The Museum of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House, blowing its own trumpet, has just announced that the results of its 2015-16 year reveal an effervescently busy institution.
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"We get 90,000 schoolchildren visiting us in a year," its director, Daryl Karp, enthused on Tuesday as a party of schoolchildren gambolled towards us down a green-carpeted corridor on the old parliament's House of Reps side.
The just-published annual report for 2015-16 trumpets a cheerful medley of museum statistics. Almost 700,000 people engaged with the museum in various ways during the reported year. Actual crossings of the museum's threshold grew for the third successive year, to 357,000. In addition, more than 330,000 engaged with the museum's online offerings. What's more, it trilled in a press release, "the iconic museum has participated in 17 filming and photography productions, reaching a potential audience of 66 million in Australia and overseas".
At this point, this reporter should own up to a strong sentimental association with OPH, having occasionally worked there as a journalist in the olden days before the new parliament house existed. On Tuesday, I offered myself to Karp and to the museum as an OPH "living exhibit" to join its rich and growing collection of artefacts. That collection includes one of then prime minister Tony Abbott's bicycles but alas not a pair of his prime ministerial budgie smugglers. Karp swears that she really did ask for a pair of those historically significant bathers, but without success.
This reporter should also own up to finding the museum a very fine place that I haunt even when not reporting on it. A credit to our city and to our plucky little democratic nation (Daryl Karp is fond of patting Australia on the back and saying: "If democracy were an olympic sport we, Australia, would be gold medal champions"), it is very stylishly, engagingly and wittily arranged. Museum fatigue is unlikely to be a problem.
We wondered if, in these quite frivolous, Kardashian-following times, the institution's desperately unsexy name was a problem? Karp agreed, laughing, that, yes, as well as the name lacking sparkle there was the way in which the museum was in an "old parliament".
"But I think if you get the story right, if you understand your audience (which I think we do and so we're not doing a one-size-fits-all display because we recognise that people come here for different reasons), and if you base everything around a story, I think we can cut through. And we really have cut through. People are genuinely interested.
"We try to give a sense of why democracy is so important, why this building matters. I'm passionate about showing how democracy is important and showing that Australia [with its continuous, unbroken democratic systems] has been one of the world's leading democracies. We can't just sit back and [take it for granted], because democracy is a gift and we really have to treasure it and understand it and protect it.
"So for me [the museum is all about] encouraging engaged, informed citizenship. So that's really what we try to do. The approach we've taken is to offer a range of exhibitions [appealing to various enthusiasms]. But the overall aim is to get people to think about the sort of Australia we live in, the sorts of values we have, what we actually want for Australia, moving forward."
She thinks that to the extent the museum seems to work well for folk (some museums are daunting and fatiguing), its home has to take a lot of the credit.
"It was a really well-designed building to begin with. It's got a lovely sense of scale. [When it was the parliament] you could bump into people. People would stand in the corridors and talk to people as they came by. So we want to hang on to some of that."
And of course the old building's Senate and House of Representatives chambers (much in use on Tuesday by children being led in mock debates and being encouraged to shout "Hear! Hear!" as loudly as they could) have an irresistible leathery, polished woody loveliness.
"And I think the big thing we've done that's different is that we're continually trying to bring out the stories that connect with people," Karp continued.
"So for example [as our wander down green corridors brought us to yet another grand room, disturbing its ghosts], when you go into the party room you find it currently set up [and furnished] for a Liberal Party meeting as it would have been in the late 1930s and early 1940s when Menzies came to power. And here we tell the story of Menzies ... and try to give an understanding of the party system ... we're trying to use story and narrative to make Australians proud of our world-class democracy."
