Holocaust memory at the National Museum of Australia 2022

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On 11 March 2001, the National Museum of Australia (NMA) officially opened. One week later, architectural critic Peter Ward penned a sharply critical piece about the now-famously controversial building, reserving his most scathing criticism for the Gallery of First Australians, the design of which directly references the famous fractured star of Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum, Berlin.

He wrote, 'This extraordinary piece of rhetoric not only fundamentally misreads both European and Australian histories, their triumphs and their pogroms, but serves metaphorically to trivialise one of Europe's blackest recent experiences. And in doing so, in so comprehensively confusing issues, identities, motives and morality, it trivialises our own, Australian, attempts to understand ourselves.'

In this lecture, Associate Professor Avril Alba will discuss the memorial and posit that rather than offering a prescriptive (mis)reading of the past, this architectural referencing of Holocaust memory in an Australian setting both reflected and contributed to a process of political maturation in Australian public discourse.

Associate Professor Avril Alba is Senior Lecturer in Holocaust Studies and Jewish Civilisation and Chair of the Department of Hebrew, Biblical and Jewish Studies at the University of Sydney. She teaches and researches in the broad areas of Holocaust and modern Jewish history with a focus on Jewish and Holocaust museums.