Although Mary Kalantzis argues in this passage for a ‘post-national’ citizenship for Australia that is based on a pluralist ideology, it is my contention that contestation over the ‘national’ has itself yielded new and complex understandings of citizenship in official and everyday contexts (even if the complexity has not yet been fully recognised in citizenship legislation). I want to conclude by reiterating my argument that the NMA was not drawn into the History Wars by whim or accident but that the curators and exhibition developers were led by the 1975 Piggott Report, by transformations in public policy and by the transformations that museological practice was undergoing at the time to actively stake a position as a key player from the outset. Although no-one could have fully anticipated the events that followed the museum’s opening in 2001, Dawn Casey’s comments about the need for national museums to involve themselves in public debate might, with the value of hindsight, appear to function more as a statement of intent than a mere coincidence or prescience. Not only did the NMA seek to enact the role of socio-political agent and provocateur, it succeeded, albeit at great cost to many people involved, and with widely contested outcomes. Of greater interest is the seriousness with which the ‘robust politics of culture’ proffered by the museum was taken by proponents of the conservative ideology promoted by the government of the day. This means that the government and its representatives (exemplified of course by Prime Minister Howard) had a keen understanding that the NMA’s provocation, its demotic approach to representation and its alignment with notions of cultural citizenship were more than rhetorical, and that the traditional utility of culture (where culture is an instrument of government) was being threatened if not explicitly inverted.

It is also interesting to note that the reiteration of instructive ties between national museums and legal formations of citizenship have continued to be reinscribed beyond the NMA’s opening and review. Most recently, for example, Australian Citizenship Day (17 September 2008) was celebrated at the NMA with a special ceremony. Having conferred 17 people with Australian citizenship, the Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, Senator Chris Evans, declared, ‘Australian Citizenship Day is an opportunity for all Australians to think about the changes that shaped our nation, and to reflect on the role we play in building Australia and our future.’^[92] This ‘cultural turn’ was consistent with the official and emotional apology to the Stolen Generations made by the newly elected Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, in February that year. While there is much that can be said about the apology, for the purposes of this article, we can observe first the Prime Minister’s pre-emptive strike against those who would interpret his words as part of a ‘black-armband view of history’ and, second, note that it was a discourse of pluralism that framed the apology that also functioned as a rallying call to the nation to, in the words of Rudd,

The speech reiterates comments made in the 2000 report Australian Citizenship for a New Century, which eschewed any notion of common national values or shared culture in favour of public acceptance of diversity and abstract civic values. According to the Australian Citizenship Council, it is diverse values that underpin citizenship, and these together define and unite Australians.^[94]

In the final instance, should we understand Senator Evans’ actions as being a concession to the significant role of the cultural politics that have played out at the National Museum, or as an attempt to recoup the alignment of cultural nationalism and more instrumental understandings of Australian citizenship? I think that both this example and the earlier discussion about the Yolgnu community’s use of the museum work to show that while the NMA can be viewed as a technology that plays a part in constituting legal formations of citizenship (hence being the choice of location for the 2008 Australian Citizenship Day ceremony), its performance cannot be fully understood without a consideration of how it is shaped by the exercise of heterogeneous and everyday forms of agency (exemplified by the yingapungapu sand sculpture and performance). This means that the museum continues to be centrally implicated in the processes of identity formation in Australia—as intended by comments made by the Piggott Report and reaffirmed two decades later by the institution’s inaugural director, Dawn Casey.