Reflections of Indigenous history inside the National Museums of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand and outside of New Caledonia's Centre Culturel Jean-Marie Tjibaou

This paper proposes a comparative analysis of discourses of indigenous history as they emerge from three recently established institutions: the National Museum of Australia (NMA) in Canberra, Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington, and the Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Centre (CCT) in Noumea. [1] As we shall see, while these institutions were all inaugurated in the span of four years (1998-2001) and while they have all responded to similar imperatives - such as the need to showcase national or territorial identities or to participate in reconciliation processes - they have each adopted different stances, approaches and strategies in their representations of indigenous and/or colonial pasts. These divergences are particularly interesting because they belie the extent to which the historiographies of these three countries have converged in the last thirty years, and because they reflect different approaches to questions of postcolonial identity and history in colonies of settlement.