Museum of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House—Like

I’ve been asked to tell you about my favourite object or space in the museum. Where to start? There are so many wonderful objects and rooms in this beautiful museum that I am spoilt for choice. Just like the tabloid-size restaurant menus in the 1980s with their pages and pages of dishes, there are dizzying amounts of choice here. Each new object outdoes the last. In this place I am like a teenage girl in a jewellery shop—ooh, shiny, ooh, shiny, every way I look.

Each morning our team walks around the museum checking that it is beautifully presented and ready to open to visitors at 9 am. Yesterday I set off with my white gloves and clipboard intent on finding my favourite object or room. If only I looked hard enough surely I would find it. Maybe a deep burgundy club chair in the Senate Opposition Party Room? A utilitarian yet elegant John Smith Murdoch designed waste paper box? The elaborately carved Speaker’s Chair in the House of Representatives? Maybe the wooden filing cabinet in the Press Gallery? But no, I couldn’t settle to one.

But let me tell you about something that always makes me smile. It is the marks left by workers long gone—some easy to see, some concealed. The stickers extolling the issues of the day—a motorbike rider safety campaign, the right to child care, repetitive strain injury. The eerily familiar political bumper stickers from the 1980s. Pencilled or penned notes and scribbles. The laborious labelling of trays and press boxes with a quaint rainbow of dymo strips.

All these marks speak quietly to me of the staff and journalists who worked long hours in this place reporting on the debates in the chambers, advising ministers, typing up correspondence, agendas and minutes, taking down Hansard, preparing press releases and generally keeping Parliament going. Those are my favourite things.