摘要：The implications for this shift in consensus over biculturalism for a museum thatpromises to 'speak for a nation' may be great. In contrast to the previous National Museum¨C housed in a 1930s neo-classical edifice that sat atop a Wellington hilltop ¨C Te Papa hasembraced the role of being 'a place of encounter'. Te Papa was architecturally designed asthe meeting of Maori and Pakeha 'halves' on a shoreline location. As Chris Prentice has noted,'the familiar (post)colonial chronotype of the beach is conventionally posited as a colonial siteof first encounters between peoples, cultures, geographies, and histories; and often thesettings for re-encounters, re-enactments and revisions, in the postcolonial moment'(Prentice, 2004: 212). It is both fitting and provocative that Te Papa's basic mission ¨Crepresenting nationhood ¨C is being decided at this physical location, and is now beingcontroversially negotiated through the subject of 'the beach
