The photo of the original Perth Federation day proclamation day arch shows a group of middle class people - dressed in their best, lined up under a triumphal flag bedecked arc of native vegetation. No one knows what the flags signified but the general implications are pretty clear - this is all about triumph, the triumph of an invading army whose century long march across the continent is just about over. However unfair it might be I just don’t like the people in the photo especially the two mean geezers on the right who look ready for any kind of desparate deed, hands in pockets, legs spread in the casual but threatening gestures of bullies at leisure. They might just as well have be attending a lynching

At the WA museum artists Jo Darbyshire and Andrea Williams and assistants have reconstructed the arch to include aboriginal artefacts and other references to the absence of inidgenous people from the original ceremony This is a good idea and the process of reconstruction, the collaborative work must have been thrilling. Both artist have ancestral connections to the event and these are reconstructed via objects in nearby show cases.

Even so there are some problems with the project, more to do with Federation itself than with the work. Federation was an ugly compromise that gave away far too much to the narrow interests of people like those in this picture. It was, and as little Johnny demonstrates almost every day , still is built on the possibility that an oppressive state might be run with the enthusiastic consent of its citizens. Therefore I have some doubts about wanting to work a symbolic reconciliation by reordering the past, by investing past events with new generous memories.

It would be wonderful if this act of reconciliation could open up the community for all its members but I wonder if the community was ever there in the first place except as acrude, coercive pretence. Certainly that is what I see in the original photo. The new arch invites everyone to think whether our current community is any more generous or less vicious.