As he puts it, there was no great rush to do so. Other collecting institutions, such as the national and state art galleries, were augmenting their collections to present exceptional exhibits, and that was his priority. The site at Acton was too good for a heritage museum. What the project needed was an indifferent quasi-industrial building at the southern end of the lake, which could adequately house a collection of the many ordinary, and sometimes, great things, which the museum, over time, could scoop up.

That doesn't sound to me like a red-hot commitment.

The fact is that we could have lived with an indifferent building on a second-grade site which could be built in stages.

We mightn't have preferred it, but it was genuinely the case that any building would have done. The important thing was to have a physical presence.

Mr Keating claims that our museum is deficient (the lemon reference) because we built the building before the collection was substantially completed. Before, as he put it, we got ''the schematic right''.

He is clearly of the view that the shape and character of the collection should determine the form of the building, and he argues that he was holding off on agreeing to a building precisely for that reason.

Now to some extent he is right. There is not much point in building a museum without having a collection to put into it. I imagine you could probably find plenty of examples of successful museums which initially made the wrong call about their ultimate focus, or which started without much of a collection at all.

But this was not the situation that we were in. We had a substantial collection, well in excess of 100,000 objects. We had an Act of Parliament which had been in place for more than a decade, and itself provided the schematic for the museum.

And this schematic had been based on the recommendations of a major inquiry into the future of heritage collections in Australia and the role for a national museum. Mr Keating also claims that he was more concerned to provide additional budgetary funds for the National Museum to grow out its collection, rather than building a building.

As far as I am aware, and I'm pretty sure I'm right, the National Museum of Australia did not have an acquisitions fund until it was provided with one by the Howard government in 2004. Prior to that its capacity to acquire objects was almost non-existent, unless they came from donations or the transfer of already existing collections.

I have no doubt that there was little support for this hoarding approach that Mr Keating favoured. People wanted to see our objects as soon as possible, rather than wait until some undetermined future time, 10, 20, 50, 100 hence. They wanted to learn about them, they wanted to learn from them.

If they were members of indigenous communities in particular, they wanted them on display so that their stories, and the stories of the communities that created them, could be told, rather than swept under the carpet. They wanted to be able to teach their children, to commemorate, to celebrate, and, if necessary, to mourn.

Ask Aunty Phyllis Pitchford from Tasmania whether she was in no hurry to get a museum in which she could tell Australians that ''We're here''. Ask the Yorta Yorta people whether they thought it was important to recreate and display their possum skin cloaks as a process of cultural renewal.

Or talk to people from our multicultural community. Ask the Vietnamese boat people if their story needed to be told. Ask the people who built the Snowy scheme or worked on the prototype of the first Holden. Talk to our rural supporters.

Reading Mr Keating's article, I can't help feeling that his real interest was not in a national heritage museum, which he implies is a lower order enterprise. As he says ''heritage museums, unlike art galleries, do not focus on a number of exceptional exhibits''.

Mr Keating's interest was more in the encyclopedic museum, with a collection of international treasures, antiquities and so on, where the aesthetic value of the object was supreme and their interpretation as an historical object secondary.

In such a case, there is perhaps more of a nexus between the building and the collection it contains. Think of the great European palace and house museums.

But this is not what we were about. Despite what Mr Keating claims, I believe that we have a lively national museum which addresses its themes in an appropriate way.

Craddock Morton is director of the National Museum of Australia. This is an edited extract of an address given to the Friends of the National Museum of Australia Foundation last night.