Article: Sydney Morning Herald, Thursday 19th February, 2009

Hawkie's desk...William McInnes, chairman of the Old Parliament House Advisory Council, at the prime minister's desk last occupied by Bob Hawke. Photo: Andrew Meares

Democracy enshrined in the first House

• Yuko Narushima

WHAT was intended as an alabaster halfway house for parliament is set to become a permanent shrine to Australian democracy when Old Parliament House is reborn as a museum.

The Museum of Australian Democracy will open at the heritage-listed building in May.

Yesterday the actor William McInnes was appointed the board's chairman.

"It's going to give Old Parliament House a reboot," the star ofLook Both Ways and SeaChange said. "I'm enthusiastic about a place that takes a historical building and broadens its appeal."

Old Parliament House opened as a provisional home to parliament in 1927. Its myriad passageways and rooms housed 3000 cramped workers by the time the new Parliament House replaced it in 1988.

The museum is designed to make politics accessible to and to encourage people to take an active role in its running.

McInnes, who recently played the former prime minister John Curtin in an ABC telemovie, joked about reprising the role for matinee sessions in the reinvigorated house.

The building had changed from his first memory of it, he said. As a Queensland schoolboy he travelled 48 hours by bus to see the place, only to have his recollections obliterated by the sight of his school crush vomiting beef sandwiches on the lawn where Gough Whitlam spoke before his dismissal.

Yesterday McInnes reflected on the building's elegance and accessibility.

"It isn't as grand as what I thought it. In many ways that reflects the Australian idea of politics - the idea of getting above yourself, or building a magic castle for yourself in the clouds, isn't here."

A senior historian at the museum, Joy McCann, said visitors would encounter the same ambience that filled the building when it was alive with debate on conscription, land rights and anti-discrimination.

"They'll see the facade as it always has been. The chambers were where it all happened. It's where the first two women walked into parliament in 1942," she said.

More than that, the museum will chronicle the history of democracy across the world. It will acknowledge challenges to the system and exhibit a first edition of Mary Wollstonecraft's 1792 tome A Vindication Of The Rights Of Woman, highlighting the difference between the ideals and the reality.

A hunk of the Berlin Wall will be on display as well as a yellow collection bucket used for the Farmers Fighting Fund, when 45,000 farmers protested on the lawns of parliament in 1985 while the Hawke government deliberated tax reform within.