I rarely ever go into Australia's state museums as I have little sympathy with their natural-history focus which separates out natural and human histories.

My problem is the flaw with the conventional natural history approach. This linera history is one that highlights the Australian continent's separation from Gondwanaland; and establishes a historical continuum ranging over 400 million years, with 60,000 years of Indigenous occupation and 225 years of European occupation and ownership.

It also establishes the intellectual rifts between Aboriginals and Europeans and divorces European settlers from nature.

I favour an interpretation of natural history that integrates people with their natural environment ,and so acknowledges that European culture in Australia has been conditioned and influenced by the natural world as well as shaping it.

As well as highlighting the way that colonial Europeans understood themselves to be divorced from nature or the ecology of the continent, ithis interpretation undercuts the way the natural history of the state museums establishes an intellectual rifts between Aboriginals and Europeans. The latter kind of natural history is silent about the colonial wars between aborigines and settlers in colonial Australia.