The National Museum of Australia’s show of Indigenous Australian objects is a museological minefield, raising questions about why they cannot stay in the country from which they were taken

The National Museum of Australia’s exhibition, Encounters, is drawn from the vast and rarely seen Australian Indigenous collection of the British Museum, a repository of booty from all corners of an empire under constant erosion.

It is an important and deliberately provocative exhibition. It has caused tensions in some Indigenous communities over whether precious objects – some stolen from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people on the colonial frontier in circumstances of extreme violence – should be permanently repatriated or displayed in a museum show at all.

Enthusiasm is frequently qualified with sadness and regret that the objects must return to Britain

The British Museum is not prone to returning precious cultural property

These objects embody, spiritually and physically, the lives of the ancestors who made and used them

Related: Preservation or plunder? The battle over the British Museum’s Indigenous Australian show

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