant cultures on Australian ways and customs—from food, to architecture, to café streetscapes, and to footballers hugging in public.’^[84] The attempted depoliticisation and stereotyping of culture strongly reflected the contemporary global backlash against multiculturalism that was sweeping the Western world after 9/11. It is also symbolic of how, in contrast with previous approaches that have seen ‘mainstreaming multiculturalism’ as a valuable project in economic and social terms, ‘any support for multiculturalism on social grounds is now qualified, and conditional on its subordination to “mainstream” Australian culture’ that is represented (in the recommendations put forward by the NMA Review at least) by a certain national homogeneity.^[85]